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Bella Voce Part III

With the cooler weather and changing leaves comes, in my world, an even more striking sign of autumn:  the October meeting of Bella Voce.  

In case you haven’t read my blog or just don’t know the inner workings of my heart and soul, Bella Voce is an author series that meets thrice a year in Portland and which, through the kindness of my husband’s business partner and forbearance of many-an-affluent-middle-aged-woman, I am allowed to attend.  (See what I did there with thrice?  I used one word instead of two: thrice instead of three times a year.  It’s the mark of sophisticated writing, trust me.  And doesn’t come off as pretentious at all.) 

The anticipation of taking the rare day off from Life to drive down the Columbia Gorge and sit at the feet of famous writers is, well, pretty much what gets me out of my small-town, big-hair, housewife bed every morning.  And yet today—the day that I should be zooming to Bella Voce for the first time since last May—I am instead sitting here, writing about why I’m not there.  And why, ahem, am I not there?  In short:  I missed Bella Voce because of my kids.

It’s those kids—ooh, those kids!  Those mean, nasty, rotten ‘ol kids.  They make me sign them up for stuff and then they make me pay for it.  They make me drive them everywhere and then drop them early so they’re not seen with me.  They suck the life out of me and then spit it back in my face.  (i.e., Daughter on Saturday Night:  “Can I go to the dance?”  Me:  “Sure.”  Daughter on Monday Morning:  “I forgot to do my homework!  Why did you make me to go to the dance?!”  True story.)

But worse than any of that, those mean, nasty, rotten ‘ol kids make me, sometimes, miss Bella Voce.  Swim meets, violin lessons, cub scouts—all have conspired to make this “I’m a mom first” put Bella Voce last.  Okay, I get it:  on her deathbed, no mother ever whispered, “I wish I’d spent less time with my kids and more time at Bella Voce.”  But last I checked, I am not on my deathbed, so this living mother can only scream, “I WANT TO GO TO BELLA VOCE!”  (I actually did scream that, late last night, but my kids just glanced up from their phones, a little confused, then held out their hands for more Snack Shack money.)  The brood didn’t care that while I was home doing their laundry, the lovely lunching literati would be lunching and literati-ing without me.  Nobody cared that I was missing my Big Day—or so I thought.  Until I got a call from Renee.

Renee is this dreamy woman who works for the dreamy bank that hosts this dreamy event.  I’ve never actually met her, but yesterday she sent an email asking me to call her before the luncheon, as she had a “surprise” planned for me.  Ever the cynic, I assumed this was a form letter sent to all Bella Voce attendees, and that the “surprise” was likely a free money market account or some such Wealth-Management-Super-Boring-Thing.  (No offense, Wealth.  We love you.  Please don’t go.)

So imagine my astonishment when, after leaving her a voicemail telling her I wouldn’t be coming (those rotten kids!) she called me back personally that night.  And imagine my increased astonishment during our conversation which, after standard pleasantries, went something like this:

“Jennifer, we get such a kick out of your blog, and we don’t want you to be a stalker anymore.  So we wanted to invite you to sit at the the Author’s Table tomorrow.”

“Really?”  (small voice, borderline squeaky)

“Absolutely!” (gracious voice, non-squeaky)

“But” (gulp) “I can’t come tomorrow.”  (those…rotten…KIDS!)

“I know.  But it’s no problem, we’ll just have you sit with the author at our February event.”

“Really?”  (squeaky-voice-turns-whimper)  “I can still do it in February?”

“Of course!  I’ll have it all set up for you.  We’ll look forward to seeing you then, and the author will look forward to having lunch with you.”

“I love you, I love you, I love you Ms. Renee from Bella Voce!  And I promise to never again curse my children or regret bearing offspring.”

Okay, fine.  What I really said was:

“Thank you so much!”

Can you believe it?  With one phone call I go from Repressed Housewife to Glittering Member Of The Social And Literary Elite.  (At least, I think that’s what Renee was saying.)  (Wasn’t she?)

bookclub

And if you think that’s exciting, wait til you Guess Who’s Coming to Bella Voce in February, and whose table I’ll be drooling at  gracing when she does?

I’ll give you three clues:

1)  She’s an Aussie—which makes her automatically cooler than you or me.  (I’m not sure how this works.  It just does.)

2)  She has a dog named Milo and a horse named Butter.

3)  She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction a few years ago for a story related to a story we all love.  (I love it.  You love it.  Guaranteed.)

And I will love meeting this internationally acclaimed writer in a few short months!  Though I’m sure I’ll manage to make a fool of myself in the process because, as my children have informed me on numerous occasions, “You’re so…cheesy, Mom.”

Well, maybe I am, but what do they know about the neglected dreams of a mother’s stolen youth?  What do they know about anything?

Nothin’, that’s what.  Rotten kids.

Bella Voce is what gets me out of my small-town, big-hair, housewife bed every morning.

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Posted on by jsmith

Life after Life

Don’t ask me what this book is about, because I’ll answer you all wrong.  I’ll try to explain how a young woman, Ursula, is born into a wealthy English family and is allowed the rare privilege of living and dying and living again until she “gets it right.”  And that will make the book sound tedious and confusing–like Groundhogs Day in print–and then you won’t want to read it and you’ll miss out on a fantabulous literary experience and it will be all my fault.  And really, between my looming pile of laundry and the king-sized Twix I inhaled while writing this, don’t I have enough to feel guilty about?

Life After Life is, for lack of a better phrase, just kind of about everything.  Choice, consequence, survival, selflessness, selfishness, love and the lack thereof.  All of this takes place against the backdrop of World War II—London during the Blitz, Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, or the English countryside during both—depending on which version of Ursula’s life we are witnessing.  (My favorite version is the one wherein Ursula becomes BFFs with Eva Braun.  Talk about an audacious author.)

When asked, Kate Atkinson said Life After Life is mostly about “being English.”  But I thought the book was also very much about family, as Ursula is born into the same stable but imperfect one over and over again, and every road she takes leads her, ultimately, back to them.  Through the failures and triumphs of her varied lives, Ursula’s family remains the one constant.  The book doesn’t beat us over the head with this idea; it’s just there, like a welcome warmth through the sometimes chilly pages.

This book is unique and fascinating and superbly written, and it challenges the reader in a good way.  I read more for mood and impression than a linear plot line, so this book worked for me.  I’ve been meaning to read Atkinson for a long time, and now I understand what all the hype is about; whether or not you like the mechanics of this novel, her writing is just fantastic.

Have you read it?  Did you love it?  (It’s okay if you didn’t.  Tell me here.)

Happy Friday!

 

p.s.  In the interest of full disclosure, I thought you should know that I will be attending a “Harvest Bazaar” this weekend.  It will be the first craft show I’ve attended in at least fifteen years, and the first craft show I’ve attended willingly in my entire life.  (My mom and sisters used to drag me every year.  It was almost as bad as going to the fabric store.)  I even called up my super-crafty sister and invited her.  I invited her!  I feel like Ursula, waking up to an alternate reality.  Maybe choosing to visit to a holiday bazaar is my way of finally “getting it right.”  (Oh gosh, I hope not.)

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It’s not that there’s nothing to write about.

And how do I begin to describe it?

The hurry, the noise, the talking, the people.  So many people to write about:  teenager, father, grandmother, child; how they all topple and spill and swirl into each other.  How time spins like a top, and only by squinting hard and willing myself to focus on just one shape–the blue hexagon, for example–can I almost, almost identify it each time it whips around.  A determined trick of the eye to pull constancy out of chaos; that’s what writing is for me.  And lately, the top has been spinning so hard and so fast, I’ve surrendered to the chaos.  I’ve given up trying to find the blue hexagon, and instead only try to make some sense of the spinning blur.

I could write a lengthy assessment of our recent family life, our busy-busy-busyness of work and school and music and sports and church.  But how would that interest you?  I will not (and cannot) detail the minutiae of those singular events, but I can try to explain what happened above and below and around them.  I can try to explain the blur.

I could tell you how the red leaves and nubby gravel crunched under my wheels as I drove to the outskirts of town for my daughter’s piano lesson, where her shy attempt at Clair de Lune washed over me with such wistfulness, I could almost put a hand on the back of my fifteen-year old self, sitting up straight, punching down nervous keys for a silent, listening teacher.

leaf

It is fall.  Why do piano lessons go so well with fall?

Or I could describe how the polyester volleyball jersey draped over my thirteen-year old’s narrow shoulders as she pounded her new overhand serve, and how the squeak of the bleachers and smell of the waxy gym floor mercilessly pulled my junior high days—which were funny and awful and typical—up from the forgotten well in which I’d thrown them down so many years ago.

I could write about yesterday’s twilight bike ride with my boy; how he dared me to coast with my feet off the pedals, how the scent of burning leaves and glimmer of streetlights brought me back to neighborhood gangs and my mom’s spaghetti and pedaling fast to make it home for The A-Team on a warm and cloudy Tuesday night.

It is fall.  Why do memories go so well with fall?

And I could try, I suppose, to write about the three-tiered October sky that met us on the highway as we drove home from that volleyball game:  periwinkle-on-sapphire-on-indigo, stretched before the tawny sagebrush in a soft striped canvas, a pale circle of moon punching through it like a fine pearl earring.  It was a sunset of summer’s end; a sunset slowly losing her heedless blond to that of a richer, darker hue.  I could write about how that sunset, cast like a telling backdrop against our madly spinning lives, made me feel.

But how do I say what I mean?

I can only say that I peered through the windshield to take it all in, but just when I was getting close—just when I thought I had it—I had to grip the wheel and look back down the road; I had to focus on the tasks at hand.  Carpool, dinner, homework, bedtime—the stuff of our days, the stuff of our lives.  The stuff that keeps me blessedly distracted from really understanding that sky, from absorbing the full weight of Change.

Why do memories go so well with fall?

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