Scan barcode
sjgrodsky's review against another edition
3.0
Once again, GoodReads crashed and lost my review.
I will retype this much, a quote from page 149:
“There is a look I have grown to recognize on the faces of the captive offspring caring for parents they have long since ceased to love.”
12/23/23. I just tried to add a few more words to this review. GoodReads crashed again. It appears the safest procedure is to save after each sentence.
—-
I turned the last page with a feeling of great relief. Doris Grumbach may have been brilliant, but I found her … grouchy. It was good to be done and to leave her dispiriting company. So many of her observations, such as the one quoted above, are just plain wrong.
The baffling thing about her grouchiness is that she doesn’t describe constant pain or (at least initially) physical constraints. She describes snorkeling and visiting Mayan ruins in the Yucatán. Sounds good to me.
And that all the anxiety about “coming into the end zone” was in anticipation of her 70th birthday.
Shoot. I am about to be 72. I certainly get that I’m closer to the end than the beginning. But the past decade, of retirement, has been my happiest decade in 50 years. Disability and death, are ahead, sure, but not even in view yet. So why worry? Let’s go to yoga class.
Maybe it’s just generational. She is my father’s age and I’m a baby boomer.
I might have coffee with her if the rules of engagement prevented snobbish ranting. She had some wonderful stories about being in San Francisco as a Navy WAVE during World War II. If I could get her to reminiscing about that period, I’d probably hear some good stuff.
This bit, from the SF period, is worth quoting:
“The order went out that the block on which the building stood, and the street across from it, were now constituted decks of the ship. On those streets, enlisted men were to salute officers … To salute every officer one passed … was an absurdity … So [the enlisted men and women] would step down into the gutter … They were on the water, they claimed, and gutter travel came to be known as the Jesus walk.”
Glass half empty or half full? She was disgusted by the bureaucratic absurdity of some swelled head captain calling a street a ship. I am charmed by the mischievous anti-authoritarianism of the Jesus walk.
I will retype this much, a quote from page 149:
“There is a look I have grown to recognize on the faces of the captive offspring caring for parents they have long since ceased to love.”
12/23/23. I just tried to add a few more words to this review. GoodReads crashed again. It appears the safest procedure is to save after each sentence.
—-
I turned the last page with a feeling of great relief. Doris Grumbach may have been brilliant, but I found her … grouchy. It was good to be done and to leave her dispiriting company. So many of her observations, such as the one quoted above, are just plain wrong.
The baffling thing about her grouchiness is that she doesn’t describe constant pain or (at least initially) physical constraints. She describes snorkeling and visiting Mayan ruins in the Yucatán. Sounds good to me.
And that all the anxiety about “coming into the end zone” was in anticipation of her 70th birthday.
Shoot. I am about to be 72. I certainly get that I’m closer to the end than the beginning. But the past decade, of retirement, has been my happiest decade in 50 years. Disability and death, are ahead, sure, but not even in view yet. So why worry? Let’s go to yoga class.
Maybe it’s just generational. She is my father’s age and I’m a baby boomer.
I might have coffee with her if the rules of engagement prevented snobbish ranting. She had some wonderful stories about being in San Francisco as a Navy WAVE during World War II. If I could get her to reminiscing about that period, I’d probably hear some good stuff.
This bit, from the SF period, is worth quoting:
“The order went out that the block on which the building stood, and the street across from it, were now constituted decks of the ship. On those streets, enlisted men were to salute officers … To salute every officer one passed … was an absurdity … So [the enlisted men and women] would step down into the gutter … They were on the water, they claimed, and gutter travel came to be known as the Jesus walk.”
Glass half empty or half full? She was disgusted by the bureaucratic absurdity of some swelled head captain calling a street a ship. I am charmed by the mischievous anti-authoritarianism of the Jesus walk.
More...