My toe is sore today. Actually it’s been sore for a couple of days because I dropped a glass on it the other night. I knew it the moment I set the glass down on the corner of my desk. Actually thought to myself, ‘Don’t put it there. You’ll knock it over.’ Pah on that inner voice. I set the glass on the corner of my desk so that I could close the curtain to the right, and turn on the lamp to the left. As I simultaneously pulled my hand gracefully away from the lamp switch and started to sit down in my chair, I caught the top edge of the glass with my hand and tipped it toward myself. The contents of the glass splattered first against me (spraying in a sort of arc behind me), then after the glass hit my foot, it spun and sprayed more liquid around in front of me, before bouncing onto the tile and breaking.
While I screamed ow ow ow ow standing in a glassy puddle on one foot, my lovely Partner got towels and brooms and ice. I’ll be fine. It was actually sort of funny. Did I mention that it was a glass of wine? Wine that I’d taken barely a sip out of before the spectacular spraying of wine all over the room? Did I mention that it miraculously missed the computer on its track to soak the tile as well as a towel that has been wedged under the thousand-pound filing cabinet for the last year to keep the metal cabinet from scraping the tile? Or that there is no way to remove this towel from under the cabinet without emptying the files out of it?
The living room now has the lingering aroma (thankfully pleasant) of a 2005 Australian Shiraz Cabernet that I really liked and was disappointed to have dropped on my foot.
Perhaps the fumes led to the next weirdness, which was measuring out a level teaspoon of salt to put in my tea yesterday morning. No, I realized my mistake before I drank the tea, thank you very much.
All of this should not, however, cause you to doubt my next enthusiastic endorsement. We came across
Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in the juvenile fiction section of the library last week. I guess you’d call it a graphic novel, in that there are no words, only pictures. Don’t assume though that the pictures and its location in the library make it kids’ stuff. The word that comes to my lips anytime I try to describe it is ‘beautiful.’
The Arrival tells the story of one man’s journey from his home country to make a new life, first for himself, and later for his family in a magical fictionalized world. Each page, each panel is filled with magic. You will choke up when the main character holds the hands of his wife and daughter before boarding the boat. You will understand the awe, the frustration, the loneliness, the fear, the hope that immigrants must have felt when stepping off the boat at Ellis Island more than a century ago. The pages are filled with fantastical elements meant to illustrate the foreignness, the exoticness, the seeming magic of this new place. Also embedded in the pages is the generosity of the shared immigrant experience, the way in which one person helps another through the initial confusion, how each person has a different story that led him or her to this place at this time. The pictures are shaped with subtle details, small beauties and wonders that you will linger over.
While perfectly appropriate for young people, it should not be overlooked by adults, who will understand the complex choices we sometimes make to care for our families, who might see reflected, if not one’s own experience, then perhaps that of a parent or grandparent. A great book to share in any language.
;)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 1:49PM 