I have a friend who quit her job here in Santa Rosa a month ago and returned to her home base in New Zealand with the desire to work the grape harvest and learn about making wine. (The fact that she lived in California wine country but wanted to return home to learn about wine making deserves a round of applause here. In my opinion, of course.) We email back and forth a bit and she did get hired on as a seasonal vineyard worker and has managed to cobble together a place to live (hostel) and transport to work (shuttle) and computer connections (spotty). I find it so admirable that a young woman would just toss her cards in the air, store her belongings and set out to answer a calling she has, on her own, with no set plan other than to just do it.
It's things like the above and things like accidentally coming across an obit of someone I knew from SF, things like finding out that friends of my daughter were killed mysteriously, like realizing there aren't that many more years in my life to get to do what I want...... it's all this and more that has dropped me into a vat of introspection. And I am not terribly happy with what I am finding in that vat. Sometimes, introspection sucks.
But I digress. A book: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie is well worth checking out of the library or borrowing from a book-buying friend. It's a look at marriage and careers and relatives and nature but through a rather crazy pair of glasses. There are squirrels in this novel that possess quiet insight (very quiet) into human lives, there are large pharmaceutical companies that have no insight into anything except profit (big surprise), there are people who believe in those squirrels and those companies and yet, there's a lot more. McKenzie is a cool, funny, breezy writer that takes you along for the ride in the swanky convertible down the tree-lined boulevard but you gradually realize that the convertible is really an old, lime-green Gremlin and that the boulevard is not just full of broken dreams but full of chipped teeth and severed doll heads as well. In other words, things are never what they seem. In other words, reality is hard and harsh and often not what one wants. However, reality is what we have. It is the thing of marriage and relationships and love and squirrels.
You can read the book in two or three days, it does move quite nicely, and it will make you laugh and cry and acknowledge the craziness and idiosyncratic ways of life. And along the way you will meet some squirrels. It's a good read, one you will enjoy.
More on crime and fools in paradise later. It's time for some food now. We will call it lunch.
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