Swings, late August

A Little Philosophy Along With the Lettuce

Hmmm...

A Small State, A Husky Nation

What a lovely way to take the grey out of March and early April
and color it blue and white,
to have not one team but two to root for this weekend
in the Final Four,
the incredible UConn Huskies.

I remember covering the UConn Women's Basketball team back in the mid '90's, writing color stories that magical first NCAA Championship season when the smallest fans would gather after games, hoping for autographs, and the players would stop and chat and sign their programs and notebook pages and tell them that if they wanted to be Huskies they should always practice hard and study hard.

 I remember talking with the director of an assisted living facility who said the residents there crowded around the TV in the common room every game night and all they could talk about were "their girls." And I member driving up to Storrs to the pep rally after they won that first title. Fans were stopped on overpasses holding up banners and folks cheered and waved posters all along Route 195 as their bus passed by, then they crowded into Gampel Pavilion to celebrate with them and to say thanks for such a ride.

Twenty years have passed and it's every bit as magical. Twenty years later and we're all still rooting on each new group of players and the coaches who, year in and out, give it their all. 

Five individuals on the court who find a way to play as one. 

How very lucky we are.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/04/01/sports/ncaabasketball/ap-bkc-uconn-final-four.html?ref=sports

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