I returned last night from a quick trip to Oregon. Two weeks
ago my mother fell and broke her clavicle and some ribs (like daughter, like
mother?). But she also had a head injury that scared the bajeebers out of
us. I arrived in Woodburn, Oregon, on
Wednesday, spent Thursday going to three therapy sessions with her, and on
Friday was able to be with Dad when we brought her home. Meanwhile my dad’s on
at least a one-month break from radiation treatments. How I needed to hug their necks!
I’m one of those blessed people with loving, supportive
parents. And let me tell ya, there’s
nothing like hearing your father pray for his beloved of sixty years (they’re
less than two months from celebrating their sixtieth). Watching her, with one
side out of commission, rubbing moisturizer on his radiation burn—I’ve just witnessed much stronger love than the Hollywood glamour version.
The weather was fantastic, offering fab views of Mts. Hood,
Jefferson, and St. Helens. One 31-degree morning as I drove to the rehab center
in Mt. Angel, the sun rose and turned frost to droplets. So the sun glistened
on dew-filled fields full of tulip shoots in the foreground, against a snow-covered
backdrop of hills and a mountain or two.
On Friday afternoon, I drove with Dad to retrieve Mom’s
wallet from the hospital where I was born and where he receives his radiation
treatments. From there we swung by nearby Keizer, the town where my parents
raised their five kids till I was ten. We found our old house. It used to sit
on five acres overlooking the Willamette River. Now it sits back from the road
in a cul-de-sac. Our orchards, lawn, and view have morphed into a residential
neighborhood with a string of houses backing up to the waterfront and blocking any
view of the river. Some things change;
some things remain the same.
That night my nephew, Jonathan, starred in Vancouver,
Washington, as Aslan in a production of “Narnia.” That quiet nephew whom few of
us realized could sing stood up on the stage and belted out songs in perfect
pitch. Those who know he lost his dad
two-and-a-half years ago in a collision with a texting driver especially
appreciated that in the Playbill he gave thanks for the support of his family,
his friends, and his heavenly Father.
Because I booked such a last-minute flight, I had one-stop
flights—going through San Francisco on the outbound and through Denver on the
return trip. That means I spent all day on either end getting to and from my
destinations. So I did a lot of reading.
In April, I plan to attend the Calvin Festival of
Faith and Writing, where one of the scheduled keynoters is Jonathan Safran Foer. So I read his book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close.
In this novel the main POV
character is nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an unusual boy who lives in a
Manhattan flat with his mom. Together they mourn in their own ways the loss of
Oskar’s father, who was in a meeting in one of the World Trade Towers on 9/11/2001, when an airplane flew into it.
A year after his father’s death, Oskar discovers a vase in
his father’s closet that contains a key. The key is tucked inside an envelope
that has only one thing written on it: “Black.” So Oskar sets out to meet
everyone with the surname “Black” living in New York and also to try every lock
in the city. He thinks doing so will lead him to find an important final message
from his father. It certainly leads him to have some interesting experiences
and conversations.
Throughout the book Foer uses photos as a literary technique
to connect some of his themes. He also uses Oskar’s grandparents as additional
POV characters, taking readers back through different timelines set during
WWII, the most vivid of which are the fire-bombing of Dresden and the dropping
of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. These cities were obliterated by the allied
forces and United States, respectively. The firebombs killed about 30,000 in Dresden; the atom bomb killed about
90,000 in Hiroshima. In setting these
within a story about a 9/11-associated loss, the author makes a statement
without making a statement.
Knowing what happened in these cities gave me an advantage
as I read. Many in my generation and later are unaware especially of what happened
in Dresden. But I had received an introduction to those events somewhat by
accident. As part of my PhD research into classic literature, I listened to a Mars
Hill Audio recording in which the interviewer mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut
survived the bombing of Dresden—being there as a POW—and it left an indelible
mark on his work. Maybe the interviewer
also noted, or at least I certainly made the connection, that Vonnegut’s
experience paralleled that of another great literary mind, T. S. Eliot, who served
as a fire warden during the blitz in WWI.
Foer’s photographic elements in the narrative, his partially
non-linear chronology, and his different POV characters make Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close an
unusual work. It’s like a modern version of a Modern novel.
The book provides readers with an up-close view of some dynamics at work when we lose something
and must come to terms with that loss. I found a lot of overlap with my own
feelings. But maybe everyone would. Are we actually ever, in this life, not mourning something?
