Sentences That Keep

This week NPR ran a story about how The American Scholar magazine released its list of the top 10 best written sentences in the English language, in fiction and non-fiction.

It came about because staff members at American Scholar found themselves discussing what makes an exquisite sentence as they gathered at the water cooler, perhaps along with talk about their busted NCAA brackets.

They decided to make a best sentences list and started thinking about lines that stopped them in their tracks when they were younger, lines that were artfully crafted but also made a beeline for their hearts. They went in search of gems, sentences so beautifully crafted they could make a reader see something more clearly or in an entirely new way, lines with an interior rhythm, parallel structure or simply graceful gathering of words.

Some of the writers who made the list: Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion and Toni Morrison.

What a lovely thing to collect. I like picturing pretty or startlingly gritty sentences pinned to a string and you could pluck one each morning like fresh and fragrant clothes just off the line, taking the wind and the air, a bit of the world and a character with you as you walked off into your day.

Hundreds of comments poured in; people offered sentences they felt were best, the lines that stayed. I started to think of so many:

That moment after Scout walks Boo Radley home near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird and she sees the town through his eyes and understands all he has done for her.

“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives."

I thought of Toni Morrison too, but of lines from Beloved.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."

Or
"So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky."

It's hard to pare a favorite passage down to just one sentence, as so many lovely lines live around them. In Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, the main character, a young girl named Esperanza, takes solace in the trees that insist, that grow out of the concrete, trees with secret strength that "keep and keep."

Esperanza says, "When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against too many bricks, then it is I look at the trees."

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/26/294823375/it-was-the-best-of-sentences

Happy Birthday

When I was in college I was lucky enough to have an English professor whose curriculum seemed as broad and wide as the world; novels, poems and plays, short fiction and nonfiction. We read at a clip and still she'd pass more on to us, a haiku, an intro to a book she was reading and yellowed newspaper clippings. "Read everything," she exhorted. Sports, science, art, politics, within and outside your interests, all!

Watch what the writers are doing, she said, like a ball player might study another's at-bats. It's a free education, right there for the taking, so take it, she said.

That was how Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem ended up in my hands and how, later, at a used book sale, I found Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. That night I read "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" about Steinem's mother who was a journalist in a small town. Her mother loved her work but left it to help with a fledgling resort her husband was running. Soon after, her vital mother began to change; she retreated, heard voices, could no longer care for her family. Her father left; her sister was away at college. So from the age of 11, Steinem tried to keep a house, make meals and keep her mother's fears and worries at bay. She wrote about how for years she tried to get help from doctors but couldn't get any. Her older sister insisted that she get away and go to college, so Steinem did and went to Smith College. She and her sister were finally able to get mental health care for their mother.

As soon as she got to college, Steinem knew she wanted to write about women whose voices - because of so many different circumstances - were not heard.

A piece by Barbara Lovenheim in NYCityWoman.com, brought that story back. When Steinem won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silurians, a group of veteran journalists, she accepted it on behalf of her mother, who showed her how to create her own reporter's notebook out of folded paper when she was a little girl, who had so loved her short career telling stories.
http://nycitywoman.com/features/gloria-steinem-award-my-mother?page=0,0

This weekend I saw a piece in The Times that said Gloria Steinem turns 80 today and she looks, I don't know, 40? Maybe 45? It said she plans to celebrate by riding elephants in Botswana. At 80 she travels the world, speaks out and writes, as she has all her life, most often about people who live on the margins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/collins-this-is-what-80-looks-like.html

Just Spring

In March

It’s that time of year again when, if you hear the `word’ “bracketology" even once more, you start looking for the hills and consider running for them.

Still, despite that word, I love the mayhem of a mad march.

I join bracket groups for the fun of it, no money on the line, and not much in terms of reputation either as I’m usually out, in the men’s bracket, shortly after tip-off of the first game. But I fold up the bracket anyway and check scores now and then. I like the upstarts and the upsets and learning about a college tucked in a corner of a state I haven’t yet visited; I like knowing that a shock of wheat can be a mascot and, while pundits are expounding and mathematicians are devising formulas and sports fans, the crazed and the casual, are bantering back and forth, they’re all filling out brackets by the millions and for a couple of weeks we all go merrily mad together.

Yesterday on Colin McEnroe’s radio show on WNPR, he had Bill Curry, a political analyst and former Democratic nominee for governor, share a bracket that was essentially created entirely from grudges, mostly centered on who did UConn wrong at one time or another (makes sense to me). Meanwhile, Julia Pistell, the director of writing programs at the Mark Twain House and Museum, concocted her own scheme. She researched foods that were either produced or made in that team's state or could be found at a state fair there and she’d pit the two foods against one another. Her thinking was that the players were made up at least in part (perhaps) by these local foods and, also, it was a hoot.

So in one game, it was fried scorpion (sold at a local fair) versus jello. (People in that state consumed the most jello per capita.) The scorpion, she said, would likely trounce the jello. In another face-off, she had emu tacos versus Johnny cakes. McEnroe thought that emus, known to be hard cases and elusive in terms of the chase, would take that game.

http://wnpr.org/post/march-madness-2014

It’s doubtful Pistell willl take home Warren Buffett’s billion dollars, but I kind of like her chances.

What I like best, for all the pontificating, exhorting and cheering, is that it all comes down to a whole bunch of games played by a bunch of college kids, the Creighton guy whose mom, the former college standout, taught him his three-point shot back when he was a kid at the hoop on their garage, or the guy from Providence who plays every minute of every game and the players from Wichita State who haven’t lost yet and, of course, the UConn women. At a party the other night, a friend said that when she wants to teach young kids how to play like a team, especially boys, she tells them, “Just watch the UConn women play."

The college bands will make their music; the mascots will romp; the fans will shout, a group of
kids may summon up something they didn't know they had and a little-known team may make a run. On any given night, anything can happen. I guess that’s why it’s mad but also why it’s magic.

Still, Frozen

Yesterday:

kickball in the street and

and tree climbing.

Shirt sleeves and light jackets,

in place of heavy coats and hats and scarves.

Windows flung open to let

the air spill in,

sweet and fresh,

and the birds' songs followed.

Puddles everywhere,

small rivers of melted snow.

Daylight stretched

before our eyes and

nighttime waited.

The City

These Hollows

It was crater-like

the pothole,

hungry,

waiting on tires, stealthily,

around a sharp corner.

It swallowed up my front left tire and a

a good bit of my nerve.

These hollows and gaps 

as familiar now as snow days and

22 degrees.

But just this morning I saw what looked

like a the hint of a blossom

on the slender branch of a tree.

One morning, warm light