I have mentioned before that Az the husband and I are both working on advanced degrees. We have been working on them for a long time. Our school is considering scaling back the program, which could mean we have wasted our years here if we don’t hurry and finish soon. I received a letter this summer declaring me an inactive student because it has been so long since anyone has seen any work from me (Since, oh, I don’t know, my babies were born. Yep, that’s it.).

So we have decided that our degrees are worth one last gamble. We have decided to try to sell our house and accept my parents’ invitation to come live with them. They will provide free childcare for us so we can work on the dissertations. This is a scary, scary thing, but that’s the plan. Nobody feels pride about moving back in with their parents, but we think it is the right decision if we are ever going to finish these degrees.

This depends, of course, on selling our house, which may prove difficult. We love it here, but that doesn’t mean anyone else would. Az the Willfully In Denial is pretending this is so impossible that we will never actually move. It comforts him. I am trying to get the house in some sort of shape to sell. So I will be very busy the next few months. We have decided I can take the time to blog two days a week, and I have settled on Monday and Thursday. So my posts will probably come in a flurry (like today) rather than one at a time. I hope you stop by and read them anyway. I have appreciated all of your comments and encouragement. I want to keep up the blog if we move, but I’m not sure about that yet.

In the meantime, I have been writing unpublished posts about my favorite places in the area, and I plan to publish them in one big glut whenever we move. I want to wait till then because it would be too creepy to write about my favorite place X and then have some stranger call out “Hey, Veronica!” the next time I go there. Unlikely, I know, but possible.

So this is my last post of today. I have to go scrape some paint now.

The soldier I mentioned in a previous post has died. You can read more about him at JHatfields. Please pray for his family.

I went alone to the library the other day. Az was watching the kids, so I was able to enjoy an hour alone with all the books. I was excited to pick out some new books. I came home with nothing.

I tried. I wandered through the history section. But every book seemed to be about blood and death and horror. The few books of amusing memoirs seemed to be deliberately ignoring the blood and death and horror.

I tried the science section. Every book seemed to be about how we are destroying our world. Global warming, species extinction, poisoning our environment. Cheerful ways to spend an afternoon of reading.

I tried the religion section. After sampling a few, I realized that popular books on religion express one of two themes: “God is my buddy. He helped me find my parking space today.” or “I am smarter than the people who say, ‘God is my buddy. He helped me find my parking space today.’” Shallowness or superiority. Not much of a choice.

I briefly considered fiction, but remembered I had several books at home I had not read yet, so I came home. I picked up a paperback on my shelf about a vicar in Wales. It was full of anecdotes about the business of running a church. After 66 pages in which he expressed no more faith than your average rotarian, I put it down.

So what did I finally read after all this discouraging book searching? Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose. It’s about the Holocaust.

Thank you all for your kind and encouraging comments, both for the situation and for my writing. Clearly this is a situation you all have thought about. I tried to respond in the comments section, but it got too long, so here is an additional post.

I share with edj a tendency to feel bad about whatever I’ve done, so I have learned to have a policy for situations like this, and then stick to the policy. Then at least I have the comfort of consistency. I debated for a long time whether it was right to give to beggars: wouldn’t they misuse the money? Probably. Jesus said “Give to whoever asks of you,” certainly one of his more troubling commands. The rabbis, addressing suspicion of beggars, said the only verification necessary for a person’s poverty is if he asks for money. Our great spiritual traditions have taught me that I need to cultivate a generosity of soul without reference to other people’s behavior. At some level, it’s not about them; it’s about the kind of person I want to be.

I start with a simple assumption of human dignity by only giving what is asked. I don’t like being duped, and I try to encourage honesty by expecting it. If someone begs for money, I will give them the pocket change I have handy. If they ask for food, I will give them food if I have it. If they ask for work, I will assume they really want to work and I will try to find some for them. I don’t let a request for work become a pretense for begging. Work has dignity, and I give people a chance at that dignity. Asking for food won’t get money from me. And nothing makes me angrier than a beggar saying, “Can I borrow a dollar?” I hate the disrespect of that refusal to admit the truth of the situation.

I don’t try to control what people spend money on. Larger organizations need to do this, obviously, but I’m just an ordinary person giving away a few bucks, and I am suspicious of my own desire to control people. I understand if you all choose otherwise, but in the giving that occurs in the brief contact of strangers, I give up control.

Thanks to Smoochy for his encouragement not to worry and his strong response to the importance of our actions. Can you tell he’s a new daddy to a brand new son? May God spare our children the life that comes with such foolish actions. I try not to worry too much. My sister tells me that our peaceful lives include a duty of gratitude for that peace. We owe it to those who have given it to us to live contentedly with it. So I try not to destroy my own peace by worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes at night it gets difficult.

To KJ’s Muse, I think we are using different definitions of desperate. Alan has nothing. If he is willing to spend a whole afternoon earning $20, his life would actually be improved by a dead-end, minimum wage job, the sort of thing no educated person would consider. It would bring him more money than the sporadic things he could do for me.

If you haven’t read Helene’s comment yet, please do. She is dear to me in Real Life, and is one of the most generous people I know. Whatever she says on the subject is worth listening to.

Briar Rose is Jane Yolen’s contribution to Terry Windling’s Fairy Tale Series, a set of novels that retell fairy tales set in real historic periods. I discovered the series when I read (and enjoyed) Patricia Wrede’s Snow White and Rose Red, and I have another volume, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, on my shelf awaiting me.

The first few novels I tried by Yolen were forgettable, and I probably never would have bothered reading her again if I had not found one of her short stories in a collection in honor of JRR Tolkien. I do not now recall the title, but it was a story of children kidnapped by goblins, and it was simply wonderful. So I decided to give her novels another try.

Briar Rose is the story of Sleeping Beauty set in the Holocaust. Unlike the other books in the Fairy Tale Series, there is no magic in this story, unless it is the magic of improbable survival. Yolen opens her book with a quote from Jack Zipes in Spells of Enchantment:

“(B)oth the oral and literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer terror through metaphors.”

Presumably this is her purpose in writing about the Holocaust. A difficult goal, but one which she manages reasonably well.

Gemma is an old woman, living in the US. She is dying. She has three grand-daughters, who have heard her tell the story of Sleeping Beauty throughout their lives. Gemma has always insisted that she is Sleeping Beauty. On her death bed, she asks her youngest grand-daughter, Becca, a twenty-three-year-old journalist, to find her castle. Becca promises. The rest of the book details Becca’s search for her grandmother’s identity, leading her to a death camp in Poland. Yolen alternates chapters of Becca’s search with segments of the version of Sleeping Beauty which Gemma told. This structure works surprisingly well, creating an aura of magic around a painful reality.

The characterization is mediocre, but the novel still works. The fairy tale rubric renders the horrors of Gemma’s experience somehow real enough to touch the heart, but magical enough to leave hope alive. The beautiful princess survives, and there is a happy ending of sorts. Yolen’s choice to make the princely hero a gay man gave me pause. Within the story it serves to remove romance from the happy ending, which I found satisfying, but the choice was so obviously a political one that I almost put the novel down.

I am still trying to figure out my own reaction to Briar Rose. The disturbing details of genocide in the book mean it is inappropriate for children. The details of history are gruesome and horrifying, and Yolen gives only the barest description necessary, which is horrifying enough. It is definitely an adult book, and she classifies it as such on her website. Briar Rose would be a useful book for inspiring discussion in a book group. In fact, I think I might suggest it to mine.