Three Wonderful Writers

Today is the birthday of three writers who created children’s classics (along with a lot of other favorites).

1832: Louisa May Alcott 1898: CS Lewis 1918: Madeleine L’Engle

Tomorrow is Mark Twain’s birthday; he was three years younger than Alcott. Hmm. They must have met. He lived in Hartford, after all, though that may have been after her death. She knew every literary figure in New England, plus plenty of visiting writers. Imagine going to a party to meet, say, Oscar Wilde and the author of Jo’s Boys. She grew up knowing all the Concord writers — Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne. But what she did was extraordinary.

Alcott was one of the first people to write honestly about children’s lives — both the rages and the love. There are nasty siblings and good siblings in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but no indication that the ideal Rivers family ever descended to the nastiness of the Reed children. Anyone who has had siblings knows that rivalry and even soricidal violence do happen. Some of us are lucky enough to know that the bond of sisterhood also entails great love and loyalty.

Yes, Little Women is preachy. That’s fine by me, since it’s one of the books that raised me. CS Lewis was another of my literary parents. Not the Narnia books, which I didn’t read until I was 14. But I had the first two books of the SF trilogy from the day I turned 7. It took me another seven years to find the third book. I read and reread Screwtape from the time I was 12 or so, and I’d read all his major works by the time I was 16. Not only did Lewis give me a kind of morality, he taught me ways of thinking — and that thinking, reading, writing could be godly. A welcome antidote to the attitude of my home church, which was that there’s only one Book that matters.

[My God, how the books of those years *marked* me. The essays in WH Auden's The Dyer's Hand, which I found in seventh grade, helped shape the way I think. I read and reread in those days, ravenous for new ideas. The memory of reading Dylan Thomas for the first time is physical, three-dimensional -- the spring sunlight in the seventh-grade classroom, my seat by the wall switch, myself reading transfixed until I had swallowed them all. Like drinking honey, I thought then.

I still remember finding my copy of Again, Dangerous Visions in a used bookstore in Scranton. I was 14 and fresh from an appointment with my orthodontist. The book was on the bottom shelf; I sat on the floor and thumbed through it until "When It Changed" caught my eye. I read the story right there, on the floor, and cried unashamed. I bought it for a quarter, and the book traveled with me to college, all the apartments, all the houses, and came with me here to California. The bookstore, which also sold guns, is long gone; the building now houses the real estate office where I signed the papers selling the last house my ex-husband and I owned together.]

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time I read in fifth or sixth grade, and I still remember the electric thrill of its ending. But, though Meg is a strong heroine, it did not speak to my condition. (Reading about one more goddamned happy family wasn’t going to be any help to me then. ) Later, though, I read her adult novels and her nonfiction, and these I have found extraordinarily beautiful and moving. Through her I discovered Soror Mariana Alcoforado, who (possibly) wrote The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. And she is the author of one of my favorite quotations: There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of deepest messages of the incarnation. Her combination of deep faith, awareness of the world, and unflinching honesty have made her work important to me. But in an adult way — that’s different.

Louisa May Alcott and CS Lewis freed me to be a writer. In some sense, they are my literary parents. Happy birthday, then, to a loving mother and father. I hope my work touches even one life as yours has touched mine.

JOB UPDATE: Better Late than Never

After ten or eleven days of working without being officially hired, I’ve finally become an legally recognized contractor with the Very Large Software Company where Michele is also a contractor. I’m settling into my new cubicle, and I might even have a telephone tomorrow. I’ve submitted my first time sheet, and tomorrow I should get an official badge and propeller beanie.

Huh? Job? Contract? Cubicle?

After all the long waits, the many resumes sent, the frustration — getting a job happened very fast. And I’ve been so swamped with work ever since that I haven’t had time to update here.

I started a four- to six-month contract on November 13. The company was desperate for help with several hundred Visio workflows, plus all the tech writing tasks for next year’s software release. So I got my resume in Tuesday, interviewed Wednesday, started Thursday, and worked an 11-hour day Friday. And I worked last weekend as well as this weekend.

Of course they looked at my resume faster because I knew someone, but even so, the whole thing happened at lightning speed. After the hiring decision is made, it usually takes them two to three weeks to get someone started. But they needed very specific skills that I have, and they needed someone who would be willing to leap right in and pump out a lot of work very rapidly.

An admin had to sacrifice her laptop so I would have a computer to work on. We’re working at rolling tables in a conference room with six other contractors. Five more contractors arrived last week, and fifteen more are coming in next week. The management is looking for places to stash us all.

I’m very much enjoying the sense of being a vital part of a big software project. Over the summer, I missed the adrenaline rush of meeting insane deadlines. I also like the people very much, and the campus is gorgeous. Waterfalls, picnic areas, and lovely little balconies with comfy patio furniture off many of the conference rooms.

Also, since Michele and I can commute together, we get to use the car-pool lane, which speeds the commute considerably. There’s a real Schadenfreude in watching lone drivers sitting in traffic while we zip merrily along beside them. It’s almost as good as going to the grocery store and sneering at 50-cent lemons. We walk into the backyard and get ours for free.

Severe Weather Alert–California Style

The National Weather Service’s warning of record cold for the weekend was the lead story in yesterday’s San Jose Mercury-News.

Here’s a bit from today’s paper, explaining just how terrible the chill was:

Overnight Friday, downtown San Jose hit 37, San Francisco, 43, — their lowest so far this fall. Saturday night, San Jose was expected to hit 33, with surrounding areas reaching similar temperatures before climbing to the upper 30s and lower 40s the rest of the week.

Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Race

The case of Jessica Lynch already exemplifies the differing value placed on the lives of young men and young women. Yes, though women are paid less, their actual existence is worth more: they are future Mothers of the Race, and as such must be protected. Males, on the other hand, are considerably more expendable, so their deaths in battle are not given the same emotional weight. Nobody is offering book and movie deals to any of the male POWs from this war. Men are supposed to suck it up.

Now we see the value of blonde hair and blue eyes. For the record: My mother, two of my sisters, and several of my nieces and nephews are blue-eyed blonds. I love them all, but not because of their coloring.

The Army apparently doesn’t share my indifference to mere pigmentation. This came today from an Episcopalian mailing list.

Army Spec. Shoshana Johnson, the African American woman who was held prisoner of war in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was looking forward to a quiet discharge from the Army in a few days. Battle scarred and weary, she has said not a word as her fellow POW comrade in arms Jessica Lynch cashes in with book and movie deals and a celebrity status in the media.

But it is the Army that is forcing Johnson to break her peace. A few days ago, military brass informed her that she would receive a 30 percent disability benefit for her injuries. Lynch, who is White, was discharged in August and will receive an 80 percent disability benefit.

The difference amounts to $600 or $700 a month in payments, and that is causing Johnson and her family to speak out. They are so troubled by what they see as a “double standard,” that they have enlisted Rev. Jesse Jackson to help make their case to the news media.

Jackson, who plans to plead Johnson’s cause with the White House, the Pentagon and members of Congress, says the payment smacks of a double standard and racism.

“Here’s a case of two women, same [unit], same war; everything about their service commitment and their risk is equal. . . . Yet there’s an enormous contrast between how the military has handled these two cases,” Jackson told The Washington Post.

Johnson’s father, Claude Johnson, himself an Army veteran, says that while neither he nor his family begrudge Lynch her celebrity or disability payments, he believes that his daughter should get her due, and it is more than a 30 percent disability benefit.

For its part, the Army, in denying charges of double standard, said Friday that claims are awarded to soldiers according to their injuries.

Johnson, 30, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter, was held captive for 22 days, when her unit stumbled into an ambush in southern Iraq last March.

Eleven soldiers were killed, and six, including Lynch and Johnson, were taken prisoners. Johnson was shot in both legs and is still traumatized by her war experience. In addition to walking with a limp, she suffers from bouts of depression.

Now, I’m naturally suspicious of such claims. I checked various newspapers and Snopes.com, the best place to debunk urban legends. Snopes says it’s true. The newspapers say it’s true.

I am bitterly ashamed of my country.