There and back again

This image sums up the weather and the mood around here right now. Leaves mostly gone. Skies leaden. Colors muted. Ground damp. And now it's getting colder. It's all to be expected, of course. It's that time of year. But there are normally a few sunny and dry days mixed in. Enough to lift the spirits and get us out into the yard a little.

Looking up at the overcast sky.

But so far we've had more of the gloomy and wet and less of the sunny and dry. I hope the whole winter doesn't go like this. It probably won't.

I've picked up The Lord of the Rings again. I read it every few years. This will make the tenth time in thirty-four years that I've read it. I always enjoy it; I find that I've not concentrated on some section or chapter the last time through and it's almost like reading it for the first time. And the story becomes richer and more complete. At least for me.

And another thing that I find curious: now that I've lived nearly eight years in France and have come to know many British people, I realize that the book, written by an Englishman, is filled with cultural references, words, and expressions the meanings of which I just couldn't grasp as a young, somewhat insulated American. A simple example of this is "elevenses," a tea time between breakfast and lunch. A custom we Americans don't have; for us, tea is a drink, not a meal. I can't imagine what I thought when those voracious hobbits were upset about missing "elevenses." I didn't understand then that it was one of the many meals of their day (after first breakfast and second breakfast, but before luncheon, of course).

It's interesting to re-read some of the books I've read as a young person. My understanding of things as a fifty year old is so very different from when I was high school age, or even in my twenties. I've recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. So much more meaningful now than when I was fifteen or sixteen. And a year or so ago, just for fun, I read The Last of the Mohicans by Cooper. Wow. I missed so much stuff the first time through. I should re-read more of that stuff from high school and finally figure out what I was supposed to have learned back then.

I wonder how many of my teenage classmates were lost in all that literature like I was. I was completely at sea with Shakespeare and poetry in general. I trudged through those plays and books and short stories by the likes of Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, and all the others. It's not that I didn't enjoy some of them, but I just couldn't get what all the fuss was about. I supposed I absorbed enough to regurgitate what my teachers expected. At least enough to get by. I dreaded having to write essays about the motivations of protagonists and antagonists and over-arching and parallel themes and how did I interpret the subtle references to, what was it again? Ugh.

I was better at math and science. Hard cold reality. Something I could grasp and hold on to. Right answers. Wrong answers. Proofs. Reason. The only nebulous things in those subjects were clouds and gasses. What a nerd.

And I liked French, too. I took French from the sixth grade through twelfth. French was fun; it was kind of like math. One giant set of formulas. All I had to do was to plug in the right variables and it worked. And it fulfilled my foreign language requirement. Do American high schools still have foreign language requirements, I wonder?

Oh, and I liked musical theater, although I had no talent for it. Still, it was fun to watch. My high school actually had an elective class called "American Musical Theater," which of course I enrolled in. Most of the students in that class were girls, the rest of us were nerds. It got one-half of one of my English credits out of the way. We took a field trip in that class to New York City to see Yul Brenner in The King and I. That experience remains one of my coolest memories (by coincidence, Brenner is buried not far from where I currently live in France). For my final paper in that class I wrote a biography of Barbra Streisand. Stop snickering.

I got another half-credit in English for a class called "Fantasy in Literature." In addition to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we read Tolkien in that class. And that was my first exposure to The Lord of the Rings. As usual, I was completely lost. It was a hard read for me, complex, very long, and filled with words I didn't understand. I couldn't keep up the pace. Especially during class discussions of the chapters I had yet to slog through. Still, there was something interesting there. It just took me a little more time and a few re-readings, on my own terms, to come to appreciate it. And, after thirty-four years, I'm happily reading it again. For the tenth time.

See how nicely I wrapped that up?