Mardi's Link

Gratitude & Gravy

Two days from now, the Big Valley will be full up.

My parents and my brother will be here, along with two thirds of my three sons, my husband, his two sons, a one-time girlfriend, her mother, and a new baby daughter. The artist couple who rents the house my husband used to live in before he married me will probably stop by for dessert, and so will some other friends from the township.

There will be dogs. There will be wine. And we'll open the last bottle of leftover wedding champagne.

If we are lucky, my father will give the blessing and then read a Maya Angelou poem, like he did a few years ago, plesantly shocking us all from his patriarchal spot up there at the head of the table.

There will be gluten-free pies and a high chair and baby cereal and an organic bird from Circle B Turkey Ranch and my mother's applesauce and a Fiestaware gravy boat filled to the top. There will be football and there will be naps.

And in this pause before my favorite holiday I'm feeling the gratitude. For a life that includes all these good souls and for a home that draws them in. For the table in another home with other people where my oldest son will be sharing a meal and helping to plan the menu for a new restaurant. For one day together.

And for the words from that Maya Angelou poem that might have been written as a lament but that when spoken by my father, seem more reverent than sad: "Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone."

Happy Endings = Badass

 



Last month I posted a happy ending lament. Ok, not a lament, a gripe. I griped that happy endings in contemporary literature aren't taken seriously often just because they are happy. Not because they don't work, not because they aren't satisfying, not because they ignore plot, but just because they are happy. And I think that is b.s.

I am tickled to see that I have some high falutin' company in that regard. AbeBooks.com has a list of Feel-Good Reads for those in need of some redemption and author Alexander McCall Smith wonders why literature has to be so gloomy. And novelist J. Robert Lennon not only likes happy endings, he respects them. Because they can be, his word, "badass." He talks about this in his Ward Six post, Gimme some happy.

I was lucky enough to have Lennon as a workshop instructor a few years ago. In the spring of 2004 his novel, Mailman had just been published, Library Journal compared him to Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey, and he was hired on to be an instructor at the Bear River Writer's Conference. I was the woman sitting in the Adirondack chair scribbling away like mad, trying to write down everything he said.

Seven years have passed, I'm still scribbling (and occasionally getting my badass on - see above) and I caught up with Lennon on his blog, Ward Six, just as he decided to shut it down. Ending, yes. Happy, no. To quote Axl Rose: Every rose has it's thorn.

What's So Bad About Happy Endings?

Maybe it's those impossibly beautiful images from the Royal Wedding lingering in my head. After all, I'm officially still a newlywed myself. Or, maybe it's that all of the armageddon-laced predictions of late turned out to be wrong. Hell, maybe it's simply that spring has finally arrived in Northern Michigan. Whatever it is, I'm feeling decidedly cheerful these days.

Which is why I was so taken aback to read this in The New Yorker: "Marriage is an anachronism."

Having just turned in a memoir containing the two literary sins of marriage and a happen ending, this caught my attention. I've been using my newly aimless days to plow through my reading pile like a hired hand. The above pronouncement is part of a review of Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage that the magazine published a ways back. The review goes on to say this about Ms. Gilbert's happy ending: 

"The 'peace and contentment' at which Gilbert abruptly arrives in the final chapter of the book is a little suspicious . . . As in all romantic comedies, from the novels of Jane Austen to the 'Sex and the City' movie, 'Committed' ends with a wedding that brings with it the cessation of doubt and strife."

From there, my reading veered off to an anthology, My Mistress Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. In the introduction, I found this: "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart."

Well, I like a cold heart just as much as the next person but only if it's earned. Same with warm and happy endings. They have to be earned. But to criticize a happy ending only because it dares to be happy? Now that's cold.

In my stack of reading it is beginning to seem like a happy ending is, well, stranger than fiction.