If you have not yet seen The Story of the Weeping Camel, please do. You will not regret it.
Set in Mongolia it is the tale of a family (two sets of grandparents–or at least that’s what I thought they were–a young mother and father and their three children) who herd goats, sheep and camels. When a beautiful white colt is born and his mother refuses to suckle him, the family fears he will die and tries everthing (including hand feeding) to get him and his mother together, but she is unmoved. They bring him to her colt and she kicks him away. Then she leaves him so that she can wander off alone. I will leave it there and not tell you where it ends but it is a story of past, present and future colliding, of mother love gone wrong, of motherhood in general, of family. AND it is heartbreaking and joyous.
I’m making it sound all very Walt-Disney, but it’s not. It’s stark and beautiful and horrifying and wondrous. The sound the baby camel makes when he is trying to get to his mother haunts me. The sound of the violin in the desert moves me. The stark beauty of the lives of this family is astonishing. The scenery, harsh and yet breathtaking.
I don’t know what else to say but watch it. And you can watch it with your kids, too (unless they’re freaked out about seeing an animal being born, because there is that.)
signed,
the weeping Myfanwy
(you should have seen me when this movie ended! wah wah wah!)
p.s. After you watch it you can emulate the herder’s camel noise with one of your pets like we did. Hanh, hanh–something like that. We did it to Darby until he got freaked out and left the room.
Isn’t funny how you can find things–little slips of paper with an old boyfried’s handwriting, a card envelope addressed to you and written in your mother’s hand, a receipt for gas purchased in a town you traveled through once–and how sometimes you are immediately brought back to the moment of the thing–where it was conceived–and a whole rollercoaster of nostalgia overtakes you? And then sometimes you find something that was perhaps very important to you at one time but you have no recollection of it. You look for clues and there are none. Your memory banks fail you.
I picked up one of my books yesterday and out fell a white piece of printing paper, folded in a square (and folded crookedly, so I folded it. I have a problem with straight lines). I could see through the folds that there was something printed on it. When I unfolded it, this is what I saw:
The minuteI heard my first love storyI started looking for you, not knowing howblind that was.Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.They’re in each other all along.— Rumi
I wish I could remember how these words ended up with me. Did I find them online somewhere and print them out? Did someone give them to me? But I don’t remember. The sheet of paper remains a mystery and all that is important is that I’m glad I found it again.
The stories in Courtney Eldridge’s collection, Unkempt, are breathless 1st person narratives, documenting the lifestyles of the neurotic and the damaged. Often, I had to put the book down and take a break from the voice, the monologue, the anxiety (perhaps one should not read it when one is experiencing daily panic attacks).
This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book or that it lacks cleverness or intrigue, because it has all of these things. It also has a sort of meanness of spirit in which the writer seems to not only pick on herself but others as well. Now, while I do appreciate the writer’s unflinching honesty, sometimes I wanted a bit more artifice.
Of the many clever stories in this collection, the two I liked best were “Unkempt” and “The Summer of the Mopeds.” They are all raw emotion. They are humane and they are heartbreaking.
“Unkempt” is the story of the relationship between an alcoholic mother and her daughter. It is a painful story and one is completely sucked into the mother’s voice (except for those times when she shows her red neckness). I felt tender for her and hated her ungrateful, whining daugher. How dare she treat her mother so meanly? Okay, but at the end you learn why. You learn in a very clever way how the mother’s actions have traumatized the daughter. And when the daughter apologizes, your heart sort of breaks.
“The Summer of the Mopeds” is told through repetitive scenes all leading up to the final revelation of childhood sexual abuse. It, too, ends with an “I’m sorry” but from someone totally unexpected. This story is raw and angry and brutally honest. I was completely taken by it.
Be prepared for this collection–it will not go easy on you. It will poke at you and sometimes you will find yourself exasperated but in the end you will likely feel glad you read it.
So there are these two women I’m friends with in my non-dream life–and while they share certain sensibilities they are clearly not related.
So here is the one scene I remember from last night’s dream: I’m with these two friends–it seems we were sitting down and drinking tea or something.
One of them says, “We’re sisters, you know.”
I’m baffled. I think, but don’t say, “So what?”
The other one is pissed and says, “Why did you tell her that?”
I say to them, “What’s the big deal?”
The one who made the revelation says, “We decided to keep it secret because we don’t want people to get the wrong impression.”
Again, I think but don’t say, “Wrong impression about what? Who cares if you’re sisters.”
And that’s it.
If I take a certain route when I’m walking my dog, I pass by the house where bad things happen. I cannot confirm that it is such a house, but I feel that it is. It is a ranch, sided with dark brown (vertical) clapboard. The lot it sits on is full of tall pine trees and much brush. The lot is marked by several beautiful stonewalls, made sinister by what they surround. Off the back is a dingy, plasticy looking sunroom. The blinds are always down. Dark, dark, dark. There are cement steps leading up the front door and some plastic flowers in the window (with the blinds behind them). There is no light.
When I first saw it I was immediately depressed. Who lives there? Why do they like it so dark? What are they hiding? This feeling has not left me. I hate passing it but the road it is on is a good one for walking, so I pass it.
I can’t, or don’t want, to tell you what I imagine happening behind those blinds but it’s not good. I just feel that it is not good. I want to break down the door and say, “Stop it! Stop it right now. I’m on to you.” But I pass and I watch it in my peripheral vision. I hope it knows that I know. And I hope it doesn’t. I hope it continues to let me pass by unharmed.
Last night, I watched again one of my favorite movies. It’s probably been ten years since I last saw it and yet it remains a beloved as it was the first time I saw it (so often, I find a movie disappointing the second time around). 84 Charing Cross Road is a movie for bibliophiles, for writers, for Anglophiles, for romantics. Charming, funny, touching, heartbreaking the story documents the 20-year epistolary friendship between New York writer, Helene Hanff and London bookdealer Frank Doel (played beautifully by Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins).
In 1949, Helene is exasperated that neither the smaller bookshops nor the larger bookstores have the out-of-print books she wants. Now why not just get them out of the library? Please! If you love books you know that the library does serve a purpose as a sort of smorgasboard for you to taste without yet purchasing (and this is exactly the way Helene feels–she claims to have never bought a book she hadn’t read first). She also is compelled to write in the margins (as am I). When she finds the advertisement for Marks & Co. (the bookshop Doel manages) she writes to them with her list of books she is looking for. They send her back two of the most beautiful books she’s ever seen and from there friendship is born.
Of course, Helene is not always pleased with Frank’s choice and she is not afraid to tell him. Even though she chastises Frank, he remains dogged to satisfying her desires. She is as much the wonderfully abrasive and outspoken New Yorker as Frank is the polite, quietly wry and reserved Englishman. The fact is, they like each other. For all of their differences they are so alike in humor and intellect. They are kindred spirits, then.
I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for any potential watchers, so all I will say is that if you love books, you will likely love this movie. I should note that this movie is based on Hanff’s bookof the same title, which I have not read, but intend to.
Kathy Fish points readers of her blog to great new work from two talented writers:
Famous Fathers by Pia Z. Erhardt (this story requires a log in–but it’s free so go ahead and sign up!)
&
The Film We Made About Dads, by Pasha Malla
Thanks Kathy! I loved reading these.
It is quite possible that I am an impatient curmudgeon. I do sometimes have to stop myself from snapping at people. So perhaps my problem is that I am hateful or mean-spirited. OR maybe my problem is that I should be living in a hut/cave/cage in the middle of the woods or in a desert. OR maybe the problem is that some people are just really fucking irritating.
Yesterday I was at the grocery store and I got THAT checkout clerk. You know the one: she portrays herself as friendly with a sing-songy voice (“Is PLA-stic ALL right?”) and keeps up a constant monologue as she scans your items. Now the monologue, I could deal with but when she comments on each one of my purchases as she scans it… well, it gets a bit annoying. It gets a bit intrusive. It gets just a wee bit RUDE.
Do I really want her to ponder over my bar-be-cue soy chips? Really? I feel dumb enough buying them because the bag is miniscule and they cost more than they should, but sometimes I need a treat and they taste good. See? There I am justifying my purchase to you. Do you care what I’m buying? Of course, you don’t and neither should she.
And, the thing is about her friendliness, I know it’s all put on. This is New England. People are not friendly in New England. We are wary of the friendly. And rightly so. Because the friendly are typically nosy and will not waste a second in talking behind our backs and tsk tsking over our lifestyles (I can just hear her in the break room, “Did you see how much wine she bought?”). Isn’t going to the grocery store horrible enough without this commentary and judgment?
The thing is I have been a clerk and I’ve been a waitress and a bartender and I NEVER felt compelled to comment on people’s purchases/orders unless they specifically asked me. Okay, maybe I would tell someone that a book he was buying was great—but then that’s the sort of thing you go to a bookstore for, right? I’m flattered (because I am lame and constantly seeking positive reinforcement) when a bookstore clerk tells me the book I’ve chosen is good or that that particular author is a great writer. Whatever, it’s just nice to know that the purchase (at least in that person’s mind) is not in vain.
You might be saying, You can’t have it both ways, Myfanwy. Either you like it or you don’t. BUT I would argue that I can have it both ways. Quite simply, I do NOT want someone musing over my soy chips. I just don’t. It makes me want to throw them in the garbage. I feel tainted and invaded. Am I too precious?
Well, okay, so here’s another story. Years ago, I was at a TJ MAXX or a Marshall’s or one of those stores and I was buying a tragic piece of lingerie for a friend’s bridal shower. I thought it would be funny. We’d laugh about it. Ha, ha!
Anyway, the clerk, as she was scanning it, called another clerk over, held it up, and said, “Would you ever wear something like this?” and the other clerk said, “No. I’d feel like a whore.”
Can you stand it?? I think my mouth hit the counter and I don’t know why I didn’t just walk out but I was in shock.
So am I a curmudgeon OR are people rude OR both?
21st CENTURY GRIEF: When personal tragedy is public domain, by Hannah Selinger epitomizes my favorite sort of writing–powerful, emotional, honest, real:
Is it selfish of me to pull Molly away from network news and identify her as a real and specific part of my own life? She was wonderful and sweet and young and this was all very unexpected, and the newscasters could say that a hundred times over, but that would only make it seem more distant, more unreal.
myfanwy collins 