Tandy was the daughter who became an attorney and moved to Orlando, the city where her adopted parents picked her up. After a snafu with a client puts her on administrative leave, she goes back home to Stars Hill, Tennessee to spend time with her family. Only she also finds her high school sweetheart who left her for the military right after he graduated.
Okay, so you already know the story, but it shouldn't really deter you from this one. The tag line on the back reads, "Whoever said 'You can't go home again' was a genius. So why didn't she listen?" What's funny is that she is so eager to get back to Orlando, when...dude. Anyone who lives there is trying to get out. The only thing that bugged me about the whole book was the way the author made a point to talk about the "salt air" and going to the beach from Orlando. IT'S IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STATE!!! And you're more likely to smell exhaust fumes and factory pollution than salt air. You're 60 miles from the ocean.
I'm over it. Orlando is a pit, so I had a hard time believing Tandy wanted to go back. She gets some well meaning advice from Daddy, from Clay (her old flame), and of course from her sisters, who she feels have everything and she looks up to. They all help her figure out that she's running from everything that makes life worth living.
Like I said...overly simplistic, but I love the mood and atmosphere to it. I want to go back to the place that makes me feel all warm and homey, but it doesn't exist anymore, so books like this take the place. Plus, the reminder that the simple things of small towns is just as entertaining as a night downtown makes me want to hit up the next street fair and pull out my own scrapbooking supplies.
Annie requests a trial separation until Natalie returns to the States six weeks later, and goes home to Mystic, Oregon to nurse her heart with her father. There, she begins to find out that she is more than just a wife and mother. She finds her old high school crush is now an alcoholic after his wife committed suicide with a six-year-old daughter who is struggling along without either parent. She is traumatically mute and thinks she is "disappearing" a finger at a time to be with her mommy. Annie takes over watch of Izzy during the day, while Nick barely continues on as the sheriff, then goes to the bar.
Soon, Annie begins to confront Nick about his habit of ignoring his daughter and between that, Nick's friend Joe, and Nick's own resolution, he slowly becomes sober and joins AA meetings.
They begin to have an affair, though it is more of an affair of the heart. Fate throws a tire iron into the deal, d just as Annie is about to leave to pick up her daughter, she finds out the she is pregnant with her husband's child, and her husband, Blake, realizes that his younger woman can't hold a candle to Annie's care of him and his life for the last twenty years. Now Annie must make a decision that is between what she thinks is right and what her heart wants.
I don't imagine many guys are going to be running to the bookstore to grab this one up, but it occurred to me that if a guy ever wanted to know how women worked, all they have to do is pick up something like this, which I affectionately refer to as "chick-lit". I have a difficult time relating to the relationship aspect of it, never having been married and not one for relationships, but I did love the raw emotion apparent in most of the pages. It's even sadder when Annie shuts down because she believes her responsibilities are more important than being happy...you get to see this vibrant woman when she was with Nick (after he went sober), and then it's gone as soon as she's in her husband's presence.
But it's the kids who get this story straight. Izzy and Natalie both have the insight of their ages - which sometimes sees through all the cloudiness that adults have fuzzing up their vision.
I enjoyed this thoroughly. It took me a while to get through because I was only reading it during my lunch and smoke breaks at work (they were probably wondering where I was for two weeks) and I read non-fiction much slower than I read trash romance. But it took an area of history that is so romanticized in the American mind and turned it into real events and real people and real conflict. Ellis explains in his introduction that the book goes in chronological order, with the exception of the first chapter covering the duel between Hamilton and Burr. I guess just to get you interested. The book covers Hamilton and Burr's personal dislike of each other and the insults that flew back and forth - both personal and political. The conspiracy theory (for lack of a better term) about whether Hamilton actually shot at Burr, and where the shot was directed...whether it was ever shot at all. Ellis does a good job of wading through the first tier documentation and journals to get that information and sort through it.
He leads you through all the politics and back stabbing, Jefferson undermining Adams as Adams' vice president (what we would pretty much consider treasonous today), Hamilton's backroom finagling to get the states to accept his financial plan of the federal government assuming all the individual states' debts from the war (considered to be a compromise to get the Capitol's location changed to the Potomac), the bitter rivalry between the Federalists and the Republicans, and allegiance to either the English or the French. So much is covered, and you realize that it sounds just like the politicking on CNN and Fox News today.
The events matter, of course, but what interested me was the people; their ideas and thoughts and motivations are the same as those today. I have a friend who practically worships Jefferson, but in the end, because of the direction the French were headed, an allegiance with them would have been disastrous (Napoleon ruined everything, there), and his backroom politics are less than honourable. But politicians in any time or place are the same, I suppose, and it was interesting to see all the famous characters of American history not as figments of legend and myth, but as men and women (Abigail Adams gets a lot of talk time, so I don't want to leave her out).
What you also realize as you get in deeper in how young this country is. Jefferson and Adams, in their lengthy correspondence for the first two decades of the nineteenth century, are still talking about the 'Spirit of '76'. That was more than thirty years earlier by the time we were dealing with French Napoleonic blockades and strengthening our own Navy again. So by the time the Civil War comes around (and the smart people knew it was coming - Ellis devotes much time to the absence of talk on slavery, calling it the "elephant in the middle of the room"), we had been through the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic War(s), and heading onto a greater Civil War - and the country wasn't even a hundred years old! Eighty-five or ninety years later, the country is dealing with a decision not to deal with the slavery issue. The founders' knew it would be a battle, and at the time, that battle could not be fought. But they knew it was coming. A hundred years - so what kind of decisions were made back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that will come to a head very soon? It simply makes you realize that we hardly have any experience at all in being a country. We've got nothing on Rome or England. And I wonder, in the present day, if our experiment in democracy - the 'Spirit of '76' - can actually survive to prove these revolutionary ideas right or wrong?
I think that’s what impressed me most about Dery’s story: she never asks for pity because of where she was born, or the circumstances she grew up in, for the times her family was poor. She tells the story the way a child would see it; she doesn’t have anything else to compare it to, and it doesn’t seem to matter. She was lucky enough to have a very loving and supportive mother and father who were willing to make even what could be termed miserable circumstances into something fun. She had good neighbors, and sometimes, even good friends. The last lines of the book state what you know from the beginning: “It would take me another eighteen years to realize that what we had back then was as much as anyone on earth would ever need. We had each other, and plenty of love in our hearts” (p. 349).
I enjoyed reading about Dery’s antics and bluntness as a child. She gets into the ballet conservatory almost on charm and personality alone, but hard work keeps her there. Her family has a big St. Bernard named Barry who used to star on Czech television, and she proudly shows him about town. She knows that she talks too much, so she doesn’t talk to the people working on the roof with her father because the family knows they are informers (Dery’s nickname is “Little Trumpet” because she tends to repeat things that aught to be kept quiet). She has a bout of dysentery where she is isolated in the infection ward with gypsy children who also have some form of the infection. It is a challenge to have dysentery in communist Czechoslovakia because the government believes they have eradicated the disease: “ ‘…she will simply become unclassifiable until she gets better. That’s the way it works with diseases we’ve already officially cured’” (p. 193).
Dery says at one point that communism makes people do exactly as the doctrine says they should not: “We followed the teachings of Marx and Lenin every day, but the biggest irony of communism is that it taught the working class to look out for Number One” (p. 9). Life is made up of “private arrangements” (p. 5) done under the table to make life easier for everyone, and everything goes on however people can make it work. For me, this was the biggest draw to the story.
Political things hold very little interest to me, but watching how miserable these people’s lives were as a whole in this country drew me because that’s what everyone is afraid of here. I don’t think I really understood communism other than its basic premise which I have always defined as “a good idea, but then real life intrudes.” In some respects, I couldn’t have been more correct, but I think I may have also oversimplified. People lived under the system and made it work. Humans will keep doing whatever it is that we do under whatever system we have to, until we can’t anymore, and then there is a change to make it easier to carry on again. It happened in the Soviet Bloc after the Cold War, it happened in Germany after WWII, it is beginning to happen in Darfur....
So even though I didn’t take much from the book except learning about living under the Soviets twenty years ago, it does reinforce the amazing strength that people have to get through just about anything, and to be able to do it with a smile is admirable. Dery’s family made her childhood as fun as they could, enjoying good times, and making the best of the bad. They encouraged her in dance and in school, they allowed her to try going to church with a neighboring family (even though that was an "oops" – I believe taking communion when you haven’t been confirmed is a biggie), and they tried to take her fun places so that she wouldn’t miss out on being a little girl, too. I was lucky enough to have parents similar to Dery’s, and what a difference it can make.
What I've found in reading memoirs about people's experiences in religion and spirituality, though, is that there isn't much repetition to be found. Everyone has their own reasons for turning to God or the Ultimate Being or the Universe or the Lord and Lady - and everyone's reasons are different. Everyone's paths are different.
Braestrup describes how her husband's death led her to attend the Bangor Theological Seminary almost in his stead. He had dreams of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, though he was a Maine State Trooper at the time. He was killed in a car accident leaving Braestrup with three (shoot, four?) children. She becomes the first chaplain of the Maine Game Wardens.
She does not feel the need to give you her entire life story in chronological order, which I found to be a neat way to conduct a memoir. She gives anecdotes of things that stand out in her mind as significant markers of spiritual thought in her life whether it be something one of her children said, one of the game wardens pondered with her, something in the faces of the families she assisted. These are things that I don't think we usually take time to notice (at least I forget to stop and take notice a lot of the time), and can ultimately make the difference between a meaningful life and one that just kind of happened.
As far as Christian spirituality goes, I love her take on things; it's infused into real life instead of diffused through stained glass windows. She is never afraid to take other viewpoints into stride, never afraid to explore new information, not so wrapped up in Jesus and Scripture that her ability to minister to all is hindered. She takes what she needs, what others need, and leaves the rest. Maybe that's not the best way to phrase her intentions, but who really knows the true intentions of others? Her view of God draws me in:
" 'Why are you here?' my seminary professors asked me.
" 'You don't really believe in God, do you?' my brother wrote.
"Dear professors, dear brother. It is possible that God is the way Annie Payne used to lean her old head against my shoulder, trusting me as I held her on the bedpan; Drew's arms holding me in our fertile scent; Ron Dunham walking out of the woods hand in hand with a child lost, then found. It is possible that God is my neighbor with her pan of brownies standing on my doorstep. It is entirely possible, that is, that the God I serve and worship with all my mind, all my soul, and all my spirit is love (1John 4:8). It's enough. It's all the God I need." (p. 54-55)
A few other little bit to leave you with:
"If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are." (p. 136)
"A miracle is not defined by an event. A miracle is defined by gratitude." (p. 181)
And a prayer for the wardens who often have not taken the position to be "safe", so prayers for their safety are rather high-handed. I have thought so of my brother as well, who is serving his 3rd tour in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. I thought this suited all who serve in this manner:
"May you be granted capable and amusing comrades, observant witnesses, and gentle homecomings. May you be granted respite from what you must know of human evil, and refuge from what you must know about human pain. May God defend the goodness in your hearts....[and the sweetness in your souls]." (pp. 190-191)
I love the way the book is laid out. The author's personal spiritual journey is interesting, but not particularly moving and the writing is what you can learn out of a college-level creative writing class, complete with over-extended similes. But the unique layout of a unique subject works to apply the story to everyone in the midst of their own spiritual journey.
Covington introduces the reader to snake handling the same way he was introduced: the trial of Glenn Summerford, who was being tried for the attempted murder of his wife by forcing her hand into a cage of live rattlesnakes after holding a gun to her head and making her write a fake suicide note. The snakes were used in their church when "the Spirit took them", where Summerford was a preacher.
Taking up serpents, drinking poison, and speaking in tongues comes from Mark 16: 9-20, and also from where Jesus tells Luke, “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you," in Luke 10:19. In the book of Acts, Paul also demonstrates this method of becoming closer to God/Jesus and to identify himself as "a true believer." Covington takes us to some of these Pentacostal-banch snake-handling churches as he is invited to several by the people he meets at the trial, and the people they later intoduce him to.
Covington begins by going to Summerford's Church of Jesus With Signs Following, but soon finds that it has been fractured by the trial and power stuggles over who would now control it and the funds it raised. Those who did not side with Summerford's people left and either attended other services or built their own small churches. The author makes his rounds at many of these with two photographers (of whom some photos are included), but soon finds himself drawn in.
He looks into his own background and discovers that there were some snake-handlers there, and as he draws parallels between the past and the present, he becomes engrossed in the culture of these churches. He "testifies" (tells a personal story in which he felt Jesus' power), joins in the enthusiasm, sings, handles snakes, and even brings his wife and 2 small girls with him to a few of the services.
Covington's descriptions of the people and their surroundings are more than detailed, and give an accurate portrayal of people trying to eek out a living in the rural South and the bible, but being pushed upon by the modern world. Women do not preach, do not wear pants or make-up, and in some cases, do not even share he same side of the church as the men. Men must have their faces clean-shaven, and have their ownn code of conduct to follow (although Covington isn't quite as clear on this). But they accepted the author, his friends (the photographers), and his family saying "You have to catch the fish before you can clean it."
And catch him, they do.
But in the last 2-3 chapters, you can begin to see it unravel as the dark side of this religion/culture begins to show itself. Covington meets a man who attends the services, but is ostracised by the rest of the congragation because he is more modern and because his background is a touch unsavory (but hey, their former preacher is now in jail for attempted murder). His story is a sad one. Then, at a service given by the man who had become a mentor of sorts to the author, Melissa, one of the photographers, was singled out because of her modern hair and clothing, and the fact that she was "a woman doing a man's job." Covington wrote that he could feel his wife, beside him, stiffen, and that Melissa had a hurt and slightly betrayed face. He was then invited up to the pulpit where he procede to tell them that it was Mary Magdelene who had to tell the 11 diciples about the ressurection, and that they did not believe the angel, but had to be told by a woman that Jesus was not among the dead. His mentor told him he was out of line, and that was that.
He wraps it up saying he sill hears from some of the people he knew, including the couple that he and his wife had become good friends with. He says that he understands that sometimes, a hurt can stregthen, not weaken, faith. His last words are:
Most of the children in my neighborhood were called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe theirhands on their aprons and yell, "Willie!" or "Joe!" or "Ray!"...I was always called home by my father, and he didn't do it in the customary way....If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the gray light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.
The double entendre is a nice touch.
They layout, as I mentioned earlier, seems very important to me, as I have a friend who is going through the same process now that she has spent some time in Brooklyn and Manhatten among an extremely condensed population of Orthodox Jews, whom she's found she shares some background with. Covington found the same with the snake-handlers. The more he learned, the more drawn-in he became. I see the same in my friend.
When you find that special blend of roots and religion, everything has a rosy tinge, it seems. It looks like this is the way to be (whatever the indescribable this is), and the religion and history fits perfectly. It took Covington almost two years to begin to see what I call the "dark side." Every religion, every society, every single geoup of people that come together under a common cause has one. And that's when that fire of the newly-converted begins to wear off.
Not that either Judaism or Pentacostal snake-handling is bad or dark. Quite the contrary. But nothing is all roses, and I think Covington does a brilliant job of showing the arc that such a spiritual revelation can create: the slow build-up, the pulse-dazzling climax, and the inevitable downslide and even-ing out. For Covington, the hurts and realisation made his faith stronger. I hope it will do the same for my friend.
