I was watching Andy Rooney recently on “60 Minutes,” something I never do. Have you noticed that he is missing one eyebrow and the other sticks out for about four inches to the side? It makes him look a bit like a unicorn. I am not sure if that is the look he is going for, but it was interesting.
Anyway, he did his segment on bags and how people carry pounds of stuff in their bags. Everyone he interviewed, he said, was carrying a book. He started by asking them why they have books in their bags, since they were headed to work. He suggested that they were wasting company time reading.
Each person denied this and yet several had at least one, maybe two or more books in their bags.
I was intrigued. I’m always curious about what people are reading and why. Maybe when the weather gets colder and darker, I’ll go around and interview people of all ages and find out what they are reading and why.
Maybe we can make sense of it all, which would be an accomplishment since I can’t quite make sense of the hodgepodge of books that sits by my nightstand and how they could possibly go together.
Since it was a quiet Thanksgiving with many of our family members on the East Coast and just a few of us here, there was considerable time to read and reflect.
Here are my recent reads:
• “Story of a Soul,” the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux. A Carmelite friend loaned this to me years ago, calling Therese Martin the “greatest saint of modern times.” I wrestled with this young woman’s life story, because it is so alien to my own.
The baby in a wealthy French family of nine children (four of whom died as infants and small children), she was pampered, petted and adored by everyone. Everything was done for her and given to her.
She never even brushed her own hair until she was 11. When she wanted to join a Carmelite order and was denied admission because she was too young, she begged her father to take her to Rome to get an audience with the Pope. She was granted her wish and her early admission.
While I couldn’t relate to her life or her desire to suffer to prove her love to God, I wondered about living a life where you believe that everyone loves you.
Where you believe that you are incredibly loved by God and that everything you receive is a gift. It made me want more. Right after finishing the book, I heard Thom Hartman, the radio talk show host on a liberal radio station (yes, they do believe in God), speak of St. Therese in a discussion he was having over faith with an atheist, who was egging for a fight.
Hartman said that he really enjoyed the works of Wayne Teasdale and Thomas Merton. So, the Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions by Teasdale and Mystics and the Zen Masters by Merton are now on my list.
• Do books come to you when you need them? I have been working my way through Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.” It is a wonderful book, one of the “greatest business books of all times.” I am reading it along with Leading Teams, for a business class.
Yet for me, it’s similar to the first time you take a psychology class and as you are studying the symptoms of mental disorders, you start seeing all your family members and friends in them. It ends up not being fun.
As I read Senge with his wonderful discussions on mental models and shared visions and creative tension, I keep taking apart our conflicts as a community and the leadership styles of our local leaders.
I spent two disastrous weeks recreating what went wrong with the South Kitsap Community Park issue and the Port Orchard overlay plan. While I take some comfort in the thought that maybe we are now moving toward creating a shared vision, I still, like the little kid in the Sixth Sense, see dead bodies when I look at the two issues.
When the overlay project was delayed, the “green” developer pulled out and the architectural firm, Amajin lost a major project they had spent hours preparing. It doesn’t help that they lost out on the park project, as well, when behind the scenes efforts denied them the money put into a fund in Chuck Jeu’s name to develop a set of plans in his vision.
Since then, they have lost their business, their home and at least one of their vehicles. I really want to get them the $4,000 for their efforts on behalf of the park, which is owed them.
I realize that I will have to pay for it myself.
I don’t think that Senge meant for his book to be so personal.
• On a lighter note, Ross, the owner of Bay Street Books, handed me a book by E.B. White. When you think of White, you think of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but Ross said that those books don’t do justice to E.B. White’s humor and brilliance.
He’s right. I have especially enjoyed White’s “The Gastropods, an Answer to a Hard Question,” in which he writes, “Everywhere we find them (snails and slugs) to be sensitive creatures, imaginative and possessed of a lively sense of earth’s pleasant rhythm.”
Finding out that slugs are sensitive creatures makes a good enough reason to say “Damn the economy,” I don’t need the headache, the traffic and all the pushing and shoving that goes along with the Thanksgiving weekend shopping madness. I’ll shop locally and give myself time to stay home and read.
Mary Colborn is a Port Orchard resident.
