This past weekend, I saw Reservation Road, about a man who accidentally hits and kills a young boy with his SUV and then drives off. It wasn’t fantastic, but Mark Ruffalo played the man. I am crazy about Mark Ruffalo.
I also saw Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, which was excellent.
I almost want to cover my eyes these days when an actor has to react to a catastrophic loss, I have seen it done unconvincingly so many times, but Ryan Gosling gets this exactly right, in the funeral scene.
In the waning days of his friend, three ladies come over and sit with him in his gloomy living room, bringing their knitting. One explains, “That’s what happens when you have a tragedy—people come over and sit.” You could hear people sniffling all over the theater.
I have finally mastered the art of using dried porcini without having the dish end up gritty: After soaking the porcini, one should put the water and mushrooms through a strainer and then rinse the mushrooms thoroughly, in several changes of water, at least until the apocalypse, when there will be no water for rinsing mushrooms. After that, don’t cook with dried mushrooms. Use plain sand instead.
If the soaking water is needed for the recipe, after straining, put it through a compostable paper coffee filter. This will remove 99 percent of the grit.
I said to my mother, nearly 99 percent of the readers of this blog, on the phone recently, “I can tell you’re not reading my blog, because if you were, you would have emailed me to tell me not to ride my bike in the middle of the street.”
“I try not to think about you riding your bicycle, at all, ever.”
We discussed ISPs and I summarized Jesus Land for her. When we hung up, she said, “Don’t ride your bike in the street, period.”
Jesus Land is a memoir by Julia Scheeres, whose parents were missionaries. I thought it was going to be a sort of humorous, sort of appalling story about living with religious zealots, but it was a profoundly upsetting and heartbreaking story about living with vicious sadists, in your own home and everywhere else.
Julia had three siblings who had gone off to college by the time the memoir starts, plus two adopted black brothers, one of whom was older, angry and predatory, and who sexually abused Julia repeatedly, which she bore in silence.
The other adopted brother, David, is almost exactly Julia’s age, and they are best friends, riding bikes together, exploring the countryside, making each other laugh. David is intelligent, funny, gentle, and sensitive. He had been in a series of foster homes and wants nothing more than to be part of a close-knit family, but in Julia’s parents, he finds people who, at best, show no affection to their children. Julia has no recollection of being hugged or hearing the words “I love you.”
Julia’s mother spends a lot of time writing to people she has met doing her missionary work, while her own children are told to get lost. There is an intercom system in the house which, in transmitting mode, blasts religious music to all points, and which, in receiving mode, is handy for eavesdropping on one’s children.
The father, a doctor, seizes any excuse to beat the sons in their room in the basement. Julia, from her room on the second floor, can hear their shrieks of pain. Once, the father, a doctor, hits David with a two by four and breaks his arm.
(My mother said here, “It sounds like they were even worse than your parents.”)
That’s at home. When these children step out of their house, to ride their bikes or go to school, they are tormented constantly by racists who scream at David, the only black child in their school, that he is a nigger or ask Julia why she is with a nigger. When they get on the school bus for the first time after moving to their new town, a larger boy kicks David in the testicles.
And these are the parts we know about. This kind and smart little boy’s life was an absolute hell on earth, yet he never stopped hoping to make friends and to be loved.
When they are 16 or so, the siblings are sent off to a Christian school in the Dominican Republic, there to be at the mercy of another bunch of sadistic creeps, a tale that seems to be all too familiar. Christian boarding school? Uh oh.
The book is dedicated to David, so I assumed there would be a happy ending: In the end, we grew up and we moved where we wanted and did what we liked and had happy lives, but as the remaining pages grew fewer and fewer and the happy ending hadn’t started, I got worried, rightly so.
I highly recommend this book for a searing portrait of racism and cruelty to children, but it will make you angry and very sad.
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