During the last two weeks alone, she read La’s Orchestra Saves the World, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Olive Kitteridge, and Three Cups of Tea—all while on a rather intense business trip to Uganda! All four have been sitting on my bedside table since the holidays, but I’ve managed to read only one!
Being in a book club certainly helps her keep her production numbers up—she’s been in three clubs off and on during the last thirteen years here in the DC area.
She’s an unabashed, card-carrying library patron and comes from a long line of librarians: her mother was a librarian, her sister is a librarian, and for two years she herself cataloged Spanish and Portuguese publications at the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate Library.
If I can’t find her in the stacks of the local public library, it’s a sure bet I can track her down at Barnes and Noble, sometimes running into her while she’s standing in line with her selections and her cherished Discount Membership Card, often reading a magazine while she waits.
In a word, she’s a page-turner who loves a tome with a spine, and has no plans to make the jump from papyrus to E-Book. Speaking of loyalty, she also has her favorites: Kingsolver, McCall Smith, Tolkein, Asimov, Christie, LeGuin, Francis, Conan Doyle, and Rowling—she’s read everything they’ve written.
When I asked her recently about her earliest memories of reading, she told me that comic books and comic strips were among her first loves. When she was young, her mother bought her an Archie, a Superman, or an Aqua Man (not to be confused with the Aqua Velva Man) once a week at Tom’s Grocery in Fitchburg, MA—notwithstanding the contemptuous looks from her mother’s friends, who were convinced that these rags would impede her intellectual development.
With the exception of a brief period of motherhood when she introduced the X-Men to our sons, she put away the comics a long time ago. The comic strips, however, have remained a life-long habit. First thing Sunday morning, she has black tea at the kitchen table with Zits, Doonsebury, Prince Valiant, Hagar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace, Garfield, and the incomparable characters from Peanuts.
As serendipity would have it, in 2005 she had the opportunity to meet all her favorite Charles Schulz characters, up-close and personal, when our younger son was cast as Linus in his high school production of the Broadway Musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Snoopy, “Chuck,” Lucy, Sally, Linus, Shroeder, Peppermint Patty, Pig Pen, and the Little Girl with the Red Hair—they were all up there on the big stage for several performances.
We still laugh whenever we recall Linus’s ill-fated effort to convince his friends, and himself, that he could live without his beloved blanket in the number “My Blanket and Me:”
It’s a cozy sanctuary
But it’s far from necessary
Cause I’m just as self-reliant as before
As a simple demonstration
Of my independent station
I will go and leave my blanket on the floor
Yes I’ll walk away and leave it
Though I know you won’t believe it
I’ll just walk away and leave it on the floor
Yes, I’ll walk
Away
And
Leave
It
On
The…
AAARRRRGGGHHH!
[He runs back to gather the blanket and while clutching it to his chest, says to the blanket:]
Don’t ever let me do that again!
So I had to chuckle when not long after the final curtain had been drawn on the show she told me she was joining the “Linus Project” at her office. The first image that came to mind was that of a collection of blanket-dependent cerebral types, spreading then sitting upon their special keepsakes at lunch time, to think about and reflect deeply upon the nature of the world as it is and could be—a kind of a “quiet time” for adults.
Following a strategically placed poke with her crochet hook, she explained that the Project is a national network of people who knit or crochet blankets for children in crisis. In 2009 alone, colleagues, friends and family from my wife’s office donated 458 blankets to hospitals, shelters for battered women and children, and other agencies in the greater Washington metropolitan area and North Carolina. The group is planning a shipment of blankets to Haiti next month. Since 2005, my wife has averaged about four blankets a year.
Although I kid her about how she will have plenty of time later in life to make blankets in her front-porch rocker while sitting there in her fashionable housecoat and hairnet, the response from the service professionals who receive and distribute the blankets is no joke.
Sometimes their letters of thanks can produce goose bumps on even the thickest-skinned.
"It is a pleasure to thank you again…for the beautiful blankets and quilts that we have received from you via the Project Linus…Your kindness to the patients we serve is tremendously appreciated. We will be giving them to mothers who have already or will soon be giving birth as well as to the many children who are admitted as patients to the Hospital. Your outreach to our families helps us to send the message of caring that is so important. It is through the efforts that you have taken that the hearts of the staff and the people we serve are filled. Again, thank you for your commitment, your talent and your generosity in sharing yourself with us."
****
"…I thank you so very much for the fifteen blankets that you donated. These “hold-able hugs” will be distributed to hospitalized or traumatized children in local hospitals or shelters so that they may be available for holiday admissions. It will make a hospital stay over the holidays easier for children who would much rather be at home. The colors of your blankets are always so child-friendly…They will bring both physical and emotional warmth and comfort to the children who receive them. They will bring comfort to their parents as well, who are often more frightened than the children…It is only through donations from caring people like you that Project Linus can continue to reach so many children…"
****
In the months ahead I am confident my wife will continue to burn through those paperbacks at a high rate. How she can find more time to increase her blanket production numbers, however, is another question. Yesterday she muttered something about a “Husband Project.”
Oh, good grief!
