Books and Stars

The power went out last night. I was in the middle of preparing dinner for my daughter, Jessica, and myself, since Pat was off in the East Bay at a gospel singing workshop. The potatoes and green beans from our garden finished their steaming and were seasoned rather casually by flashlight. I collected a couple of fluorescent camp lanterns from the garage and we sat down to a quiet dinner without any of the usual distractions.

Typically, summer blackouts in our neighborhood are relatively short, lasting just five or ten minutes. But this was something else. As night fell and the lights refused to come back on, we took the opportunity to catch Jessica up on her summer reading. She had been slogging her way through Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and still had some eighty-five pages left.

We took opposite ends of the couch, draped a blanket over our legs, installed her dog, Zoe, in the middle, and took turns reading, tilting the book toward the lanterns for light. If you’ve never read this classic before, or if your memory of high school English has grown dim with the years, the last few chapters are where their long struggles come to a head: Rose of Sharon is getting ready to have her baby, Tom has killed a man and is hiding out, and the Joads have run into a bit of good fortune picking cotton and are living in a rather luxurious (for them) boxcar. All too suddenly, the picking runs out, Tom has to flee, torrential rains come, and Rose of Sharon loses her baby.

As we read in the silence, the darkness folded around our two little lamps. It was almost as if we were sharing the unlit boxcar with the Joads. I can’t recall reading and having the drama build so convincingly and thoroughly. We even took a break to go outside and admire the Milky Way stretching across the starlit sky – something we normally can’t do in Novato, except during a blackout.

The pages flew past as the flood began to rise up the walkway of the Joads’ boxcar. The men try to build a mud dike to hold the back the stream, but a tree breaches it. They take planks from the bed of their truck to build a raised platform inside the boxcar, but still the water rises relentlessly. Finally Ma Joad calls it quits and they wade out of the encampment to higher ground, with only the clothes on their back. I won’t spoil the last scene (in case you want to go back and re-read it), but when we got to the final line – “She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously,” – the evening was utterly complete.

Reading to Jessica and having her read to me have always been two of my favorite things to do. But this night was extra-special, bringing back wonderful memories of when my mother would read bedtime stories.

I was probably 11 or 12 and had accompanied her to the bookstore on Throckmorton Avenue in Mill Valley. As she browsed, she told me to pick out something for myself. At the time, I was heavily into archaeology and paleontology. Having read everything on the subject in my middle school, I had moved on to more advanced texts from the public library. I suppose she guessed I would pick something on the subject. Instead, I was drawn to a children’s book: Walter the Lazy Mouse, by Marjorie Flack. I brought it to her at the cash register and she raised her eyebrows just a fraction. “Is this what you really want?” I assured her it was and that was it, no more questions. I liked that about her: She accepted life’s little inconsistencies and moved on. If I wanted to delay adulthood just a little bit longer, that was okay with her.

That night, I asked her to read it to me and, this time, there were no questions. Of course, that was what I had wanted in the first place – to recapture just a little bit of something we both thought was long gone. She finished the short book and then kissed me good night. That may have been the last time she read to me like that, and it sits in my memory like a jewel.