"DID YOU SEE THE WILLA CATHER PBS SPECIAL?"

I had a funny experience today. On Saturday mornings I work out with Rayna, my trainer, and usually run a few errands after going to the gym. This morning the weather was clear, cool and bright and you could see all the American flags waving up and down B____ Street with the skyline of the city as backdrop. Fall has arrived in Boston along with the students; the trains are crowded and there is a line at the bank when I go to pick up change for the wash. On my way back home, I stop in one of our local bookstores. The door to the store is open and I can't resist. It's as if I have no power to walk past without stopping. I have piles of half-read and unread books all over the place but I can't stop buying more and more and more and more, books and books and books........I fear at times all this blog reading is addling my brain, messing up the neurons, I blink and think and process faster, but oh, for the 'old days', when I could sit and read at peace. Or maybe, I just work too much.

I bought My Antonia and A Lost Lady by Willa Cather. At the counter, I stop to pay and the girl who takes my money says, "did you see the PBS special?"

She's like so many of the students here in Boston, funny and open and full of twenty-something energy. She is wearing a fitted gray t-shirt, nerdy-cool glasses and has a huge tattoo on her left arm: something square with words, but I can't tell what it is.

"I did see that special! Those things are usually so dull and dry, but this one was really good. And, I grew up in Iowa, so....."

"You got homesick?" she says. No, I think, as I pay for the books. I'm not homesick. That's not it, exactly: Willa Cather grew up in a prairie town in Nebraska and moved to Pittsburgh and New York. She made a name for herself and became famous, but it's obvious the mid-west, or the west, stayed with her. The vast open spaces of my youth (which don't seem so vast now, isn't that one of the disappointments of adulthood?) have stayed with me and I understand the longing with which she wrote. Only it wasn't, and the PBS special made this very clear, a longing written as sentimental fiction. It was a longing for a very specific time and place. "1922 tore my world in half," she is quoted in the special, "and I stayed in the first half." The twentieth century had begun in earnest, after the first World War, and she chose instinctively, the world that came before. Her childhood world that included the spaces of Nebraska, the emptiness, the loneliness, the immigrant ethos that surrounded her childhood. As an immigrant myself, making the trek to the midwest more than a generation later, why wouldn't I respond?

All of this made me think about the new Hindu temple and cultural center in Iowa. When I first saw pictures of it, I thought: this is how it happened. The germans and swedes and other immigrants, struggling to make new lives, and the poor native Americans who were pushed off the land, all those people that came before. This is how it happened. This is the story of my country, and it's all still being told.

Comments

[brimful]

Even though I didn't grow up in the midwest, I did grow up in the boonies, at a time when my parents were really the only perceived "immigrants" of the day. So, My Antonia has always resonated with me very deeply. The line "you really are a part of me" has always meant to me that we carry our childhood and our geography within us, always.

And I think I know what you mean about the blog-reading. I think it's just easier to read these bite-sized portions, than it is to sit down to read a book, if only because we convince ourselves we have time to read a blog for a few minutes. I always feel like books require a chunk of my time; I'm not content to read a few pages daily. Know what I mean?

[MD]

I do know what you mean, and yet, I used to be able to do that. Read a few pages a day and finish a novel in a week or so! Oh, the humanity...