Childhood

A friend recommended This Is Happiness to me last week. Surprisingly, it was available. Luckily she'd said the beginning was slow so I was prepared. As the chapters built, though, I could see the inkling of what was coming. Now only a quarter of the way through, I'm enjoying and looking forward to more. 

A story of one man's remembrance of his youth visiting his grandparents, it is probably more "fable," as the quote says, but an engaging, humorous and telling one. We see life in a small Irish town of long ago, how life was and what Noe garnered from that life and the people around him.  I love books like these!

In fact it soon reminded me of one of my favorites novels from my teaching days, A Long Way from Chicago, again about a boy's time of being sent during the summers to visit his grandmother, a woman of note in a small town during the Depression. It is a funny and sentimental with a loving view of a tough lady who believed in fairness, justice and caring, even if it was often meted out in her own particular way. 

This morning from the newest New Yorker, the style issue, I was reading Rachel Kushner's recollections on her efforts to find her style during her childhood. I smiled. I too got one new pair of shoes each fall, wore red converse sneakers and struggled to define my style. 

But in that, I had a mother who always was willing to indulge me. My love of old clothes, no worries from her, and as a seamstress, she made me the beautiful velveteen Christmas dresses and the dotted Swiss Easter outfits every year. She also created, though, the incredible look of Linda Evans'a riding outfit from The Big Valley: long culottes and vest in a beautiful wool pinstripe. Another memory: standing in the kitchen as Mom measured the hem - never worrying about how short it was - of my unique paper dress. So too could I have hot pants (with not a whit of a body that was hot) sewn by her hand. 

Memories or fable, to be one of the lucky ones, I am!

Remembered