She Got Up Off the Couch

I was so smitten with Haven Kimmel's writing in her memoir Zippy that the sequel was in my greedy hands the next day. I got the last copy, paid the bookstore megachain full price, and was glad of it. I'd have tipped the author if I could.

I was so happy to be back in Mooreland, listening to more stories, I cannot begin to tell the full extent. I'm 48 pages in and may just stop reading every written thing and read Treasure, the 7th little chapter in the sequel over and over. I laughed until my stomach hurt. I loved the story, the description of the stuff on the floor, the glee with which a child can wear something ridiculous, coloring, happy as a clam, and have her world blown wide open by a random, sparkly person who magically pops into her life. The Hitchhiker. What a perfect story, eloquent and hilarious.

The surprise was when I went back to actually look at the picture at the top of the first page of the story. Both books contain the added perk of actual photographs to begin each chapter, polaroids of actual people stuck in these lovely moments in time. I am such an impatient reader and a total spaz, that I thought it was just a picture of Zip and her Dad, who I thought looked mighty young and not my preconceived notion. I was ill informed. Right there, in black and white, is irrefutable proof, a snapshop of the Hitchhiker and Zip, the little girl whose heart and imagination were gobsmacked, and thought that's the treasure, right there. Not the stuff you have, but the stuff that makes you dream. And the thought of it made tears burn in my eyes, which surprised me, since I was still laughing. Textbook bittersweet.

I remembered the way people have come into my world, thanks to the open minds and hearts of my parents, and plain old serendipity, to make me see more, wish for more, demand to see and do and be more. I had forgotten some of them, people who saw the spark in me and didn't squash it, but instead urged me to see what was out there, if only because I could. It really moved me, the reminder of the gifts people give with their presence, hidden like that in a funny little treasure of a story.


I have finished the book now, and naturally, I'm a little sad to say goodbye to these characters and stories. I didn't realize how much I'd enjoy a skewed look back at my own riduculously unbelievable childhood, so different but so similar to Haven's. I'm sorry that Haven had to lose her father to find her mother, and that, like all of us, she had to grow up.

A Girl Named Zippy I wish I knew...

Once in a while I read a book and all I can think about is the author. How did she remember it all so well? How'd she get to be so funny? How'd she think up that phrase or that way of telling her story? How could her life be so hilarious and unbelievably true to small town crazy life? How do some families get to be so funny, so warped with such wicked senses of humor, dripping in irony and insight?

My home town, Laurel, was 10 times the size of Mooreland, but it felt awfully small yet oddly infinite to me. My extended family was sprinkled among a handful of towns with 300, 1200 and 3000 people, the largest with a grocery store and a tastee freeze at the one intersection, all with farms and fields and the highway going somewhere else. Mostly farmers, country folk and factory workers, with every imaginable stereotypical label you could think up. Holy cow, they're pretty much the same everywhere, just different kinds of funny. It's the proximity that makes it all so acute, knowing everything a person does because you can't miss it, being around every kind of crazy, and everything else inbetween. I marvel at the common ground we share watching some of the planet's meaner or dumber or more interesting specimens operate, and living for the fun feeling you get when you're laughing or just happy. So many moments rang true, particularly the church avoiding, camping and packing expert flawed gem of a father, and the freedom of riding your bike all over town.

Anyway, A Girl named Zippy is making me laugh and remember absolutely glorious, ridiculous, pathetic and funny things from my childhood, I thank Haven Kimmel for bringing it all back to me and would love nothing more but to sit in the same room and listen to her stories and snarky sense of humor. Another friend I'll never know. Oh well. At least there's the book, and I'm glad it's my first, so there's plenty more. The blog I'm pacing myself, its strange being late to the party, everybody else is already on the same page, I'm needing a dictionary and a road map as always. But I know funny peoply when I find em so I'm sticking around for the laughs and the great writing.
This excerpt from her blog:


Thank You, Thank You Very Much!

There are a number of questions I’d like to pose to you, my virtual posse, and I’ll get to them in time. But an interesting one came up today: what is the very best (or favorite) compliment you’ve ever received?

Here’s why I ask. On one of my booktours I was flying Southwest and was fortunate enough to get the aisle seat in the third row from the front. The window seat next to me was empty. The last person to board came dashing in and up the aisle and said to me – and I don’t know how to describe the way he said it, because it’s not going to sound funny, but it was VERY funny and I knew it immediately – “Look, it’s your fault you have to get up to let me in.” I said, “OH NAY. It is your fault for being an untimely slacker.” He had trouble getting his carry-on bag under the seat and I said, “You’re one of those.” “One of what?” he asked. “One of those people who don’t want to check a bag because they’re so enormously important they can’t waste time waiting for the bags to be unloaded, and so entitled they believe they can take up as much space as they want.” He looked at me gleefully and said, “You really KNOW me.” Needless to say, we made with the yackety-yack all the way from Houston to Durham, and much of the conversation was side-achingly funny. It turned out he was a breast cancer specialist, on his way to deliver a paper at a conference at Duke Medical School. He had developed a very specialized technique of tumor removal, and he showed me the slides he would use the next day. We took to each other just smashingly well – which is odd, because, you know, he was a doctor, not a bohemian or an outsider or . . . one of us is what I mean. But after an hour I had reached the point where, when he mentioned how much he loved spending a day on his boat I said, “Oh here we go. A boat. Boat Guy. So you get out on the water and you’re drinking a beer and feeling manly, and the wind is in your hair, and the 25-year-old nurse you’re trying to seduce looks SO fetching in her bikini, and THIS is freedom. You are free. And the next day you go back to working 80-hour weeks because you want a bigger boat.” He said, “Hey, that nurse was twenty-seven.”

When we landed in Durham he turned to me and said, “You know, you are so smart and so attentive and quick – just lightning fast – you would make a great bird dog.”

I am complimented constantly by my readers and by booksellers, etc., also my mother, and I appreciate every one, truly. But THAT will always be the best.

Okay, your turn.


Don't you just love her?

Haven's Blog
It figures that 4 days prior to my discovering her, she posted her last post to the blog. FIN

In the Fall

How do I begin to write about a book that swept me away like this one? How do I explain to a reasonable person why I did this while I read -

- used a ridiculous amount of sticky notes to mark passages and prose that I wanted to revisit or remember or reread. Some of the notes drew arrows to entire paragraphs, often pages of words that brilliantly created a character, an emotion, a sense of place and time. Several passages were so stunning I read and reread them in amazement. As I neared the end of the story, I kept putting the book down and walking away to ponder what might come next, to postpone the ending, because I knew when I finished, I would be a bit lost without these characters, without this story, without another page to read.

What a gift to read such a riveting, truly American novel that begins with the Civil War and echoes for generations affected by the legacy of slavery and the mysteries of life and love. If it's not on your must read list, it should be.

Link follows to the author's website, where exquisite excerpts such as this await:

After midnight he was walking sentry, the Springfield loose alongside him held in just one hand, his tunic unbuckled, open to more than just the spring night. In the darkness he paused and as he stood looking at those men the idea of leaving them frightened him a little. He wondered if the men there he knew from Bethel or Randolph or Royalton or Chelsea would come upon him in years ahead and nod their greeting and pass along by as if this were all nothing more but a great and forever silent part of their lives. Norman knew how glad he'd be back up on the farm with his arms bloody on February mornings from birthing lambs or his back burned and sore from lifting forkfuls of hay from the hot fields. The war was already breaking apart into fragments for his memory to hold, the odd things: the squirrel racing back along the road through the advancing troops that first day at Second Bull Run; the summer mist burning off the Potomac as they marched north into Pennsylvania two summers before; the man out on the field well before him who landed on his back and for a long moment seemed to hold the cannonball with both arms to his belly before he flew apart under it; the boy face up and his mouth open to the air, flies already pooled around his eyes as he called a woman's name, his tone plaintive as if she were nearby and ignoring him. These sights and others, each forever etched in its own small box of his mind. Life after this was not so simple a thing as going home and carrying on from where he'd left off, and he remembered his father's death, a news that at the time seemed just one more in a long chain of life poured out upon the ground. Now he could begin to feel it as the hole he'd forever carry forward with himself: not having the chance to not talk about the war with his father, not even having that silent presence there beside him as he birthed those lambs or dug that potato ground. He was watching his fellows and himself all at once when from behind him she said, "Norman don't you shoot me with that gun of yours."

Jeffrey Lent

And so it begins....

A blog to share book reviews, my thoughts on the books I read, links to my favorite places, my favorite people and whatever else strikes my fancy. Come visit anytime.