4/21/23

 Friday, April 23, 2023

In bed at (:30, awake at 1:30, up at 2:00, unable to sleep, dreaming of meeting Susan Friebert's father at a movie theater, speaking of RHF's parents, brothers Marvin and Jerry at Radio Doctor's at 3rd and Wells St., Jon, Ellen, and Leslie.  45℉, wind SW at 13 mph, high of 59℉, daytime mix of sun and cloudsl with shower this afternoon, wind gusts to 32 mph, sunrise at 6:00, sunset at 7:41, 13+41.

Reading Lila at 2 in the morning.  Lila's baby arrives in March some time after an Iowa Spring blizzard.  "No one came to look in on them because the drifts were too deep to walk through and the wind was fierce. People can get lost in a storm like that and just die in the road outside their own gate the way they might if they were wandering through a country they’d never seen before, . . . Then he’d say he ought to clear a path to the road and even get up from his chair, but the road was so deep in drifts there’d be no point in it. There’d be nowhere to go if he ever got to the road. The telephone wires were down and the electrical lines, too, but they had the woodstove and a kerosene lamp and Mrs. Somebody’s meat loaf to warm in the oven."

I'm reminded of my father taking me on a train from Chicago to Iowa once he was out of the Marines and being there during what to me was a huge snowstorm.  Was it in 1946, or was it later.? I remember having motion sickness on the train, and vomiting, some of it getting on the uniform of a Marine or soldier, maybe coming home after his discharge.  I remember a struggle to open a storm door because of the deep snow blow against it.  I remember being on a farm or maybe just a house where there were chickens and someone showing me how to put a chicken to sleep, tucking its head under a wing and rocking it. (?)  As I pull up my few memories of that trip, I wonder about all that I didn't and don't know about it.  Why was I taken to Iowa with my father and his PTSD?  Why weren't my mother and Kitty with us?  Were they separating?  Was he running away from strife, from heartache, from responsibilites, as he fled to Florida when my mother died?  I'm recalling Geri telling me that my Dad told her than my mother never wrote him while he was in the Marines.  If that was true, it was so inconsistent with her remaining with him after the war and was so uncharacteristic of her.  Did she believe that he abandoned her by not invoking his exemption from the draft for working in a war-related industry, and having one child and another on the way?  Did we visit his cousin Keith in Duncombe or elsewhere in Webster County?  Grandma Miler and Albert in Amana? or Newton? or Fort Dodge?  If it was, as I suspect, the Spring of 1946, I was 5 years old and we were living in that basement flat at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, we and the 'waterbugs.'  Memories and mysteries come back reading of the Spring blizzard in Gilead. [And Lilly comes out from Geri's bedroom at 3 a.m. for a drink of water, a trip outside, a beef jerky treat, another drink of water, and back to bed.]

 "You turned into a perfectly fine baby. Maybe your father has enough years left in him to see you turn into a perfectly fine boy. And maybe not.  Old men are hard to keep.  Lila knew what would really happen next. One day she and the child would watch them lower John Ames into his grave, Mrs. Ames on one side and his father, John Ames, on the other, and his mother and that boy John Ames and his sisters, a little garden of Ameses, all planted there waiting She knew it was ridiculous, but she always imagined them coming up some June day, right through the roses, not breaking a stem or bruising a petal. Shaking hands, patting backs, too taken up with it all to notice her flowers. . ."

Matthew 27: 50-52: "When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He yielded up His spirit.  At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split. The tombs broke open, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.  After Jesus’ resurrection, when they had come out of the tombs, they entered the holy city and appeared to many people.…" 😱😨😫😬 and not to mention Lazarus, brother of Martha and Mary. John 11: 38-44.

I finished Lila and feel a bit worn out by it.  Each of Robinson's novels is a workout.  They are all character studies in depth and they all explore human nature itself, 'the human condition,' and the idea of a God, especially as imagined in Christianity, Protestant Christianity.  Robinson doesn't offer glib answers to deep philosophical, theological questions.  She doesn't shy away from the contradictions that abound in the Bible and in Christian beliefs.  Both Ames and Boughton wrestle with and argue about the doctrines and are unable to provide answers to Jack Boughton or to Lila Dahl Ames.  All the principal characters struggle with loneliness, especially the natural heathens, Jack and Lila, but also Ames and to a lessser extent Boughton.  The attention to the loneliness of the characters make the stories seem almost Existentialist, not so much like Sartre's Huis Clos, but more like Camus' "L'Estranger," again especially for Jack and Lila.  On the other hand, Robinson must have a warmer view of humankind than the post-war existentialists had, they whose spiritual wounds from Europe's war were much more intense and recent than anything Robinson would have experiened growing up after WW II in Idaho.  I'll order the Kindle edition of Jack today but wonder if I should wait awhile before diving into it.  (I was a bit surprised that Jack Boughton received scant attention in Lila since the two characters were somewhat kindred spirits, lost souls, in Gilead and Lila.)    I may need a break from Robinson's deep dives in la condition humaine.

7:20 a.m.  Through my bathroom window I saw a robin fly onto a low branch, then a higher one, on our bottlebrush buckeye tree with a long strand of dead foliage in her beak.  Then she flew up toward the eaves on the back of our house.  I'll check later to see if that is where she is building her nest.  Meanwhile, I'll continue to be thrilled by the fact that birds build nests and how they do it.  And by so many other facts about 'birdbrains.'  And, BTW, all seeds are gone in the squirrel-proof feeder, 

9:00 a.m.  Another sign Spring has sprung - the lawn needs mowing.  It seems like only a couple of weeks ago we paid for the last driveway plowing.