Weather: What a Character (unfinished)

All was calm and dark. After a long day of lab experiments and flight simulation, followed by an even longer night of gossip, peanut butter M&M’s, and severely burnt popcorn, sleep was welcomed with open, if drooping, arms.

A young girl lay in a dormitory bed, an odd combination of simultaneously stretched and coiled limbs beneath a single sheet and a homemade fleece blanket. A small electric fan blew at the center of this gently breathing mass from its perch on a chair dragged nearly to the edge of the bed.

Outside, dark billowing clouds, heavy with rain and giving off an aura of trouble, gathered around the tops of academic buildings, as if waiting for their cue to strike. The air zipped with electric energy, and the indescribably delicious smell that only comes before a good soaking rain drifted to the ground, into windows opened to ward off the stifling summer heat, and permeated the silent and soon-to-be-forgotten dreams of many piles of blankets steadily rising and falling with unconscious life.

Without warning, a single drop of water fell from an impatient cloud, riding a powerful gust of air through a window to land smack onto the young girl’s nose. As if it were a sudden bursting snore from her nasally-impaired father, she brushed at her face even as she rolled onto her other side and pulled her coverings tighter around her, oblivious to the chaos-toting Pandora’s Box that she had unlocked along with her windows earlier that night.

Another few drops fell, each blown by the forceful wind into the side of a building, like particularly stupid birds into a really clean window. The storm began this way, hesitantly, building up its courage and confidence in preparation for the real thing.

As a drizzling level of rainfall was reached, a flash of lightning zigzagged its way from the clouds to the ground and back, like a cautious swimmer would use their toe to test the water temperature. A few short seconds later, a resounding crack of thunder split open the sky, and let loose torrents of cold, unrelenting rain, which the wind directed right at the young girl’s window.

Second Response to The Child That Books Built

"For me, such words demonstrated the autonomy of stories. In stories, words you never heard spoken nonetheless existed. They had another kind of existence. They acted---upon objects likewise made of words" (Spufford 76).

This phrase really stuck out for me while reading more of this memoir. Spufford's narration jumps between being a kid who has just begun reading, and the man he is today whose life revolves around books. In some cases, though, like this one, the line between the two is quite fuzzy. In stories, everyone is a kid again, no matter what book is being read. New vocabulary is discovered, sometimes made-up vocabulary, but either way one's view of the world is expanded a bit more with every book read. Not only do words never before spoken have "another kind of existence," but they also draw the reader into this alternate state of being. The reader experiences the action of these unknown words in a breakthrough unparallel by anything else, especially by anything of a non-literary nature.

Spufford, Francis. The Child That Books Built. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002.

First Response to The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford

In reading the first two of the five sections of this memoir, I found Spufford's narrative to be almost clinical, but at the same time engagingly descriptive. As he talks about growing up with a kid sister who suffers from cystinosis, the vivid mental pictures the auther creates really drew me in and got me to pay more attention. When he moves on the topic of the Puffin publishing company's monopoly on children's literature "and their astonishingly precise recommendation to 'girls of eleven and above, and sensitive boys'" (pg. 20), I loved how Spufford could move seamlessly between stories in his descriptions of their underlying elements.

My Favorite Place: Childhood

My grandma's house is flat, safe, and predictable. There's always cookies, or bars, or pie, less than three days old. There's the rumble of my grandpa's deep, slow voice, unless you hear him snoring away in his favorite reclining chair.

When we arrive, and when we leave, my grandma's hugs always feel the same, always smell the same, and she always says the same kinds of things: "You guys be careful driving home, now!" or "D'you think you could take this trash out with you? If it's no trouble, I mean..."

The yard and the town are the same every time we visit, with slight adjustments made with changes in the season. Snow is always white and untouched before our arrival, and full of footprints and muck by the time we leave. In the summer, dandelions litter every yard within view, no matter how well cared for the lawn might be.

There's always something going on, usually instigated by my grandma. She rarely sits, flitting about like a hummingbird in a box. She rushes from room to room, maknig sure everyone is comfortable. My mom always tells her to take it easy, but this regularly backfires.

Response to The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday

"In the white light a whirlwind moves far out in the plain, and afterwards there is something like a shadow on the grass, a tremor, nothing. There seems a stillness at noon, but that is an illusion: the landscape rises and falls, ringing."

I liked this phrase because it describes a setting in an extremely detailed manner, then strips it all away, as if the author is trying to convince himself of the wonders of this place, not the reader. The line "...there is something like a shadow...a tremor, nothing" is almost contradictory as it illustrates a feeling of self-doubt on the part of the author, displaying the emotions brought up by the scene instead of the emotions of the scene itself. The following line, however, is contrastingly redundant: "There seems a stillness at noon, but that is an illusion..." This emphasizes the unknown quality of the plain, the mystery of the effects of the whirlwind.