And here we have perhaps the most aptly titled tattoo parlor in all the world.
It’s a real place in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I captured it here on digital media for lotsa little reasons.
I love the name.
I love the color red.
I especially love red gingham.
I am a mom.
I have a son who came home one evening with a tattoo on his back.
I will take your questions one at a time. . .
It’s not often that I re-read a book – there are too many great books out there and so little time – but I am taking another look at my favorite read from 2007, The Thirteenth Tale, for a book club I am in.
It’s amazing to me how much I don’t remember about the book that was my all-out favorite three years ago, and that I am enjoying as much the second time as I did the first, perhaps more so, though I don’t think I could explain why. I suppose you could make the argument that you don’t expect to get everything out of one look at a really great painting. I mean, if you had the chance to see the Mona Lisa a second time, wouldn’t you take it?
How about you? Any books out there that you’ve read more than once? And what did you discover in the second and third readings? Do tell. . .
When I wrote The Shape of Mercy, a number of people asked me if I went to Massachusetts for my research. Some seemed surprised when I said I did not. The truth is, the Salem in my story does not exist anymore. A friend of mine who lives in nearby Peabody told me the place where the executions took place is now home to apartment buildings. Colonial Salem village exists only in history books and the imagination. I happen to have those!
But the book I will be writing over the next few months, A Sound Among the Trees, which will have as its historical thread a Civil War drama, is different. It will take place in a fictitious Fredericksburg house that witnessed the crucible that was the War Between the States. And since I am creating a house that technically still stands, I felt the pull to go to Fredericksburg to see and feel the lay of the land. I am grateful to my friends Sarah and Jeff who let me stay with them and took me to so many battlegrounds and museums. The echoes of those sad four years of American history are everywhere. Everywhere still. Here are few images.
Top photo is a replica cannon on Marye’s Heights overlooking Fredericksburg. A horrific battle was fought here in mid-December 1862. The Confederates technically won this one, but the loss of life on both sides was chilling.
Second photo: On a day trip to Richmond, Sarah and I toured the Museum of the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis’s White House. Above his desk, Davis had portrait of George Washington, his hero. A rebel like himself, he thought, who also took up a cause that sadly meant taking up arms. Davis believed he was like Washington in this respect, a solider of freedom. I find this curious – that he would so desire freedom that he would dissolve the Union and yet would keep a culture of people chained to slavery, denying them the very thing he was ready to die for. . .
Third photo: Looking up Marye’s Heights from what had been the Union Line. Union soldiers tried to take the Heights and were unsuccessful. The field was covered with Union casualties, prompting one Confederate general to say, “A chicken could not live on that field.”
Fourth photo: Confederate women sewed uniforms like this one in their parlors. Their parlors also became hospitals. And their yards, burial grounds.
Last photo: Lovely Washington Street in current day Fredericksburg reminds us that not everything of beauty in Fredericksburg was obliterated. I am thinking of crafting my fictional house like this one. . . .
On Friday, thoughts on C. S. Lewis. See you then. . .
It’s been a tough week on the homefront.
I did not know Chelsea King, the 17-year-old student whose life was snatched away from her as she jogged on a peaceful nature trail, but I feel like I do. She attended the high school I went to when I was 17; the same high school my 17-year-old son now attends. My son and Chelsea were on the track team together, ran the same event – the long jump – and the few times I saw this girl, she was dashing across a runway, gaining momentum, flying high, arms outstretched, legs extended for maximum distance. That’s what long jumpers do; they reach well past what the rest of us could do if we decided to see just how far we could go.
It doesn’t make any sense – what happened to this young girl. And sense is something we look for when our world is rocked. An answer would help, we think, but I wonder if there really is an answer we could understand. The question of Why is huge, the answer must also be huge; too big an answer to adequately satisfy, I think. A genius could probably provide me with the answer of what string theory is but it doesn’t mean I would understand the answer. I would still most likely walk away mystified and unsatisfied that now it all makes sense.
Yesterday the remains of a teenager missing for a year were found a few miles away from Chelsea’s last run. The paper says police believe the two events are unrelated. And I know what they mean, but of course they are related. Not to the offender perhaps, and only perhaps, but we as a community relate them. They both make our hearts break.
What we do know for sure is life is fragile. Aside from the fact that some people are desperately evil, life is fragile. And you only have the one life. Each day we are given to live out our fragile lives, we are building the legacy by which we will be remembered. We can’t always determine the scope and span of that legacy, but it is wholly our privilege to design it. No one can rob that from us. They can shorten it, but they cannot steal it.
In the sadness, there is that.
When I travel, I take a new book with me. It’s a quirky thing with me. My great fear is that I will be on a plane thirty thousand feet above the nearest bookstore and I will finish a book and still have two hours of flying time ahead of me. Yikes. And since I’ve not made the financial or emotional leap to buy a Kindle, I’d be stuck reading the inflight magazine or, gasp, the the aircraft safety card.
Torture.
So I brought Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge with me on my recent research trip to Virginia (more on that later) and read it during the flights it took to get there and back. Anything that wins a Pulitzer always gets my attention, and since I had heard this novel was constructed in episodic fashion (very different from your usual, linear this-happened-and-then this-happened fashion) I was eager to read it.
I have to say I was mesmerized by Strout’s skill as a storyteller, especially the way she wove in varied lives with the singular life of Olive Kitteridge, a tall, opinionated woman who only appears to have nothing but rough edges. There was no goal to reach or quest to fulfill; rather the story was a collection of stories teetering on the cusp of Olive’s life, sometimes spilling into it, sometimes spilling out of it. Based on the construction and the staggering subtlety of Strout’s prose, I can see why it wowed the Pulitzer committee.
And yet it is a book I cannot recommend. I don’t consider myself prudish or overly modest but I was embarrassed more than once by the language. There were times, sitting on that plane with a big guy next to me (who completely commandeered our shared armrest) where I had to fold the pages in as close as I could and still be able to read as I tiptoed, cringing, over pages peppered with the f-word. I don’t use profanity myself in my speech or writing, and I do understand that it plays a part in relevancy in some literature, but this was over the top for me. The characters who talked this way were certainly the kind of characters who would talk this way – I get that. But I don’t want to get it. Honestly, I don’t.
There are some things out there that I know are out there but I just don’t want to get them. This was an interesting, cleverly constructed book. And I wish I could say you should read it.
But I can’t.
And that just makes me kind of sad.