She was a big time DC lawyer asked to come back to her hometown to act as receptionist for her country doctor dad, a position with no glamor at all. What she found was that her call to service, that she’d heeded with words in DC was filled with the act of showing up for this real life. She’s got a great honest take on us locals too. LOVED it.

Best quote:

“We were a family famous for being stoic in a community of the most stoic people in the country. It was a source of local pride that soldiers from the mountains of East Tennessee always won more medals in battle and took the highest casualties, both injured and killed, in every war. Courage, or at least poker faces, was our trademark. We never showed vulnerability, never asked for help, never showed any sign of strain. To anybody. Ever.”

Second best quote:

“East Tennesseeans generally tried to avoid making a spectacle, but if somebody else, particularly a Yankee, would give it a go, they couldn’t resist watching, hoping for a foul up.”

(the entire account of the foxhunt is hilarious, particularly the blessing of the hounds)

wonderful.

I also love that you have to be prepared but you can’t have too firm of plans.

marvelous. simply.

I ran into this book in the stacks and liked the title and the cover. I have a fantasy of going to work a summer on a dude ranch which is how this guy started so it sounded like a good fit.

Except he’s a whiner. Oh, life is so hard. Yeah, like we all haven’t gotten ourselves into a hard place where everything was bad and then we made some more wrong decisions but still we lived to tell about it.

He’s a Chicago city boy who thought two years of dude wrangling and a year on someone else’s cattle farm bought him enough smarts to have daddy buy him his own ranch in a climate he didn’t know shit about. Big surprise he failed. Anyone would. Especially anyone who found themselves incapable of asking questions of the surrounding ranchers who’s cattle weren’t all falling over dead. But really, you can’t expect someone who finds fish trapped in a shrinking puddle and doesn’t choose to eat them himself, or who faces a downer calf and chooses the slow death of suffocation rather than the quick one of a shot to the head, and who then takes it to the dump instead of puts it in his freezer as veal, to make it. The photo on the front of the cowboy in the grocery store was telling I guess.

Still, it was interesting enough. Not the story but looking at his writing and his life as an observer, musing over the choices he made (why document this exactly) and the way he chose to describe them.

I hope he is happier working for someone else than managing his own ranch (I can see why that would be for a lot of us), but really, I hate memoirs of failure. You can learn a lot from other people’s failures but really, I know enough of them in person already.

At first I found this book really irritating to read. Who CARES about your divorce, lady! But then I found it enjoyable enough. And there was one absolutely dynamite quote: “We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses — one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is — which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?”

And I’m with her on “any excuse for a party”.

This book was easy to read and it explores some interesting territory but it doesn’t ask the questions that its story longs to. Like, was his entire disease actually caused all along by all the drugs he was taking. That would be my take on it.

Still, it is heartening and strengthening to my own biases that he overcame such huge MH issues through nothing but his choices. We choose our minds.

Sad that the medical and industrial/school complex caused his suffering for so many years, along with his parents trusting the doctors more than the kid.

Terrific book. If I had the money, I’d take all his classes.

This is a fascinating and an infuriating book. First of all, the author doesn’t know how to tell and weave a story. But she documents thoroughly so at least you know when she is conjecturing herself and when she has evidence to back something up.

Second of all, the author is a total product of modern times, unable to imagine what life for Martha might have been like. I say this because the author states that Martha’s knowing what the various internal organs of a human were at an autopsy was evidence of her medical knowledge when any idiot who has ever killed a chicken for Sunday dinner knows what all the internal organs are, and when they don’t look right.

Second and a half, that is, a continuation of above, the author feels the need to insert her opinion that Martha strongly values her “career” but the author never feels the need to conjecture that Martha loves her family, or values her garden.

But despite the author’s shortcomings, the story and its insights into life and culture are compelling.

Like all of Maya’s writing, enjoyable and sometimes surprising, and supremely well written.

Very short, sweet vignettes, most some sort of morality tale. Lovely, easy, sweet read.

I have read this before. And I’m sure there are other Sun Bear books in my library — time for me to organize it so I can find them! It is time for me to read this again as I’ve met someone who for years worked with Sun Bear.

(Spirits, many thanks.)