Having It All

Look: not one but two!
First crocus sighting of the season!
[Warmer in Kansas than Indiana!]

from the essay, "Bakeries"
by Delia Ephron
found in her book Sister Mother Husband Dog
To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A total eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the earth is at its greatest distance from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science Web site, but one thing is clear: it’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes and 31 seconds.

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind. (p 79)

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it. (pp 151 - 52; see also p 13)

And this . . .
from the essay "Hurtling Toward the Eschaton"
by Wayne Muller
found in his book Sabbath:
Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives
A Sabbath Challenge to the theology of progress: But we must ask this question: What if we are not going anywhere? What if we are simply living and growing within an ever - deepening cycle of rhythms, perhaps getting wiser, perhaps learning to be kind, and hopefully passing whatever we have learned to our children? What if our life, roughhewn from the stuff of creation, orbits around a God who never ceases to create new beginnings? What if our life is simply a time when we are blessed with both sadness and joy, health and disease, courage and fear — and all the while we work, pray, and love, knowing that the promised land we seek is already present in the very gift of life itself, the inestimable privilege of a human birth? What if this single human life is itself the jewel in the lotus, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price? What if all the way to heaven is heaven? (79)

[Bill Bryson says something along the same lines as Muller:
". . . you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. . . . That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be repeated moment, reading this book, eating bonbons . . . doing whatever you are doing--just EXISTING--is really wondrous beyond belief." ~ Notes From A Small Island, 120 - 21]

A Perfect World, Better Than Real

My Favorite Wingfield Illustration
from The Party by M. E. Gagg
[See also this nostalgic blog post from "Wartime Housewife"
about the rosy world of Wingfield]
As I mentioned a couple of years ago, I always find Bill Bryson to be at his most endearing when he describes his favorite children's books from long ago. Like Bryson, I too have always felt "strangely influenced" by the depiction of life in those old readers and storybooks. Bryson's enthusiasm indicates that it's not just a "girl thing" to want that idealized version of childhood for your kids. Father's can have a similar vision (Bryson has, I think, 2 daughters and 2 sons). As Bryson was enchanted by the Ladybird Reading Series, illustrated by J. H. (Harry) Wingfield, I, in turn, am equally enchanted by Bryson's description of this long lost imaginary world:

"Once many years ago, in anticipation of the offspring we would one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird children's books from the 1950s and 1960s. They all had titles like Out in the Sun and Sunny Days at the Seaside, and contained meticulously drafted, richly colored illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litter-free Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled, and children in freshly pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes -- riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on a park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman.

"My favorite was a book called Adventure on the Island. There was in fact precious little adventure in the book--the high point, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock -- but I loved it because of the illustrations (by the gifted and much-missed J. H. Wingfield), which portrayed an island of rocky coves and long views that was recognizably British, but with a Mediterranean climate and a tidy absence of pay-and-display car parks, bingo parlors, and the tackier sort of amusement arcades. Here commercial activity was limited to the odd cake shop and tearoom.


"I was strangely influenced by this book, and for some years agreed to take our family vacations at the British seaside on the assumption that one day we would find this magic place where summer days were forever sunny, the water as warm as a sitz bath, and commercial blight unknown.

"When at last we began to accumulate children, it turned out that they didn't like these books at all because the characters in them never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain, but they wouldn't have it and instead, to my dismay, attached their affections to a pair of irksome little clots called Topsy and Tim."
from Notes From a Small Island (103 - 04)
by Bill Bryson

Topsy and Tim certainly appear eager to camp out in a tent and clamber through the woods, yet the illustrations simply do not carry the idealized charm that Bryson appreciated in the Ladybird / Wingfield adventures. For another look at the contrast between Ladybird and Topsy & Tim, scroll down to see yesterday's post on "Bonfire Night".

I've written several posts on Bill Bryson (see list below), but I can't move on without sharing one more thing: his winsome commentary on the Dick & Jane reading series. The following passage from his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is rather lengthy but well worth reading every heartfelt and hilarious word:

"We were taught to read from Dick and Jane books, solid hardbacks bound in a heavy - duty red or blue fabric. They had . . . lots of handsome watercolor illustrations featuring a happy, prosperous, good - looking, law - abiding, but interestingly strange family. . . . Father is always called Father, never Dad or Daddy . . . Mother is always Mother. . . . The family has no last name. They live in a pretty house with picket fence on a pleasant street . . . The children . . . have only the simplest and most timeless of toys: a ball, a wagon, a kite, a wooden sailboat. . . .

"I was captivated by the Dick and Jane family . . . so wonderfully, fascinatingly different from my own family . . .

"Because our Dick and Jane books at Greenwood were ten or fifteen years old, they depicted a world that was already gone. The cars were old - fashioned; the buses, too. The shops the family frequented were of a type that no longer existed -- pet shops with puppies in the window, toy stores with wooden toys, grocers where items were fetched for you by a cheerful man in a white apron. I found everything about this enchanting. . . . It was a wonderful world, a perfect world, friendly, hygienic, safe, better than real. There was just one very odd thing...Whenever any of the characters spoke, they didn't sound like humans (145 - 47)."

Bryson goes on to mimic the stilted dialogue of the reading series:

"'Here we are at the farm,' says Father . . . then adds a touch robotically: 'Hello, Grandmother. Here we are at the farm.'

"'Oh, look! Here we are at the farm,' adds Dick . . . 'Here we are at the farm . . . Here is Grandfather, too! Here we are at the farm'

"It was like this one every page. Every character talked exactly like people whose brains had been taken away. . . .

"I loved the Dick and Jane books so much that I took them home and kept them. (There were stacks of spares in the cloakroom.) I still have them and still look at them from time to time. And I am still looking for [that] family . . . " (147 - 48).

from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid:
A Memoir
by Bill Bryson
My essays "Tom, Betty & Susan In The Autumn" and "Dick, Jane & Bill (Bryson)"describe my own early mesmerizing experience with The Little Red, Blue, and Green Storybooks, which is remarkably similar to Bryson's nostalgic attachment to these formative old favorites.

My previous posts about Bill Bryson include

"Monday Pop" Quiz

"The Small Things That Make the Big Things Big"

"Dick, Jane & Bill (Bryson)"

"Jam Cake"

"Mind the Gap!"

"Catching Up On Bill Bryson" (on book blog)

And my LIST: "Siblings in Literature"

Mind the Gap!

Taking the Tube at Covent Garden, Spring Break 2000
No matter what country he is writing about, Bill Bryson has a knack for tracking down all the best place names -- the most absurd, quaint, funny, lewd, charming -- you name it! I think you will enjoy his pastoral description of riding the London Underground:

"The best part of Underground travel is that you never actually see the places above you. You have to imagine them. In other cities, station names are drearily mundane: Lexington Avenue, Potsdamer Platz, Third Street South. In London, by contrast, the names nearly always sound sylvan and beckoning: Stamford Brook, Turnham Green, Bromley-by-Bow, Maida Vale, Drayton Park. That isn't a city up there, it's a Jane Austen novel . . . a semimythic city from some golden pre-industrial age."
(from Notes From A Small Island, 41 - 42)

And you might want to try Anna Quindlen's humorously helpful map - storage system:

" . . . the maps in the glove compartment are all folded the wrong way . . . If you live in New York, the maps will generally be of New Mexico, Alabama, and downtown Houston. If you live in Seattle, the maps will be of Maine and the Florida Panhandle. In your datebook, however, will be the map you are never without, that all-important map of the London Underground."
(from "Putting Up a Good Front" Living Out Loud, 48 - 49)

All - Important Map!

Jam Cake

Back in the days when Ben and Sam were Choral Scholars, we had the exciting opportunity to house four choristers from the Sheffield Cathedral Choir when they came visit to Philadelphia in late October 2001.

Naturally, this trip had been planned for a long time, and naturally there was much discussion about cancelling it: should all these British students be flying across the Atlantic so recently after 9-11? The consensus was to shine a light in the darkness and let the show go on. So on a cold and frosty full-moon-lit night, eight years ago just about now, we welcomed our guests from Sheffield, England -- City On The Move (if you've seen The Full Monty).

As it happened, one of the boys was turning 14 during his brief stay at with us. So we set about to plan a little party. When I asked what kind of cake he would like, he answered without any hesitation: "A jam cake!" That delightful request just confirmed for me one of Anglophile Bill Bryson's clever remarks in Notes From A Small Island about Brits loving jam cakes (something you don't hear / see much of in the States):

"And the British are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small. That is why so many of their treats -- tea cakes, scones, crumpets, rock cakes, rich tea biscuits, fruit Shrewburys -- are so cautiously flavorful. They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling constituents of a pudding or cake" (79).

I wasn't exactly sure how to assemble a jam cake, but as you can see, it's not difficult: two layers of white cake (8 inch round or square), raspberry jam in between, white frosting and sprinkles on top, candles, flame, song.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLIVER!