Notes From My Knapsack 5-28-06
Jeff Gill

Decorating Your Days and Simplifying Your Travels

Decoration Day, the one time name for May 30, was the original idea of "Memorializing" the honored dead. Whether it began with Julia Pierpont, wife of the governor of occupied Virginia, leading a group of Union women after war’s end to decorate soldiers’ graves both North and South, or any of the other claimed inspirations for the GAR commander General Logan’s order, flowers and wreaths and speeches have been part of late May since 1868.
Now a Monday holiday, Memorial Day falls on May 29 this year. Many communities around Licking County will offer simple parades and quiet ceremonies to honor the dead of all wars on Monday, and I trust you will find your way to mark the solemnity of the occasion.
Other cultural traditions have grown onto the weekend, with the Indy 500 on the last Sunday, and summer "officially" starting with the profusion of grills and picnics and sales that usher in what we trust and pray will be warmer weather.
School has a couple more weeks to go, but higher ed is off and those returned students scrambling for summer jobs if they didn’t do that arrangement last Christmas, and the public school program is more focused on inventories of lab glassware and turning in your textbooks.
For grownups, the office scramble is for figuring out who gets which week for vacation. News flash: you won’t get your first choice. Trust me.
The big idea this summer is "microvacation." This is the one tank trip to the nth degree; you find a nearby attraction you’ve always meant to see or visit in depth, and go do it, returning home in time for dinner in your own lawn chair.
Your Knapsack will offer a few of those in coming weeks, but may I suggest a micro-microvacation idea: books! A good read is not just for wintry cabin fever or beach broiling, but can be a back porch break that takes you to another era, a different land, to a new place in your head that you feel in your bones.
With Memorial Day in mind, I would belatedly commend to one and all "Hannah Coulter" by Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and farmer and writer on agriculture and sustainability who has done the nearly impossible. He has published nothing that wouldn’t reward a close reading, in essays, collections of poems ("The Country of Marriage" his best, I feel), magazine articles, and novels.
Berry returned to a family farm in Kentucky, working as a professor of English while working the land at the same time. His novels all take place in a piece of Kentucky that is, and isn’t quite where Berry lives and farms and writes, and "Hannah Coulter" is the latest of that series. It is a short and powerful story of growing to maturity through and past World War II into the modern world.
You will not travel far reading "Hannah Coulter," but you will go deep into the human heart, perhaps even your own.
"The Genizah at the House of Shepher," by Tamar Yellin is a very distant work from Kentucky; Jerusalem, the lands of exile for Judaism in Eastern Europe and central Asia, and Yorkshire in England are all vividly sketched. You don’t need any knowledge of Hebrew to read this novel, but you will know much about Hebrew culture and the Jewish diaspora when you’re done.
There is love and romance, too, but not that kind. The love of words, and writing, and of one’s culture, even when you’re in rebellion against it, is the amour propre of this work.
Men and women marry, but not always to good ends. And faith is occasionally misplaced . . . all like real life at home, but looking a bit different far away.
If those recent novels aren’t enough for you, Penguin Classics has put out, in a fat paperback, a "restored" version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. Most of us who might have read this in the past, as it turns out, got a pasteurized, bowdlerized, heavily edited version of this vast and complex tale, which is on a very short list of books that is actually improved by being twice as long.
Yes, it reads like a book written when Queen Victoria was still eating with her own teeth, but the fine folk at Penguin have given you just enough notes to clear up chronological confusions as they arrive. Once you allow for the unique tones and rhythms of the late 19th century, this is a remarkable travelogue through post-Napoleonic Europe, in Marseilles, Rome, Sardinia, Paris, and of course the Chateau d’If.
At the very least, this is a book that will hold down a corner of your beach towel; at best, you will be transported yourself.
Check your library or bookshop, and take a trip. Gas prices won’t even enter into the equation.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; pass him your favorite titles to disciple@voyager.net.