"Sisters Behaving Badly" by Maddie Please

If you think I'm a bookworm, you should meet my sister. Our relationship has never been the Hallmark "my sister is my best friend!!" variety -- it's had its ups & downs over the years (happily, more ups in recent years than downs) -- but books have always been something we could talk about and bond over. Her favourite place to be whenever we're all together at Mom & Dad's is curled up on the couch under a blanket with her e-reader in hand. Sometimes she falls asleep clutching it, the screen glowing in the darkness. 

Over Christmas, I was browsing the sale titles on Kobo.com and started laughing when I stumbled onto a book called "Sisters Behaving Badly" by Maddie Please.  Some books beg to be read simply because of the title, and this was definitely one of them. (The cover was pretty beguiling too.) I told my sister and saw a mischievous gleam flash into her eyes. Long story short, we both wound up with copies ;)  and I finally got around to reading mine. 

The plot: British sisters Jenny & Kitty were close when they were growing up -- but they haven't spoken in six years. As the book begins, they're on a ferry headed to France to fix up and sell the rundown farmhouse they inherited from their late Aunt Sheila. Uptight older sister Jenny is 66, married for 35+ years to controlling, persnickety Paul, and mother of an adult son, Ace. Impulsive younger sibling Kitty, 62 (the narrator of the story), is a childless three-time divorcee, now living alone in a dreary flat. The cast of supporting characters includes a flock of wayward chickens, a flatulent donkey (!), a well-stocked wine cellar, and (ooh la la) a charming contractor.

For the most part, this was a quick and easy read (if perhaps somewhat predictable) -- lighthearted chick-lit/rom-com, a bit of a fairy tale, with a midlife flavour -- a pleasant way to spend a few hours. But there are some serious issues underlying the fun -- sibling rivalry, family estrangements, failed marriages, emotionally abusive spouses. There are some deft observations about women and aging, second chances and starting over later in life. And Kitty's childlessness comes up at several points in the book (sometimes in direct contrast to Jenny's motherhood). Those of us who are childless-not-by-choice (particularly those of us of a -- cough! -- certain age) will definitely relate. 

4 stars on Goodreads.   

And now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go call my sister. :)  

This was Book #11 read to date in 2022 (and Book #6 finished in February), bringing me to 24% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

Odds & ends

• Monday was Family Day in Ontario. I mostly stayed away from social media -- but I couldn't stay away entirely... and yes, I regretted it! (Will I ever learn??)  Not sure which was worse -- the personal posts from  friends, with "happy family all together" photos, or the companies/brands I follow cashing in on the day by wishing customers a "Happy Family Day!" and offering Family Day specials. 
• Something else that got under my skin:  People posting "Happy Family Day, Canada!" It's NOT a holiday in all provinces, and not all provinces that have a February holiday call it Family Day (smart people!):  it's "Riel Day" in my home province of Manitoba, "Heritage Day" in Nova Scotia, and "Islander Day" in PEI.  
• We recently got new neighbours in the condo unit kitty-corner from ours. 
• It was for sale at the same time this one was, six years ago... we looked at both units, but ultimately decided on this one. Our unit is slightly smaller, but faces the back of the property (the other one faces the busy main road out front), has more storage/closet/kitchen cupboard space, and we liked the layout a little better. (Also, this one was cheaper, lol -- albeit it was still a little more expensive than the price range we were looking in.)  
• That unit sold shortly after we bought this one, and we met the new neighbours the same day we moved in -- a couple about the same ages as us. We're not sure why they decided to move now. (The wild parties we've been having, maybe??  lol)  
• Anyway -- we haven't met the new neighbours yet. But we've heard at least one childish voice coming and going in the hallway outside recently, more than once, which makes me think there's at least one young child living there. There's two bedrooms, and it's one of the more sizeable units in the building, so there's certainly room for one and possibly two children. This could be good or not so good (or just neutral)... time will tell...! 
• I had a visit with my family doctor last week to discuss changing where I get my mammograms done. (I'm due for another one  -- the last one was two years ago, just before covid hit...!) I've always gone to a clinic within one of the big hospitals downtown (near the provincial legislature) -- which was fine when I was working downtown and could just zip up there on the subway -- but for obvious reasons (covid, protesters, etc.) I would prefer not to have to make that trip (45 minutes on the subway now) or be anywhere near a hospital or the provincial legislature right now. 
• I'm now booked at a local clinic for later in March.
• I also wound up with referrals for a colonoscopy (has it really been 10 years since my last one?? -- I guess it has!) and will be getting one for a surgeon re: my gallbladder as well. (Yikes!)  
• I am having the colonoscopy done in late March at a clinic that is quite literally a three-minute walk away from our condo building, which is nice. 
• As for the gallbladder surgery -- there is a huge backlog of  "elective" surgeries that have been postponed/delayed because of the pandemic (the dr told me his own dad has been waiting for gallbladder surgery since before covid! -- yikes!!). So I'm not holding my breath, but I decided I might as well get my name on the waiting list for that sooner versus later...!   
• I am saddened by what's happening in Ukraine. I am, as some of you know, partly (one-half) of Ukrainian descent, on my dad's side -- albeit the Ukrainian part of my family has been in Canada for more than 100 years. I looked up the town in western Ukraine where my grandfather was born on Google Maps. It's about 1 hour from one of the targeted larger centres I've seen on the maps on TV, and 2-3 hours from the city of Lviv. (About 9 hours from Kiev.) I know there are still relatives "over there" --  the descendants of some of my grandfather's siblings. One of my uncles went there and met some of them, about 30 years ago, after the Cold War ended. I don't know their names or anything about them -- but they are my kin, and it makes what's happening there a little more personal.
• As Russian expert Tom Nichols said on Twitter, "I haven't felt this kind of feeling in the pit of my stomach since the 1980s." Me either. (Nichols and I are the same age.) 
• Someone asked Nichols, "Could you help describe how bad it is for the under 40 crowd?"  Nichols: "Not as bad as the Cuban Missile Crisis. But bad."  :( 
• (This rant comes a week or so late, but it's still bothering me, so here goes.) Another quadrennial, another Winter Olympics, another figure skating scandal. (eyeroll)  My usual enjoyment of the Olympics, and Olympic figure skating in particular (aside from the 5 a.m. wakeup calls to watch...!) was marred by the scandal over young Russian skater Kamila Valieva's positive drug test, revealed only after she helped propel Russia to a gold medal in the team event -- and how despite this, she was still allowed to compete in the women's event (with disastrous consequences).  
• Personally, I think the minute that positive drug test was uncovered, the entire Russian team should have been told to pack their bags, put on a plane and sent home. They were at the Olympics on "probation" for previous doping offenses as it was, not even allowed to compete under their country's flag. That seemed like an overly generous arrangement to me as it was. (But then, I'm not the IOC.) 
• I felt immensely sorry for a 15-year-old who was clearly being manipulated by the adults around her and should never have been placed in this position. I felt even sorrier after she was "allowed" to skate but fell apart under the enormous stress, with the entire world watching. Even more so after watching her coach berate her (in Russian -- translations were later provided) when she came off the ice. But I felt sorrier still for all the other athletes who skated drug-free and had their Olympic moment of glory tainted by what happened and how it was (mis)handled. 
• I'd never even heard of Valieva before this season, but apparently little girls who can do quadruple jumps are a dime a dozen in Russia -- at a terrible cost. This same coach has produced several other world and Olympic champions in recent years -- most of whom explode onto the scene in the same way Valieva did, and then flame out a year or two later, their bodies and spirits broken under the physical and mental demands. Few make it to two Olympics in a row.  (The Washington Post had a pretty good article last week naming other recent Russian blink-and-you'll-miss-her champions and what happened to them.) 
• Back in the 1990s, I read (and still have) a book called "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters." (The author just wrote a piece for the Washington Post about Valieva, calling for reforms.) Sad to think that so little has changed, almost 30 years later.   

"The Boys" by Ron Howard & Clint Howard

Since I enjoyed Hayley Mills's memoir so much, I decided to immediately tackle another child star memoir released last fall. "The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family" was written by not just one but two of Hollywood's most famous child stars of the 1960s & 1970s -- Ron Howard (of "The Andy Griffith Show" and, later, "Happy Days") and his younger brother Clint, whom I remember watching in "Gentle Ben."  Ron's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard -- also an actress, and the third generation to enter the family business -- provided an affectionate introduction.  The two Howards alternate telling their stories, with occasional interjections into each other's memories.  

Ron & Clint's parents, Jean & Rance Howard (born Harold Beckenholdt), were born and raised in Oklahoma (introduced at university by classmate Dennis Weaver -- who later played Clint's dad on "Gentle Ben"!), but headed to New York and then Hollywood in pursuit of fame & fortune. While both continued to act in small/character roles (Rance later branched out into writing and directing too), their own careers took a backseat when first Ron and then Clint also became actors at very young ages. Rance patiently coached both of them, helping them learn their lines before they could read, explaining what was happening in each scene and what was expected of them, and accompanied them on set. 

Both Ron & Clint give full credit to their parents for providing them with a solid grounding of Midwest values, a modest, ordinary home life, and a focus on hard work and professionalism. Unlike Hayley Mills and other child stars of the era, the money Ron & Clint earned was wisely invested for their futures, with Rance & Jean taking a minuscule 5 per cent as compensation for their services. (In one chapter, 12-year-old Ron realizes, with a shock, that between his salary on the "The Andy Griffith Show" plus residuals, he was earning more money annually than his baseball hero, Sandy Koufax.)  

As you might expect, there are some great stories about the movies and TV shows both boys worked on, including anecdotes about their famous co-stars, and the life lessons they learned along the way.  Even as a child, Ron was fascinated by what went on behind the scenes on the set of the Griffith show -- how the shots were lit and set up, the special effects used and so on. The show's  producers gave him an 8mm movie camera for his 8th birthday, which he used to make his own home movies (often starring his brother and his dad). Eventually, of course, he became one of the most well-known and respected directors and producers in the business. 

While Ron has maintained his wholesome Opie/Richie image, he confesses to some un-Opie-like behaviour. His dad taught him to fight to help counter the bullying he received in school. He admits to his guilt over teasing his mother at times, and confesses to ignoring a summons to report for an army physical, a prelude to being drafted and likely sent to Vietnam.  (The draft ended shortly afterward.) Clint struggled with alcohol, pot and then cocaine from his teen years onward, finally achieving sobriety in 1991.  

Like Hayley Mills's memoir, this book effectively ends well before present day, after Ron's first major directing job for Roger Corman ("Grand Theft Auto") and his departure from "Happy Days." The last 40 years are dispensed with in a few pages that bring us up to date on what's happened since then. I will admit to shedding a few tears in the Epilogue, in which the brothers describe their parents' final years & deaths.  Their love, respect and gratitude is evident in every page of this book.  

I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.  

*** *** *** 

ALI alert:  Ron & Clint had an older brother:  Mark Allan Howard, Rance & Jean's first child, was stillborn on Jean's birthday in January 1953. He had a congenital heart defect, and would not have lived long even if he had been born alive. "Forever after, she never much enjoyed [her birthday]. Ron and I didn't know why when we were kids, though," Clint writes. "Our folks rarely discussed Mark with us. He was simply too painful a subject for them. Not until we were adults -- after Mom had died, in fact -- did Dad tell us the complete version of what happened."  

Jean had a later miscarriage (in her early 40s, I think?), a few weeks after telling the boys she was pregnant.  

Ron also writes with great affection about Mrs. Barton, his teacher on the set of "The Andy Griffith Show," who (so far as he knew) did not have children. 

This was Book #10 read to date in 2022 (and Book #5 finished in February), bringing me to 22% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

#MicroblogMondays: "Grief stole my love of reading"

The New York Times had a wonderful personal essay this past weekend, written by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and a lifelong reader, who was dismayed to find she'd lost her ability to read books after the loss of her father, a complicated pregnancy and two miscarriages (further complicated by her social media consumption). (Caveat: Living children are mentioned in the article.) Sample passage: 

I could still go through the motions. I could open a book and stare at its pages. But I couldn’t concentrate. My eyes floated on the page like a castaway adrift. I couldn’t sit still. Every few minutes, I’d pop out of my chair and get busy with something else. I’d return to the page unable to remember what I had just read.

What was worse was that I didn’t care about what I was reading. It all felt stupid and pointless. Sitting with a book requires some level of compassion and energy. A reader sits with the thoughts, stories, insights or opinions of another. She opens herself empathetically to the world of another human being. And I didn’t feel I had the requisite compassion or energy to do so...

No one told me that grief affects reading. No one told me that this was common. But apparently it is.

I mentioned this experience to my therapist recently and she told me that some find comfort in reading. But for others, in times of intense grief or stress, our brains decide to spend their energy elsewhere. This was the illiterate impulse of my poor, overtaxed limbic system.

She said it was analogous to her experience after a recent surgery. She assumed that during her recovery, laid up all day, she’d get a ton of reading done. But she read nothing at all: “I was in so much pain, I just didn’t give a crap about what was in the books.” She said her body had to focus all that energy on healing. It is the same, in seasons of grief, when it comes to our heart and souls.

I could relate to Warren's story. While my love of reading never totally abandoned me -- and while I think the Internet/social media also had a lot to do with the marked decline in my reading consumption during the past 20-odd years -- grief most certainly had an impact on how much I read, and what. I remember Jody Day of Gateway Women telling me the same thing happened to her for the first several years that she grieved her childlessness. If I remember correctly, she said that while she was eventually able to get back to reading, it was mostly non-fiction for a very long time. (As Warren noted above) Jody explained that reading fiction requires us to put ourselves into the lives and minds and feelings of others -- empathy -- and sometimes when we're grieving, we just don't have that capacity. Coping with our own situation is taxing enough without taking on someone else's, even when they're just characters in a book.  

This rang true to me. My fiction reading took a real hit in the years after stillbirth and infertility, although there were a few exceptions, which I think I've mentioned in previous posts on this blog. I fondly remember reading "Bridget Jones's Diary" by Helen Fielding, not too long after Katie's stillbirth in the summer/fall of 1998, and having to stifle my impulse to laugh out loud while reading it on public transit. At a time when I felt like I might never laugh again, it was a real comfort to find that I could. 

And when my dad flew in for Katie's funeral (Mom was already with us), he brought me a gift from my sister: a copy of Elizabeth Peters's newest "Amelia Peabody" book, "The Ape Who Guards The Balance."  Both of us had/have been big fans of Peters (who also wrote as Barbara Michaels) since we were teenagers.  There was a handwritten note inside which read (in part), "I thought Amelia chaining herself to #10 Downing Street would be more entertaining than flowers."  (She was right. :) )  (I wrote more about our love of Peters/Michaels -- and how I got the book autographed by the author, a few months later -- in this post from 2017.)  

It's only in recent years that I've started reading fiction again in significant quantities.  Joining both real-life and online book clubs (which mostly seem to choose fiction, it seems) has helped, I think. Some of these books wouldn't have been something I would have chosen to read on my own, and some of them were a bit of a slog to read to the end (*cough* -- "The Three Weissmans of Westport" -- *cough*).(lol)  But some were delightful surprises, and got me picking up other works of fiction on my own. Last year, for the first time in many years (and certainly since I started tracking my reading), my fiction choices outnumbered non-fiction (many of them re-reads, but still...!):  36 fiction, 22 non-fiction and 1 volume of poetry.

Warren notes that she turned to "doomscrolling" social media after Donald Trump was elected, and that while many people took comfort in reading while everything else shut down during covid, others (including herself) found they could not focus on books.  (I've taken part in the Goodreads challenge every year since 2016.  After reading Warren's article, I checked:  2017 -- the first year of the Trump presidency -- is the only year to date in which I did not meet my reading goal, which was then a rather modest 24 books. Hmmm....)  

But having felt this way before, she was confident it would pass. It did:  

As we slowly return to some semblance of normalcy, part of my “recovery” has been taking up deep reading again with a newfound joy and fervor... I am feasting after a fast, drinking words down deeply after a time of drought. After these blank years of stress and sorrow, page after page is just waiting to be savored.

Have you noticed that grief/covid has affected your reading life? In what ways? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.

"Forever Young" by Hayley Mills

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my sister & I often spent Saturday afternoons at the matinee at the local movie theatre, which was always a film geared to younger audiences -- Beach Party & Gidget movies, Elvis Presley vehicles and, quite often, Disney movies. (The cost of a ticket was 35 cents -- later jacked up to 50 cents -- and a bag of popcorn was 10 cents. Those were the days...!)  

Sunday nights, we faithfully watched "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour" on TV (albeit our TV was black and white, until we finally got a colour set when I was about 12). It was the one night of the week we were allowed to watch TV while eating dinner, sitting on the couch with our plates set on TV trays. 

(I didn't know it then, but my great-uncle, who worked for the U.S. Coast Guard in the Santa Barbara area of southern California, was friends with Walt Disney. He introduced Disney to his mother/my great-grandmother, when she came to California to visit her family in the 1940s. I never met my great-uncle, who died in 1969, not too many years after Disney. But, I digress.)  

Between those two screens, I saw a LOT of movies that featured one of the biggest child stars of the era, Hayley Mills:  "Pollyanna," "Summer Magic," "That Darn Cat," "In Search of the Castaways," and "The Truth About Spring." Two of her movies in particular are still huge favourites of mine:  first, "The Parent Trap," in which Mills plays identical twins separated as infants when their parents split up -- one winding up in California and one in Boston. By coincidence, the girls wind up at the same summer camp -- and take an instant dislike to each other. Eventually, of course, they become friends, figure out why they look so much alike, and decide to switch places -- first, to see how the other half has been living and second, to try to bring their parents back together again and reunite their family.  

(One more digression:  Disney remade "The Parent Trap" in 1998 with Lindsay Lohan (!) as the twins and Dennis Quaid and the late, lovely Natasha Richardson as the estranged parents. Hayley Mills has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a hotel elevator passenger. My mother & I went to see it as a diversion in mid/late August that year, shortly after our Katie was stillborn. I thought it was cute on its own merits, but I still far prefer the original.)  

My other fondly remembered Mills favourite is "The Trouble With Angels:" Hayley and June Harding play two students at an all-girls Catholic boarding school whose "scathingly brilliant ideas" keep them in constant trouble with the Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell).  

So, as you can imagine, I was pretty thrilled to find a memoir written by Mills -- "Forever Young" on the shelf of my local mega-bookstore early last fall.  (I have a huge weakness for Hollywood memoirs generally!) I was able to get an e-copy at a fraction of the hardcover price not long afterwards, and it's been on my "priority TBR list" ever since then. 

*** *** *** 

The book begins with Mills returning to Disney studios in 2016 for the first time in many years, where Walt's office has been preserved exactly as he left it for the final time before he died suddenly in December 1966.  She'd already been thinking about writing a memoir for many years:  

I wanted to go back and remember, to make some sense of it all, not only for myself but also for my children, who I felt deserved some clarity. After all, it was they who had borne the brunt, as well as reaped the benefits, of my unusual childhood. 

At lunch with some Disney friends, old and new, the co-creator of "Frozen," Michael Giaimo, asks her, "So come on, Hayley, tell us... What was he like?"  

And then it hit me -- of the hundreds of people now working at Disney, most had never known him, never met him. But I had... For better or for worse, I'd literally grown up at Disneyland. 

And that was it. The penny dropped. Not a bolt of lightning, exactly, but the missing piece of jigsaw puzzle that I needed to write this book. For while this is the story of my childhood, and of course my career, it is also about a time that has now passed into history -- when Hollywood was still "Tinseltown" and the great Walt Disney was at his zenith, ruling over what was, at least in his own head, still a family business. 

Mills grew up in an acting family:  her father was the distinguished stage and film star John Mills;  her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, acted before turning to writing;  her older sister, Juliet, was an actress, and her younger brother Jonathan eventually carved out a career behind the scenes. Mills had no thoughts about entering the family business until she was 12, when the director J. Lee Thompson came to the visit her father about a part in his new film, "Tiger Bay."  He wound up casting Hayley in a pivotal role in the movie too. A Disney producer saw the movie and thought she would be perfect for the studio's next big project, "Pollyanna."  Walt Disney agreed. Not only did he offer Hayley the part, he insisted on signing her to a six-film/seven-year contract. 

In Hollywood, Mills met many other current and former child actors who provided her with cautionary tales about the business. On the one hand, Mills was grateful to her parents for providing her with a relatively normal life in England between making movies for Disney;  on the other hand, she sometimes chafed at their well-meaning attempts to protect her and control her career. (She wasn't aware of just how much they were involved behind the scenes, or the errors in judgment they made, until much later in her life.)    

All of us struggle to some extent with growing up and learning to stand on our own two feet -- but Hayley had to do it on the big screen with millions of people watching. She clashed with her mother, a complex woman who descended into alcoholism and depression, and she struggled with shyness and feelings of inadequacy. She also struggled with her weight, which led her to develop an eating disorder. 

If you're a fan of Hayley Mills and/or Disney movies from the 1960s, or just enjoy a good Hollywood memoir, you will enjoy this book.  There's lots of name dropping and wonderful descriptions and anecdotes about the famous people she met along the way (Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were neighbours and good friends of the family;  Noel Coward was her sister's godfather; Richard Attenborough was "Uncle Dickie"). Her paths crossed with the Beatles several times, and my favourite story in the book is probably about how her mother called up George Harrison, at the height of Beatlemania, and asked him to escort Hayley to a charity function (!). Despite being mortified by her mother's interference, and being pestered by autograph seekers all evening, she enjoyed George's company. They wound up back at her parents' home, with her dad making scrambled eggs for them at 4 a.m. :) 

My one quibble about this book:  it ends in the early/mid-1970s, when Mills was in her mid-20s, shortly after she gave birth to her first son, Crispian, and divorced her husband, Roy Boulting, who was 30 (!) years old than she was. The rest of her life since then is glossed over within a couple of pages. I'd like to have read more about her life between then and now. Perhaps she'll write a sequel someday? 

(Also: ALI/CNBC warning: near the end of of the book, Mills waxes rhapsodic about motherhood and being a grandmother. Mercifully, it's not for too long. She does admit to fearing that she wouldn't have children at all, having been told she wouldn't by an astrologer when she was a child.)  

4 stars on Goodreads.  

This was Book #9 read to date in 2022 (and Book #4 finished in February), bringing me to 20% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

#MicroblogMondays: Valentine's Day/Mid-February odds & ends (& rants!)

(Including a couple of rants/vents on various topics that have been bugging me lately...!) 

• It's Valentine's Day -- and dh & I are marking our 40th (!!) Valentine's Day together.  :)  (We met 40 years ago last October, and had our first date 40 years ago last month.) 
• It's never been a big-deal day for us... mostly we just exchange cards. We used to go out for dinner, sometimes, earlier in our marriage, but it was always so crowded and noisy and expensive, we gave that up. I've always told dh not to get me any flowers, because the prices are always SO ridiculous -- but he did pick me up a small box of chocolates when he was at the supermarket on Valentine's Day last year, which was a completely unexpected treat and a mid-February/covid winter pick-me-up.  :)  (I will NEVER turn down chocolate!  lol)  
• I still have the first Valentine's Day card he gave me (and all the other ones since then too). 
• Past Valentine's Day-related posts have been tagged, here. 
• Recap: The Elton John concert that SIL & I bought tickets for, way back in November 2019 -- originally scheduled for March 29th, 2020, then rescheduled for Feb. 15th, 2022 -- was postponed again to March 13th. There was an option to ask for a refund within 7 days of the change in date -- and we decided to take it.  But then, on Feb. 1st, I got an email saying "Your event has been postponed," saying organizers were trying to reschedule. 
• Update: Finally, on Feb. 11th, I got another email saying the event had been cancelled :(  and a refund would be forthcoming. I went on Ticketmaster and checked all the Elton John dates for Toronto, just to be certain, and sure enough, the March 12th & 13th dates (as well as the February dates) were all cancelled. It's a relief to finally have things settled, one way or another. 
• There's a September date at the Rogers Centre/SkyDome stadium that's still on, but I'm sure most of the seats for that are long gone -- and even if there are tickets available, who knows what the covid situation will be by then?? -- I don't want to buy tickets for anything too far in advance right now...! 
• BIL called dh early last week and invited us to come to dinner last Saturday night. Both nephews, their wives and (of course) Little Great-Nephew were all coming. (He didn't mention it, but it's his & SIL's wedding anniversary this week, and I suspect that may have been the reason for the family get-together.)
  • Then he called again a day or so later -- to UNinvite us. (!) He said to dh, "Don't get mad!" Dh said he knew he felt very guilty. You have to know BIL... he's got a huge heart, and he's very impulsive. Doesn't always think things through, and doesn't have a lot of filters. ;)  He told dh they wanted LGN to spend some time "bonding" with his aunt & uncle (Younger Nephew & his wife, who are LGN's godparents). They are even more paranoid about covid than dh & I are, and none of us have seen much of them over the past two years (even though we all live in the same area) -- so they haven't spent much time with the little guy, certainly not as much as dh & I have over the past year. They're also very, very covid-cautious, and would probably have been less inclined to come if too many people were around (even though we're almost as cautious as they are!). 
  • We weren't mad. (Dh actually thought it was hilarious -- so typically BIL.) BIL & SIL have always been so very kind about including us in things -- and they certainly have the right to be together as a family without us hanging around all the time. Especially right now, when family together time has been so limited.
  • But -- I have to admit -- it still stings a little. :(  
• I had to mute yet another person on social media (and am debating whether to unfollow outright), over some comments they made about what's been happening here in Canada, in Ottawa and at several border crossings (including one right outside the border town where I was born). Not the first, and probably not the last...  :(  
• I can't write too much about that whole situation (although I did, a little bit, in this post) --  I can't even watch the news right now -- because I am just so, SO angry about the whole thing -- about the "protests" and the people behind them, the politicians who are enabling them and hoping to cash in on it all, and the way things have been (mis)handled by the police and by all levels of government (municipal, provincial and federal)(and I know I am far from alone in feeling this way). :(  You can be damned sure that if these protesters were indigenous peoples or other people of colour, they would have been cleared out of there long, long ago (in fact, they never would have been allowed anywhere near Parliament Hill in the first place with that many trucks, etc.). My heart goes out to anyone living (or trying to live) in downtown Ottawa right now.    
• In other decidedly not-good news this morning, our premier has announced our province will be dropping vaccine passports, as well as all remaining capacity limits, as of March 1st -- about two weeks away, and sooner than expected. (Mask mandates will remain for now -- and thank goodness for that!)  Numbers *have* been on the decline -- but they still remain high overall, if you look at the past two years to date. I think it's premature. (Could the fact that there's an election coming up on June 2nd have anything to do with this eagerness to embrace "normalcy" so quickly? -- hmmm....) 
• I've never actually used my vaccine passport, other than to get through airport security at Christmastime. (Even then, they just looked at it, didn't scan it.) We haven't been in any restaurants or other venues where they are currently required -- but knowing that the mandate existed made me feel better about the prospect of going back, eventually. Needless to say, we are highly unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future, once those passport requirements are dropped (and most certainly once masks are abandoned).  The numbers will have to come down a whole lot more, and remain low for quite a while, before we'll consider doing that. 
• This is an incredible story of siblings and half-siblings reunited through the miracle of modern DNA testing. It's also a heartbreaking tale of poverty, abuse and black-market adoptions in Quebec in the 1950s.  Worth a read! 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

"Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift

After taking a while to get through my last book ("Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom" by Carl Bernstein, reviewed here), I deliberately sought a book that would be short and quick to get through. "Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift fit the bill, in that respect -- it's 200 pages (or less, depending on what version you're reading and, if it's an e-version, how big you make the type and spacing, lol). It only took me a few hours to read. It's been on my TBR list for a while -- it caught my interest at the bookstore when it first came out in hardcover a few years ago (gorgeous cover design!). It's also been adapted into a movie that's coming out at the end of the month. 

"Mothering Sunday" -- the day, not the book -- is not a familiar term to those of us in North America. In the United Kingdom (and some Commonwealth countries), it's been celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent since the Middle Ages. It's a celebration both of mothers (the equivalent of North America's Mother's Day) and the "mother church," i.e., the church where you were baptized.  Traditionally, Mothering Sunday was a day when domestic servants were given the day off to visit their mothers/families and mother church.

There's not much action or plot in "Mothering Sunday" the book -- although there is a plot twist, midway through. It's Mothering Sunday 1924, a warm spring day in late March. Jane Fairchild is a 22-year-old maid at an English country estate. (Think "Downton Abbey" on a much smaller, reduced scale, after the devastation of the First World War -- Jane and Milly the cook are the only remaining servants, and most of the local young men are dead, their bedrooms preserved exactly as they left them. A melancholy air hangs over everything.) Several of the local families, including Jane's employers, the Nivens, are heading out to lunch together at a local hotel while the servants are off, and to celebrate the upcoming marriage of two of their children, Paul Sherrington and Emma Hobday.  

Jane is an orphan with no parents to visit -- but she has secret plans for the day. She and Paul have been lovers since shortly after she arrived at the Nivens' house several years earlier, at age 16, and they are taking advantage of the Sherringtons' empty house to make love one last time, in Paul's bedroom, before his marriage. Everything changes for Jane after Mothering Sunday -- although not for the reasons she (or we) might think... 

While the main story takes place on this one day, we also get glimpses of Jane's past and of what ultimately happens to her. (I don't think it's a spoiler alert to tell you that Jane never has any children.)  There's a lot here about books, about writing and storytelling, the power of words and observation and memory. 

I debated on how to rate this book, and settled on 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 -- it's a fast read, but slow moving and contemplative, if that makes sense. The writing is beautiful, but it's a bit dense at times. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, but it made me think, and I may need to do a re-read...! 

This was Book #8 read to date in 2022 (and Book #3 finished in February), bringing me to 18% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."