Some things smack of unfairness and other things are just tough to explain. Here's something that is both:
Really, Uma has been on the green bean diet for TEN AND A HALF MONTHS! It started well over 300 cans ago. I don't know why she still looks like a dually (is that what non-Texans also call those heavy duty trucks with four-wheels in the back?).
I don't understand it, and for a girl with such a beautiful face, it's really unfair to be so wide in the back end. The before view here, shows that not much has changed since last Thanksgiving.
My mother and I are reading A Tale of Two Cities for the mother/daughter book club, which is to say that my mother finished it several weeks ago, and I have barely met Madame DeFarge. That is not what is unfair and inexplicable.
What I can't figure out and what pains my heart is that I actually read this book cover to cover (without resorting to Cliff's notes and without skipping over the hard bits) when I was in high school. It claimed the number two spot on my all-time favorite book list for decades. I can quote both the opening paragraph and the closing lines even to this day.
I.CAN'T.REMEMBER.ANY.OF.IT.NOW.!!!
I read along in it every evening, sure that something will ring a bell. I keep waiting. Nothing. Nada. Zippo.
How does this happen?
And this is not the only book that I can't recall. Walter and I teach adult Sunday school. We have read--and not only read, but studied and taught--books that made really big impressions on us when we studied them. I can remember their titles now, and usually their authors. BUT besides a vague and possibly inaccurate recollection of their main thesis, I couldn't tell you much about them.
If Cherokee People by Paul Revere and the Raiders, popular when I was a sixth grader in 1971, comes on the satellite radio, I sing along without stumbling over ANY of the lyrics EVEN IF I DON'T WANT TO SING ALONG AND EVEN IF I THOUGHT IT WAS A DUMB SONG AT THE TIME. This happens, and I can't even remember the characters in my second favorite book of all time?
Can you tell me that's fair?
Can you explain it?
I had virually the same experience with exactly the same book. I reread it this past year - partly out of the guilt that I didn't finish it in high school. I mostly finished it... but resorted to Cliff's Notes for the last part. But the kicker was the complimentary note my teacher wrote on my paper about it. She noted that it was such a pleasure to read a paper written by someone who had clearly read the entire book and not cheated by using Cliff's Notes. So, forty plus years later, I read it in her honor. It was the best of books.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever read "The Book of Bad Songs" by Dave Barry? If you haven't, you must. Really. Must. He is one of our favorite humor writers anyway but he writes about a survey he did of all his readers and the songs they hate the most and can't get out of their minds, that they sing even though they try so very hard not to.
ReplyDeleteI think you could relate.
And by the way, I think that with you two teaching, your Sunday school class is blessed indeed.