I don't tell people in real life that I write a blog. There's no real reason for this except that it is a pandemic and so the only people I see in real life are the people who know everything about me anyway. There are none of those relics called parties where I used to hide in a corner speaking only to my husband until he went to get another plateful of guacamole and got trapped talking to someone with wine questions leaving me to make small talk with someone in my general vicinity that I maybe know of or have seen around or maybe who just moved here and doesn't know anyone else and so was also standing a bit away from the crowd. But let's just pretend that happened for the sake of demonstration.
"You're Page, right?"
"Yeah. I'm so sorry, I am terrible with names."
"I'm Esmerelda, I just moved here and *our mutual friend* invited me."
"Yes, Esmerelda!" I'll shout her name back in her face like she is a game show contestant who has just gotten the question of what her own name is right and I'm repeating it in affirmation.
"So, what do you for fun around here, Page?"
Now, obvious to all of you and to me about three seconds after Wes and I leave the party (approximately 61 minutes after we've arrived), is that Esmerelda wants some tips on the local area. Where to eat, where to shop, the best bars, etcetera. But no matter how many times this happens, I always take it a bit more personally. Like they want to know what I, specifically, do for fun.
"Well, I do a lot of things. I like to stay busy. But what takes most of my time right now is this blog I started."
"A blog?" She'll ask, looking around the room for someone to save her from hearing about a stranger’s blog, but she's new and no one comes to save her, so poor Esmerelda resigns herself to her fate. "What kind of blog is it?"
"Have you ever heard of Little Free Libraries? No? Oh, well, let me tell you about them. They are these boxes that people make and put in their yards and fill them with books for people to take. So anyway, I walk around to different ones and pick a book out and then review it. My blog is about the walk AND the book."
"Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun." She'll say because she literally has to or the world will end.
"Actually, it is a lot more work than I anticipated." I'll explain gravely. "I can't just read the book for fun. I have to read it like a book in school, like there will be a test. And I have to finish the book even if I don't like it. It is actually not as fun as I thought it would be."
Esmerelda will tell me she's sorry to hear that and Wes will come back without guacamole and he'll ask me if I'm ready to go and I will be and Esmerelda will leave soon after and call her ex and tell him that's she's made a dreadful mistake in moving here and will he take her back because at least he doesn't have a blog.
The point of that made up story is (1) maybe I don't miss parties as much as I was beginning to think I did just because I haven't been to one in over a year and (2) this blogging experience has not been exactly what I thought it would be.
Reading for this blog feels more like reading for a school assignment than for pleasure. I am taking notes and copying quotes and thinking more about what I'm going to say than what the author is saying. That, coupled with the fact that I don't have total control over the exact book that I'm reading, has made this experience a bit more like work than play. However, it is accomplishing some of the goals that I set down as resolutions this year. I am reading a greater variety of books and I am on my phone less. My weekly screen time report has been down the last several weeks.
There has been another tick in the pro blog column that I did not expect. It has pushed us to be more adventurous. When I started this blog, I was expecting to just visit the same 10 LFLs that are within fifteen minutes of my house over and over again. But so far, only 1 out of the now 3 posts has been from a box in Carteret County. The second post came from Black Mountain and this one is about Oriental.
As a married couple without kids to dictate our schedules, Wes and I often ask each other the question, "What do you want to do tonight/this weekend/the rest of our lives?" Honestly, sometimes I find myself wishing we had kids just so we'd know what we were doing for the next 18 years.
The first weekend in February, we were getting antsy because it had been almost a month since our last vacation. We needed to get out of town and floated a few ideas around. How about West Virginia or Charleston or maybe we could make it all the way to Florida? We decided that it was more responsible to take a day trip and pulled up a map to see what was in a 2-3 hour radius of Morehead City. Neither of us had ever been to Oriental so that won out.
Oriental, NC is directly north of Morehead City as the crow flies, but it is across the Neuse River, so you have to drive northwest and pass through New Bern. The drive takes about an hour and a half, mostly depending on how many of those damn traffic lights in Havelock catch you. Oriental is a very small town right on the Pamlico Sound.
We headed out pretty early that morning so Wes could be back in time to watch the Duke-UNC game which is usually pretty epic every year, but apparently both teams are playing below their standards this year (but UNC won so it was a GDTBATH). Having never been to Oriental, we weren't sure what we'd find or where exactly we were going. We ended up just driving until we hit water signaling the end of Oriental itself and parked beside the town dock which made me really happy because I'm a #shrimpboatfangirl.
The Walk
I pulled up the LFL map, entered the address into the GPS, and we started walking. Not very far into our trip, I saw this thing.
I stopped to take a picture because it is very weird and this is a walking and reading blog so I needed some material about the walk itself. It is a utility pipe that someone dressed up like a dragon. It's weird, sure, but that whole property was very whimsical, as evidenced by the turtle crossing sign and watermelon benches, so I didn't attach much meaning to the dragon itself.
But then I saw another dragon just chilling in someone's yard. The only thing weirder than one yard dragon is two yard dragons on the same street.
I point it out to Wes and he says, "Please do not take pictures of people's yards." I ignored that.
It wasn't until the third yard dragon on that street that it clicked.
This isn't a coincidence. This town is called Oriental and this must be like, a thing. A thought that was confirmed at the end of the walk when we passed a store with this logo.
I explain my theory to Wes and he says, "Please do not take pictures of people's yards every time you see a dragon." But I did.
Wes claims he spotted more yard dragons that he didn't tell me about because my photo taking was embarrassing him. So the next time he tells me he supports my dreams I will totally throw this in his face. Don't worry, I give more free marriage advice later on.
According to townoforiental.com, this tradition started forty years ago when a local artist made a dragon costume and got some people together to run around under it on New Years Eve. The dragon theme has since taken off to include a yearly Dragon Boat Race & Festival along with the NYE Dragon Run and the yard dragons. If this pandemic ever ends, we may make a few trips back to see those events.
Besides the yard dragons, another odd thing that we saw on our walk was a few yard graves. Which was very disturbing to me when I first moved here, but there are so many of them around that I've gotten as used to random graves in people's yards as a person can get.
I do not know the actual zoning laws, or if they are statewide or just coastal, but small cemeteries and single graves can be found on private land all over Carteret County and apparently Oriental has or had the same laws. Although I have seen many of these graves in the 5 years I've lived in ENC, I have never seen a pottery head atop one, so Oriental is keeping it real weird.
Here are a few other pictures from our walk.
A concrete bench built beside an Artesian Well.
A sign that infuriated me to the point that I've thought about it several times in the past 2 weeks. Why am I like this?
And this glorious siren of the paving stones.
Little Free Library
Lat: 35.0307699 Long: -76.68433
Blurb from the stewards: "We live in a small town (Oriental) in eastern NC - 900 residents and 2,500 registered sailboats. Oriental is the "sailing capital" of North Carolina. Consequently, we have a lot of "cruisers" pass through our harbor from all over the world. If you live or travel on a sailboat, fresh reading material is always in demand. Our town residents are also avid readers and we have found immediate and enthusiastic support for our LFL in our neighborhood and among town residents and visitors."
I know I say this every time, but isn't she cuuuute? But as with books, a LFL cannot be judged by its cover. Here are the contents.
Wes took one look in this one and said, "Someone sure likes Fern Michaels," and then he walked to the end of the road where there were a bunch of boats on stilts for him to covet.
Besides the Fern Michaels books, this LFL had a really good variety. Along with those two educational books in front, there was some non-fiction, historical fiction, and then a range of fiction from romance to murder mysteries to this one book about a sensual sorceress out for blood. There were so many good choices, that, you guessed it, I left with more than one.
The winners were For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, and The Big House.
I am not going to attempt to review a Hemingway novel because I have a full-time job. I couldn't leave it there since I haven't read it and it's been on my list probably since high school. I was interested in both the other books and Wes was getting impatient so he told me just to take both of them and I could decide which one to review later. He assured me it was not cheating and so let me assure you of that as well.
I got about 50 pages into Hemingway's book when I realized I needed to focus on a book for the blog first or I wouldn't be able to publish anything in a timely manner. I chose to read the book by Robert James Waller for this review with my only thought being that it was the shortest (see earlier comment about that full-time job). You are probably questioning my choice as you will think it is a romance, but let me assure you, it is very different from what I meant when I said I wasn't going to review any romances for this blog (except for that first post and fine, whatever, this is somewhat of a love story, fine, I'll admit it).
RJW also wrote The Bridges of Madison County. I don't think I ever read the book but I know the plot because some brilliant casting director somehow got Meryl Steep and Clint Eastwood in the starring roles of the movie adaptation and so of course I had to watch that. I haven't seen it since high school, maybe college, but I know it is a glorification of an affair between a bored housewife and a traveling photographer.
In the real world, cheating is wrong. It is tragic and sad. But in fiction it can be beautiful. In fiction, it can be a different kind of tragic, it can be soul-crushing and magic. And that's what it was in The Bridges of Madison County. A good old midwestern housewife finally, finally, finally meets the soulmate who would elevate her to an individual from her current place as a somewhat neglected part of a family.
From the summary on the book flap, I knew Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend was also about a single man who fell in love with a married woman. I was expecting that magically devastating kind of longing for another soul that you can't have just because of some silly social convention that shouldn't but does take precedent over the trueness and the rightness of The One.
Instead, what I got was this gem detailing the first meeting of Michael and Jellie.
Michael was looking past her, looking at the back of Jellie Braden’s head and wondering if her hair was as thick as it seemed to be, wondering how it would feel to grab a big handful of it and bend her over the dean’s kitchen table right then and there. He somehow had a feeling she might laugh and bend willingly if he tried it.
I almost quit reading it after that sentence. I don't want to read about a lust-driven affair. That's just not interesting. Also, I do not want to read an entire book inside a character's head who thinks that a woman, just by her appearance, is somehow asking for it or wanting it from a man.
But I did keep reading and I'm mostly glad I did. In between all the man-thoughts that made me either roll my eyes or throw up in my mouth, there were some really beautiful sentences that made me forgive this man's-man-motorcycle-riding-hard-living-came-from-nothing-academic for almost all of his shit.
And there was a lot of shit to push past when it came to Michael. The book mainly chronicles Michael's life, there is less focus on Jellie's life in the beginning. He grew up in South Dakota as a drunk mechanic's son who only made it out because he happened to be tall and good at basketball. He later tells people at a dinner party that he only liked basketball for the "art and physics of the long-range jumpshot". Yeah, that's the kind of guy Michael is. A college professor of economics who rides an antique motorcycle around and does oil painting in his spare time and occasionally sleeps with some woman or another who he manages to remain friends with without any romantic commitment because they all have understandings.
Obviously, Michael does not even make my long list for a book boyfriend. He's too much of the kind of academic that made me want to leave academics.
Michael and Jellie have some brief interactions over the course of the fall semester and somehow fall truly, madly, deeply in love. Jellie and her husband, another economics professor - but one who is portrayed as much more stable and thus much less attractive, go to England for him to teach the spring semester abroad. Jellie writes to Michael a few times, sending him a photo of her in Ireland that he hangs above his desk at home and stares at while drinking whiskey and feeling feelings the depth of which Jellie's boring stable husband could not possibly be capable of reaching.
After some really valiant efforts on both of their parts to not fall into bed together, they fall into bed together. This lasts for a few weeks before Jellie and her husband go to Jellie's parents' for Thanksgiving. Jellie then proceeds to have some sort of emotional crisis and heads off to India.
Michael and Jellie have both been to India in the past. We know that Jellie spent three years there and that something happened that she doesn't like to talk about, but the specifics are kept secret from Michael and from us. Jellie's husband, Jimmy, comes back to Cedar Bend and pours his heart out to Michael who he believes is a friend to them both.
As soon as Michael gets his affairs (no pun intended) in order, he jets off to India to find Jellie. Romantic, right?Chasing a woman halfway around the world. Except he does this even though Jellie telegrams him asking him not to come because she has to work some things out. He does this even though he knows he is pushing himself on her, knows it to the point that he searches for her clandestinely because he is scared she will run if she knows he is close to finding her. After following some clues from her past and running into an old friend of hers, he finally catches up to her on a wildlife preserve resort island in the jungle.
Now, this is where the book and Michael redeem themselves. It took 171 pages, but it was well worth it.
I want to scream this next part at Michael, at you, at people I know who I think really need to hear it, at my past self, probably at my future self as well. YOU ARE NOT THE MAIN CHARACTER!
When you finally find out, at the same time as Michael, what happened to Jellie in India, you realize that Jellie is the interesting one. Jellie is the one who has survived a thousand lifetimes. Jellie has lived the tragic life that is book worthy before she ever heard the name Michael Tillman.
All along, this hasn't been a cheating scandal/star-crossed lovers story at all. All along, this has been the story of a woman being brave, resilient, sacrificial and then letting all those things go in the name of stability only to find herself again a decade later. And the finding of her self is not, importantly, reliant on her feelings for Michael.
Jellie's great love had been an Indian "warrior-poet", a revolutionary who died for the cause right in front of Jellie as she held their baby daughter. As Jellie introduces Michael to her daughter and then tells him of her life in India, her life before Cedar Bend, Michael realizes his place in Jellie's life, his place in the universe. It smacks him down off his motorcycle, off his ivory academic tower and it smacked me in the face just as hard.
"What a stupid joke, he thought, his wrong and undue assumptions about himself and Jellie and how he presumed Jellie saw him - for the last year he had been measuring Michael Tillman against Jimmy Braden, not against a man with the power and spirit of Dhiren Velayudum, a man who had lived for just the right amount of time and died at just the right moment to create a larger-than-life image in the far back memories of Jellie Braden. It was an image that would never have any equal, for it had never been lessened by the slog of ordinary, daily existence."
I mean, damn. Right? That is the tragic shit I signed up for when I picked this book. This is the problem with a lot of relationships, with a lot of marriages (I say as a marriage expert...). It is the reason that people are unhappy, that people compare their spouse to an old boyfriend/girlfriend, the reason that people find themselves more excited by the new person in their orbit than the one they have at home, the one they know too well, the one whose habits and sounds and idiosyncrasies are no longer cute but are now the reason why Snapped will never run out of material.
For Michael to see this so suddenly and so clearly and so rightly breaks my heart for this past-forty romantic in a bachelor's life. She's his One and he knows she's the only One and then he knows, somehow more certainly than he knows his own feelings, that one day she won't love him above all others as she does now. He doesn't spell it out, but you know he can see the days stretching before him. The days and nights of living together in a small space with only one bathroom and sharing chores and budgeting and her dragging him to dinner parties and him refusing to move his motorcycle out of the living room. The days and nights of ordinary, daily existence that snuff out the type of flame that burns between them now.
He sees this truth, their future, so clearly but he can't save himself from the coming pain. He loves her too much and she loves him for now and so they end up together. Travel around India with her daughter in tow for awhile before heading back to Cedar Bend to break the news to Jimmy. Jimmy, if you'll remember, is a lesser man because he's more practical than romantic, so he takes it all pretty well and ends up as a dean at some other college.
Another book might have ended right there. Things worked out for Michael and things worked out for Jimmy and all's right with the world. But Robert James Waller does not end the book right there and thank God or it would have been a lesser book.
Michael and Jellie's story continues. Michael's premonition comes true. He and Jellie have some troubles adjusting to their ordinary, daily existence once the excitement wears off. They want different things in life. Michael is ready to settle down for the first time and Jellie's had too much of that, she yearns for that self-fulfillment that so far only the men in her life have had.
Eventually, Jellie runs back to India. Michael does not chase her this time. He has learned his place in the universe, in her world. He has learned that she is the master of her fate. While in India, she meets a new, exciting man, a Frenchman at that. She thrives on the movement and the freedom of her life in India, on the attention of a flattering man whose daily habits she does not yet know. Michael yearns for her back in the States, but she tells him goodbye over the phone in a way that feels final.
In the end, she doesn't sleep with the Frenchman. She sits on a seawall and stares outward and then she goes to her room and stares in the mirror. She realizes that she loves Michael. That this freedom in India isn't what she wants at fifty one. She is brave and resilient and sacrificial and she chooses to stay with Michael.
Michael's aha moment came when he realized he wasn't even the center of Jellie's world so he couldn't possibly be the center of the whole universe. He became a much more honest and realized character after that, although he never did move his motorcycle out of the living room. Jellie also fulfilled her character arc. She finally realized that she could have the whole world but what she really wanted was a small piece of it worth staying and fighting for.
Although this was, at it's core, a book about a cheating couple, I think it is much more than that. It tells the reader that another person isn't going to solve your problems. Michael and Jellie did not have a perfect life once Jellie left her boring husband. Instead, they both realized that in order to make it you have to work for it. You cannot take the other person for granted. You have to chose them every single day, over and over again and that is how the ordinary, daily existence becomes its own kind of magic.
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