meghan rose allen

I promised a picture post, and it isn’t that much of one, and it isn’t even my picture (google image search from this flickr account), but it’s worth a thousand words nonetheless.

This was a book I used to read at my grandmother’s cottage. Debates have been had about what happened to it. My uncle says he gave it to me about fifteen years ago. I don’t think that happened. My mother thinks it did happen, but I put it in a box with some old textbooks and that box was thrown out during one of my parents’ renovations since they thought the box was my sister’s and my sister said to chuck it. I still don’t think any of this happened. My uncle did give me a puzzle he said I always used to do, which I’m pretty sure I’d never seen before in my life. That puzzle I have no clue where it ended up. I think that’s what everyone else is thinking about when they’re thinking about this book. Maybe one of my cousins has the book and is wondering whatever happened to the cat puzzle they liked.

Then I couldn’t remember what the book was called. I remembered the story (a Fin McCool one) and I remembered the publisher (Scholastic) but frustratingly didn’t remember the name. Then the nice people at librarything Name that Book forum helped me out, then a search of alibris, and blammo – I have my own copy again (and also twenty less dollars for a picture book that cost twenty cents or something to buy and I could have had for free if my family could come together and actually remember what happened to their copy in the first place).

And after all that – it only sort of holds up. Why doesn’t Fin’s wife have a name when she does all the thinking? Wikipedia tells me she actually has a name – Oona. Why doesn’t she have a name in the story? Why is she just referred to as Fin’s wife? It bothers me. But I read the story to Tesfa anyway because at least the wife is the smart one in the story and I liked the story when I was a kid.

So there’s a picture post for you. Sometimes books from the 1960s about Irish legends are not as awesome as we remember them to be.

Things are wet here. The lake that used to be my backyard is back. There is also snow that is sort-of-melting, with the melting part of that last hyphenated word being more wishful thinking than not. I think we’re still below freezing and cloudy, so the snow may not be melting for a while yet. And things. There are always things. Hopefully next week I can sit down and make about a change in my brain.

In the wetness, I have been re-reading. I re-read Plain Jane by Eve Horowitz. Last time we talked, I talked about over-reading through my tween years (not that they were called tween years then. I think in the early nineties, we still went by the moniker Young Adult). Then in high school, I slowed down. Ninth grade I read what was assigned for ninth grade English (all two books, pathetic), the two books for ninth grade French, and two other books (Fifth Business and a non-fiction book about the Holocaust, but I can’t remember which one.)

So I was not much of a reader in high school. Or much of a writer (see my About Me page for my failed foray into high school Writer’s Craft). I wanted to be a writer, yet didn’t write much. I suppose that’s like now. I want to be a writer, and although I write an exponential amount more than in high school, I likely still don’t write enough.

I didn’t stop reading entirely. Clearly I still went to the library because in either the spring of grade twelve or the spring of OAC, I took Plain Jane out of the library (I’d like to think it was OAC, because for some reason doing things in your last year of high school makes things more meaningful than doing things during a placeholder year). I don’t remember many books in high school, but this was a book that I left right by the front door so that the minute I came rushing home from the school bus, I could pick it up to read it (I rarely took the school bus in OAC, so likely this story happened in grade twelve. Boo.). It was the first time in a long time I remember enjoying a book.

So I read it again. I can see why seventeen/eighteen year old me liked it. I still do, but there’s a lot there that I can see my teenage self not really understanding why she liked it so much. I know I’m being vague and frustrating, but I guess around going off to university time, that’s a breaking-free time, like you don’t have to be this person anymore. You can be someone else. Not that I went to university and started writing more (pretty much the opposite being a math major). Not that I even went to university and changed that much (bigger changes happened more after I moved to Halifax in 2004).

Maybe I felt like I was in high school this week. As the pudgy, quiet, geeky kid with no self-esteem in high school, these have not been the most pleasant of feelings. But I still liked the book. It was comforting to re-experience something and not have it be a disappointment.

See earlier post here.

The last time I read and read and read and read, more for something to do than for enjoyment, was grades six, seven, and eight, when I was bored and without many friends, being an awkward and pudgy pre-teen. I guess I’m bored now too. I wasn’t so much last year, even when I had a longer day to fill with Tesfa away from eight-thiry to four, as opposed to now from eight to two. Writing isn’t as much of an intellectual exercise because I don’t know how to write intellectually taxing stories. Lately, I write straightforward ones, like my story about summer, if I could ever figure out an overarching conflict rather than the string of microconflicts that are keeping the story going forward right now.

I’m working on embracing the sameness. It doesn’t get green here until June. Maybe more sun will cheer me up. Maybe writing more stories of summer will trick my brain. I feel like I’m using all my brainpower deciding on children’s bicycles at the Wal-Mart and making small talk at the bus stop. I should pick some extreme books and work out my brain.

Or something.