Team Jack
I'm going to give you my favorite Anne Tyler quote first, and then one that is profound, and even more profound when you read the word correctly as "scarred" rather than "scared" (I found Anne Tyler when I was pretty young). In between I'm going to provide a link to a story that, whether you grew up with Nebraska football or not, or even like or understand football or not, should make you cry (watch the video and you absolutely will start crying). Anne Tyler is North Carolina's gift to humanity (yes, yes, I know she was born in Minnesota, but her formative years were very much spent in the Tar Heel state). And Rex Burkhead and the Nebraska football program is another gift to another completely different segment of humanity. One is probably "better" than another culturally, but are they really all that much different? And then I'm going to provide you with another of Anne Tyler's views (or, more appropriately, one of her character's views, rote warblings from a distant pastor) on death, which could be confused with the nostalgia that wells up when you find yourself sitting next to a really good storyteller.
"You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so?"
-Anne Tyler, "The Accidental Tourist"
http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/22654367/jack-hoffman-nebraska-cornhuskers-spring-football-run-legacy
"In the night he heard a child cough, and he swam up protestingly through layers of dream to answer. But he was in a room with one tall blue window, and the child was not Ethan. He turned over and found Muriel. She sighed in her sleep and lifted his hand and placed it upon her stomach. The robe had fallen open; he felt smooth skin, and then a corrugated ridge of flesh jutting across her abdomen. The Caesarean, he thought. And it seemed to him, as he sank back into his dreams, that she had as good as spoken aloud. About your son, she seemed to be saying: Just put your hand here. I'm scarred, too. We're all scarred. You are not the only one."
-Anne Tyler, "The Accidental Tourist"
"But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories - all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a sunlight night. 'That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others - one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive."
-Anne Tyler, "A Spool of Blue Thread"
"You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so?"
-Anne Tyler, "The Accidental Tourist"
"In the night he heard a child cough, and he swam up protestingly through layers of dream to answer. But he was in a room with one tall blue window, and the child was not Ethan. He turned over and found Muriel. She sighed in her sleep and lifted his hand and placed it upon her stomach. The robe had fallen open; he felt smooth skin, and then a corrugated ridge of flesh jutting across her abdomen. The Caesarean, he thought. And it seemed to him, as he sank back into his dreams, that she had as good as spoken aloud. About your son, she seemed to be saying: Just put your hand here. I'm scarred, too. We're all scarred. You are not the only one."
-Anne Tyler, "The Accidental Tourist"
"But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories - all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a sunlight night. 'That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others - one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive."
-Anne Tyler, "A Spool of Blue Thread"
Comments
Post a Comment