Twisted. Messed up. Unusual. Freakish. Call them what you may, but let’s face it: there are a lot of dysfunctional families out there. In my humble opinion (and experience), there are many of us escaping from upbringings more reminiscent of a really bad soap opera, than “Leave It to Beaver.” Unfortunately, I am included in the former group, and then some. I don’t mean to poke fun at those who had really dreadful, traumatic childhoods, as mine was not a walk in the park. But after a bump or two (or ten), some great friends and extra help, I can now laugh at (read: mock) or at least not cry about my childhood these days.
We are all at different points on the path to healing from some of these odd or awful childhoods, and maybe even the crummy choices we made as a result of them. Yet, as I noted last month, my book club buddies got me to see I wasn’t an island in a sea of perfect families. Indeed, if the old idiom is true: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” you probably have some friends who can truly move mountains!
That all being said, I find it instructive, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes heart wrenching, and often cathartic to read fiction that details the unusual family. Even more fascinating is how the individuals within said families respond to their situations. Do they sink in misery for a few decades or run as far as possible from the past? Meander or bolt for home like a carrier pigeon? Fiction provides a safe way for us to explore the intricacies of the injured heart and cultivate a deeper understanding of ourselves or a greater empathy for others.
This month’s selections deal with a dying mother and her talented daughter, a young academic and her siblings coping with life in the aftermath of their parents’ death, and a family full of secrets that do nothing but destroy those who come near.
The Fiction Class, Susan Breen
“Why weren’t you [the teacher] writing on the blackboard?” her mother asks…
“I was just tired, and I sat down.”
“Oh.” She waits for her mother to press her, to say that [she] has no idea what it means to be tired. Try taking care of a sick man for twenty-five years… and then you’ll know the meaning of tired. But her mother is quiet. 1
Aspiring writer Arabella Hicks is pushing forty, unmarried, unpublished, and living in Manhattan. She has been writing her own Great American Novel for seven years now, but just can’t quite find the ending she needs. Heck! She can’t even find a date for the weekend! In her off time, she teaches a creative writing workshop one night a week. And every week after class she visits her dying, overbearing mother in a nearby nursing home, smuggling in a burger and fries in an attempt to bring her mom a little comfort from the outside world and play the part of the good daughter.
Through Arabella’s eyes, we teach her class, become aquatinted with her colorful cross section of students, write a novel (or try anyway), test a new relationship, and feel her anguish as she enters her mother’s bitter and painful world each week. Aching to love her mother, and have that love reciprocated, Arabella pushes through her own tears and disappointment to discover a mother she never knew existed.
The Fiction Class was an enjoyable surprise for me, a spur of the moment grab off the grocery store shelf, and I have to say I was immediately taken. I love Arabella. She is a sweet gal, whose wings are aching to fly but have been weakened by years in her mother’s stifling shadow. I expected her story to end well, but I didn’t know to how much of it I would relate. In the end: a lot. The difficulty of her mother’s life, and the ensuing crustiness, makes it very clear that as children, we very rarely know the minds of our parents. Sadly, this unavoidable part of innocence can lead to many, many misunderstandings in our adult years, as Arabella finds out.
Breen’s novel is well-paced and replete with a complement of interesting, well-constructed characters. As an added perk, a fun and unconventional addition to the text awaits you at the end of each “class” chapter. I challenge you to complete these assignments and share them with your group.
Anyone who had or has difficult moms will appreciate The Fiction Class, and those who didn’t will rejoice!
Note: This story is set in Manhattan, not Mayberry. It is truly quite tame, but there is still the odd thought or comment that may not sit well with a few, starting with a class character named like a Bond Girl.
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson
I don’t know why I suddenly saw it then. Maybe because they were both so intent on the subject,
so absorbed. Two remarkable men, deep in conversation, walking slowly across the dust of the farmyard. It was not a tragic picture. Definitely not. 2
Take four fairly happy siblings, two teen aged brothers, Luke and Matt, and their much younger sisters, Bo and Katie, ages two and seven, and put them in a pleasant, but humble home in Nowhere, Canada. Next, remove their parents in a sudden, deadly car accident, and you have the beginnings of Crow Lake .
Told in flashbacks by Katie, a present day zoology professor in Toronto, every thing that happened from the day her parents left the house and never returned was one tragedy upon the next. Intelligent children in the frozen north with limited opportunity and even more limited funds, Katie’s oldest brother Luke forgoes a scholarship to stay at home and work in order to keep the family together, and so Matt, the “smart” brother,” will at least graduate from high school. Upon graduation, Matt receives a university scholarship, but on the eve of his leaving it is revealed he, too, will be staying at home for family.
It takes Katie to finally be able to break free from the gravity of their small town and difficult upbringing. She succeeds by finally achieving what her brothers did not: an education, both at the university level and beyond small town Ontario. Despite her love for her siblings, especially Matt, Katie can not bring herself to stay connected with them. Her personal grief over their dashed hopes and ruined lives, as well as her shame at their lack of formal learning, keeps her away year after year. Only an invitation from Matt’s son for his eighteenth birthday party, and a personal note from Matt himself, compel her to finally make the journey home.
However, contemplating the impending trip brings to mind memories she would prefer to forget, and as a result of her return, Katie is confronted with facts about her self and her siblings with which she is unprepared to cope. Largely because her issues are not with her life, but with what she perceives as the waste of her brothers’ lives, Katie doesn’t even know how to begin to heal the breach in order to reclaim the brothers she once loved so dearly.
Readers with siblings that have taken the “road less travelled” will appreciate this deeply touching and candid portrait of a family seeking to maintain its identity, while still allowing its individual members to achieve their own measure of personal success.
Note: There is some mild, soft PG-13 language in Crow Lake .
Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz
Ruth remembered drowning.
“That’s impossible,” Aunt Amanda said. “It must have been a dream.”
But Ruth maintained that she had drowned, insisted on it for years, even after she should have known better. 3
One of Ruth’s earliest memories seems to be of drowning in the icy lake that edges her family’s farm. She insists upon this fact almost as vehemently as her Aunt Amanda, Mandy to most others, refutes it.
The daughter of a Wisconsin farmer and a frequently ill and ineffective mother, Amanda grows up to serve others and put her needs last. Eight years her junior, Mathilda, or Mattie, is exactly opposite. Marrying young to a man with few prospects and little aptitude for farming or fatherhood, Mattie becomes increasingly unable to cope with life after her husband leaves to serve in the war, a new baby and difficult parents only exacerbate the situation.
Amanda, a nurse in Milwaukee, unknowingly and fatally infects her parents with influenza during a brief visit home. Once they pass, she returns to her hospital work, but the gore and stench of the wounded soldiers, along with a failed affair with a local businessman, soon sends her back home to the farm. She just “needs a rest,” she tells herself, a break. That is the first of many lies she tells herself over the coming years.
Upon returning home, Amanda finds dealing with Ruth and an increasingly flighty Mattie, drains her spare resources. Then when Mattie dies in a tragic accident on the ice just weeks before her husband Carl is due home from the war, Amanda is left alone with her niece, and all semblance of the kind and vulnerable Milwaukee nurse seems to vanish.
Like opening a set of Russian nesting boxes, Schwarz reveals what is at the heart of Drowning Ruth twist after unexpected twist until we reach the littlest doll in the middle and find out just how much of what we thought was the truth was really a lie from the start.
Set between World Wars I & II in rural Wisconsin, Drowning Ruth follows the narrative style of Crow Lake by being told in flashbacks, but from multiple characters and differing voices. When not being recounted in the third person, Schwarz uses Amanda to narrate, but Ruth also helps. Her parts are small at first, as she is only a toddler, but as she grows, so does her side of the story. Like many books narrated in this fashion, you have to pay attention. There are moments where it is easy to get “lost in time,” as it were.
Maybe there was no hiding here. Maybe this place was a mistake. But by summer, I assured myself…, it would be different. By summer the island would be shrouded in leaves, and I could keep my business to myself with no one the wiser. 4
Due to the era, there is much that both Amanda and Mattie feel the need to conceal- from their parents, society, each other, and even themselves. Shame, secrecy and fear all drive the plot of Drowning Ruth . There seems to be hardly a single moment that one character or another isn’t immersed in some sort of non-disclosure- just piecing together reality becomes a bit of a challenge. Schwarz’s tale becomes a case-in-point against the harmful and ignorant practice of starting or even keeping “family secrets.” In the end, they truly serve to protect no one, and generally wreak more damage than the truth ever could.
Notes:
1 Susan Breen, The Fiction Class, (Penguin Group: USA, 2008)106.
2 Mary Lawson, Crow Lake, ( Dell: New York, 2003) 289.
3 Christina Schwarz, Drowning Ruth, ( Ballantine Books: New York, 2000) 3.
Honorable Mentions:
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards (language?to a downtown stake center. A throng of faithful Saints awaited us. We had no time to rehearse the hymns we planned to sing, but our experiences with the Sunday broadcasts have given us the ability to pull things together quickly. Armed only with hymnals from the Chapel and an instruction sheet telling how we would vary each verse we were able to present a beautiful performance.
Four choir members gave talks illustrative of our myriad backgrounds and experiences. One said, “Much of my memorization for the tour took place over forty years ago. As a boy growing up in Casper, Wyoming, I listened to recordings of the choir singing many of these songs.” A sister spoke of feeling drawn to a young woman in the audience when we sang in St. Petersburg, Russia. They met and embraced after the concert. Though unable to speak each other’s language, they knew their spirits had connected. The young woman later joined the church. Though it has been 10 years, they have kept in touch.
The crowning moment of the fireside came when we sang the well-known Spencer Cornwall arrangement of, “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” No matter where in the world we go, this is the piece that immediately draws us together as fellow Latter-day Saints. As we left the chapel with smiles, hugs and handshakes, we felt at one with these wonderful people. It’s unfortunate there wasn’t enough time to do this in every city.
Our fierce Second Sopranos show why they are a force to be reckoned
with (at Disney Epcot Center).
Singing at Cinderella’s Place
Yesterday (Monday) morning the choir was divided in half and each performed a short concert in front of Cinderella’s castle at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. I felt very out of place as we made our way through crowds of casually dressed tourists, walking in two long columns – the women in long fuchsia gowns and the men in black suits (magnets for the hot sun). Both groups met at the castle long enough for a picture [sorry I couldn’t duck out and snap one]. We felt sorry for the orchestra members, who had to get up at 5:30 to be there for a sound check and accompanied both concerts.
The evening concert in Bob Carr Performing Arts Center was yet another high point of the tour. As I started to sing it seemed like I had “extra tools in the bag.” My voice had more range; the most challenging passages came almost effortlessly. It seemed others around me felt the same way and I could tell Craig was aware of it because he asked for even more at places we would normally peak. As he later put it: “First I thought Atlanta was the high point. But then there was Tampa… and then Orlando!” The audience was the most enthusiastic yet. The concert was a complete sellout and there were two prolonged standing ovations.
The previous paragraph is starting to sound like a broken record and I fear I may start to bore you. Words are simply inadequate to communicate the transcendent nature of these concerts. Maybe you will understand a little better when I tell you why at this moment I am in my hotel writing this story rather then enjoying the climactic light and fireworks show at Disney’s Epcot Center.
Today was our only completely free day of the tour; nothing scheduled from dawn to dusk. People went in all directions: the Orlando Temple, Kennedy Space Center, various Disney Parks, golfing; one fellow even told me of plans to visit an orchid grower. Tom Porter and I decided to spend the day at Epcot. It was fun to run into fellow choir members waiting in a line or shopping for things to take home to their families.
But as the day grew long and I began to tire, I realized I really had no desire to stay late and see the grand finale. Over the past 12 days I have had some of the most intense spiritual highs I will experience in life. There is one more to look forward to: tomorrow night in Miami. Epcot’s greatest pales in comparison, and that is why I am here writing and resting up for Miami.
There is an additional reason I’m reflective. Yesterday at dinner President Christensen said, “For some reason the word ‘caution’ has popped into my mind. I want to urge you all to be careful.” That incident now seems like a premonition, because this morning at breakfast we were shocked and saddened to learn that one of our brothers lost his son in a drowning accident at Lake Powell. This man also has a brother in the choir, and they have both left to return to Utah. They have been in our thoughts and prayers all day.
The Real Grand Finale: Miami
It is day fourteen (Thursday) – the last day of the tour. As I write I am sitting on the bus waiting to leave for Miami Airport. Yesterday was another of the busiest days, with travel from Orlando, hotel check in, rehearsal, dinner and concert all tightly scheduled.
Unsung Heroes
The concert hall was near our hotel. This gave me an opportunity to go to rehearsal early and witness the technical preparations. People were busily positioning lights and working on the sound system. Ear-splitting “pink noise” was being played through the speakers in order to set the proper frequency response. The organ technicians were positioning its speakers and adjusting its sound.
Sound engineer Lynn Robinson consults with Mack Wilberg.
Here were the unsung heroes who have worked out of sight, early mornings and late at night. Sound engineer Glen Glancy told me it takes all the time they can squeeze in from the moment they arrive to get everything right. Lynn Robinson, sound engineer for the weekly “Music and the Spoken Word” has handled mixing of sound in the halls and Chris Acton managed onstage audio. Lorin Morse has been our lighting specialist.
Wolfgang Zeisler has been overall stage manager for the tour. Alex Morris and his son Alex Jr. are stage managers for the orchestra. [Alex serves the same function for the Utah Symphony, as did his father and grandfather. Alex Jr. now carries it to the fourth generation.] ‘Alex and Alex’ have performed the yeoman’s share of labor in packing, unpacking, loading and unloading the large percussion instruments. The Choir’s Stage Manager is Jim Turner. Invariably there are last minute changes to the seating configurations in the different halls, and Jim has always been ready with up-to-the-minute seating charts when we arrive at rehearsal.
It was interesting to talk to Mark Anderson from Rodgers Organ Company. He and assistants Jeff Hansen and Jeff Eehlers – all based in Idaho Falls – have traveled with us to set up and adjust the organ in every hall.
They even brought a second organ console to be safe (in the end it was not needed). Digital organ technology has made great strides in recent years and this organ contained the latest advances. Entire ranks of the organ and even individual notes could be adjusted to suit each hall. While it is still no pipe organ, the instrument has been the best available compromise for traveling. Mark said it takes about an hour to adjust the organ to a new building, but they must also set up 36 speakers, including 4 subwoofers for the low bass sounds.
Thanks, Ryder!
At the rehearsal we were addressed by local Stake President Tony Burns, who said he and his wife have looked forward to this day for 27 years. Chairman of Ryder Truck, President Burns has played the central role in bringing the choir to Miami. He underwrote the concert and made sure the large hall was filled with an enthusiastic audience – the great majority of whom were not members of the Church. Ryder Truck also donated the semi-trailer trucks that transported our equipment.
Before the concert I was pleased and surprised when Gina Paz and Laura Madeira of Plantation, Florida, came up to introduce themselves. They are Meridian readers who have eagerly followed these articles in anticipation of our arrival in Miami. [Hi, Gina and Laura – in making the effort to find me you earned cameos in the story!]
After 7 straight successful concerts there is no way the choir was going to let down for this one. The largeness of the hall made for more difficult acoustical conditions, but the more than 3000 in attendance did not seem to care at all. Though we were unable to see their faces, I felt this was another of those concerts where we connected particularly well with the audience. The ovations were again exuberant; it was in every way a fitting climax to the tour.
There are probably as many feelings about what is the best part of each concert as there are members of the Tabernacle Choir. For me, the most poignant moment in Miami was not a rousing climax but an instant of worshipful stillness. The subtle, O Magnum Mysterium is written to a Latin text expressing how great the miracle that the Savior’s birth took place in a stable among humble animals. Just as we entered one of its most delicate passages I caught a glimpse of the divine. Standing on a brightly lit stage in Miami, I suddenly felt as if I was looking into that Bethlehem stable, reverently watching Mother and Child, ox, ass and sheep. I’m not one to become easily emotional, but that thought brought tears to my eyes.
Afterwards I talked to Gina again and was gladdened when, with great emotion, she confirmed I have not exaggerated the impact of these concerts. Much of the choir lingered long, talking to audience members and to one another. One does not want to let go of such experiences – they are the bread of life.
This luggage tag has seen quite a few hotel rooms!
Reflections
And so we have finally come to the end of our journey. It is unfortunate I can only relate that which my own eyes, ears and heart have experienced. If I were able to see into the souls of all who witnessed this glorious two weeks there would undoubtedly be stories to tell that are more impressive than mine. But this brings up an important point.
Isaiah 52:2 says, “…he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” This is also true of the Tabernacle Choir; pick any of the twelve busloads of people on this tour and take a walk down the isle. You’ll find we’re a pretty ordinary looking bunch. On our own we are unremarkable, but joined together in the glorious cause of our Savior Jesus Christ we become a body unique in the world; one that can sometimes transcend the boundaries of earth and offer a glimpse through the windows of heaven.
Remember President Hinckley’s quote of the author who compared life to a train ride? Life is also like a Tabernacle Choir tour. We have traveled over 2000 miles in 13 days – most of the time sitting on a bus, hauling luggage about, waiting to check in to the hotel, waiting for the elevator, waiting for the elevator …and waiting, …and waiting, sleeping, eating, walking, rehearsing – all kinds of ordinary, mundane activities. But those glimpses through the windows of heaven are what have made it all worthwhile. As I review my narrative I realize how important it is to record and remember the rare, precious moments that make life meaningful. Thank you, dear readers, for coming along!
