Surely Joy

It’s Labor Day, the unofficial close of summer, and the season’s passage feels especially acute this year. We’ve had a summer, but it has seemed at turns precious and precarious, fulsome and fleeting. There’s a chill in the air many mornings and a few leaves are turning, and I am nowhere ready to trade my T-shirts and shorts for sweaters and jeans.

Tonight is also the start of the Jewish High Holy Days. Last fall, I signed up for Do You 10 Q, which helps participants reflect on life’s biggest questions, including ones that have loomed larger than usual for most of us during the pandemic. Given the vicissitudes of the past year-and-a-half, I’m trying more than ever before to be in and of the moments in which I find myself. This feels a little harder than it was a year ago, when life was less full and less complicated, but also more important as new opportunities and relationships emerge. This is a too-long way of saying I haven’t done as much reading this summer as I did in 2020, but I did read several good books — and interestingly, they’ve mostly been by or about girls and women finding their power and their strength. I’ll recap a few of them here.

I started with The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, a slim middle-grades book that I impulse-bought at the Columbus UU church on my last trip to Ohio back in 2017. Mick Cochrane writes of Molly Williams, an eighth-grade knuckleball pitcher who wants to play on the boys’ team. It’s a good little baseball book, and it’s also about friendship and how our parents never really leave us. It’s funny how long I carried it around, through several moves, before I decided it was time to read it. I’m glad I did.

Early in the summer, I signed on to update my Idaho Off the Beaten Path guidebook for a 10th edition, so next up were two books set in the state. The first one, Daredevils, is a novel by Shawn Vestal. Set in the 1970s, it’s kind of about Evel Knievel and kind of about Loretta, a rebellious Mormon teenager. I recognized many of the places and characters in this story, which made it a fun blend of identification and escape.

Speaking of escape, years ago, while driving through a polygamist town on the Arizona-Utah border, I saw a little girl walking down the street and felt seized with a desire to liberate her from her fate. Daredevils reminded me of that — as did Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir of a fundamentalist-end times upbringing in Idaho, not so far from where I lived. It was a hard book to read; I had to put it aside several times, appalled by the mental and physical abuse Westover endured. Ultimately, though, Westover learns that she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and that knowledge helps set her free.

In late July, I traveled super-light on a solo trip to Alaska, but I made room in my pack for one book (which I’d picked up at the wonderful Bonners Books in North Idaho a few weeks earlier for that express purpose). Tisha is, as its subtitle says, “the wonderful true love story of a young teacher in the Alaskan wilderness,” but lest you think that gives the whole thing away, it doesn’t. Robert Specht’s as-told-to book is also a story about active antiracism on the early 20th-century frontier, and it’s yet another story of a girl growing into womanhood and learning that she is capable of handling whatever life throws her way.

That’s a lesson we keep learning, too, no matter what our age or gender. In Mud, Rocks, Blazes, Heather “Anish” Anderson was well into adulthood when she attempted to set a speed record on the Appalachian Trail, and even though she’d already won fame and acclaim for her extreme hiking exploits, she continued to harbor self-doubt. My main takeaway from Anderson’s book (as from my peripatetic journeys into Buddhism) is that everything is temporary, so relish the moments, keep going, and keep practicing gratitude at every turn.

I’ll end with a book that I’ve been dipping into all summer — one I finally decided to buy after renewing my library copy several times (and buying a copy for my daughter), one that, should I ever have a grandchild, I would hand to her to say, “Here, this is what it was like.” There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is a book of essays about the collision of pandemic, climate havoc, police brutality, and the possibility of change. Most were written in the summer of 2020 but still resound today, such as this from Héctor Tobar, who evokes ash falling over Los Angeles: ash from wildfires and protests, ash through which anthropologists will someday sift to try and understand this confusing epoch “in some future age, when justice reigns.”

All but one of the links above are to my online bookstore, The Optimist, where you can buy a book and support both my work and that of independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Win-win-win. I’ll also put in a plug here for one not-quite-yet-a-book that I had the good fortune to read as copy editor earlier this year. One Heart With Courage is Teri Rizvi’s collection of essays that spans decades and continents, a timely and timeless book that details Teri’s blended Pakistani-American family, the power of faith, and the beautiful bonds of lifelong friendships. (Teri and I met at Ohio University in 1979, part of a group of friends that has endured all these decades.) The book is coming October 1, and you can pre-order it now. Finally, here’s a very early link to the next edition of Idaho Off the Beaten Path (even though I’m still writing it!) and another to my 2020 summer reading list. Be well, and happy reading.