Coffee Cups and Great Books

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.” I love that quote because that’s often the way I feel when I reveal my willy-nilly thoughts in my blog and I’ve used that quote by Paulo Coelho several times before. But until today I had no idea who Paulo is other than I suspected he isn’t an American because no one here goes around calling themselves “Paulo.” Now that I’ve googled the guy I’m embarrassed to reveal my ignorance because I should have recognized him, if for no other reason than his first book, The Alchemist, is on a list of the '100 Books Everyone Should Read.' That list was compiled in the last century and I’d read 50+ of the titles but I just found out that I’ve only read 45 on the list compiled in this century. The Alchemist is on both lists but books like Gone With the Wind and The Tale of Two Cities have apparently lost their relevance and books like The Kite Runner and The Handmaids Tale have been added which just goes to prove I can never live long enough to read the 100 Best Books because they keep moving the target. 

Another reason I should have recognized Paulo Coelho is because some of his words have been immortalized on those great keepers of wisdom: coffee cups. Words like: “You are what you believe yourself to be” and “Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly” mean ever so much more when they come with a nice cup of hot coffee. My husband was obsessed with both coffee and coffee cup philosophy. In the house he had before we got married three quarters of his kitchen cabinets were literally devoted to his coffee cups---over a hundred if my memory isn’t playing Pinocchio on me. His ritual of picking out a cup reflected his mood and was not just a grab-one-and-go affair. When he’d picked the one that proclaimed “Don’t let the Turkeys Get you Down” I knew he was in a gloomy mood. He was treated for depression for over a decade so that cup got a lot of use. 

When we moved in together I wasn’t willing to devote three quarters of the kitchen cabinets to his collection so I boxed most to them up with a promise to rotate them up from the basement from time to time, a promise I never kept nor intended to do. Wives are wicked that way. What would you have done if the man in your life refused to pare down a collection like that to a number that would fit into the  normal, allotted cabinet space? Ya, you’d lie, too. I know you would. Or maybe you’d have risked a war of words, hurt feelings and resentments by getting rid of them when he wasn’t looking? 

 

Don had cups he’d never let company drink from but if he served you coffee in cup with a Snoopy quote you knew you were more than just a friend-friend. Only good friends got the Snoopy cups. Snoopy was up beat and whimsical. “Keep looking up. That’s the secret of life” being one of his favorites. Even then his choice of cups were mini subliminal messages especially chosen for what ever was going on at the time. 

When I downsized to move here I didn’t keep a single one of Don’s message coffee cups but I bought a new one of my own and I kept one political cup---an Obama cup that shows his birth certificate. I had a hard time selling all the presidential campaign cups on eBay because I liked them---part my collection as well as Don's. We had them back as far as JFK. And sometimes I regret having sent the “turkeys” cup to Goodwill. It’s not like I need that object to conjure up the memory of Don sitting at his roll top desk with that coffee cup in his hand. But objects once special to deceased loved ones are like jigsaw puzzle pieces found on the floor long after we’ve boxed up the puzzles and passed them on. They give us brief memories, knowing where they came from, but we know those pictures can never be whole again. Not for us. Not for anyone.  

I’ve been trying to figure out when and in what context Paulo Coelho wrote the words about writing being a socially accepted way to get naked in public but all I found out is that a ton of bloggers like me love to use the quote and that good old Paulo has a Twitter account. I love books that contain snippets of authors' words on writing written with aspiring writers in mind. I thought the quote might have been in a book like that.  

Very few of those kind of books leave out Stephen King's quote about “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” While looking for Paulo I got hung up on a King quote about claiming your identity as a writer. He asks, “Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not.” Ohmygod! This is SO me! I never say I’m a writer. Never. I will say I’m an aspiring writer or a wanna-be writer but there’s always an adjective firmly in place. I write every day and according to the Great Stephen King that’s all a person needs to do to own the title. So I'm asking: would someone like to make me a badge? I'm thinking of wearing one each time I sit in front of my computer because, ya, I'm going to try to kick the adjective habit. ©

100 Books Everyone Should Read 2022

1. 1984 (George Orwell)
2. The Alchemist
3. American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
4. And Then There Were None and Selected Plays (Agatha Christie)
5. Animal Farm
6. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
7. Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights) (Anonymous)
8. The Art of War
9. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
10. Atlas Shrugged
11. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
12. Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
13. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
14. A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
15. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
16. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
17. The Canterbury Tales
18. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
19. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
20. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
21. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
22. Crime and Punishment
23. Divine Comedy
24. Don Quixote
25. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
26. Dune
27. Emma
28. Ender's Game
29. Fahrenheit 451
30. Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Anderson)
31. Fanny Hill (John Cleland)
32. The Fault in Our Stars
33. Faust
34. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Nevada)
35. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
36. The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
37. Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
38. Gravity's Rainbow
39. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
40. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
41. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
42. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
43. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
44. House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)
45. The Illiad
46. Interview With the Vampire (Louisiana)
47. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
48. King Solomon's Mines
49. Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
50. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
51. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
52. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
53. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
54. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
55. Madame Bovary
56. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
57. Metamorphosis
58. Middlesex
59. Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
60. No Country for Old Men
61. The Odyssey
62. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
63. Old Man and the Sea
64. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
65. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude
67. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
68. The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain)
69. Pride and Prejudice
70. The Raven
71. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
72. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
73. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
74. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
75. Schindlers List (Thomas Keneally)
76. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
77. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
78. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
79. Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
80. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
81. Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert a Heinlein)
82. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
83. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
84. To the Lighthouse
85. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
86. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
87. Ulysses
88. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
89. Vanity Fair
90. War and Peace
91. Wasp Factory
92. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver)
93. Where the Wild Things Are
94. White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
95. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
96. Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
97. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
98. Women in Love
99. A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'engle)
100. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Grief is Grief

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write my grief away. Back in 1983, just after my mom died, I started a family history book that took me two years to complete. It started out with me just wanting to hold on to her stories that would have gotten lost if not recorded and it grew from there.

Her death was a traumatic event. She’d been going to the doctor every week for a dozen weeks complaining of pain. Near the end my brother started going with her to get some answers about what was going on and the doctor told him Mom was just getting old and looking for attention. Mistakes one through ten. Unbeknown to anyone she had a small hole in a kidney and blood was slowly seeping out and filling up her body cavity. Mistake eleven came the day she died and the ambulance got lost trying to find my parents’ house. (They lived on a lake in a rural area.) Mistake twelve through fifteen happened on the way to the hospital when the ambulance caught on fire and they had to wait for another. She died of septic shock and a doctor told me later that dying that way is very painful. Her death was a series of human errors and oversights and it was filled with the kind of shoulda, coulda anguish that only comes with hindsight.

Mom only lived ten minutes after she got to the hospital and I remember an ER doctor saying that they could have saved her if they’d had a little more time, and then a nurse replied,” Someone should do something about that ambulance company!” She was looking right at me when she said it. But I was in shock and the true weight of what she said didn’t sink in until much later when someone started a class action suit lawsuit against the company that built the ambulances like Mom rode on that fateful day. There had been ambulances catching on fire all over rural America.

One of the worse weeks of my life was when the deadline for joining that class action suit was coming up and I had to decide if I wanted to get our family involved in it or not. Don was right there with me, talking it out and helping me come to the conclusion that I couldn’t do that to my dad. He’d just started dating a lovely woman, moving on and it would have been cruel at his age to put him through reliving the details surrounding Mom’s death that a legal deposition would have required. No, it was up to someone else to “do something about that ambulance company.”

When I go to an online support site for widows sometimes it makes me feel lonelier. It’s common to see statements from women in my age bracket like: “This is the worse thing to ever happen to me” or “I don’t know how I can go on.” What bothers me more is when the people there complain about others who try to console them with words like, “I just lost my father/mother so I know just how you feel.” Sometimes I want to scream: “Grief is grief!” But I can’t do that. People have to work through their mourning in their own way and if they need to believe their grief is deeper than other people’s grief who am I to challenge that opinion? In the words of novelist Paulo Coelho: “We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.”

But I know. I know to the depths of my soul that most humans are resilient. We can be happy and whole again after horrible, life altering events. I have the ghosts of past grief to thank for teaching me that. Even now, with Don’s death so recent, and my mother’s so long ago, I can still hear the words he kept repeating in my ear during Mom’s funeral: “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay!” And when I’d finished writing my family history book, it was okay. I had purged the grief induced melancholy from my life by introducing the relatives from the past to my relatives in the future. Writing truly is my saving grace. ©