Darling,
Your dad and I are reading a book called
"Behind the Attic Wall" and the main character, Maggie, is a precocious, insightful, spunky, angry young orphan who is hardened by her lot in life but exists carved into a singular
existence within the beauty of her imagination and accepted, fierce alienation.
In one of the earlier chapters, her great aunts who take her in decide that she is in need of a respectable friends. "I don't want a friend," she says, immediately withdrawing and defensive due to her experience with past "friends." They go on to describe the girl, Jeanette, who aspires to be a singer and they liken to a lark. Jeanette comes over and flaunts her superior upbringing and accomplishments while Maggie flips idly through a National Geographic magazine, which features mainly birds. When Jeanette gets so frustrated at Maggie's lack of sychophantic behavior and obvious apathy, she attacks her and says she know that Maggie has been kicked from home to home and no one wants her and that she knows her parents were killed in a car accident. The next paragraph continues:
"Maggie flipped the pags of the magazine quickly and stopped suddenly at a glossy study of a brown-and-gray bird. It had speckles on its creamy breast, and it resembled a sparrow more than anything else, but in flight it took command of the entire page, and the trees in the distance were small and vague beneath the spread of its wings. It was a lark, the caption said, an Old World Lark, and she could see by its open beak that it was in full song. In a moment she had ripped the page in half and then in half again, so that she had four fluttering strips of broken wings and fragmented feathers. These she crushed into a solid ball, and walking, almost marching- step-stop, step-stop, across the room, she reached Jeanette's frozen figure and in quick movement pressed the crumpled bird hard against her mouth. A soft cry rose, like the cry of the rubber doll when Maggie had pressed its face in the day before, and Jeanette's face flamed."
Obviously I don't wish orphaned or cynical or violent qualities on you, but the other parts resonate so deeply as part of who I am and also
instinctually what I feel you might be as a part of me. I could be completely wrong but I think there is a reason we are reading this book right now and that I am absorbing it like it was the most nourishing sustenance for me and you.
After all, I read on pregnancy360.com that the soul is developed in week 7.
:) Wouldn't it be great if that was identifiable?
This book and the song from which I took the title of this posting both match this intrinsic feeling,
don't really know why other than that they both remind me of the aforementioned qualities mixed with the stillness of
antiquation and the poignancy of something utterly fundamental:
The National- Racing Like A ProYou’re pink you’re young you’re middle-class
they say it
doesn’t matter
fifteen blue shirts and womanly hands
you’re shooting up the ladder
Your mind is racing like a pro, now
oh my god it
doesn’t mean a lot to you
one time you were a glowing young ruffian
oh my god it was a million years ago
Sometimes you get up and bake a cake or something
sometimes you stay in bed
sometimes you go la
di da di da di da datil your eyes roll back into your head
Your mind is racing like a pro, now
oh my god it
doesn’t mean a lot to you
one time you were a glowing young ruffian
oh my god it was a million years ago
you’re dumbstruck baby
you’re dumbstruck baby now you know
you’re dumbstruck baby
you’re dumbstruck baby now you know
Your mind is racing like a pro, now
oh my god it
doesn’t mean a lot to you
one time you were a glowing young ruffian
oh my god it was a million years ago
you’re dumbstruck baby
you’re dumbstruck baby now you know
you’re dumbstruck baby
you’re dumbstruck baby now you know
you’re dumbstruck baby
