Happy July 4th

In most places July 4th is midsummer.   Here in Las Vegas we think of it more as the end of the beginning of summer.  We'll get some rain and then it will be hot and then school will start and then it will still be hot.  Not suprisingly, New Year's is more of a traditional Las Vegas fireworks holiday than July 4th.  Also, as many places do, we live under the even-more-traditional illegal fireworks hypocrisy.  In my county, you can't buy or use anything but sparklers and noisemakers.  In the next county over, you can buy anything you like but you can't set it off.*  I only ever buy sparklers but I'm quite happy to sit in a lawn chair and watch the neighbors' illegal fireworks.

When I was a kid the local paper printed a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence every year on July 4th.  (I suppose they still do it, I just don't read a physical paper anymore.)  Anyway, here is my version.  Turner Classic Movies will be showing "1776" tomorrow around 5 pm my time.  I haven't seen the movie, but I saw a stage production of it at Williamstown, MA one year.  This is from the 1997 Broadway revival.  Enjoy, and have a happy 4th:

Something for a lazy summer afternoon:

The Underground New York Public Library

I think my favorite is the 3 people reading My Family and Other Animals (a book my husband introduced me to years ago), Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and Borrower of the Night.  The other thing is, obviously, just the sheer variety of the people of NYC, all classes, ethnicities and religions, and the even greater variety of book titles.

Also notice the Subway Look, which you can generally catch on the faces of those who are not reading.  "I'm here, but I'm not here."  The Subway Look is actually pretty close to a state of meditation, when done right.

The Group

I've belonged to an SCBWI writer's group for almost two years now.  I joined eagerly, driven by a wish to talk to and know other writers.  I got more than I expected, in ways both good and bad.  Chit-chat with other writers over coffee? Delightful.  Listening to actual criticism of my sacred words?  Oh, yeah, that. 
It's been a learning curve.
For all the eagerness with which I joined, I had, and have, a dark secret -- deep-seated, competitive, seven-deadly-sin kind of envy of other writers.  Mean stuff.  Bad stuff.  Sitting still, listening to them, listening to their criticism (which was, I should point out, usually constructive) of my work, was and is an ordeal.  I'm a better person and a better writer for having done it, but I still sometimes have to force myself to bring work to the meetings. 
One of the saving graces of SCBWI is the fact that the groups include illustrators.  The artists in my group are fantanstic, and the fact that I didn't feel competitive towards them gave me some breathing room and just a tiny bit of a beginning in appreciating the other people in my group for who they were.  A lot of my more snobbish and childish beliefs have fallen by the wayside.
I'm a pretty faithful member, partly because I lead a fairly predictable life, and so in nearly two years I've witnessed some interesting aspects of the group dynamic.  There are, for instance, people who come regularly, for a month or two, bringing pieces of a novel with a good basic idea and multiple chapters planned, plotted and written.  Then one day they vanish and never return.  Months go by.  "Whatever happened to...?" "Do you ever hear from...?"  "Oh, she got busy and isn't doing much writing right now." Another member was always bringing in new projects and new ideas, and when we asked her about previous ones she would say, "oh, I'll get back to that eventually."  Eventually she left the group altogether and went into another genre.  (I later learned she had migrated over to us from another genre.)  A third, who had a really lovely Irish mythology story she was seeing through a first draft, got discouraged (I think) by an adverse critique at a conference.  Some encounters were even more fleeting, leaving me to wonder, did we do something wrong?  Were we not welcoming?  Or did it just come down to not being able to stand the scrutiny of outsiders?
The path to being a successful writer has many stages and maybe groups aren't for everyone.  I'm glad I have mine, though.

In Memoriam

A couple of years ago I came upon the blog Collecting Children's Books, by Peter Sieruta.  If you have never seen Collecting Children's Books, follow the link NOW -- you have hours and hours of enjoyment ahead if, like me, you have been reading children's books (including YA) all your life and can recall your first M.E. Kerr and Ursula K. LeGuin, plus you know your Newbery Winners back to Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, and you just plain love the look and feel of books.

Peter published every Sunday and looking through my blogger reading lists for his posts on Monday was a highlight of the week.  His posts were long, well-illustrated and fascinating, a round-up of contemporary gossip, looks back at the past, and personal stories of books that had influenced him.  We were contemporaries and reading his blogs I frequently felt the thrill of similar memories. I know he must have worked very hard on his posts (I know how hard I work and mine don't come off half as well!)  because they were so elegant and funny, flowing so neatly from one subject to the next.  I commented on his posts...sometimes...very cautiously.  Once he quoted of my remarks in a subsequent post and I went through the virtual equivalent of blushing mightily. 

This morning on Facebook, late as usual because I tend to banish electronic communication over the weekend, I discovered that Peter had died.  Last week he had posted about breaking his ankle tripping on the stairs (I am so glad now that I wrote a response to that post) and, according to his brother John, he had difficulty breathing on Saturday night and collapsed before EMS arrived.  It may have been a blood clot.  It doesn't matter, really.  There's a strangeness about sudden death.  It makes me think of the German writer W.G. Sebald, who died in a car accident, in a scene not unlike something that might have happened in one of his own novels.  One minute here, the next minute gone.  As a Christian, the idea of death is not bleak to me, although for those left behind the loss is grievous.  I think of Peter as simply somewhere else, in another world.  But Lord, I will miss him in this one.

Other tributes to Peter at Fuse #8, Educating Alice and Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Buried History

Living in Brooklyn, I taught myself to find history as I walked down the street, to judge the houses, large, set back from the street, dating from the 1910s, and the apartment buildings with masonry typical of the 1930s.  I won't deny Henderson history, but it's scattered and separate and doesn't have the layers of patchwork places, places that have long gone unnoticed.  Take the area where I work, for instance.  It's what they call "light industrial."  Nothing scary, nothing big -- in fact, it's rather pleasant to walk in, since there's not much foot traffic, the sidewalks are wide, everything is landscaped.  A block and a half away there are some train tracks, and going up there makes a nice walk, especially to survey the wild-grown shrubs along the line, and think about the backs of the buildings that the train goes by.

It so happens that there are traffic cones along the streets, and have been for several weeks, along with construction signs.  Some city officials came in and held a meeting to explain the purpose of the construction and how it would affect on-street parking.  I missed the meeting, as it happened, but a few weeks later someone filled me in.  "Oh, they're removing contaminated water -- from Pepcon.  It was just over there, you know." (Waves hand down the street)

Wait, what?  Over where?

I'd heard of the Pepcon Explosion.  Anyone living in the LV area at that time remembers it, as it shook windows all over the valley and caused a huge fireball, and since moving here I'd heard the occasional reminiscence.  Pepcon made rocket fuel for the space shuttle.  Following the Columbia accident, when the shuttle program was on hiatus, they stored a great deal of fuel on-site.  On May 4, 1988, a fire started and spread to the fuel, which blew up, completely leveling Pepcon, as well as another plant next door, which made marshmallows.  Because evacuation began when the fire first started, only two employees were killed -- one who stayed behind to call the fire department, and a disabled man who was unable to evacuate quickly enough  (both heartbreaking stories, for all the "only two people").  Some 300 people were injured, mostly by flying glass and debris.  For several hours the fire was so intense that the FD didn't even try to fight it and just concentrated on evacuating the area.

I went to the Henderson newspaper archive on line, back to May 1988, and looked up the exact location of the plant.  There were the train tracks, and there was Gibson, the street I take to work every morning, and just beyond it two Xs marked the locations of Pepcon and Kidd Marshmallows.  Today there's an electrical substation there (that's what it looks like, behind a grayed-out fence) and a modest business park, including a place that sells used hot tubs (apparently, there's money in that.)  Somewhere beyond that is the Kidd factory, which I'm told was rebuilt.  Of Pepcon, nothing left.

Except that water.  Three to four hundred feet down, according to my informant.  They're going to cut a trench in the street and pump it out.  Why now?  What else might be down there?  Where else might stuff have gone?  I really don't know.  I note from the Wikipedia article that everything in a 1.5 mile zone (which would definitely include where my office building is now) was subject to "severe" destruction.

It's a reminder that even the most innocuous-looking block has history, somewhere.

Diana Wynne Jones reissues

On my desk calendar at work I have the words "Fire and Hemlock" written across this Thursday, April 12.  That's the day three of Diana Wynne-Jones' earlier novels -- Dogsbody, A Tale of Time City, Fire and Hemlock -- are going to be reissued by Firebird, in paperback and Kindle editions, with new introductions by Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman, among others. 

Jones wrote a lot of books and they're all worth reading, but I like seeing these particular examples of her early work made available.  Dogsbody is the story of a celestial object -- a star -- who falls from heaven to earth and is reborn as a mongrel dog with a task he must perform (but, being a dog, he can't ever concentrate on this task for very long.)  There's a quest in there, and a phantom hunt, and strong emotions -- jealousy and unhappy families.  It came out in 1975, when YA novels weren't expected to be quite so magical, and like many of her novels never got much recognition in the US.  A Tale of Time City starts with a girl being evacuated to the British countryside during World War II, and then pitches forward, dazzlingly, through the eons, to an era when humanity is very different, and still somewhat the same (at any rate, people still eat toffee), in a place called Time City, where time seems to be coming to an end.

As for Fire and Hemlock, which was originally published in 1985, it happens to be one of the few Jones novels I've never read -- out of print and the library didn't have it. I pre-ordered it back in January and I'm trusting that when I fire up the Kindle on Thursday it will be there. All I really know about it is that it's Jones' take on the Tam Lin ballad...which is quite enough for me. 

Easter goes Organic

When I used to go with my husband to visit his grandmother for Easter she always had the traditional Greek bright red Easter eggs.  I never thought to ask how she made them and unfortunately she's no longer here to tell us.  Not long ago, however, I read that Greeks get that color by dying the eggs with onionskins.  My husband disputed that Yia-Yia ever did this.  "She took the bus to the Greek store and she got some kind of dye there," he said.  But I decided to try it, figuring I had some freedom to branch out as my son is now too old for dyeing eggs.  My first test run two weeks ago, with two eggs and some yellow onionskins, produced eggs that were a deep...well, kind of mahogany.  This past Saturday I tried again, with both purple and yellow onionskins.  On the stove, the colors of the liquids were different, with the yellow onionskins producing pale orange and the purple producing a stronger red.  On the eggs themselves the color was basically the same, reddish-brown.  I tried a couple of variations seen on Youtube, including boiling the egg wrapped in pantyhose, with a cilantro leaf against it to make a pattern on the shell.  I also tried wax designs on the egg from a candle...didn't work, most of the wax came off in the water.

If you want to do it yourself, you'll need skins from onions (I had 5 or 6 reds, probably around 10 yellows, obviously the more the stronger the dye), vinegar and eggs.  Boil the onionskins in enough water to cover them plus two tablespoons of vinegar for about 20 minutes.  Strain the onionskins out and let the dye cool.  Then boil the eggs in the dye.  I boiled them as you normally would hard-boiled eggs (15 minutes).  You can do them longer but eventually the eggs will become inedible.  If you don't like the color after 15 minutes just let them cool in the water and the dyeing process will continue.  You can even soak them overnight. 
If you want designs, take a cilantro or other edible leaf and place it against the eggshell, then wrap in pantyhose and tie it with a twisty. 

As for the bright red eggs Yia-Yia used to produce?  Research suggests she may have used Rit fabric dye.  Sometimes traditions are better left unrevived.