Self-Improvement

When the Urban Mamas group in Portland announced on a Monday the week before Christmas that the reading for a the next Thursday would be Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was so hungry for conversation about books I persuaded to Raven to pick the book up on his way home from Seattle that night, and managed to finish it by Thursday night. I liked it much more than I expected to, since I picked it up with all sorts of defensive feelings about why my family eats as they do and why it is not going to change. But she makes lots of excellent points, and I think she isn’t saying everybody should try to spend a year eating nothing that isn’t locally grown, but that the benefits to us societally and individually if many people tried...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 30, 2007 | 2 comments

Competition

As we pulled into a parking space at the mall, I couldn’t believe my ears: my three year old in the back seat sang out “nah, nah our van is bigger than yours” to the car next to us. I know that some of this is just life with siblings, but I do worry that our youngest child is being warped by the micro-competitions happening all day, every day of his life, who gets to the van first, who gets buckled in first, who is first at everything from getting dressed in the morning to brushing teeth at night. Worse, is the anxious gracelessness of his five year old brother calling out, “It’s not a race” if it’s close, and then racing anyway and “I won!” So our family motto seems to be “It’s not a race...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 20, 2007 | 2 comments

No Saint

Don’t get me wrong, Annie Dillard’s writing still knocks my socks off, her descriptions of things are powerful and poetic. And I love that about the Maytrees, but I ended up throwing the book across the room last night in frustration with the main character, Lou’s, equanimity. I don’t usually get violent with books, and I really LIKED this character except for this paragraph where she is working in a nursing home and describes the residents as needing to be special at someone else’s expense, this one looking down on immigrants and that one on tourists, all informed and none of them wise “Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else’s, but their many experiences’ having taught them so little irked...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 13, 2007 | 0 comments

Contagion

This morning I woke up to our three year old doing a pitch perfect imitations of his five year old brother’s outraged shriek howl, which is, by the way, an awful way to wake up, but worse was this feeling of, “Oh no, he caught it from him!” If this particular noise is contagious, I expect to be shunned on playgrounds across Portland as I haven’t been shunned since taking a child with a runny nose to preschool. Still, this had me thinking about how behaviors spread from one person to another. There were several news stories this summer about obesity being ‘contagious’ which were sort of annoying, at the time. Actually, the more I think about them, the angrier I get, because I imagine people getting shunned who are already...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 12, 2007 | 7 comments

No Words for It

When I discovered Tom Robbins as a teenager, the passage that I remember just being blown away by was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he talks about the brain overestimating its own importance because it’s the part of the body that goes around estimating relative importance of body parts. I think the word-generating, word-understanding part of my brain has been similarly carried away lately, since I wrote an unprecedented number of words in November and this week finished reading the 750 pages of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, which is LOVELY and funny (and I love the name Abysmillard! And the comical Binky-isms!). And then I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard which I couldn’t read during NaNoWriMo because I always feel like...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 6, 2007 | 1 comment