Magical Mystery Present

On my birthday, my two at-home daughters (H and J) presented me with a magical birthday present – an Amazon.com gift certificate.

They know the way to this dad’s heart.

I dropped this piece of paper into the magical hat, and drew out three ‘rabbits’ of a very special nature.

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First, I drew out a book called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. This book had been recently very highly recommended to me, and so it was an easy choice for me. It is a fictional collection of letters written by an aged pastor to his seven-year-old son. In the letters he recounts his life, including insights into his life as a pastor of a church in the small Iowa town of Gilead. As a pastor (not aged, thank you!) I’m intrigued. The book won the author a Pulitzer prize, but more interesting to me is that the book was suggested to the one who commended it to me by two people of nearly opposite ideological worlds. I’m digging into it now. I’ll have more to say when I finish it.

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Secondly, my magical piece of paper became a small book of collected essays called At Large and at Small by a woman named Anne Fadiman. Ms. Fadiman is the champion of a genre known as the ‘familiar essay’ of which this book is a small collection. In her words:

“The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crakling fire with their cravats loosened, their facorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjecteive, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own epense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffussed with a lover’s intimacy…. Today’s readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal — very personal — essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).”

In short, the familiar essay is something I would love to learn to write.

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And finally (cue the theme music), a DVD special edition of one of the greatest movies ever made: Sergio Leone‘s classic ‘spaghetti western‘ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. What can one say about a 179 minute classic (with 18 minutes of restored footage) which has no line of dialogue until ten or twelve minutes of time have elapsed, and which ends with a shootout so well choreographed with its music that one thinks of it as a dance more than a showdown with deadly force. What a great film.

A great film in which my wife can find no merit whatsoever, even with the close-ups of a young Clint Eastwood, the unnamed hero of the film. So, since we normally watch movies together, I have a problem.

Fortunately, my daughter is very pregnant. At some point in the very near future my wife will feel the motherly impulse to spend some extended time with my daughter and soon to be born grandchild. What shall I do with time alone? I’m not sure, but nearly three hours of it will be spent with Clint and Co. Perhaps six if I also watch it with the commentary turned on.

Problem solved.

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I loved all the presents I received for my birthday. (If my daughter holds out, then I will enjoy Barb’s gift to me on Thursday – a baking class at a local cooking school, which we will take together.) But to be given free reign at the world’s largest store – that was fun. Thanks H and J.