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I was walking along Walter Street today when a big gust of wind blew past, scattering leaves and papers and making a cute toddler, who was tromping sturdily along the curb and holding her father’s hand, giggle and clap with delight.

It was just getting dark, and as I looked up at the porch lights of the houses, admiring the dark stained glass panes on the doors and decorating imaginary homes with dark, cozy rooms, I got such a feeling of there-ness, of Cambridge, or Somerville, of streets and houses and fall nights, and the snow and the smell of it, and oh, I just wanted to go home. Home home, twenty years ago home (though now that I think of it, not twenty years ago, because twelve was kind of awkward).

Anyway, Christmas will be here soon enough, and Brian and I will be holed up in my old bedroom, and I can sit awake at night and look out over the porch roof at the bright pools the streetlights make on the snow. That’ll be nice.

Just when Library School was getting all dry and stressy, the simple joys of research come to the rescue.

Among the many cool databases my school library subscribes to, I found Alexander Publishing’s North American Women’s Letters and Diaries collection. Which is basically just what it sounds like: a database of letters and diaries, all available online with full text and searchable by date, subject and author, as well as historical and personal events.

I searched for mentions of the Titanic’s sinking, and ran across this letter (written on my birthday, as it happens), that I knew was written by a Quaker before I even got past the date:

Fourth month 23, 1912.

Dear Gertrude –

Theodore Roosevelt spoke in Greensboro yesterday; Joe Dixon was with him. I did not hear or see either one of them. I was asked to make another speech in Greensboro on education, and I had to prepare my paper on very short notice. On Seventh day afternoon Virginia Ragsdale invited me and several other friends to supper at her house. We had a lovely time. The dogwood and Judas trees were so pretty. As we went along in the train, it looked as if we were going through a park. On First day I had a nice visit at David White’s. I spent the night at Aunt Gertie’s and came home about seven o’clock yesterday. Thy father met me at the trolley. Rachel is rather upset over her ocean trip since the terrible Titanic disaster. I think travel will be safer now than heretofore, but one contemplating a voyage just now would naturally feel uncomfortable, I suppose.

I have been hard at work on the yard whenever the weather permits. I am so interested in it that I do not like to do anything else. This afternoon I expect to go to Todd’s and get some tomato plants, egg plants and a few shrubs for the public school ground. I have not had much done on thy tennis court yet; I hope to put Al at that job after he plants corn. He is very busy now plowing the bottom land at the farm. He and Walter think that they have cleared a very fine strip of land. I hope it will produce enough corn to feed our horses and cows.

Lovingly,

Mother.

From Hobbs, Mary Mendenhall, 1852-1930, Letter from Mary Mendenhall Hobbs to Gertrude Mendenhall Hobbs Körner, April 23, 1912, in Letters to Gertrude, 1910-1913.. Shamburger, Mary I.. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston & Co., 1936, pp. 175. [Bibliographic Details] [4-23-1912] S7477-D095

And there you have it: history, happening someplace offstage while meanwhile at home the yard work gets done and the dogwood and Judas Trees are blooming at Virginia Ragsdale’s house and no one has time to listen to Teddy Roosevelt.

Things I have:

1. A computer that won’t start

2. A back up computer (thank goodness)

3. A headache.

4. Two assignments due tomorrow, two more this weekend.

5. A slipping GPA.

Scientists agree global warming is real.

Scientists agree world faces mass extinction.

Scientists agree it’s in his kiss.

Scientists agree ocean acidification is caused by humans.

Scientists agree Denny’s is dangerous.

Scientists agree — Star Trek wins.

So, school’s going well. I’m busy, but once I manage to push through the cobwebs of “ohmydogthisissomuchworkandwhatamIevendoinghere” it’s actually kind of fun, and refreshingly straightforward compared to, say, trying to write a decent poem. So why do I, at least once a week, become convinced that I’ll never finish, or that I’ll never find work, or that I’ll be the worst librarian ever? The crazy, I guess.

This week, I’m especially busy, with term papers and group presentations looming on the horizon. And I find myself wishing for all sorts of crazy things, mostly that I’d done this years ago and were securely ensconced in some sort of cushy-shushy library job someplace, wearing cardigan sweaters and stripey socks and, I dunno, flirting with itinerant music men. You know, librarian stuff.

Sometime in July.

For the next year, I’ll be taking part in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read, joining one hundred other bloggers as we read and review 52 books in one year.

The first time I ever heard of Cynthia Ozick I was probably about twelve. Someone gifted my parents with Spy Magazine’s Separated at Birth?, one of those gifty, funny, ephemeral books that you can paw through and giggle at and pretty much rest assured that whomever on your Christmas list still needs a gift will giggle at it, too. The premise is simple: take two celebrities who look alike, or don’t, pair their photos with a witty caption, repeat. It’s because of this book that, in my mind, Carol Channing is twinned forever with Señor Wences’ hand, and Princess Di is interchangeable with Wayne Gretzky. It’s also because of this book that I even know Wayne Gretzky exists.

Anyway, I was twelve (or so), and naïve and curious in the way that twelve year olds tend to be naïve and curious. I wanted to know the world, but my knowledge of it was so haphazard, so strange. Separated at Birth (which I now realize was actually Separated at Birth 2: The Saga Continues), became the shadow puppet theater on the cave wall of my bedroom: Through this book, I learned of the existence of cultural luminaries, but not their context, their names and faces, but not their reason for being. I learned to scoff before I learned to know, and that pretty much explains my entire adulthood, now doesn’t it?

But that’s not where I meant to go with this. What I’m trying to get at here is that the first time I heard of Cynthia Ozick was when I learned she looked like Roger Ebert.

And let me just tell you that I went to the rare books room at the San Francisco Public Library, where they keep a collection of humorous books, and paid fifteen cents for the librarian to copy this page. For you, internet. FOR YOU.

Now, keep in mind that I was twelve. I read a lot, but I didn’t like to stop and look words up, so my sense of the meaning behind words was usually cobbled together from context clues, and more often than not at least a little bit off. A year later, in English class, I would confidently proclaim that the word vicar meant “some sort of criminal.”(Which is where a stash of Andy Capp comics scavenged from the church Christmas sale will get you). So when I read in the caption that Cynthia Ozick’s novels were obscure, I somehow got it into my head that they were difficult and abstract and beyond my ken, that they were the kind of book that would prove, once and for all, that I was too much a dullard for real literature, and that I should stick to Andy Capp if I knew what was good for me.

Which is why it’s taken me twenty years to pick up a book by Cynthia Ozick.

I’m both sorry I waited so long and happy to be here, 32 years old, tasting one for the first time, with a whole shelf of undiscovered Ozick to work through (as an aside, Undiscovered Ozick is the name of my new prog-rock band). She’s so good, hitting it out of the park at every level, from story to idea to language and pacing. I seriously could not put this down. Take that, Spy.

But what I’m trying to get at here is the central tension of Heir to the Glimmering World , namely what things are, how they seem, and how our attempts at interpretation can have ramifications that echo through our lives.

The novel follows Rose Meadows, eighteen years old, “a watcher and a listener,” half-then-fully orphaned and navigating the haunted shadows of 1930’s New York state. When the novel opens, she is living with her father, a morose and deeply flawed geometry professor exiled to Troy, NY after an ignoble career in Thrace, NY’s public high school. Rose is soon pawned off on a distant cousin, whose vivid communist lover, Ninel (that’s Lenin backwards), soon connives to send Rose packing.

Rose finds employment with the Mitwisser family, refugees from a Berlin — and a Europe — that Rose comes to recognize as “a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil.” The patriarch, Rudolph Mitwisser, is a scholar, laboring in exile over his treatise on the Kararites, an obscure Jewish sect. Elsa, the mother, a physicist in Germany, now keeps to her bed, refusing shoes, sanity, and English. But, wonders Rose, is “she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or. . . Ophelia, whom true madness submerges?” The children, except for baby Waltraut, are all tall, long-limbed and dark, Anneliese, the eldest and the house’s de facto head, is regal and aloof, her brothers, Heinrich, Gerhardt and Wilhelm, an indistinguishable mess of rowdy, rapidly Americanizing voices.

Housed in the outskirts of New York City, the Mitwisser family occupies a sort of fever-dream. Rudolph disappears into the New York City Library during the day and locks himself in his library at night, in pursuit of some dark, mad truth. Elsa plays cards, destroys small objects, and secrets Rose’s money beneath her mattress, while Waltraut keeps to her crib, silently watching for passers-by and shrinking from her mad mother’s touch. They are kept afloat by a mysterious benefactor, James A’Bair, whose childhood antics were captured by father in a successful series of children’s books. Dissolute, profoundly unsatisfied, all image and no essence, James throws the Mitwisser’s world dangerously askew, providing and withholding with an ever-changing, capricious whim.

For Rose, and the Mitwissers, the past is as fickle a patron as James A’Bair, doling out punishment and reward seemingly at random. But the light that glimmers throughout this world does not come only from the past’s broken shards. There’s the glimmer of surprise, of hope, the sense that, in the end, nothing need ever be what it seems.

Why, hello there, Wednesday. Where on earth did you come from?

Here’s what’s hot and not this week. Inspired, once again, by Loobylu.

Hot:

1. Brian! He’s redesigned his website a bit, he’s featured on the Linney Group’s design blog today, and I just found out that the opening for his show at our neighborhood coffeeplatz coincides with December’s Lower Haight Art Walk. I’d better start freezing up some snacks!

2. Moon! The full moon rising over the sparkly Oakland hills Monday night just breathtakingly pretty. It looked almost like a Jean Giraud landscape.

3. Slippers! Hope’s mom was visiting all month, and presented both Brian and I with lovely hand-knit wool booties before she left. They’re super cozy, and I wore them all morning as I padded around the house doing laundry and loafing. It was fun having an octogenarian around the house, and I’m so happy to have a little something to remember her by.

Not:

1. School. I got my first ‘B’ this week on a group project, ruining my perfect 100% average for that class. I’m gonna do an extra credit assignment to bolster my grade, but I still feel like things have gotten a bit off-kitler. And it only serves to enforce my…

2. General feelings of ennui. This week I’ve had trouble shaking the sense that I just straight up fail at living. It’s pretty much passed, but Monday thru Tuesday? No fun at all.

1. I wish I were better at math.

2. I’d like to finish my novel, or write a new one, and see it published.

3. I wish I were better with people.

4. I wish that, instead of sirens, fire engines played ‘the hustle’.

5. I wish I remembered my Latin better.

6. I wish my natural speaking voice was softer.

7. I wish that I were more like my grandmother: unfailingly gentle, courteous, and kind.

8. I’d need to clean out my closet. Wish I’d do that.

9. I’d like to make a rope bed, and a mattress stuffed with straw.

10. I’d like to get out of the city more.

11. I’d like to be able to pay back my parents, financially and otherwise, for all the support they’ve given me over the years.

12. I wish Brian and I were in a place — financially, emotionally, and otherwise — where we could have children. Or child. Whatever. It’d be nice to have the option.

13. I’d like to play more music.

14. I wish I weren’t angry so often.

15. I want to find a library job while I’m in school, or soon after I graduate.

16.  I’d like to live in a place with Brian that’s quiet, private, and ours.

17. I wish Brian had health insurance.

18. I wish we had a lawn.

19. I wish the house didn’t smell so much like cat pee.

20. I wish I were better at having fun.

21. I wish I were better at knowing what I want.

22. I sometimes wish we lived somewhere where it snowed. (Don’t tell Brian).

23. I’d like to travel more.

24. I’d like to live somewhere else — Brazil, Australia, Italy… Somewhere.

25. I wish I saw my family more often.

26. I wish I were better at naming the things that frustrate me.

27. I’d like to learn how to knit.

28. I wish that my income exceeded my expenses.

29.  I wish it were spring.