So how do you like your books?

Rare, medium, or well done?  I prefer books that are done well — I mean, well done.  Bookstore names fascinate me.

Once upon a time, I worked part-time at A Novel Idea, which sold rare, used, out-of-print, and collectible books — and more and more new books as time went on.  When it was sold, the new owner changed the name, but this photo shows what it looked like back then.

Happy 22nd birthday

... to my granddaughter, even though she complained that she hadn't even put on makeup this morning when I took this photo.  She's the only natural blonde I've ever known to deliberately choose brown hair, and still she's beautiful.

Sunday Salon ~ Irish art

POSTER

My artist friend Jane brought me a couple of gifts from Ireland.  First, this delightful poster of "Pangur Ban" from Trinity College Library in Dublin.  The poem was written into the margin of a manuscript copied by an Irish Monk in the ninth century.  I'll have to memorize this first verse.

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

On the left is an enlargement from the bottom of the poster, showing a cat as twisty as a Celtic drawing.  Jane got the perfect gift for a wordlover who has a cat.  The encircling lines above are four more of the eight verses (2, 4, 5, and 8) of the "Pangur Ban" poem.

Pangur Ban
(click title to hear it read)

I and Pangur Ban my cat, / Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight, / Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men / Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will, / He too plies his simple skill.

Tis a merry thing to see / At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find / Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray / In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set / Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye / Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I / All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den / O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove / When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply, / Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss, / I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made / Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night / Turning darkness into light.

Jane also brought me a nice Celtic Art bookmark showing the initial letter "b" adapted from the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Double-click the illustrations so you can compare the bookmark to Wikipedia's illustration of the page from the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Can you see the "b"?

(And did you notice the twisty cat above, drawn by Denis Brown in 2001, is using a computer and has his paw on a mouse?  Look closely at the mouse.)

WHAT I'M READING

Just finished

1.  Dead Asleep ~ by Jennifer B. White, 2011, fiction (Massachusetts), 9/10

Currently

2.  Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story ~ by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009, memoir (Greece, Turkey, South Carolina, France)

Next Up

3.  Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus ~ by Robin R. Meyers, 2009, religion

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Beginning ~ in a Greek museum

Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story ~ by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009, memoir (Greece, Turkey, South Carolina, France)

"Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet she's performing -- her slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light.  The scene reminds me of something, a memory mayvbe, but I can't recall what.  I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me I'm possessed by an acute feeling of loss."

In a comment on another blog, someone said, "I just read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter."  I thoroughly enjoyed reading that book, which has this subtitle:  A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine.  When I mentioned I'm about to read Traveling with Pomegranates, she said it's on her TBR list as well.  I was very impressed with The Secret Lfes of Bees.

Some of us have talked about starting an online book club to discuss Traveling with Pomegranates.  Are you interested?  If so, go here to sign up.  Here's a synopsis:

In this intimate dual memoir, the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other.  Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France.  Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel.  Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.
Click here for today's Mister Linky.

BTT (#23) ~ pet names

Lu @ Booking Through Thursday asks:

Do you have any pet that has a name inspired by your readings?

I'm using only the basic question today, because my answer will already be divided into several parts:  Jack, Pippa, Dickens and Junie B.

(1)  Jack of "Jack and Jill"

When my twin daughters were five and my son was two, they found under the tree on Christmas twin kittens, one male and one female. I have never been able to tell one sex from the other until cats grow up, but we told our children which we THOUGHT was which.  We were, of course, wrong.  Before we learned we had mislabeled the kittens, the children had chosen names from among their favorite stories, and the furry babies became Jack and Jill.  Or Jill and Jack.  Within a few months one darted under the wheels of a car and "Jill" lived on ... until the day it was undeniably clear that "she" was Jack.  I'm sure Jack was totally confused when he received his sister's name, after having been Jill up until then.  But it was clear that he knew the word meant HIM ... whenever he heard "Jack," even in the middle of a sentence spoken between humans, he would twitch his ear in our direction even if we thought he was asleep across the room.

Jack was an outdoor cat who loved to chase squirrels.  When he spied one in the dogwood tree, up he would go after the critter, who simply hopped to a branch of a nearby oak tree and chattered heatedly at Jack, who sat dejectedly in the dogwood tree like an oversized gray-and-white Persian blossom.  Lest you believe Jack was not a hunter, however, let me assure you he brought in his share of "gifts" to the family.

One Sunday morning I left my children at home getting ready for church (my mother lived downstairs) and dashed off to the office to make copies for a Monday morning business trip.  When I got home, I saw my 10- or 11-year-old son coming across the back yard from the woods.  He was dressed for church, crying, and dragging the double-bladed axe.  My heart stopped! Until I heard the story.  Jack had brought a twitching rabbit onto the patio, and my young son told me he knew if I'd been there, I would have put the dying animal out of its misery.   "But Mom, I knew you'd kill he if I used the 22-rifle," he said.  Darn tootin!   Instead, my kind-hearted child used the axe ... almost, but not quite, as bad as the rifle.  And he managed NOT to get blood on his Sunday suit.   I was so proud of him for doing what had to be done, something that he knew was the right thing, even though his little heart was breaking when he did it.   I never saw the rabbit because my little boy took care of the problem.

Jack the Gentleman Cat probably wondered about his humans ... didn't they recognize what a gift he had shared?  Usually what Jack shared was laundry time.  When I would come to the basement laundry room, Jack would follow me and sit on a window sill or the dryer to talk to me while I stuffed the washer with dirty clothes.

Since he spent a lot of time roaming the neighborhood, he himself would sometimes be the one who came home bloodied and scarred.   One evening about dusk I got a call from a neighbor, telling me my cat had knocked over a large $100 vase on her front porch.  By the time my husband got on the phone with her, the vase was worth $200.   I got the car keys to go find Jack, went to the basement garage, and found Jack sound asleep on top of the car ... and the garage door was firmly closed.  Not.  My.  Cat!  Oh, you can't imagine how happily I called the woman back to inform her the naughty cat was someone else's!  Jack, my sleeping fur person, was totally exonerated!

(2)  Pippa, of "Pippa Passes"

Pippa got her name from Robert Browning's famous poem "Pippa Passes," published in 1841.  Perhaps the most famous passage is sung by a little Italian girl named Pippa:

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven —
All's right with the world!

Each of my three children memorized these lines and could recite them to me.  (Okay, I bribed them to do it for a quarter apiece, which really was worth a little bit of something in the late 1960s.)  Pippa was a regular-sized collie with a very sweet and loving personality.  I have a photo of her romping with David when my son couldn't have been more than five or six years old (he'll be 49 next month).   They were in the lower part of the yard, down near the stream that ran through our back yard, near my children's earliest treehouse which was built beside a large tree and had a sandbox under it.

That's one of the good memories, but the bad memory almost obliterates the good.  On December 12, 1977, we arrived home after dark to discover Pippa lying dead in the upper part of the back yard.  She had been shot and killed, we learned later, by someone who said to my daughter at school, "I know who killed your dog."   It was apparently a boy she refused to date, a boy who must have come around the end of our house and shot Pippa with a 22-rifle as she stared toward the back road, away from the shooter.  A beloved pet was killed by a boy who wanted my daughter to suffer because she wouldn't go out with him.  And I am so glad she never did!   I was fearful for the longest time, however, that the next time it would be one of my children.

(3)  Dickens, named for the famous author Charles Dickens

This cute-as-the-dickens kitten was hiding from the rain under my roommate's car when she went out on a Sunday morning.   Needing to get to church to teach a children's Sunday school class, she brought him to me.  What could I do?  I left a cellphone message that I'd miss church with family, but would meet them for lunch afterwards.   In the meantime, this little dickens was exploring his new digs (interesting word) and thus totally annoying the two elderly cats, Sammy, who was 13, and Kiki, who was 8 years old.  Much deep-throat growling and spitting occurred.  Sammy hid under Donna's bed, snarling whenever the little fuzzball appeared on her radar, but Kiki defended her turf, actively growling her "ERRRRMMM-mmmmm" whenever the hyperactive youngster cavorted too near the corner where she had retreated.

Surprisingly, this tiny fellow wasn't taking any guff from the big cats and would hiss right back at them.  Once, having run from Kiki's hissey fit of snarling and spitting, he jumped into the litter box in the laundry room and said what I can only translate as "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah ... hisssss!"   Then he pooped, covered it with sandy litter, and pranced right back into the living room where Kiki sat, quivering with righteous indignation that we humans had allowed this ... this ... strutting white ball of fluff into HER home.

I left the kitten closed up in the bathroom with a bowl of water and went out for lunch and an afternoon of swimming.  When I returned late in the day, Sammy was still under the bed and Kiki looked frazzled from listening to hours of meowing emanating from the other side of that door.  When I released the captive kitty, I found that everything on the counter had been knocked aside and dusty paw prints decorated the sink.   (Had he first conquered any dust bunnies hiding behind the toilet bowl?)  It was an interesting 24 hours.  I was awakened at 7:30 the next morning by the kitten, who was ardently waging a battle against my elbow with his needle-sharp claws and teeth.

(4)  Junie B., of the beloved Junie B. children's books

Dickens is now Junie B.  Kiki, Sammy, and I decided the little dickens who moved in on the previous Sunday could be described as "tiresome" or maybe "more energy than a dynamo" or even "make it stop"!  The non-stop kitten drained us of our energy.  Donna, who missed about nine hours a day of "fun with kitty" by going to work every day, was off on Wednesday and finally realized we really could not keep such an active kitten who took a walk in my oatmeal and liked to tackle the tails of elderly cats.  So she departed with kitty on a journey to the brand-spanking-new animal adoption place nearby.   Kiki was so relieved that she came and sat in my lap for close to 45 minutes, sighing and content.  When Donna returned in about an hour, all three of us ... Kiki, Sammy, and I ... stared in disbelief as the kitty bounced out of Donna's arms and back into our lives!  What happened?   The new place takes only 30 adoptions a day, with the next possible date being next month, and asked Donna to "foster" the little one a few more weeks.

We did learn something, however. I had thought, upon examination, that the kitten was a girl; Donna was sure she saw a couple of things I had missed and said it was a boy.  The adoption center confirmed he's a she.  So the little dickens needed a new name.  We were going for literary and tried every female name possible ... until Donna thought of Junie B.  Unless you have youngsters in your life, you may not know about the Junie B. Jones books by Barbara Park, which even little boys enjoy.  Junie B. is always into something, like in this "Sneaky Peeky Spy" story.  Aha, just like our little dickens!  And the amazing part is that the kitten likes "Junie B." and totally ignored "Dickens" when we said it.  Maybe she was trying to tell us something.

Library Loot ~ May 23-29

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade ~ by Ann Fessler, 2006, history

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.  An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

A discussion arose in one of my groups about "the value of girls."  I said, "I’m 72, and being a teenager in the 1950s was very different from now — or even from when you were a teen.  Any girl who got pregnant dropped out of school and seemed to disappear."  Martha replied, "If you haven’t read it, Bonnie, I recommend The Girls Who Went Away for a look at the societal framework that encouraged and supported that disappearing. It’s heart-wrenching."  My library had a copy, which I checked out this afternoon.  It's absorbing, and I'm already halfway through the book — even though I had intended to just "take a quick look at the contents."  Ha!

 Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share titles of books they’ve checked out of the library. To participate, just add your post to their Mister Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries this week.

Sunday Salon ~ salad days

SALAD DAYS

I don't usually get excited about food preparation, maybe because it too often seems like a lot of work to make a meal for one.  I do, however, like to experiment with salads.  My process is to toss in whatever I have on hand that sounds good to me at the moment.  It could be leftovers, like this one.  On Thursday, I had a hard-boiled egg from breakfast, a tomato, and some leftover asparagus from a recent meal.  So I cut up those together in a bowl.  After taking this photo, I added Roasted Onion Parmesan Dressing and called it a salad.

My lunch, which was delicious, now becomes my first post for Weekend Cooking @ Beth Fish Reads.  It's open to anyone with a food-related post to share:  book reviews, recipes, photographs, random thoughts.  If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up.

CAN YOU GUESS?

The title of my sermon at St. Luke United Methodist Church this morning is Please, Thank You, Oops, and Wow!  Can you guess what the subject is?  If it's any help, the two scriptures I chose are First Samuel 3:1-10 and Mark 10: 13-15.

First Samuel 3

 1 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD under Eli. The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.
 2 At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room;
 3 the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was.
 4 Then the LORD called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!"
 5 and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down.
 6 The LORD called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again."
 7 Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him.
 8 The LORD called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy.
 9 Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
 10 Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

Mark 10

 13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.
 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.
 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

WHAT I'M READING

Just finished

1.  One Hand Clapping: Zen Stories for All Ages ~ by Rafe Martin, illustrated by Junko Morimoto, 1995, YA religion, 9/10

Currently

2.  The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed  the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels ~ by Thomas Cahill, 1998, history

Concurrently (with my study group)

3.  Living Buddha, Living Christ ~ by Thích Nhất Hạnh, 1995, religion

Next up

4.  Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story ~ by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009, memoir (Greece, Turkey, South Carolina, France)

5.  Close to Famous ~ by Joan Bauer, 2011, YA fiction (West Virginia)

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