Category: Reading

Being real like the Velveteen Rabbit

1/24/2023

Today let Margery Williams’ Velveteen Rabbit speak for you.

You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand….Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.

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No beach reading for me

7/2/2019

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Elder Chicks, http://www.elderchicks.com, “a blog for women age 70 or better,” has posed its July topic: July: Beach Time Means Beach Books. Readers are asked to share what summer reading is like for them. Is it the same/different as the rest of the year? What are you reading?
Here’s my response.

Reading is the same for me not matter what the season, except that in the summer I can sit outside. The term “Beach reading” doesn’t resonate with me; by any definition, I am not a beach reader. I’ve never gone to the beach to read, not do I long for ‘beach’ type books. I read whatever I want—serious, frivolous and everything in between. During the school year when I was teaching I had less/NO time to read for pleasure. Retirement, however, changes that, and with it came a wider array of books. .
Currently I have four books going. For easy pleasure I’m reading the fifth Maggie Hope Mystery, The Queens Accomplice, by Susan Elia Macneal. Then there is The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a combination of fiction and non-fiction that I’m enjoying as I read each section and then sitting with it—not a fast read. Next is Puccini, A Biography, by Howard Greenfelt; my plan is to listen to each opera as I read about it. Finally, I’m going paragraph by paragraph through The Muller Report, albeit, one or two pages a day.

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I am a 78 year old white, educated, privileged woman, in excellent health, with a wonderful family. I go to church and travel by myself to Italy and Scotland. That’s my public vita, my public persona. But that’s not all who I am. I have secrets, secrets of an old woman. So let me say some more.
     I’m old. Not in the usual physical ways of a person age 78, but I’m old in years, and that very fact guides the sense of meaning that I feel and experience in my life. Put succinctly, more and more my age is becoming the filter through which I lead my life.
     I’ve had a rich life, with caring parents, a loving husband of 54 years, two wonderful children, and four amazing grandchildren. My teaching career was rewarding; I published six books for teachers describing my experiences as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. When I retired I earned a divinity degree and became the spiritual care counselor for a local hospice.
    I ask myself if now I am really retired. Well, yes and no. Yes, in that I have more free and unscheduled time to satisfy my longing for silence, solitude and simplicity, which I blog about in this blog-- www.acottagebythesea.net, and more time to attend to my spiritual life, which I blog about in www.aprayerdiary.net. I have more time to spend with family and friends, help at church, read for pleasure, write, and travel,. My old woman secret is that I am still searching for meaning and the search is intense and life supporting.

Being real like the Velveteen Rabbit

No beach reading for me

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