Books at the beach: A laundry list

We slipped away from the egg-yolk hotel on a hot, bright morning last week. We found a little condo at Crescent Beach near St. Augustine. Finally, relaxation at the beach could begin again. And I remembered what I had meant to tell you.

My mother used to entertain my father at the dinner table by reading out loud certain portions of my grandmother’s letters. My grandmother wrote weekly. In her letters, she never failed to list each item of clothing she had hand-washed that day. My father never failed to find this litany of teddies and slips amusing.

In the spirit of my grandmother, herewith is a laundry list of sorts, not of clothing, but of beach reading. It may not include the long, lazy novels recommended by newspaper feature writers, but it’s idiosyncratic enough for me.

Left behind

First of all, Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry did not go to the beach. I had grabbed a stack of books, including theirs, at the library, rushing through the Ponce de Leon branch just before closing, picking and choosing at random.

Lasch’s “Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage and Feminism” and Berry’s “Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror” require a lot of thought.

On some future day, I’ll think about Lasch’s assertion that the modern family has been invaded by the larger culture (no argument there). And Berry, that Kentucky poet/farmer, who analyzed “The National Security Strategy” line by line (giving a government document a virtual literary analysis) has my heartfelt admiration, but I couldn’t read his book at the beach.

A lifetime of peace

The stack that traveled to the beach was topped by “A Lifetime of Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh. This Vietnamese Buddhist monk was propelled by the Vietnam War into what he calls “engaged Buddhism.” He had come to the United States to study at Princeton in 1960 and had begun speaking out against the war. He was exiled by the South Vietnamese government, met Daniel Berrigan at the Paris Peace talks and was nominated by Martin Luther King for a Nobel Peace Prize. His writings on Buddhist mindfulness have helped fuel a growing American interest in meditation and an examination of the mind.

It seems to me that the increasingly frantic nature of American culture (part of what Christopher Lasch might call the mechanization of daily life) and a predilection for being entertained by violence are leading people to seek an antidote. That’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to Thich Nhat Hanh. In one essay, he talks about mindful consumption, both of food and of media. “When you listen to the news, when you read a newspaper article, when you discuss something with others,” you may be ingesting anger and frustration, he says. Since I would like to avoid the screaming headlines and the relentless narration of crime and catastrophe, I’m listening to Thich Nhat Hanh.
And it couldn’t hurt to be reminded of the value of peacefulness and mindfulness while being cooped up on a car trip with a particular child of mine.

Mysteries and picture books

Right beneath Thich Nhat Hanh was "Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle." At least I had managed to bring along a mystery novel, that essential piece of beach reading. The author is Nora DeLoach, who turns out to have lived in Decatur. The book is not new – it was published in 1998 -- but it was new to me. The main character, Grace Covington, lives in Atlanta. She’s described in the blurb as an African-American Miss Marple. Who could resist that?

I also had checked out a picture book: “Creating a New Old House.” For some reason, I find pictures of pretty houses and rooms very soothing. Also pretty gardens. But this book was all about how to build a new house and make it look old. It included techniques for gouging the woodwork and doing distressing things to furniture. No thanks.

Peggy Orenstein on love, work and motherhood

The book I couldn’t put down turned out to be on the bottom of the stack: Peggy Orenstein’s “Flux: Women, Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World.”

The world is half-changed for women, she says, because the demands and expectations raised by the feminist movement have not been met. The movement of the 1970s and 80s challenged the limits placed on women mid-century – the professions that were closed to women, the assumptions that middle-class women would remain at home and care for children. The feminist struggle raised the expectation of girls like Orenstein that the world of careers was open to them. They sought the same “American Dream” that men had aspired to. Unfortunately, Orenstein writes, that dream is far, far harder for women to obtain.

The question of combining fatherhood and career is hardly a blip on most men’s radar screen. The two are simply expected – just another male privilege men don’t even think about. However, under current conditions, having children can easily derail a woman’s career.

Young women often aren’t as aware of the roadblocks thrown up in front of them. In a series of interviews. Orenstein details the ways different women have managed love, work and children.

Some women easily decided to quit their jobs and stay home with children. Others despaired at the difficulty of meeting the demands of the job and childcare and felt forced to choose between the two. Sometimes they gave up their ambitions and settled for far less than they had wanted. For other women, there was no question that they would continue in their work, but many felt far too pressured. Often, they felt angry at the double load they carried. Others chose not to have children.

Aside from the inhospitality of the workplace, the thread that runs through this book is the realization that while women have moved into men’s work, men have not moved equally into the work of caring for children. But Orenstein also seems to think women would benefit from being less invested in details of mothercare. That way, they could delegate more. To Orenstein, the best solution seemed to be a professional woman whose husband took nearly equal responsibility and who delegated part of the mother role to a caregiver. But she is not judgmental. Many different solutions are respected.

Having said all this, now it’s time to finish “Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle.” And after that, Jay Bookman’s new book “Caught in the Current: Searching for Simplicity in the Technological Age.”

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