Our senior hall has a once-a-year book presentation given by
a storyteller/librarian and anyone who’s been to one of her speeches never wants
to miss the next one. She picks a batch of books from a certain genre and her
excitement over their plots and authors is infectious. I could listen to her all day. The
funny thing is I get her book list hand-outs but rarely read any of her picks
which just goes to show you don’t have to be a reader to enjoy a great book talk.
This week’s presentation was titled ‘Chillers and Thrillers’ and it included the
following books: In the Kingdom of Ice,
The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Those Who Wished me Dead, Under a Flaming Sky, The
Midnight Plan of the Repo Man, On Desperate Ground, The Woman in the Window,
Enemy of the Good, and The Plea.
Right now I’m reading two books. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by
Rebecca Skloot and Homegoing by Yaa
Guasi. The first book is a true story of a poor tobacco farmer whose cells were
taken without her knowledge and they became the basis for developing a wide
variety of medical advancements. That one is for our March book club
discussion. The other book, Homegoing,
is one my great-niece highly recommended to me, telling her mom, “I thought of
Aunt Jean the entire time I was reading this!” How could I not download that one
on my Kindle? I haven’t gotten far enough into it to understand why my great-niece
sees me in the pages but I’ve read enough reader reviews on Amazon to know the
book gets heavily involved in genealogy research. I’m at a point in the book where
one African tribe is helping the English capture another tribe’s members to
sell in the slave trade. I’ve never uncovered anything remotely that dramatic or
tragic in my family tree but the mystery and thrill of the hunt is what keeps most genealogy hobbyists going.
I took two clothe grocery bags full of books to the library’s
semi-annual book sale this week. They were all cookbooks. I don’t cook. I never
did. Still, it was hard paring down my collection so that all the cookbooks I
have left fit on two running feet of shelving. As I was unloading the books on
the library donation cart I had second thoughts about a book on making desserts
with Jell-O. I put it on the cart and I took it back off several times, then I
held it midway in between trying to understand why I cared about that book. It was
from an era when ladies in TV commercials served Jell-O with the same flare as the
chefs on the Food Network do today, but I hadn’t opened that book in decades. Did
it remind me of my mom? The day before, my niece and I had been looking through my
family photos and that made me overly sentimental, I thought. Still, I wanted to
keep that Jell-O book so badly but I didn’t and I regretted it all the way
home. Why on earth Marie Kondo didn’t pop into my head and tell me to keep the
darn, joyful little thing is a mystery I’ll never understand.
What makes some of us more sentimental than others? I’m
guessing somewhere out in the world is a person who was born at the exact
moment I was and that person has a cold disregard for anything remotely
sentimental because I got a double dose---part of which belongs to that moment-of-birth
twin. There was a story on our local news last night about an old man who
walked into an antique store and found his WWII era Army uniform hanging there
with all his metals and name still attached. He burst out crying. It had gotten lost
during a move and the owner of the antique store gave it to him, wouldn’t
accept a penny. Why is that kind of sentimentality celebrated and worthy of a
human interest story but an old woman who wants to stay attached to a Jell-O
cookbook is viewed as silly or too sentimental for her own good? Ya, I know, we’re
allowed to be sentimental over uniforms and wedding dresses but there’s a line
to be drawn somewhere down on the chain of other innate objects.
Wikipedia says, “Sentimentality originally indicated the
reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term
commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense
of reason.” That’s a charitable definition compared to one I found at
Vocabulary.com: “Sentimentality is a quality of being overly, dramatically
emotional — sad or loving or nostalgic. Your sentimentality on her eightieth
birthday might make your down-to-earth grandmother roll her eyes.” Roll your
eyes all you want but without sentimental people in the world there would be no
museums full of obsolete and curious oddities to visit and amaze you. Now, I’m
going to go check out e-Bay sales to see how much I could have gotten for that
vintage Jell-O cookbook. ©
Johnny Carson makes an ice cream pie with Jell-O
