librarygrrrl.net

ALA was great. Orlando sucked. What a cultural wasteland. I don’t know why people travel there - it’s just a 15-mile long strip mall and altar to consumerism. And goodness knows, that kind of stuff makes my soul shrivel. It reminds me of Dante’s Third Circle of Hell - that reserved for the gluttons.

The conference, though, was really fun. I saw all the friends I wanted to see - my LSU folks, my grad school friend, my Iowa partner-in-crime, and all my Women’s Studies Section friends. On Thursday, when I arrived, my friends Penny and Tom took me airboating on the Tosohatchee (sp?) River. I never thought I’d enjoy doing such a thing, but it was a blast. I saw lots of birds and cattle, a few alligators, and a dead cow. Fun, eh?

And now I get ready for my next adventure… which entails doing laundry and getting the dog used to riding in the car. More details later, I promise!

Off to Orlando for the American Library Association conference (no link - the website takes forever to load and embarrasses me.) If you are interested in e-stalking me, I’ll be at most of the Women’s Studies Section meetings on Sunday and Monday.

The beast is in the good hands of my friend Amy. So if you’re in West Philly, give them both a little wave hello.

I’ve been thinking a lot about things tangentially related to my last post on Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about memories - those memories long-gone, far in the past, that only come bubbling to the surface when the right trigger is there.

Today, for the first time in years, I thought about one of the women I worked at summer camps with. Her name was Ellen - she was a first-year counselor the last year I was a camper, and we worked together as counselors for the next several years. She was strong and smart and funny. She was a swimmer and diver at one of the colleges that was rival to my college. One summer, she dated another counselor named Paul. We all thought they were the cutest couple, until everyone realized that Paul was two-timing her with another counselor. That knowledge made everyone at the camp pretty uncomfortable. Not being swift or suave or anything like that, I got all ticked at Paul and stopped talking to him for the rest of the summer. At our final barbeque in August, he got in my face about it, and I recall yelling at him. I think he was the first person other than my parents or brother who I yelled at.

That was the picnic where I met Mark L. for the first time. He was the younger brother of my all-time favorite camp counselor, Shelly. They grew up in another small town in Minnesota, near my small town, in the same athletic conference. I adored Shelly. She too was strong and smart and funny, and in that way that camp counselors have, made me feel like the neatest, most special kid in the world. I wrote to her faithfully throughout my grade school and junior high school years. I wonder if she ever remembers that?

But back to Mark. He was a great guy - my age, typical of the small-town kids in Minnesota who I knew at the time. Played sports, dated some, and was headed to college. Imagine my surprise several years later when I was working a summer job at a liquor store in suburban Minneapolis, and found out that Mark worked there too! I hung out a little bit with him and his roommate that summer, but was still pretty awkward in my own skin at the time, and didn’t think that I was interesting enough for them. Only in the past 6 or 7 years have I grown into myself, and only in that time have I been comfortable hanging out with casual acquaintances.

Mark had fire-engine red hair, like many of the guys I grew up with. I loved that hair - I’m not sure why. I do know that at various points in my under-16-ness, I had crushes on each and every red-headed-boy in my school. My best friend used to harrass me about that. The tables were turned some when she ended up dating and marrying a redhead of her own. They had a little boy in April. I wonder if he’ll end up with his dad’s red hair, and wonder if he’ll have to deal with schoolgirl crushes from the likes of young librarygrrrls?

I love the way memory works, tripping and traipsing through the inner recesses of our minds, associating words with images with emotions with memories. The paths I took, from the trigger today through my summer camp experiences to the liquor-store job to red-headed boys… Only the human mind can do such a thing.

Lately, it seems, Alzheimer’s is the disease of the day. It’s surrounding me in strange ways. First, my friend Amy lent me a copy of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook.* For those of you not in the know, this is what Amazon has to say about it:

“Somewhere,” muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, “there were people making love.” Anyway, head elsewhere for Great Literature, but if you’re in the market to get your heartstrings plucked, look no further. The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she hook up with Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago? We’re not telling, but you have two guesses and the first one doesn’t count. Decades later, after Allison develops Alzheimer’s, her beau uses “the notebook” to read her the story of the great love she’s plumb forgot. The Notebook–film rights already sold, thank you very much–is a little glazed doughnut of a book: sticky- sweet, satisfying, not much nourishment. But who cares? Take an extra vitamin and indulge.

That was the first Alzheimer’s moment of the past week. Next was Ronald Reagan’s death. Now, I’m no fan of the former president - not by any stretch of the imagination. But you’ve got to admit that he died a rather undignified death. Alzheimer’s took this once-vibrant former leader of the free world and robbed him of his memory, of his very existence. Granted, I suppose that for me, if I’d have done what he did, losing my memory might be a damn blessing, but you can’t pick and choose what you lose. So not only did he lose the memories that would haunt me (the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of people in Latin America, the hatred of poor, undereducated, lower-class people), but he also lost the knowledge that he loved his wife and children. And that is a travesty.

Finally, just tonight, I left my house to take the dog for a walk and ran into my neighbor, Eryc. His family is one of the families in the PBS series The Forgetting - which airs again on June 16 (Wednesday!) His sister died 6 months ago, and he seems so sad. He got tested to find out if he carries the genetic mutation for Alzheimer’s that runs in his family, and he does not. His mom and a sister have now died of this disease, and his brother lives with it. I can’t imagine having to live with that kind of fear.

So I don’t really have anything profound to say about memory - more that I’m glad I have mine, and that my heart goes out to those who are losing their memories due to diseases like Alzheimer’s.

* The book itself is pure schmaltz. Readable schmaltz, and schmaltz that made me a bit weepy, but schmaltz nonetheless. I felt a little dirty when I was done reading it, like when I read The Bridges of Madison County. They made that into a movie too.

Just a quick update in the knitting department…

I figured out what I’m going to make for my PhillyKnitters Secret Pal. It definitely isn’t the most complex thing in the world, but I’m hoping it turns out to look really beautiful. I got the yarn for it a while ago, at Finely, A Knitting Party in Swarthmore and the pattern is from the latest Knitter’s Magazine.

Last week I drove up to Chestnut Hill after work to hit the Tangled Web and to find out what they had in their sale bin. Stella mentioned that she’d seen some Noro Kureyon in there, and since I’ve been itching to make some variation on the Booga Bag for a while, I figured it was worth the trip. And I have to say, what a fabulous store! There is room, there is light, there are well-organized displays, and the two women who were working were quite helpful (even if one of them went a little overboard on helping - I’m a librarian, and I get it.) I didn’t find any of the sale Noro (bummer) but I did pick up 3 skeins of colorway 102. Isn’t it pretty?

And more of that color:

The only Noro colorways I’ve worked with before are 87 and 95 - I like the 95 a LOT (lime green is fun!) but the 87 just doesn’t do it for me.

.

I also found a Minnow Knits pattern to make a sweater for a co-worker’s impending baby. I’m making that out of the Berrocco Plush I got a few weeks ago. It’s the Minnowknits Piccolo pattern - so cute!

When all that is done, summer might be over and I might be inspired to finish my Weekend Warrior sweater. As it stands, I’m dreading seaming it up, since I think the arms aren’t going to fit right. *grumble* Maybe I’ll bring that to Minnesota with me in July, so Mom can help me out with it…. Moms are so great that way!