Suzy Says

This one’s been going the rounds lately, so I thought I’d jump in. You can imagine it was pretty hard for someone with 30 cartons of books to come up with (or narrow it down to) a sweet sixteen.

The rules are that you’re supposed to do it in 16 minutes, but I can’t type that fast, even if I could think that fast. And no, I don’t get the 16 fetish, either.

Here are the (slightly bent) rules:

Don’t take too long to think about it. Sixteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First sixteen you can recall in no more than 16 minutes.

Here we go, in alphabetical order:

1. The Box of Delights, by John Masefield

My father loved this book as a child, and passed on his love to us by reading it to us every Christmas. I still read it every year. Written by Poet Laureate John Masefield, it tells the adventures of a boy coming home for the holidays who encounters unexpected magical adventures. Or were they?

Look for the unabridged copy if you pick one up. It’s important.

2. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

McInerney captures the hedonistic 80s like no-one else.

3. The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger

One of the two books not completely ruined for me by having to study it in school (the other being number 7). Holden’s voice still rings true to me after all these years, the same way it did when I first read it in my teens.

4. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo

Russo and I both grew up in Upstate New York, and most of his novels are set there. Besides my nostalgic enjoyment of the setting, I love his lyric prose and clever plots. This multi-generational tale is a great one.

5. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

I first read this when I was in fifth grade. My teacher was a glamorous, platinum blonde Southerner, and this was her favorite book. I have no idea how many times I’ve read this, and it never fails to capture me from the first page. I’m back in the 1860s, watching Scarlett wreak havoc and break hearts.

6. The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

Every time I read the tragic tale of the beautiful Lily Bart, I hope it ends differently. But it never stops me from re-reading it. There’s no-one like Mrs. Wharton when it comes to witty social satire. Or descriptions of gowns.

7. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

Truman Capote’s ground-breaking “non-fiction novel” was both the making of him and his undoing. His life and career spiralled out of control after he published this unforgettable book, which chills and fascinates as much today as it did the day it was written. It affects me deeply for days every time I read it.

8. Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the way Erik Larson weaves together history and the human experience (as he does again in “The Devil and the White City”) in the face of one of the greatest natural disasters in history is unparalleled. A real page-turner, all the more so for being entirely true and beautifully written.

9. Lucy Gayheart, by Willa Cather

“My Antonia” and “O Pioneers” are Miss Cather’s best-known books, but this is my best-loved of her works. It tells the story of a girl who leaves her small town prairie home for life in Chicago, with unexpected and tragic results.

10. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

The divine Jane at the top of her form.

11. The Ripley Series, by Patricia Highsmith

Miss Highsmith’s novels all deserve more attention, but the series about the charming and lethal Tom Ripley demonstrate her great gifts of observation of human nature and her sly wit.

12. A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket

San Francisco’s own Daniel Handler shows great skill and cleverness in these small, beautifully written books about the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans. A delight to look at, and to read.

13. The Sweet Dove Died, by Barbara Pym

I love all of Miss Pym’s works, and wish there were more of them. This is the first one of her books I ever read, and still my favorite. She is a modern-day Jane Austen. Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both named her “the most underrated novelist of the century”.

14. Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin

I read this series before I lived in San Francisco. When I moved there, I made a pilgrimage to all the places in the books. Living in San Francisco was as wonderful for me as it is for the characters in these funny, delightful books. They originally ran as a column in the “Chronicle” and scandalized the socialites it merry skewered.

15. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

It’s hard not to be moved by the saga of Tess. None of Hardy’s novels are particularly happy, but this one is particularly moving and is one of his best. I can just see Tess as I read it.

16. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Looks like I have both of the South’s one hit wonders on my list. And Harper Lee accompanied her childhood friend, Truman Capote, to Kansas to assist in the interviews for “In Cold Blood”. (Mr. Capote appears in “Mockingbird” as Dill.) Miss Lee’s novel is a remarkable gem, a beautifully written and moving small masterpiece.

There you have it. What are your favorites?

I felt like Pee Wee Herman today. No, not the porn movie arrest. You know, the part where someone knocks at his door, and he opens it with happy anticipation, only to discover it’s a door-to-door salesman, and slams the door shut, screaming Salesman! in utter horror.

It all started with one of a series of phone calls from a guy who wants us to hire him. If I had a dime for every time he’s called or emailed me, I’d be able to pay my PG&E bill. I was planning to get back to him after a conference call with my partners today – when I would have an update and an actual decision – but he forestalled my call by several hours. And I got to call him again after the decision was made. Yay!

I really hate it when people like this win the business. I feel like they’re just being rewarded for their bad behavior. If your kid wouldn’t go to bed, would you give him/her a cookie?

Didn’t think so.

Later, when I was making breakfast, two guys loomed in my window and front door. It was, you guessed it, our buddies, the Jehovah’s Witless. Again. And on a weekday morning. I Pee Wee’d them and got back to the business of making toast.

Audrey in particular gets perturbed when people come up the driveway, or loud things, like the street cleaning machine, drive by. She starts making an urgent-sounding meow and pawing at the metal blinds, which clank against the windows and immediately make me long for a valium the size of my head. She also does this when I walk around outside while talking on the phone, but at least then I’m not inside to get the full effect.

So Audrey started doing her alarm mew, with the usual accompaniments. I wondered if the Witless really could be as witless as all that, and peeked out the window to see a guy digging around in the garbage. Not the recycling, the garbage. His chariot, in the form of a shopping cart, awaited him. He who steals my trash, steals trash, I reasoned, as I went back to trying to make our on-line database produce a report.

Hours later, the system was still being as stubborn as a teenager, and I was on the phone again when a guy came up on my porch and started yelling “Strawberries!” and waving a box of them around. It was hard to shoo him away while preserving a modicum of professional demeanor.

No-one offered to cut my lawn with invisible equipment, though.

Living in obscurity – or at least the woods – is looking better and better.

Home sweet home?

You will be amazed to hear that I’m thinking of moving. Again. But you might really be amazed to hear where.

It’s no secret that I hate living in Oakland, or that I’m deeply tired of spending nearly every penny I make to do so. I can’t afford to live in San Francisco, or anywhere desirable in the East Bay. I’m sick of the BART station of death and the weirdness of strangers.

So here’s my possible Plan B: move into my sister’s house (back view from the garden is pictured above). Our brother has already moved out to the property (more or less), so his house is vacant-ish, and my sis and her husband can move there, and I can move into their house. Musical houses!

Yes, it’s even teenier than my current house. It’s in the country. The separation between outside and inside is extremely blurred (and dusty or muddy, depending on the season). It’s a four hour drive from my job. I’m worried about the cats going outside and disappearing forever, which has happened to both my brother and sister.

But…

I’ll be close to my family and friends. I can spend more time with Jessica. Rent will be a third of what I’m paying now, and there will be no more insane water bills. There aren’t any locks on the door, even if I wanted to lock them. Sure, I’ll have to drive everywhere, but I do here, too. And who wouldn’t prefer driving by the ocean to the freeway?

I can consign The Boxes to my brother’s storage container. I can pile up meetings on a couple of days a month, stay in the familiar hotel near my old place in San Francisco. With 24 hours’ notice, I can be there if my boss/partner needs me.

I can even take the good bridge to get there.

Can I do it? Will it be like Green Acres? Will my boss say OK?

Stay tuned.

Thoughts, opinions, notions and moving cartons are welcome. if you’re too discreet to comment, email me at speakall at earthlink dot net. I’ll be glad you did.

The one and only Buddy

They say cats are nocturnal creatures, but mine aren’t afraid to bend the rules. Or break them completely.

Audrey and June seem to be at their most annoyingly active in the early morning hours, say, between two and five. The hours that fill you with despair should you have the misfortune of being awake to observe them, gloomily considering the work day ahead, that week’s errands, the meaning of life, and why people on TV shows always have the lights on in broad daylight.

June was the star of last night’s matinée, waking me up at 4:30 by biting my toes. I think I’ve mentioned June’s chewing affliction before – she has an unfortunate habit of chewing on really hard things, like CD cases and cast iron, with her tiny little teeth. I envision them shattering in a hail of vet bills.

Needless to say, after a rude awakening like that, a girl is awake, at least temporarily. I turned on the light and started reading the witty Personal Days, trying not to think about how soon it would be before I’d have to get up and feign productivity and adulthood.

June availed herself of the light to go behind the TV, climb up on the DVD player, and start merrily gnawing away at the plastic case of my 77 Sunset Strip DVDs. I yelled at her, and she looked up briefly before resuming the task at hand. Sighing, I got out of bed and went over to remove her from the forbidden area. I had hardly found my place in the book again before I heard the distinctive sound of plastic mastication. This time, I both yelled and got up at the same time. June fled the room, and for about the millionth time I thought how convenient it would be if my bedroom door actually closed – and stayed closed.

Thinking that June had finally gotten it out of her system, I returned to my reading. After half an hour or so, she came up on the bed and planted herself on the pillows. I thought this was nice. It reminded me of my very first cat, Buddy (see above), who used to sleep on my pillow every night. I’d say, “Sleep time,” and he’d come padding majestically down the hall and jump onto my pillow. I’d fall asleep to his grumbly purr, and when I woke up in the night, as I always do, I’d go back to sleep much faster, listening to his purr and feeling his thick, soft fur.

The happy, fuzzy Buddy feeling was not to last, though, since June’s purpose was to start chewing on the metal blinds, while clanking them against the windows directly behind me. Arrggh!!

All this time, Audrey was sitting placidly on the bed beside me. Her only contribution to the “Let’s drive Suzy crazy” initiative was to pin down the blankets so I couldn’t actually cover my entire body against the foggy, early-morning chill.

I looked the the alarm clock. Is 5:30 too early to get up?

Henry was lounging on the garage roof this morning, the way he used to when I first noticed him. He hardly ever does that now, even though it’s sunny up there pretty much all day. Lately, he’s been scorning both his plush bed and the tent under the rosebush, preferring to sleep on the dry grass or somewhere else entirely. Sometimes I only see him when it’s feeding time.

Now he comes running partway down the driveway to meet me, and even lets me pet him before putting the food in the dish. He’s recently taken to butting his head against my hand, which I see as huge in the progress of our relationship. Maybe he wouldn’t take me out on Friday night, but I’d probably see him at some point during the weekend.

Today’s breakfast was especially challenging.

About a month ago, I got fed up with June and Audrey hanging around the kitchen, waiting to get their Henry kibbles before I took the food out to him. It was OK at first, but then they turned into vultures, and on top of that, started hanging out in the kitchen in case there was extra food, even though there never was and they drove me crazy getting in my way. So I cut them off and put Henry’s Tupperware-esque food container under the porch.

This morning, I found it overturned and in the far reaches of Underporch. I got a rake to drag it out of the depths, and I think it’s a testimony to Henry’s trust in me that he didn’t run away from the rake. He used to run away when I emptied the water out of his dish to replace it, and any lawn implement made him flee. On the other hand, he also hampered my rescue efforts, and I ended up pulling the container off the lid. I carefully pulled the food-filled lid toward me, but I won’t lie to you: there was spillage.

I fed Henry from the rescued food, and when he was out of the way, put it into the container and added the spilled food I could salvage.

All this before coffee.

Later in the morning, Henry was, as I mentioned earlier, lounging on the garage roof. The girls were of course completely mesmerized, and it was a three-way staring contest. I probably could have walked out there with a steak and they still would have kept staring at each other.

In the end, Henry showed the girls how cool he really is by yawning, turning his back on them, and strolling slowly across the roof and jumping down lightly without looking back. They watched him out of sight, and then had a nap.

I’ve had so much fun reading the 1965 edition of James Beard’s “Menus for Entertaining” which I picked up for free at the Boonville Famer’s Market. It really was a different world back then, at least for the James Beards of the world.

Pretty much every meal, even picnics, concludes with coffee and cognac, or his other favorite, kirsch. I imagine that mixing a stimulant with a depressant would completely flummox one’s system, but what do I know? I’ve never understood the coffee after dinner thing anyway. You’ve just gotten a nice buzz from the wine, so why kill it, especially just hours away from bedtime? And I seriously doubt that a cup of coffee, or even two, could cancel out a dinner’s worth of wine enough for safe night-time driving.

Having said that, though, back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, my parents did attend the occasional cocktail party with their pajama-clad brood in tow. When they were ready to leave, they’d pile us in the car and off we’d go. Nothing untoward ever happened. Many of my baby pictures feature Mom with a cigarette in one hand while she fed me with the other, and cocktails (which I imagine to be a total necessity for every parent) make frequent cameo appearances in several of our baby photos. Those were the days.

Beard suggests topping steak and burgers – to which grated cheese has already been mixed in with the meat and other seasonings – with a pat of butter. He has an alarming proclivity for anchovies, which he puts into everything from deviled eggs to the butter for the steak. Note that he himself lived to the ripe old age of 81, despite all the booze’n’butter (Julia Child*, another butter advocate, made it to 91). One breakfast menu calls for champagne, croustades, chicken hash, chipolatas, asparagus, toasted brioche, and damson preserves.

Among my favorite pronouncements in the book are:

“Nothing is better in the morning than enlivening vodka drinks.”

“Have a picnic at the slightest excuse. It is even fun to have a box lunch and a hot drink in the car on a wintry day, while you look out at a dazzling stretch of landscape.”

“To give a good party you must be on the alert, though you appear to be entirely at ease. What a delight it can be to settle down later with your shoes off and have a few drinks in peace and quiet.”

*I’m really looking forward to seeing Julie and Julia this summer. Also The September Issue. ‘Cause that’s the kind of girl I am. Foodie and fashionista!