The Year of Pleasures

This is the title of a book I just finished reading today. It is the first book I have read in awhile that I just had to mark in as I read it. By that, I really just mean underline stuff. I like to underline things that I think are written well, things that I really identify with, things I want to remember, and things that get me thinking. I think my underlining tendencies are a distant cousin to my list making tendencies.

In this book, the year of pleasures is just another way that the main character spends her year of grieving after her husband, John, dies of cancer. In the scene where Betta realizes the moment has come and her husband just passed, the description was so vivid, so apt, so heart wrenching that I couldn't help but underline the whole thing. --- "But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside and moved out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I'd ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain."

Something Betta's husband used to tell her that I really liked was----"We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give."

Betta's husband wanted her to be good to herself, be happy, do what made her smile. After he died, Betta found slips of paper with notes to her... and one to her was about a quirky affinity she had for green bowls - all sorts and styles- but often would not spend the money on. The quote is my favorite from the book, because it speaks of course about more than just green bowls, it just depends on who you are. --- "Take the green bowl. Take all the green bowls; love what you love without apology."

Betta decides to look up her old college roommates that she hasn't seen or heard from in years and years. --- "I wanted suddenly - intensely - to know where those women were. We could truly talk, I thought; they would still be able to hear both what I said and what I meant. It was Kierkegard who'd said that if a friendship is true, it doesn't matter how much time has gone by, you just pick up where you left off. " I can think of a good solid handful of girls in my life of whom this continues to be true. What a gift.

" ' Healing hurts,' someone at John's service had told me. ' But hurting heals.' " True dat.

LOVED this small glimpse into John's character that Betta recalls when she cannot find the coffee filters in all her packed boxes of stuff --- "Once, on a cold winter morning when we were out of both filters and paper towels, John had tried to use toilet paper. Then he'd used a strainer to try to separate the coffee grounds and disintegrating paper from the liquid. Then he'd tasted it. Then he'd gone to the store. And since the wind-chill was forty below, he'd bought lox and capers and beautiful bagels and gourmet cream cheese and roses and a type of wild rice we'd been wanting to try. That's the way he operated. Use errors to your advantage." Isn't that just great!!

And finally...this one answers a particular thing that people do that is on my pet peeve list (ooooh, I should blog about my pet peeves!! - no I won't do that) ---- "Don't let your habits become handcuffs." Preach it!

Anyway, this author was one that I actually had to read from while taking one of my graduate courses because she also writes about writing. So it was cool to read one her novels and see that yes she is qualified to write about how to write. Oh yeah...her name is Elizabeth Berg. :)