Book Club, Cowboy Poetry and the Barn in Petersboro

This week passed in a flash. Actually it seems that my whole life is passing like a flash. It seems hard to believe that we are already the 20th of April. We are now in the final six weeks until graduation so it seems like the wheel is spinning faster than usual and everyone is a tiny bit more hysterical than it was six weeks ago. Our lower performing students are not realizing that if they don’t finish make-up work they will not graduate and parents and students are now desperately wanting to see their counselors in the hope that the counselor will be able to wave their magic wand and sprinkle fairy dust everywhere and solve the problems that the student has created for him/herself. Ah, the joys of the end of the year. On the flip side of that, Paul and I will be hoping on a plane in less than two months to go to the Ukraine. When we bought our tickets last August it seemed like the time would never come and now here we are able to see that this trip is really going to happen—and fortunately for us the political turmoil and fighting has calmed down and we look like we will be able to go there safely as well. Oh, Happy Day!! This week I got two quilts that I have been working on ready to go to the quilter. That is a big milestone. And I can get back to working on my jeans quilts. They somehow got pushed to the side after I began working on them and they are in bits and pieces throughout the basement. I have squares in the open area counter spread all around, and more pieces of jeans in my sewing room. I want to get moving on all of it this week and see if I can make some progress. Thursday this week was one of my book club meetings. This is the book club that Erika also belongs to, and the meeting was at her house. This is the first time that she hosted. She chose a book she hadn’t read—one that she learned about when she was taking a literature class at BYU-I. The class members all bought it, but as the class progressed, they ran out of time to read this particular book and she was curious about it and wanted to read it, so she chose it as her book for the month. The book is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It was a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 2000 by Michael Chabon. It was a long book about 800 pages, and it had a lot of interesting aspects to it. The book opens in 1939—and sort of follows the mid-century, being an epic in nature. It follows the “Golden Age of Comic Books” as the two main characters are comic book developers, developing and writing a fictional comic book super hero called THE ESCAPIST. But it also follows their own lives and their successes and struggles. The story of families separated and fleeing the oppression and invasion of Nazi Germany is covered in this story among other side stories. When I think about the ideas that were developed in this book, and the things I learned because of the historical aspects of this book, I think it is quite impressive. However, I really didn't find this book to be gripping, or a page turner, or even that engaging. It was very wordy and long and I was really glad when I finished it. And I thought to myself over and over—this book won a Pulitzer Prize? ?? ??. It is interesting though, that when a group of people gather together and talk about a book new insights come out and I enjoyed an engaging and interesting discussion of this book after the fact. I invested a lot of time in its reading and so I felt like it paid off in the lively discussion that we had lead by Erika. Incidentally, pretty much as a group everyone shared the same opinion, that it was interesting and full of information about a period (midcentury) and a subject (The Golden Age of Comic Books) that was enlightening, but all of us thought that it was not necessarily worthy of all the acclaim it received, such as… “published to "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller,[1] receiving nominations for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2006,Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation",[2] and in 2007, The New York Review of Books called the novel Chabon's magnum opus.[3] Friday evening we drove to Mapleton where Paul performed cowboy poetry for a private party. It was a dance club and the Western and Square Dance evening is one of their annual events. The event committee organizes a catered dinner and entertainment and then they dance. The group who attended wasn't particularly big—there were about sixteen couples, but they were fun and enthusiastic. And they came dressed in western attire, mostly prairie skirts and blouses and not the gingham square dance dresses that I expected. Paul performed for about a half an hour, reciting poetry and accompanying himself on the guitar. A woman he works with joined him with her dulcimer for one number. We were provided with dinner, too. And we sat at the same table with Wayne Crawford who was the square dance caller. He was an interesting fellow—has worked as a caller for the last 40 years. Paul did a really nice job It is interesting and gratifying that Paul is being asked to do these kinds of events. He is getting to be known in the area as a performer who is willing and can do performing in these small venues as well as in the large cowboy poetry and music gatherings. Saturday morning Paul and I both headed off to Petersboro for a day of work on the barn. Paul has worked there several times since the last time we put in a day together. It is really coming together. There are fourteen concrete footed uprights that have to be installed and we have finished thirteen. There is just one more to go. It is very interesting to see the barn take shape. We got three of the uprights put in on Saturday. We arrived there at about 10:00 and worked until after seven pretty much steadily—stopping for about 15 minutes for lunch at about 1:30. Paul does most of the work. I hold stuff and steady things and move things around, and generally help, but this is really the “Paul Show”—it represents his experience, understanding, and expertise. It is a function of his ability to see his ideas clearly and then put them into a physical reality. Rather amazing really. The next step will require scaffolding and he is starting to get that ready, too. I’m excited to see this all come together. It will be a work in progress for a while, but Paul didn’t expect to be this far this soon—we have been able to take full advantage of the fact that there has been practically no winter in Utah this year.