Let me introduce you to my favorite book...

I've been keeping this one under my hat, but if stopped at school or at the grocery store and someone asks what I am reading these days, I don't tell them.  Instead, I ask them if they have read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty.

Two years ago, maybe, a gal who knows I like to read stopped me and asked me the same thing, "Have you ever read Lonesome Dove?"  She said, "There is lots of gore, cursing and sex, but the characters become your friends, you feel like you would know them if you met them on the street."  I was intrigued and even more so when I went to the bookstore and the paperback was around $7.95.  Good book AND cheap?  I probably could have uploaded it for free on my Kindle, but I still like the feel of paper between my fingers and the swish of the pages as they brush by.  Plus, when it's this good, I want to look at it on my shelf and remember it.

Lonesome Dove is "A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Epic Masterpiece of the American West," according to the cover of my Pocket Books edition.  It is a western.  A novel about cowboys who trek across the west encountering danger and drama along the way.

I recently met a man while I was outside of Troas, Turkey.  He was 80ish years old, missing a few teeth and had a round belly and thick walking stick leaning up against his perch inside his son's small gas station/general store.  All around the store were hung charcoal drawings that this man had created over the years.  He smiled when I told him I liked his artwork and told me that he had some drawings of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky he had drawn as well.  He chuckled.

In a thick Turkish accent, he went on to tell me how much he loved John Wayne.  John Wayne, the cowboy who had captured the imagination of even a man at a little pit stop in rural Turkey.

Cowboys and Indians.  The story never gets old, it is universal, I guess, in a way.

Larry McMurtry takes it to a new level with his genius for telling what feels like a true story.  I have even seen a map of the journey this fictitious bunch takes from southern Texas to Montana.

The two main characters, Augustus and Call, are retired Texas Rangers with plenty of glory on which to rest.

Augustus is the lazy partner of the stubborn Call, whom McMurtry so adeptly sums up in the first few pages by saying, "Give Call a grievance, however silly, and he would save it like money." (p. 9)  I loved that line.  I know people just like Call, those saved hoarded grievances ruin lives and the unraveling begins in the plan that Call hatches to move their Hat Creek Cattle Company from Lonesome Dove, Texas across the country.  Augustus is too lazy to object and the rest is too good to give away.

Those are only two of the cowboys in this story, there is young Newt, Pea Eye, Deets, the prostitute Lorena among others.  I love them all.  I want to sit outside some warm night around a campfire and shoot the breeze with these figments of the author's imagination.

I haven't seen the tv miniseries, yet, but I don't want to ruin the story by watching someone else's interpretation of my friends, the characters of Lonesome Dove.

Susan Isaacs and Some Other Books

It's been a while.

I've been reading, of course, but have been lacking the emotional stamina to write.  Yeah, it's been a little rough the last couple of years. I'm not getting a divorce and my kids are still all doing fine, and oh, yeah, I haven't been thrown out of my house, but I've had some devastating news from my parents that I won't go into here, but needless to say, it has thrown me into a tailspin and I have had to re-evaluate just about every thing I was taught about what it means to be a good person.

It was around the time when my parents turned eighty and I turned forty that I finally hit adolescence.  It had been a long time coming.   They say that the older we get the more we reflect on what went wrong in our lives, and I have a long list I could dwell on if I liked dwelling on that sort of thing, but I don't and I didn't want to be miserable for very long.  It sort of was a bummer.

I have been trying to do as much as I can to get happy and grateful.

So, I did what came most naturally and (along with some good wise guidance and a totally awesome husband) I picked up a few books.  Maybe you have got lots figured out and don't need a lick of help, but in case you do, I would recommend Boundaries by Townsend and Cloud to just about any one, and I have.  I also got a lot of solace from two of Anne Lamott's books:  Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son and Help, Thanks, Wow.  Both were good lifter uppers as far as books go.   I recently heard Ms. Lamott say at a conference I attended in San Diego that we are each of us uniquely ruined.  This is good to remember because it is so much less lonely knowing this fact.  Finally, I fell in love all over again with Pat Conroy when I listened to My Reading Life on an audiobook I borrowed from the library.  I would stand in my kitchen making dinner for the famished troops that live around here and cry big tears of relief and agony over his reflections on the power people and books had in his life to have rescued him from the reality of his own dad.

But, my favorite book so far has been Angry Conversations with God, by Susan Isaacs.  Susan tells the story of her life via a clever vehicle:  She engages in a "marital counseling" session with God in which they attempt to work out their differences.  Susan is funny and she is poignant.  She was a good Lutheran girl that grew up with the deep sense that in order to please God she would have to deny herself so many things--mostly things that might have brought her happiness and success.  For all her attempts--in which she takes ownership that she wasn't a perfect partner either--she was single, broke and felt her dreams slipping away.

She acknowledges, "I know worse things have happened to better people.  Mine are just middle-class white girl's tragedies.  But I'm a middle-class white girl, and they're my tragedies."  Wars, famine, genocide; Susan doesn't pretend her life was really that bad...but she still had some sorting out to do with God.  She is direct and deals with her feelings toward God in a way that had me right there with her on the couch.  Ultimately, she uncovers some pretty stark truths about what has gone wrong in their relationship and not surprisingly, God isn't such a bad guy after all.

But, she had to discover this by pushing past bad advice, bad churches, bad experiences, and totally human and uniquely ruined parents.  Her story spoke to me because she was willing to be honest and she was willing to be wrong about what she had accepted as truth--"truths" she had told to herself and received from others.

She adeptly explores disappointment with God.  She told God she thought he was sort of a jerk, felt some relief in the acknowledging and lived to tell about it, no lightening bolts from the sky.

There is something so rejuvenating, so freeing about honesty.  There is also something so brave.  I hope you read this book, I hope you let me know what you thought.