The Reader Travels

So I went with my mother and sister-in-law to see Topol’s farewell tour of Fiddler on the Roof in Dallas two months ago, and at the end of the show, the sister said, “I didn’t remember that the ending was so depressing.” Well, yeah.

Her brother had told her before we left for the show that the story was about events that triggered the start of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. She just looked at him funny like he was making it all up, probably because he makes up a lot of things and she can never really tell if he’s serious or not.

He’s literally the boy who cried wolf as most of his tall tales end with some sort of wolf attack, which he fends off with his masterful powers of Dan-fu. She should have known that since there were no wolves in this story, that he probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, the story ends with a big long road trip that somehow wends its way to Jerusalem. The end. Oh, did I mention I met a hot Israeli chick on the airplane to London? I told her I was going down to Houston for a Jewish wedding next month. It was only a five hour drive, I said. She had to comment that a five hour drive would take you all the way from one end of her country to the other.

Amazing how they were spread out all over the world and now they can just hop in the car and be there in less than a day, only dodging a little gunfire along the way.

We write together, me and my man. The way we’ve worked so far, he writes the first draft, the bones of the novel, and I come back behind and fill in the flesh, bring it new life. It’s kinda the way Banky and Holden create comic books together in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Holden does the initial drawings and Banky gives them color and life, ink as life blood. I could be ridiculed for being a “tracer,” but I don’t think of it that way.

In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth Young is a ghost writer. This is a different concept of collaborative writing. Ruth takes another person’s stories and ideas and puts them in words, infusing them with a spirit, making them live. The name “ghost writer” would have you think she’s like a poltergeist moving furniture and type in the night, while her mother thinks it means she talks to the spirits, for such is her experience in life.

Again, we’re teetering between East and West, and throughout this novel, the western world Ruth lives in seems but a skeleton of a life comparing to the richness of the eastern world where her mother came from. In Ruth’s skeletal blindness she reduces her mother’s rich spiritual past to mere superstition and delusion. But all she has to do is blow on the bones, and they come to life around her.

Something of the divine has touched me this week. I started a new book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. A dozen books were waiting on my shelves to be read, and none of them seemed right, until I spotted this one, a recent birthday gift from a dear friend. I felt something akin to relief when I opened its pages and started to read.

In the opening chapters, she spoke of her failed marriage, and how she cried on her bathroom floor every night until one day she found herself praying to God for the first time in her life. When God told her (in her own voice) to go back to bed, she did. I closed the book and slept with her.

The next morning, I woke to a letter from my husband telling me he had this strangely out-of-character thought that God might be challenging him so he could be a better person. There was something in his letter that connected with the chapters I had read the night before, so I left them for him to read. After he read them, he said, “That’s just plain spooky.” And I had to agree.

As I read further, something else she wrote connected with me. She said to a Balinese medicine man, “I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.” This is an important theme for the memoir, and an important theme for me too. To deny myself the pleasure of love and good food and wine is to deny myself a connection with the divine.

Last night I spent the evening with my three best friends in celebration of an upcoming wedding. We ate a wonderful meal at a Spanish restaurant we’d never been to before, and afterward we had wine and chocolate while listening to live jazz music and sharing gifts with the bride to be. I stared across the table at these three women I love, watching them laugh, loving their talk of language and connecting with people across the world, and I felt blessed.

Today I am resting. I wrote in my journal, read part of my book, took a long nap with the dog and watched a movie. The movie was Babette’s Feast about these two austere women in Denmark who have devoted their lives to the memory of their father, a pastor and leader in their small community. They give shelter and work to a Parisian woman exiled from her home, and she teaches them about the enjoyment of life, love and good food.

At the feast we hear the words of the long-dead father spoken by one who remembered them. “For mercy and truth are met together. And righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

In Gogol’s Ukranian short story “”St. John’s Eve,” he describes a particular beautiful girl as “a dark-browed daughter.” It made me think of similar descriptions of beautiful girls in Arabian Nights.

The really pretty girls in Scheherazade’s tales had faces that looked like the moon and one long, black eyebrow atop their eyes. Ukraine is fairly close to the Muslim world with Turkey sharing the Black Sea to the south. They could very well have shared similar ideas of beauty.

Sir Richard Burton’s notes in the back of his translation of Arabian Nights give a little thought to the joined brow. It seems that in Burton’s time, the Arab world saw it as a sign of distinction and beauty. But in the western world people thought it was the sign of being a werewolf or possibly a vampire.

And just so you know, according to Wikipedia, the word “unibrow” has officially made it into the dictionary, but the technical term is “synophrys.” Who wants to talk about a “synophrys,” though? Not me.