Covid-19 Life: Happy Birthday to Me!

A birthday is usually when the family gets together with a meal and a cake. These days, the 'get together' is different in kind.

Some FaceTime or Zoom--or have a drive-by car parade with police escort.

I got to to to the doctor. Nothing serious, folk. But it was an excuse to stop by our son's house and see him and his partner and the grandpuppies! Sunny went wild and after she wore herself out, Ellie came up to get her time. Even Hazel the cat came out for a little pet time.

Sunny at a trip to the dog park

Ellie at the dog park

We wore masks.

The kids gave me my presents--a wonderful Jane Austen themed collection of coloring books, a Jane Austen Tea Party recipe book, new colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener that can make THREE KINDS OF POINTS!

 This marzipan hedgehog is the cutest thing!

I was able to give Melissa her birthday present, the Baby Cactus quilt and succulent pillow!

I came home to book mail! The Book Club Cookbook win The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner! Yes, still on a JA theme birthday!

Not bad.

I had a bee house from my brother to give to my son, and I had a new mask that, luckily, fits him better. The bee house my brother gave me is below.

Hubby made dinner. We bought steak. We have not eaten steak in literally years. I avoid buying beef, for my health and the health of the planet. But we had steak and baked potato and a green salad. A bit of nostalgia, as it were.

So, not a bad day, all told, considering the limitations of sheltering in place.

I will close with some terrific photos from my brother and his girlfriend's trip to the Kewanee Penninsula earlier this month.

 Cooper Harbor Lighthouse

Stay safe.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Catharine Randall

A Heart Lost in Wonder by Catharine Randall is part of the far ranging Library of Religious Biography. Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry is unique and memorable, full of vivid images, but I knew little about his career as a priest or his life and how it affected his poetry.

Hopkins viewed everything through his faith, finding the divine in every tree and mountain.

Hopkins developed a personal and unique philosophy to explain the power of beauty in this world through the lens of faith. The draw of beauty was so powerful, he believed it might eclipse the divine. He would go weeks with his eyes fixated on the ground in self-denial.

Drawn by the traditions of the Catholic church he converted and he believed he was called to the priesthood. 

It seems like the absolute wrong choice that Hopkins would become a Jesuit--in effect, an itinerant teacher. I can personally attest that no one can who has not lived it can fully comprehend the sacrifices of itinerary, to be removed from a place that feeds one and set in a place that kills one's soul.

A perfectionist, he the work of grading papers and teaching wore Hopkins out and allowed no personal time for his poetry or an internal life.

He responded to the beauty of Wales and the rural assignments but the cities with their poverty and ugliness were soul-destroying. He denied himself poetry but rhapsodized in his journals.

Randall's book delves into the theologies that inspired Hopkins and shows how to interpret his poetry through the lens of his faith.  I am not Catholic and I am not deeply familiar with Newman or Loyola but she presents them very well. 

It is very interesting, but difficult to comprehend Hopkin's unique view of poetry. Cooper discusses the poems as vehicles for Hopkins's theology. 

Hopkins suffered a faith crisis in his later life and died an early death.

I enjoyed the book but do not feel I could comprehend it in one reading. It is dense and deserves a deeper study.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Catharine Randall
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Pub Date 28 Jul 2020
ISBN: 9780802877703
paperback $22.00 (USD)

Happy Birthday, Mom

Evelyn A. Greenwood Ramer and daughter
Joyce Adair Ramer

July 26, 1931 was the birth day of my mother Joyce Adair Ramer to parents Lynne O. Ramer and Evelyn Adair Greenwood. She was their first child, born eleven months after their marriage, when my grandmother was only 17 years old.

Joyce Adair Ramer

Mom was born in Kane, Pennsylvania where my grandfather was a high school teacher and athletic director. She was baptized at Tabor Lutheran Church on August 30.

Mom's baptismal certificate

The family lived at 218 S. Fraley St, Kane, PA.

photo of her childhood home taken by my mother

Mom at her Kane home

 In 1934 my aunt Nancy was born.

Nancy and Joyce Ramer

Joyce and Nancy Ramer

Joyce and Nancy Ramer

Mom's Kindergarten Class in Kane, PA

In 1935 twins Don and Dave were born.

Mom's twin brothers Don and Dave Ramer

My grandfather was born and raised in Milroy, PA and the family visited his childhood home every year. After the death of his grandmother and mother, he was raised by his mother's siblings, including Annie Smithers. The photo below shows his family also visited him.

Evelyn, Charlie Smithers with twins Don and Dve, Annie Smithers,
 Joyce and Nancy in front

Joyce, Nancy, Don and Dave 

In 1941 my grandfather lost his teaching job. The family moved in with mom's Greenwood grandparents who lived in Troy, NY. Then my grandfather found work as an engineer at the Chevrolet Aviation Engine plant in Tonawanda, NY. The family moved into the Sheridan Project, wartime housing. Gramps taught at the University of Buffalo and was a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Mom in the Projects

 In the Projects she met her lifelong best friend, Doris.

Mom loved the Big Band music, especially Glenn Miller, and was a jitterbug dancing queen at the Project dances.

Mom and Dad

Mom saw Gene Gochenour and went all-out to get his attention. They dated from the time they were sixteen.

Gene Gochenour and Joyce Ramer

Joyce Ramer and Gene Gochenour

Mom's graduation photo

Six months after mom's graduation she married my dad on January 6, 1951. It was a simple wedding, mom wearing a suit.

Mom and Dad's wedding photo. Mom's sister
Nancy is at her side.

They moved into my dad's family home, which was an 19th c farmhouse converted into apartments. Mom worked at Remington Rand in Tonawanda on a comptographer. Dad worked in the gas and service station his father had built.

the station built by my paternal grandfather
on Military Rd and Rosemont in Tonawanda NY

1865 Military Road, where I was born, house my grandparents,
my family, and my dad's sister's family

I was born In July, 1952.

Nancy, age 3

In 1959 my brother was born.

Me and my brother

Mom suffered three miscarriages between my brother and I.

At sixteen, mom had been diagnosed with psoriasis. After each pregnancy her psoriatic arthritis worsened. Over the years she lost more joint movement, unable to move her neck, her hands frozen.

Mom and Dad in the 1970s

By the birth of her first grandchild, Mom looked much older than her fifty-five years.

Grandma Ramer, our son, and Mom in 1988

Mom embroidered this clock and dad made the case
from a kit bought in the early 1960s

Mom took art classes in adult education when I was a child. I remember watching her make her first paintings. She told me what she was doing and I learned to mix oil paints to make new colors at her side.

painting by my mother

I recently found these paintings Mom made for our son before his birth.

The Royal Oak house when we moved in

In 1963 we moved to Michigan and my parents bought a house in Royal Oak. After the death of my Grandpa Ramer in 1971, my grandmother moved in with my parents and in 1972 they bought a house in Clawson.

The Clawson house

We lost Mom on April 4, 1990 to cancer. We lost Dad to non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2008. I inherited the Clawson home and we moved in after retirement. The house is haunted with happy memories. Mom putting on her lipstick at the bathroom mirror. Dad swimming in the above ground pool with our son. The knick knack shelf of great-grandmother's Hummels. Mom's paintings hang on the walls.

I love to look at mom's old photographs and her happy jitterbug days.

At Sheridan Park, Tonawanda NY

At her home in the Sheridan Projects

Mom and Dad

at her Greenwood grandparents home in Troy, NY

In the Sheridan Projects

In the Sheridan Projects

Mom loved to read and stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to enjoy the quiet house and her book. She loved music, including classical. Mom was creative. She was generous. She had compassion. Her life was a struggle with a progressive disease that required hours of personal care and left her crippled for months of the year. She was stubborn and would not budge. She loved us.

At our home on Military Rd in Tonawanda NY

Mom and Dad 1969

Pew by Catherine Lacey

A town has a feeling, I remembered someone telling me long ago, because certain kinds of thought are contagious.~ from Pew by Catherine Lacey

I grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Detroit and lived in and around Philadelphia as a young adult. My first time in a small city of under 8,000 left me struggling. A woman told me that everyone needed to fit into a box, and no one knew what box to put me in. When I took up quilting, people relaxed. Quilters they knew. I finally fit into a box.

Nothing can be more closed than a faith community. The best are open and affirmative. The worst sort people reject outsiders who challenge their values. Been there, too. Are you with us or against us? And if you don't join them, you become the outsider, an enemy.

Some humans are comfortable with ambiguity, but most want to parse the world into black and white, good and bad, male and female, us and them, liberal and conservative.

Catherine Lacey's Pew introduces us to a character with no past, no name, no identity.

One Sunday morning a worshipping congregation in a small town finds a being sleeping on a pew. Out of Christian charity, a family takes the foundling home. They name the being Pew.

The foundling has no identifying characteristics and is mute in response to people's questions.

Clothing is offered to see if Pew chooses male or female attire. The pastor tries to learn Pew's age; there are rules about how things work based on age. A social worker and a physician are brought in to discover if Pew has suffered physical or mental abuse. Pew does not respond, will not disrobe, will not speak. Pew does not know the answers to the questions being asked.

Christian charity turns to self-protection, discomfort, and even fear.

This community is separate from the world and has their own ritual of forgiveness. Pew has appeared a few days before the festival. It unnerves the community.

There is a Shirley Jackson feel to the novel, The Lottery coming to mind. The small town, the closed society, the ritual of the scapegoat are in this novel.

Pew's voice takes us into some deep territory, showing what it is like to be on the receiving end of social pressure that seeks to categorize people---put them into a box.

Can't we just be and let be? Why do we have to 'fix' the things we don't understand? Must our bodily being determine our place in the human community?

Pew sometimes catches a visual memory, almost can articulate a past. But words fail, they are misunderstood, and eventually forgotten. Some things are incommunicable.

Members of the community project identities onto Pew, seeing what they want to see.

A woman tells Pew about her son’s faith journey. The son determined that to truly follow the teachings of Jesus one had to give up all attachments in the world. The son gradually let go of his identity, becoming one with all creation. Her son's mystical journey of ego death has shattered his mother and she hoped to discover Pew was her lost son. Pew is shuttled from the white community to the black side of town. An old African American woman sees the 'new jesus' in Pew.

People tell Pew their stories, revealing sorrows and horrible acts they would not confess to a community member.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and I can't whittle it down to one idea. Perhaps readers will all see their own story in the tale, project what they want to find. I will be ruminating on this one for a long while.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Read an excerpt at
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374230920

Pew
by Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date July 21, 2020
ISBN: 9780374230920
hardcover $26.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy

In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.

As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.

Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

One of Vogue's Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2020, one of the Wall Street Journal's Nine Best Books to Read This Spring, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of Vulture's Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020, one of Refinery29's 25 Books You'll Want to Read This Summer, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020