The Garden of Stories: "The Orphans of Race Point" by Patry Francis

            "I was never not a writer," novelist Patry Francis said last week. She was speaking about her new book, "The Orphans of Race Point," at the Duxbury town library.     

            Growing up in Brockton, a down-at-the-heels Massachusetts mill town, Francis recalled visiting the city's only bookstore, a used book shop with the smell of old paper. "Someone told me it was a front for a bookie," she said. To get there, she had to walk underneath a bridge, a dark, unpleasant place with an unsavory reputation. But then she'd hunt through the piles of books and go away delighted with a fifty-cents "prize."

            Her father, who had had a difficult life that he survived in part by humor, "regaled" people with his stories. The laughter at the end told him he had succeeded.

            And the laughter taught her that a storyteller had "a responsibility to entertain."

            She learned about people from family stories, Francis said. She listened to the older members of the family, seeking all the details about the people they remembered and talked about.

            "I became a family historian," Francis said. "Begging for old stories. We learn from these stories." Our lives are enlarged.

            But stories from life don't get chopped up into ingredients for fiction, like vegetables for a soup. Real life feeds our minds, our imaginations, but all we can say about the stories the novelist tells is they come somewhere inside. Francis said she doesn't draw her stories "from life."

            "I wanted to write about connectedness," Francis said at the library talk. Also faith, relationship, hard work, hardship.

            Ideas like this raise the interesting, not obvious question, of what a novel is "about."

            The natural tendency, even in review journals, is to give a capsule summary of a book's plot. The book is about (we are told) so-and-so who suffers a blow, or falls in love, or finds him or herself thrown into one sort of crisis or another because of this, that, or the other thing. Well, yes... and no.

            My attempt to describe "The Orphans of Race Point" -- without too many spoilers -- would go something like this. The daughter of a beloved doctor, a beloved authority figure in a close-knit ethnic community, is drawn while still a child to the victim of a domestic violence tragedy. Nine-year-old Gus Silva has retreated into silence after witnessing the death of his mother at the hands of his father. Hallie Costa's goodness and determination -- she invades his solitude to read him "David Copperfield"-- helps Gus recover and grow into a paragon of compassion. The adult Gus becomes a magnet for both hale and sickly psyches, and eventually he is victimized again by a cruel conspiracy involving a victim of domestic abuse and the evil desire to bring a good man down. Once more Hallie and a now growing, but highly unconventional "family" refuse to give up on him.

            So does this summary of what the novel is 'about' explain what kept me up late reading because I had to find out what was going to happen to the characters? What made me feel that this book had heart in it?

            Her book is about "everything," Francis said.

            Other people write stories that are "a perfect pond," she said. "I write about the ocean... It's messy."

P.S. Here's the link to the newspaper story I wrote about the summer books festival in Duxbury, Mass. Patry Francis was their first author. http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/south/2014/06/04/duxbury-book-series-turns-pages-all-summer/P3asDWTyoVB4ILhPmCn2GK/story.html

The Garden of Memory: Father's Day Gifts

The photo at the top of page is a Father's Day gift from Patty Surprenant, who recently paid us a visit. She's the youngest person in the picture; posed between Anne and me. I don't know the exact date of the photo, but from Patty's recollection, it's over thirty years old.

            There's no simple way to describe our relationship to Patty. Way back in the days when everybody was still skinny, Anne and I were hired to be house parents in a therapeutic milieu program for adolescent girls. The four girls in the house were no longer able to live with their own parents for various reasons. We were the subs. We lived all together as an ad hoc nuclear family suburban style in Lexington, Mass. Our daughter Sonya was a toddler when we moved in; Patty and a couple of girls were already living there. In the nature of things we got close, lived close, learned a lot about each other, endured trials and tribulations.

            Patty is a remarkable human being today. Seeing her recently made me feel good about the two years we spent as house parents. I was going to graduate school at the time, reading Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Austen and Joyce. But real life in 'the house' was teaching me things as well; sometimes more important things.

            Since Sunday was not only Father's Day, but Sonya's birthday, we took a walk in the Arnold Arboretum, where we were likely to see mountain laurel. Sonya, the first of our two children, was born on June 15. About a week before her birth, Anne joined me (for reasons not easily explained) on a walk up a mountain trail near our house in the Pioneer Valley. The wild laurel -- the flowers look like wedding cake decorations, spun sugar, white with pink coverings that fade when the flowers open -- was blooming all along the path we climbed.

            When Sonya was born a week later, hurried into the world perhaps by her mother's strenuous, though stately outing -- the 'Mountain Laurel Progress,' to name it in the manner of royal excursions -- some of the flowers we had picked that day were still in the house, waiting in a vase (on top of the space heater, Anne recalls) when mother and baby returned from the hospital. So laurel flowers have always been associated with Sonya's birthday for us.

            We spoke to both Sonya and Saul on the phone today. We have long-distance children; hearing their voices is always a gift.

            It was a beautiful day -- blue, green, and flowerful. So many gifts.

Seasons Change and So Do We

            I cut down the hard, bare, skeletal branches of an apparently dead butterfly bush last weekend. The plant made purple flowers (top photo left), attracted butterflies, and was one of our first plantings, so I felt bad about losing it.

            I used the two-handed manual hedge clipper to do the job. We have no hedges to clip, but I keep the hedge clipper around to prune individual shrubs. Last fall, when our butterfly bushes were all growing too tall, I cut them back significantly. Apparently I picked the wrong year to do it; after a winter of long cold spells all four bushes persisted in looking dead and leafless. Three of them eventually produced some green. The oldest of the four, tall and temperamental against a bamboo fence, the first of our shrubs to rise above the fence line, wasn't making any leaves by the first week in June. It was the skeleton at the feast. I thought it was time to pull the plug.

            Sunday was a warm blue day, close enough to the approaching solstice for a long, sunny-summer-day feeling. I felt hot for the first time this year working in the garden, digging things up that had got too big or spread too wide, and replanting them somewhere else. I'm moving tall phlox from areas where they crowd out other plants and pose a danger of spreading their late-season fungus infection to a  dogwood shrub we've been cutting dying branches off the last two years to save the rest from the spreading doom.

            When it was time to bring the grim reaper to the bare butterfly bush, I cut off each of the major canes as low as I could with the clipper. When I cut the last of the branching canes, I noticed -- a half-second after applying the coup de grace -- a single fresh green sprig growing straight out of the low end of a thick cane. Some last urge of vitality had pushed out a new green stem, catching my eye just a heartbeat too late. It hadn't grown tall enough for me to notice it, to distinguish it from the surrounding growth. (Pretty much everywhere in this back garden has "surrounding growth.") I had tried to give the shrub long enough to show some sign of life, but I hadn't kept my eyes open at the last moment.

            Life is tenuous. Inches and seconds make a difference.

            Unable to turn back the clock or make amends, I cut the green sprout from the thick apparently dead wood it was growing from and placed it in water. Odds on getting it to sprout? Between now and the solstice? A tiny cutting from a once sizable shrub?

            Meanwhile, not that far away, a new peony bush has bloomed its first light pink bloom under the lea of the large (Chinese native) tree-form peony. The tree blossoms in early May before the familiar peony shrubs do. Ah, I thought, so the big plant has produced an offspring.

            But if you look closely, it's not same variety as the tree peony. (Photo at left.) It's our regular, good old American backyard variety. How did it get there?

            Plants come and go.

            I'm hoping we can replicate that butterfly bush from the surviving sample. But if we can't, something else will take its place.

The Death of a Cat

            She was an unusual creature. She climbed up into your lap and sat there. We've had cats that followed you around the block when you took a walk, but this was an remarkably people-centered cat even by our standards.

            If you came to visit, she waited for you to settle into a comfortable spot, stay there for a while, and then jump into your lap. She was a bit promiscuous. She didn't have to know you very well. She was endearing, so we forgave her much. She had a temperamental stomach, threw up her catfood more often than was really necessary, never an appealing prospect to encounter before you stepped on it, or sat on it.

             We had decided, or rather Anne had decided, that she would be an indoors cat, and this put some stress on going in or out. On rare occasions she managed to get out, disappearing for hours if you tried to corral her. There was hardly any point calling her name into the night -- we'd never used it.Previous, outdoor cats ended up dying, after years of patrolling the neighborhood in the manner of cats immemorial; often it was some cat-born disease that laid them low. It was assumed, further, that if she didn't got out, she wouldn't get fleas. She got them anyway. 

             After Kitty (the only name we actually used for her; her official name Sasquatch just never caught on) returned from her longest adventure, we rushed her into the house and redoubled security. When she meowed pitifully at the door, her appetite now thoroughly whetted for the great outdoors, Anne bade her, unsympathetically, "Live on the memories!"

            Keeping her caged up in the house felt cruel to me -- I went around muttering "I know why the caged bird sings" -- but it did keep her alive.

           Then when the kids were out of the house and we moved to another house in a city neighborhood, suddenly we let go of the rule. She was an old cat now., and we lived in a flat, contained area where she seemed less likely to disappear.

            I don't know if we can blame the ear mites on that decision. I took her to a vet some years ago when one of her ears appeared to be infected. He said the opening in the ear canal had begun to close because of repeated infections and that made it more likely to infect again. The only possible cure was surgery. When I asked how much that would cost, the answer -- four figures -- seemed to take him by surprise. Had no one asked this question before? High-priced vet services began to seem to me one of those rackets, like orthodentics, that preys on the natural conglomeration of love and fear. Where was national pet health insurance when I needed it?

           Despite antibiotics, the ear continued to be a problem. The cat would try to scratch the source of the irritation, mites, probably -- whaling away at something inside her head with the claws of her hind leg. This succeeded in tearing up an open wound in the back of her neck that never healed.

            When she began to lose her mind, as we put it, we carried her around to the places when she forgot how to get there on her own. She'd go outdoors then meow pitifully when she found me in the garden. What did this mean? I carried her back into the house, and when she tried to go out again stopped her. For years she could not get into the house unless I picked her up and carried her. Anne said she had a phobia of doors. She perched at the cusps of doorways inside the house, looking fearful and at a loss. She hid from the kind neighbors who came to feed her when we went away to visit family. As she get older, she spent whole days in one place, often on our bed, sleeping until Anne came home in the evening and it was time for the next feeding. She sat on our laps, generally mine, in the evening.

            She slept on our bed for years, theoretically at the foot; sometimes determined to climb to the head and put her face in Anne's hair. Some deep neurosis was at work.

            This lasted until she peed on the bed while sleeping away the afternoon. She lost her bedroom privileges, but worse was to follow. She peed on my lap one evening spent in the customary fashion: the adults watching episode xx in some many-disced TV drama, the cat storing up enough human contact to spend the night in a chair.

            The vet (a different one) said incontinence was rare in cats. But it proved irreversible in ours.

            I beg the reader's indulgence if I do not lead you down all the steps in this dark decline. Suffice it to say that the cat was soon a smelly mess, and the nights she chose to sleep in her litter box were often an improvement over her other choices. And, oh yes, half the house was covered in plastic.

            In the last months we wrapped her in a towel first before we held her. Whatever disease was attacking her internally began to take the flesh off her even while she continued eating her medically formulated canned and dry food, and the hair fell off her lower limbs. When she stopped eating, approaching the bowl in the old routine, sniffing it, but then unable to feel any desire to ingest, we knew her days were numbered.

            She still wanted to be held. In fact, that's all she wanted. Anne came home on Friday night and held her weakened form in a towel for hours as we waited for our son Saul to call from the bus station. I suspected this visit would be his last chance to see Kitty. He had been a child still when we took her home from an animal shelter -- a lot of years ago.

            Kitty never appeared to be in pain. She piped a few strange, louder-sounding breaths, but not very loud, nothing that suggested a struggle... and let go of this world.

            We'll remember her with affection.

A Perfect Day For A Weeding

I'm happy to hear, I write back to my sister Gwen, that you're enjoying your garden this spring. I hope to hear that from everyone.

            Personally, I have come to love weeding. It's a hands-on way to make a concrete improvement in my environment. I go away with a sense of accomplishment.

            I like being physically close to the ground, moving into the sun on cool days, staying in the shade on hot ones. I like smelling the earth and whatever's growing in it.

            Since you often stay in the same place for a period of time, more wildlife appears -- mostly bees and birds for me -- and your brain can pay more attention to subtle clues. You listen to the birds when you're out of doors doing something with your hands. It must be like weaving, crocheting, needlepoint -- things I have never done -- focusing one part of your mind on a task, leaving another piece of your mind to roam its own thoughts or take in its surroundings. A garden is a good 'surrounding.' That's what it's for.

            I find in this climate it's only warm enough for two or three months to do something slow and meditative, to take in the garden -- the home environment -- at this pace, a pace decided by other living things. Birds have reasons, and even routines, for darting about. For calling or singing. You become aware of them. If a bird happens to have a long song to sing, you're there to hear it. If the bees are busy, you find ways to meld your activities with theirs; you give each other some space, as needed, but don't cede the territory to them. It's yours as well.

            So the other day, almost warm enough to be performing this occupation in perfect comfort -- not quite, but a more beautiful day for being a little cool: that cool dry air creating a perfect light for admiring spring green and other colors -- I am removing a collection of intruders from a patch of groundcover thyme. The thyme (it makes tiny white flowers; a few of them; eventually) had captured this patch of earth fair and square some years ago. But other plants attacked it. I pulled out the intruders, a thick viney clover the original sinner, for several years before I accepted that you couldn't fight change forever and maybe you shouldn't. Making decisions now, deciding to allow some of the intruders to stay for aesthetic effect even though they will cause me more trouble in the future... I'm down on the ground where I smell the thyme. There's a comparatively gigantic echinacea (cone flower) in the middle of this patch, and I decide to leave the decision of whether to transplant it to some indefinite future. It's kind of interesting where it is right now, though probably bad for the thyme. I'm pulling out violets, clover, some clearly identifiable weeds, and a few nascent dandelions -- small, though big enough to take some thyme roots with them when you pry up their own.

            I want to stop time here. Time -- I play, as always, with the verbally inviting paradox: time, thyme -- is in charge here. Is thyme on my side? Not really; it's on its own side. Free will doesn't get to say how long I'll do this. External factors will decide. The weather will change; my legs will get stiff. The phone will ring. I'll remember what I'm supposed to be doing.

            But for a while I am back in the garden.