The very least you need to know about Oliver Twist for when you want to sound like you know lots of other things is that it’s the one about the pickpockets. (“Oh yes, that’s the one about the pickpockets.”) Beyond that some of the characters are among the most famous in Dickens: Fagin, a creepy old miser who nevertheless strikes me as a sad character, keeps a ragged little gang of orphans whom he has taught to rob the rich of London. The Artful Dodger, his star pupil, recruits Oliver, who has run away from his employment as a “mute,” a pathetic-looking person who trails along behind the coffin in a burial procession to encourage weeping, gnashing of teeth, and more business for the undertaker. Finally, there’s Bill Sykes, one of literature’s most famous sociopaths, his bull terrier, and Nancy, the prostitute who loves Bill and whom he murders.

Oliver began life as an “item of mortality” in a workhouse under the supervision of a beadle (a minor parish official) named Mr. Bumble. Dickens is relentless detailing how Oliver, is “cuffed and buffeted through the world—despised by all and pitied by none,” and left at the workhouse where “twenty or thirty other juvenile offender against the poor laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing. . .”

His original readers couldn’t get enough of the descriptions of workhouse abuse and filthy slums much like those who can’t wait for another episode of Breaking Bad. It doesn’t really matter what century or decade, it’s all the same phenomenon. More than the just the sensationalism, it’s about being told a story. Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’ early novels and the first one to be carefully planned and plotted before it came out in monthly serialized episodes.

Reading Oliver Twist this time, I skipped over the details of beatings and of the sadism. I’m not sure how I ever got through it when I read in junior high school. The musical Oliver! had just been launched and that must have helped me with the plot and the setting. But all those happy homeless children, chimney sweeps, and wretched poor dancing through the London slums to upbeat, choreographed music frothed over the darkness and the pain in the novel. The movie was like a Disneyworld’s Adventure in Seven Dials.

Here’s a quotation from Chapter XVII: “It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alteration, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.”

It seemed to me there was precious little comedy in Oliver Twist. Mr. Bumble is sometimes funny, the Artful Dodger is entertaining, and there’s a fellow who is always threatening to eat his head. But there’s also streaky bacon in the alteration of goodness with evil. Oliver is rescued from Fagin’s gang by benevolent old Mr. Brownlow. Just when it looks as though all will be well, but since you’re not a third of the way through the book, you know it won’t be, Oliver is re-kidnapped by Nancy and Bill Sykes who are associates of Fagin. Nancy develops a soft spot for Oliver. She protects him from Bill and lays plans to help him escape.

Meantime Bill takes Oliver on a housebreaking expedition in south London. Their raid on the Maylie home fails and Bill gets away but Oliver is shot by the butler. (“The two women-servants ran upstairs to carry the intelligence that Mr. Giles had captured a robber; and the tinker busied himself in endeavouring to restore Oliver, lest he should die before he could be hanged.” Chapter XXVIII) Instead of twisting in the wind—now halfway through the story—Oliver is taken into the Maylie home, nursed back to health, and befriended by the (adopted)daughter, Rose.

The bacon tacks back. Fagin re-kidnaps Oliver yet again. A shadowy figure named Monk who turns out to be Oliver’s half-brother lays the infrastructure to diddle Oliver out of any –heretofore unsuspected–family money and connections. Nancy visits Rose and makes arrangements to restore Oliver to the Maylie’s. Bill Sykes gets wind of Nancy’s scheme. In a dark, horrendous scene, he bludgeons her to death.

By the time the story is fully cooked, we learn that Rose Maylie is Oliver’s long-lost aunt, and that Mr. Brownlow is an old friend of Oliver’s deceased father. Fagin is hanged, Bill Sykes commits suicide and the Artful Dodger is sent to a penal colony, grinning and mugging all the way.

Here are a few lines I enjoyed:

* “You shall read them. . . and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, that is, in some cases; because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” Chapter XIV

* “A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counselor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.” Chapter XXXVII

* And the most famous quotation of them all:

“‘. . .the law supposes that your wife acts under your discretion.’

‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass—a idiot. . .’” Chapter LI

I’ve noticed that lots of writers do poems or prose pieces when they come upon significant birthdays and since I hope to be a writer if I grow up, I thought I’d mention that I turned 60 this month. A herd of my compatriots, all born in the Year of the Horse, 1954, have done or are doing the same. It’s both exhilarating and excruciating to be the center of attention so that it will be with both regret and relief that I watch time gallop on until I am the one picking up duty-free whisky for someone else (Eileen), or practicing making penuche frosting for a birthday cake request (Nina), catering a weekend at the ocean (Susan), popping by with flowers (Anna), making me some gorgeous earrings (Madelaine),treating me to a mani-pedi (Chris, the unclassifable), or contributing to the whole Facebook blizzard thing.

Festivities began early in the month with a small group of us who rented my two favorite cabins at my favorite ocean resort, The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach. What with five women, I knew there would be too much food but we had a professional caterer (Susan, wittiest woman I know and my copy editor)to organize everything. In the car on the ride down, we had A Conversation about Bacon that went, to the best of my recollection, like this:

Susan: I thought about getting a pound of bacon but then thought better of it.

Elena: I love bacon, especially at the ocean on a cold morning.

Gwen: I get Hempler.

Susan: Thick cut cooks up the best and did you know bacon should be baked in the oven, not fried on the stove?

Elena: I don’t eat enough bacon.

Gwen: A pound of bacon is a good thing to share with a group. Else one might eat the whole thing alone.   .    .  in a locked room.

A shout of laughter was followed by a silence in which I, at least, recalled times I had closed myself into a room to eat something I did not want to share.

Our first morning at the ocean, Gwen disappeared early in her Murano and returned with a stack of newspapers (Susan needed crossword puzzles) and a pound of bacon. My wish was someone’s command, I guess. Being the center of attention has its rewards but it can be excruciating for a reasonably healthy human being. I enjoyed not having KP duties or having to cook, but I dealt with the near constant deference to The Birthday Princess by getting the giggles a number of times, usually over things that were not inherently funny at all. If I think about it I can still laugh til I cry over the following:

Nina was telling the story of the time her then eight year old daughter (and my piano student) Jocelyn went to Sweden with family friends.

“Was that a non-stop flight Seattle to Stockholm?” I don’t know why I thought I needed to know this. “They must have had to stop at least once somewhere—like Minneapolis or something.”

“That’s right,” Nina said. “They had to pick up all the other Scandinavians who were going to Sweden.”

My actual birthday was yesterday, Tuesday, the day I paint with (a different) Susan and Madelaine (aka Hillaire Squelette who did the cartoon for my memoir.) We’ve been painting every Tuesday morning for five years. Five years. Yesterday Susan gave me a gratifyingly odd card, which she had been holding onto for years to give to someone when the occasion fell on a Tuesday. It’s a picture of two enormous feet coming through the end of a contorted pipe.

“I can do that,” it reads. “But not on a Tuesday. For that is my day of thrust in the opposite direction.”

There’s an idea for the rest of my life. Though I wouldn’t care to put myself through a pipe, I like the idea of thrusting in the opposite direction one day a week.  .   . at least one day a week.

By Susan Mrosek  The Pondering Pool 

I loved this book. Loved it. If you’re an old English major whose read some Dickens, can keep David and Oliver separate, can knit a pattern of names in the fog of Chancery, and are looking for a Dickens that’s completely new to you, read Barnaby Rudge. Or make it your first Dickens. I was so caught up in the characters that halfway through I had to read the synopsis in my Oxford Companion to Dickens because I didn’t think I could continue living unless I could be re-assured that Barnaby and his pet raven Grip would be alive and okay in the end.

I need to clarify the word okay. Barnaby Rudge is what the characters in the book call “a sort of natural.” He’d be on anti-psychotic medication today and we’d all be poorer for it. Here’s Barnaby on the subject of clothes drying on the line:

“. . . do you mark how they whisper in each other’s ears; then dance and leap, to make believe they are in sport? Do you see how they stop for a minute, when they think there is no one looking, and mutter among themselves again; and how they roll and gambol delighted with the mischief they’ve been plotting?”

When it is pointed out that “they are only clothes, “ Barnaby says:

“Clothes! Why how much better to be silly than as wise as you! You don’t see shadowy people there, like those that live in sleep—not you. Nor eyes in knotted panes of glass, nor swift ghosts when it blows hard. . .not you! I lead a merrier life than you with all your cleverness.”

Barnaby’s companion in life—other than his mother who watches over him with great compassion and understanding—is his raven Grip. I worried about this bird for 700 pages. Everywhere Barnaby showed up I needed to know if Grip was with him and Dickens never left me worrying for long.

Grip has quite a vocabulary: “I’m a devil, Never say die, Polly put the kettle on.”

After a day of rambling over the countryside, Barnaby tells his mother that when the wind rolls Grip over in the dust, he “turns manfully to bite it.  .  . and has quarreled with every bowing twig.”

“The raven, in his little basket at his master’s back, hearing frequent mention of his name in a tone of exultation, expressed his sympathy by.  .  . running over his various phrases of speech with such rapidity, and in so many varieties of hoarseness, that they sounded like the murmurs of a crowd of people.”

“He takes such care of me besides!” said Barnaby.  .  . “He watches all the time I sleep, and when I shut my eyes. . He keeps his eye on me the while.  .  .”

The raven crowed again in a rapturous manner which plainly said, “Those are certainly some of my characteristics, and I glory in them.”

Dickens describes Grip as being “alive to everything his master was unconscious of,” a notion that made me put down the book and burst into tears.

Barnaby is the titular character. I read somewhere that Dickens almost called the book Gabriel Varden so I want you to remember Gabriel for later. But first his wife Mrs. Varden, who reminded me of my own mother.  She is definitely “a type.”  Here’s a little exchange of the Vardens:

“Well, well,” said the locksmith. “That’s settled then.”

“Oh yes,” rejoined his wife. “Quite.  .  . I shall not contradict you. I know my duty. I need know it, I’m sure. I’m often obliged to bear it in mind, when my inclination perhaps would be for the moment to forget it.  .  .” And so, with a might show of humility and forgiveness, she folded her hands, and looked round again, with a smile which plainly said, “If you desire to see the first and foremost among female martyrs, here she is, on view.”

I don’t know who’s in charge of these things but here’s a scene that was replicated 150 years later between my mother and me:

“Dolly had thrown herself upon the sofa.  .  . with her face buried in her hands was crying. . .

At first sight of this phenomenon.  .  . Mrs. Varden expressed her belief that never was any woman so beset as she; that her life was a continued scene of trial; that whenever she was disposed to be well and cheerful, so sure were the people around her to throw.  .  . a damp upon her spirits;, and that as she had enjoyed herself that day, and Heaven knew it was very seldom that she did enjoy herself, so she was now to pay the penalty. . . poor Dolly grew none the better for these restoratives.  .  . though Dolly was in a swoon, it was rendered clear to the meanest capacity, that Mrs. Varden was the sufferer.” (Italics mine)

Barnaby Rudge is actually an historical novel, recounting some unpleasantness called The Gordon Riots that took place in London between the times of the American and French Revolutions. Again, I don’t know who’s in charge of these things, but the riots took place in 1780 during the same first week of June that I read the book in 2014.  It was a movement that got out of hand after a protestant named George Gordon started a petition to repeal an earlier law that had lifted restrictions on people of the Catholic faith. Dickens begins the build-up:

“If a man had stood on London Bridge, calling till he was hoarse, upon passers-by, to join with Lord George Gordon, although for an object which no man understood.  .  . and which in that very incident had a charm of its own, the probability is that he might have influenced a score of people in a month. If all zealous Protestants had been publicly urged to join an association for the avowed purpose of singing a hymn or two occasionally, and hearing some indifferent speeches made, and ultimately petitioning Parliament not to pass an act abolishing penal laws against Catholics.  .  . matters so far removed from the business and bosom of the mass, might perhaps have called together a few hundred people. But when vague rumors got abroad that.  .  . a secret power was mustering against the government for undefined and mighty purposes; then the air was filled with whispers of a confederacy among the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England, establish an inquisition in London, turn the pens of Smithfield Market into stakes and cauldrons.  .  . and by-gone bugbears which had lain quietly in their graves centuries, were raised again to haunt the ignorant and credulous.  .  . then the mania spread indeed.  .  . and grew forty thousand strong.”

Much like what goes on today between political parties and with just as much grasp of reality, people turned their insides out in the form of screaming against Popish plots, and the fire was lit. Dickens description of the massing on London is truly exciting, and with the help of a little map in the Oxford World’s Classics edition, easy to visualize. When it was over in the space of about a week, 200 (historians put it at 850) people were dead, and 72 private homes and four prisons plus numerous businesses had been burned. A distillery was burnt with the loss of 120,000 gallons of alcohol with rioters dying from alcohol poisoning.

In the first half of the book we meet Barnaby and Grip, the Vardens, other families, the usual collection of Dickensian odious characters, and those in charge of comic relief. In some cases the odious characters are also the comic ones. Also in the first half of the book, a mystery is presented. The flowing of the mystery and all its tributaries sweeps Barnaby (and Grip) into the formation of the mob. Barnaby thinks the riots are great fun. He mimics the slogans– Grip learns them, too—and carries a flag. He inadvertently becomes a hero for the Protestant side, is arrested and sentenced to hang.

While Barnaby waited to be hung along with the coward/bully hangman Ned Dennis (a historical figure) and the truly creepy, ugly, and probably stinking Hugh, I read the story’s synopsis to calm myself, and the three of them had this exchange:

“Dennis. . trembled so that all his joints and limbs seemed racked by spasms. Turning from this wretched spectacle, he (Hugh) called to Barnaby, who stood apart.

“What cheer, Barnaby? Don’t be downcast, lad. Leave that to him.”

“Bless you,” cried Barnaby. “I’m not frightened, Hugh. I’m quite happy. I wouldn’t desire to live now, if they’d let me. Look at me. Am I afraid to die? “

Hugh gazed for a moment at his face, on which there was a strange unearthly smile: and at his eye, which sparkled brightly. . .”

This was another point at which I burst into tears, even though I had just re-assured myself that Barnaby would be pardoned. He is indeed pardoned at the 11th hour, thanks to the efforts of Gabriel Varden. Besides being a lovely, likeable man, and the ethical anchor of the book, Gabriel acquits himself admirably in the riots. He faces down Hugh and Dennis while being held at gunpoint, refusing to submit to their demand that he open the lock of Newgate Prison –the lock he had made. Barnaby and Gabriel both exhibit fearlessness, the difference being that Gabriel does so in full consciousness of what it means to die.

Gabriel loves Barnaby. He thinks of him as a son. He moves heaven and earth to secure his pardon. He even steps aside and lets the novel be named Barnaby Rudge instead of Gabriel Varden.

If you have never read Dickens, this isn’t the book to start with.  Not that I think it’s the one Dickens novel everyone hopes to read before they die but I thought that made for a good opening sentence.  I wonder how often the novel is taught or if many people –like me for instance—get the notion that they want to read all the novels of Dickens and inevitably get to it.  Have you heard of the Golden Dustman?  Nobby Boffin? Lizzie Hexam? I thought not.  They haven’t entered the cultural atmosphere the way Madame LeFarge, Ebenezer Scrooge or Miss Havisham have.

It’s a long book: 822 pages in the Oxford World Classics edition.  It’s always a little alarming to me when a book has a cast of characters list.  On the other hand it’s a nice service.  I photocopied and enlarged it, referred to it often and used it as a bookmark.

The expression “Our Mutual Friend” occurs at page 111.  Now here comes a convoluted Dickens plot line.  A man left all his money to his son– John Harmon—on condition he marry a certain woman, Bella Wilfur.  It was a nasty thing to do and the man was a nasty piece of work but as it turns out, Bella wasn’t.  She was quite a lovely woman and John was quite a nice man.  But neither of them knew that nor did they know if they would find the other attractive.

On a ship returning to England after hearing of his father’s death, John trades places with a man named Julius Handford with the idea that the masquerade would buy him a little time to get to know Bella. But Julius Handford drowns.  The dead man is fished out of the river by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie.  John/Julius goes to the morgue.  This accomplishes two things: he ascertains that the dead man is Julius Handford, the fellow he is impersonating, and it allows a solicitor, Mortimer Lightwood to get a good look at him. 

Mortimer has been engaged to deal with the will of John Harmon. Now that the main beneficiary is –apparently–dead, John/Julius thinks it efficacious to change his identity again and he chooses the name John Rokesmith.  The first thing he does as John Rokesmith is find a room in the home of the Wilfurs.  Secondly he finds employment with Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, secondary beneficiaries of his father’s will.   So he becomes the mutual friend of the Wilfurs and the Boffins.  The Boffins invite Bella to live with them, recognizing that she, in a tangential way, deserves to share in the good fortune.  From these two vantage points John Rokesmith can observe Bella.

A lot of watching and spying and hiding goes on in this book.  John Rokesmith’s observing of Bella is a little creepy but it rights itself in the end.  More creepy still is a parallel plot which involves as psychopathic a character as I think one will find in Dickens, Bradley Headstone (such a name!) who stalks Eugene Wrayburn, a solicitor because they both are interested in Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of Gaffer Hexam, the riverman, and then stalks Lizzie Hexam herself.

The business of fishing things out of the river is paralleled by the business of fishing things out of the trash, which the British politely call “dust.”  John Harmon’s father made his fortune managing what Americans would call a garbage dump but what Dickens calls “dust mounds.” When the novel opens, the Boffins are the dump caretakers in a house on the edge of the garbage heaps.  When they come into their fortune, they have a glorious home built and Nobby is nicknamed “The Golden Dustman.” 

That’s probably all you need to know to nod your head intelligently at a dinner party or book club.  If you read the next several sentences without attempting to make any great sense of them, you’ll enter into the topsy-turvy world of a Dickens’ plot:

Lizzie goes into hiding to get away from Bradley Headstone but the father of her friend Jenny Wren, another creepy man who has the DTs, rats out her whereabouts. 

Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood who was initially thought to have murdered Gaffer Hexam, and who is continually trying to swear “Alfred David” (an affidavit) that he didn’t, get into a fight and kill each other.

Mr. Venus a taxidermist and collector of bones has actually bought the leg bone (how weird is that?)of Silas Wegg who gets about on his peg leg and who tries to scam the Boffins. 

The Lammles married each other because each thought the other was rich.  On their honeymoon they discovered that neither had a penny.  They weave in and out of the novel scheming and conniving to keep their appearance in society, which is represented by the aptly named Veneerings.

The scrambling to keep one’s veneer in society is paralleled by the marriage of Mr. Eugene Rayburn and Lizzie Hexam. From two different classes of society, they have both been through so much they don’t care what the upper class thinks of them.  While high society is discussing the scandal, Mr Twemlow who himself rather falls through the cracks of the upper crust makes the pronouncement that shuts them all up:

“If this gentleman’s feelings of gratitude, of respect, of admiration, and affection, induced him to marry this lady.  .  .I think he is the greater gentlemen for the action and makes her the greater lady.”

Finally, to get back to the main plot which is a Pride and Prejudice sort of courtship minus the stalking, John Rokesmith and Bella marry.  Only after she becomes pregnant does he reveal that he is John Harmon the man she was expected to marry anyway.  And even then the revelation only comes about because Mortimer Lightwood who John has tried to stay clear of, recognizes him as Julian Handford whom the police have been looking for ever since the drowning of the supposed John Harmon.  Finally it is revealed that the Boffins have been in on the deception from the beginning.

George Orwell in his marvelous essay about Dickens comments that what sets Dickens’ apart is not his use of detail so much as his use of unnecessary detail.  Here, I think, is an example of what he was talking about.  What is the gratuitously unnecessary detail in the following sentence from Our Mutual Friend?

“Her letter folded, sealed and directed, and her pen wiped and her middle finger wiped, and her desk locked up and put away, and these transactions performed with an air of business sedateness which the Complete British Housewife might have assumed.  .  .she placed her husband in his chair and placed herself upon her stool.”

I think the unnecessary detail is that wiped middle finger.

Because there aren’t a lot of famous quotations born out of this novel—at least not ones that I recognized–, here are some bits that can be enjoyed without having to keep track of any particular plot line or character:

*Mrs. Wilfur sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history, until Miss Bella appeared.  .  .

*There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being trained in her mother’s art of prancing in a stately manner without ever getting on.  But the high parental action was not yet imparted to her, and in truth she was but an undersized damsel with high shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose.  .  . Miss Podsnap’s life had been, from her first appearance on this planet, altogether of a shady order.  .  . (she)was likely to get little good out of association with other young persons, and had therefore been restricted to companionship with not very congenial older persons and with massive furniture.

*Ma was talking at her usual cantor, with arched head and mane, opened eyes and nostrils.

*Among these correspondents are several daughters of general officers, long accustomed to every luxury of life (except spelling).  .  .

*Veneering then says to Mrs. Veneering, “We must work,” and throws himself into a Hansom cab.  Mrs. Veneering presses her aquiline hands upon her brow, to arrange the throbbing intellect within; orders out the carriage; and repeats in a distracted and devoted manner, compounded of Ophelia, and any self-immolating female of antiquity you may prefer, “We must work.”

*(Silas Wegg, himself nearly illiterate, reads to Mr Boffin from what they insist is The Decline and Fall of the Rooshan Empire several times a week.  Here he is one evening:) “Mr Wegg’s laboring bark became beset by polysyllables, and embarrassed among a perfect archipelago of hard words.  It being necessary to take soundings every minute and to feel the way with the greatest caution.  .  .”

 Herein ends my Alfred David on Our Mutual Friend.

I read The Old Curiosity Shop because it was the only Dickens checked in at the Greenwood branch of the library on the day I went looking for a new Dickens.  Throughout its 554 pages plus explanatory notes, I thought I didn’t like it but I kept reading.  Every day I measured the pages read against pages to read and I kept reading.  After I finished it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I decided I liked it –aptly–for a lot of curious little reasons.

The physical Old Curiosity Shop is vacated and closed up about a sixth of the way through the narrative. It’s owned by a nasty named Daniel Quilp and is managed and inhabited by an old man whose name we never learn and his granddaughter, Nell.  When Nell and her grandfather leave London, they meet up with collections of curious characters as though to suggest they have taken the shop with them. 

I had great difficulty with the main characters, especially Quilp. He’s malignant and sadistic, a queer old creep as his name suggests–queer in its 19th century, or if you will, Dickensian meaning.  He disturbed me.  I didn’t want to read about his abuse of his wife or his relentless and malevolent stalking of Nell. 

What kept me reading were the secondary characters.  I liked Kit Nubbles, a loyal friend of Nell’s who is goodness personified without sentimentality. He’s naïve and trusting, which gets him into trouble, but Dickens gets him out again.  Dick Swiveller keeps track of the streets he can’t walk down because of all the tradesmen to whom he owes money. Dick puns and quotes from popular songs of the day like a middle class Lord Peter Wimsey.  He is nimble of body and verbiage, prefiguring nearly every Wodehouse character that was to come.  Sally Brass is also taken with Dick and his antics.  Sally Brass has “reddish demonstrations that might be taken for a beard,” but as Dickens suggests “these were, however, in all probability, nothing more than eye-lashes in the wrong place.”  Sally Brass is both creepy and compelling.

I looked forward to every scene where I might encounter two very minor figures who popped up on the fringes of things: Tom Scott and Whiskers, the pony.  Tom Scott is a kind of personal assistant to Quilp.  He lives on the premises of Quilp’s man cave down by the docks where he has a chop-shop for ships.  Just a boy, he has a neat trick: he likes to walk on his hands and stand on his head and this drives Quilp crazy.

When we first meet Tom, Quilp has gone to his place of business where “the first object that presented itself to his view was a pair of very imperfectly shod feet elevated in the air with the soles upwards, which remarkable appearance was referable to the boy, who being of an eccentric spirit and having a natural taste for tumbling was now standing on his head and contemplating the aspect of the river under these uncommon circumstances.” 

Quilp “punched” him but Tom is not afraid of Quilp, which makes me wonder if Quilp has given him brain damage from all the physical abuse:

“’Now, said Quilp, passing into the counting house, ‘you mind the wharf. Stand upon your head again and I’ll cut one of your feet off.’

The boy made no answer but directly Quilp had shut himself in, stood on his head before the door then walked on his hands to the back and stood on his head there.  .  .”

When Quilp sails off in a boat with Nell, Tom taunts him by standing on his head “on the extreme verge of the wharf, during the whole time they cross the river.”

Another time when Quilp “collared” him, Tom jumped away and “walked upon his hands to the window and –if the expression be allowable—looked in with his shoes: besides rattling his feet upon the glass like a Banshee upside down.”

At the inquest after Quilp’s death, Tom is the only one who shed any tears.  When he also tried to assault the jury, presumably out of grief, he was ejected from the court, at which point “he darkened its only window by standing on his head upon the sill.  .  .”

Whiskers the pony belongs to an elderly couple, the Garlands, who regularly drive him into town to see their solicitor.  Or it might be said that the pony drove them:

“It was plain that the utmost the pony would consent to do was to go his own way up any street that the old man wished to traverse, but it was an understanding between them that he must do this after his own fashion or not at all.  .  . the pony came trotting round the corner of the street, looking as obstinate as a pony might, and picking his steps as if he were spying about for the cleanest places, and would by no means dirty his feet or hurry himself inconveniently. Behind the pony sat the little old gentleman, and by the old gentleman’s side sat the little old lady.  .  . they arrived within some half a dozen doors of the Notary’s house, when the pony, deceived by a brass-plate beneath a tailor’s knocker, came to a halt, and maintained by a sturdy silence, that that was the house they wanted.

‘Now, Sir, will you ha’ the goodness to go on; this is not the place,’ said the old gentleman.

The pony looked with great attention into a fire-plug which was near him, and appeared to be quite absorbed in contemplating it.

‘Oh dear, such a naughty Whisker!’ cried the old lady. ‘After being so good too, and coming along so well.  .  .”

The pony having thoroughly satisfied himself as to the nature and properties of the fire-plug, looked into the air after his old enemies the flies, and as there happened to be one of them tickling his ear at that moment he shook his head and whisked his tail, after which he appeared full of thought but quite comfortable and collected. The old gentleman having exhausted his powers of persuasion, alighted to lead him; whereupon the pony, perhaps because he held this to be a sufficient concession, perhaps because he happened to catch sight of the other brass-plate, or perhaps because he was in a spiteful humour, darted off with the old lady and stopped at the right house, leaving the old gentleman to come panting on behind.”

Tom Scott and Whiskers have no real bearing on the story, but they served to keep my following the main plot which is briefly this: Nell’s grandfather has a gambling habit and cannot pay his rent on the shop.  Because they are at the mercy of Quilp who wants to appropriate the 13-year old Nell as his second wife—he would murder the first one without compunction – the two of them steal away into the country in the middle of the night.  They wander, beg, and work for food and shelter. Inevitably the grandfather gambles away their money. Nell gets sick and dies.

I had a difficult time with Nell: the virtuous, pure, innocent, all good, all loving, angelic martyr.  It isn’t that a 13 year old orphan isn’t a sympathetic figure but I am not the first to suggest that Dickens overdid her just a tad.  I skimmed through the numerous passages where he strains to bring his talent to the level of her great purity, the result being the most tedious sentimentality.  I gather the Victorians loved this sort of thing but I was frankly glad when she was out of the story.

Meantime people, Quilp among them, try to find Nell because her grandfather has hinted that she will come into a lot of money when he dies.  Since he, in fact, expects to win that money gambling, there is no money except for the few pounds Nell has sewn into the hem of her skirt.  Kit searches for Nell because he loves her.  A stranger searches for Nell because he is, in fact, her father.  Dick Swiveller, Sally Brass and the usual collection of colorful characters that live and move and have their being in Dickens’ head all have some interest in finding little Nell because they all think there’s money to be had. 

The characters who make out happily in the end are Kit Nubbles whose goodness is rewarded and Dick Swiveller, the only character who matures while still maintaining his charm.  And Whiskers.

Because there was no particular place in my meandering reflections on The Old Curiosity Shop to say this, I will say now that in it Dickens used the word avuncular as a noun as in “She needs an avuncular.”  Kind of like “The witch has a familiar.”  I liked that.

The Old Curiosity Shop is the source of a famous quotation that is lovely on some days, sentimental on others and delusional much of the time.  I see it on calendars and mugs and T-shirts: “I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”

I could say the same things about cats. Reading this book can change ones sentimentality set-point.

I knew the day was coming that I would embark on a cruise through Charles Dickens, I just didn’t know when the ship would sail. Reading the 38 plays of Shakespeare two summers ago was as a life-changing experience, not just because Shakespeare became like the grandfather I never knew, but also because I didn’t think I possessed the concentration needed to follow through on such a wordy project.  When I think of wordy, however, I think of Dickens.  I remember him from high school as having page-long sentences that wound around every house on the block before finally coming home.

Small things tip us into larger ones.  I read five novels of Charles Dickens in high school because of the Monkees, that pseudo-rock band that was more accessible to junior high school girls in the mid-sixties than even the Beatles were.  One of the Monkees, Davy Jones, was a British kid from Manchester who had played the Artful Dodger in the stage production of Oliver!  Davy Jones, being my crush of choice of all the available Pauls, Johns, Peters, and Mickeys, I –of course—had to read Oliver Twist.  I went on to read David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Tale of Two Cities. For no other reason than that Davy Jones played the Artful Dodger in the stage production of Oliver!

Small things tip us into larger ones.  I loved George Orwell’s essay on Dickens, which I read during last winter’s Orwell Fest. Then last month I somewhere picked up the stray information that Hard Times was one of Dickens’ shortest and easiest novels.  The next day I ran across a 25 cent copy at a garage sale. I bought it and read it. It served the purpose of convincing me that long sentences in high school were now not quite so long. Especially not since reading the canon of Shakespeare, not to mention four volumes in the Norton Anthology series and two thirds of Ulysses at which point I am stuck.

In any case I decided this would be the summer of Dickens. Besides the novels, which are mighty, great doorstops of books, he also wrote short stories and articles and letters.  I’m not planning to read everything.  I want to read at least enough of his work to be able to use the word Dickensian with more intelligence than pretension.

So I read Hard Times. That was a month ago.  Since I don’t want to get up and get the book, let’s see what my retention is worth.  It takes place in fictitious Coketown in the industrial north of England, a town that manufactures cloth.  The book begins with Mr. Gradgrind, a teacher, bellowing to his class that FACTS are all that matter in the world.  That horrifying beginning sets the tone. 

Gradgrind has raised his family without regard to feelings of any kind.  His wife escapes into hypochondria and dies halfway through the book.  His son becomes a lazy, scheming, selfish man.  Gradgrind marries off his daughter Louisa to Mr. Bounderby, a banker who is 30 years older than her because it’s a rational thing to do.  He himself becomes an MP and goes to London.  Gradgrind is one of more sympathetic characters in the book because he changes.  His daughter is miserable with Bounderby and she confronts her parent about all that was lacking in her upbringing.  This was a curiously modern scene.  It reminded me of today’s therapeutic advice to confront the family members who have victimized you. Gradgrind softens, opens up and becomes a fuller human being.

Mr. Bounderby is a bounder—get it?  He has made up a story about himself as an orphan who created a life and got rich out of practically a piece of string and a couple of sticks.  But his (loving) mother shows near the end of the book and unwittingly unveils her son as the, well, bounder, that he is.

Mr. Bounderby has a menial who either is or thinks she is a member of the impoverished gentry.  Mrs.Sparsit.  Dickens continually represents her as one with “Coriolanus” eyebrows partly to suggest her aristocratic background, and partly to reinforce the visual of dark, thick eyebrows.  Here’s one of the funniest lines of the book:

“So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecelia Jupe off with them to Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad. And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits.  And Mrs. Sparsit got behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the evening.

That was worth my getting up off the couch, getting the book, and finding the quotation.

I stretched happily at the back door on the morning I was to plant my takings from the Tilth Sale.  I had waited almost a week for a nice hunk of time to get out there and wallow in the earth.  I planted the chard in back, the nigella in front, and the herbs in pots.  I took a flat of ground cover to the bed at the fence that is choking with poppies about to bloom.  I’ve got green and sweet peas all along the fence as well as a few sprouts of corn and sunflower.  There’s a new grape finding its way along one part of the fence. At the other end is a yosta berry, a goose-currant bush, that has made itself at home over the years since I planted a few starts for no better reason than someone gave them to me.

The yosta berries are sour and up until last year I ignored them.  They formed, they fell off, and I hardly noticed.  But last year I tried putting them with the raspberries I infuse in vodka for three months.  The result after adding a sugar syrup surprised every taste bud in the mouth.  I stopped ignoring the yosta berry.

Watching its beautiful dark green leaves dress its independent espaliering, I wondered how many berries I’d get this year.  I thought I had been monitoring the yosta, but I must have looked away for about two minutes.  On this particular morning I was parceling out the ground cover in front of it when I happened to look up and notice some of the leaves had been eaten away.  I looked further– up and up and up—and saw that all the leaves had been stripped right off the bush almost up to the top. 

Up at the very top the leaves were drooping somewhat.  I turned one over to see 12 or 15 bloated greenish-black worms with tiny white spots lounging on the leaf like so many drunks at a frat party. Every leaf was another fraternity house.  Leaf after leaf was full of these, these.  .  . louts, burping and leering at me.  They had gorged themselves on the entire bush!

I started squishing them, whole handfuls of them and they squelched as though I had my hands in human intestines.  The more I squished, the more I found and the more frantically I turned over the leaves.  I think I might have been screaming. 

I checked all the plants close to the yosta.  There was an infestation of two kinds of aphids in a couple of the poppies.  It looked as though someone had emptied an entire pepper shaker over them. I know I screamed then. I yanked out the poppies.

I got my spray bottle of neem oil/Dr Bronner’s peppermint soap/cayenne. This was the day the spray bottle got temperamental and wouldn’t spray.  I shook it, I turned it upside down, I shook it again.  I cursed it.  Finally I took off the sprayer and pretty much emptied the entire bottle all over the yosta and every plant near it. Then I dusted the area with diatomaceous earth. 

I couldn’t stop re-living my showdown with those hideous, squelching worms.  I saw them everywhere.  A damp piece of banana peel on the kitchen floor was a bloated worm on my yosta berry.  A flutter of my hair meant one had dropped on my head while I was rampaging in the garden.  “Oh, god,” I thought. “Now the dreams are going to start!”

I was out there the next morning looking for the hangovers.  And again that evening.  Every day since then, I’ve been out at least once, checking what is clearly a stressed plant what with the denuding, the dousing and dusting, and the shrieks of a crazed gardener.  I squish a few more miscreants each visit.   I talk to the stems and berries and what few leaves are left, trying to reassure them.  Yesterday I gave them a big drink of fertilizer.

I’ve since learned that the little green worms are actually a particular kind of sawfly that love currant leaves.  There’s another sawfly that love rose leaves.  The day after I squished my last currant sawfly, I found tiny green ones feasting away on my roses. They had only gotten as far as the appetizer when I immediately bussed their table.

And so it goes in the garden. The game’s a-foot.  Next opponent: wasps.

Seattle Tilth is an organization that helps people to grow their own organic food.   They say this on their website in TilthSpeak, a dialect of GrantSpeak.  But that’s neither here nor there.  What is here, or rather was there is their spring edible plant sale, which I went to last Saturday.

It was Tim’s idea.  He’d been talking about it since, oh I don’t know, before I even knew him and I’ve known him for 15 years.  In case you’re new here, Tim is my friend who when he downsized, missed his garden so much I gave him mine.  We are into our second year of planning, digging, and planting and it’s been a fun collaboration.  When plants and gardening paraphernalia began showing up in stores, and when signs for sales starting sprouting at intersections, I asked Tim what his ideas were for new plants.

“Let’s see what they have at the Tilth Sale.”

That was the beginning.  Ensuing conversations went like this:

“Where would we get a thimbleberry?”

“The Tilth Sale might have one.”

“Two dollars a plant is pretty good for tomatoes, no?”

“Why don’t we wait for the Tilth Sale?

As the weekend of the sale got closer, the actual details came into focus.  For one, I would have to drive as I’m the one with a car. (I immediately and cravenly invited my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything to join us knowing that she would gladly drive. Or willingly.  If I begged.  But Gwen only does flowers.) If I was driving that would mean I would have to park.  Do you know how many places I don’t go simply because I have to park?  It’s not that I don’t know how to.  I actually do a smooth, efficient parallel park that I am quite proud of.  It’s the difficulty in finding a place to park in Seattle that foils me. In Wallingford, where the sale was, the cramped streets were already lined with cars on both sides, making them essentially one way roads. Trying to park or even drive two blocks in a row creates a back-up that can last fifteen minutes.

Secondly, there was the time of day. The sale started at 9:00.  Tim wanted to get there at 8:00.  That meant picking him up at 7:30.  On a Saturday morning.  My mornings are sacro-sanct.  It’s when I write and practice.  I’m up at first light these spring mornings and I love my routine.  I’m wide awake, functioning and happy as long as I don’t have to talk to anyone or get dressed.  I would have to do both those things in order to then stand in line for a whole hour in the rain waiting for the sale to start, fight and claw for half an hour like they do in Filene’s Basement, and then a second hour of standing in line, this time laden with dripping plants, and waiting for a cashier.  Even though I agreed to this violent disruption of my life, I felt whiny about it.

 The closer it got to the date of the sale, the more Tim talked about it, and in direct proportion, the less I wanted to go.

Finally I said: “I know you’re looking forward to this, but I need to say that I’m dreading it.”

“Well, look I can stand in line and you can get coffee and fun things to eat from the Vendors.”

“Vendors? Like taco trucks?”

“Well, yeah, but organic companies.  And there’ll be music.”

“MUSIC? Oh, god NO.”  I actually started to sweat.  “Music” at sales is always bad and in the rare instances that it’s good, it’s too loud.  “I need to remember to bring earplugs.”

If all this wasn’t enough, Tim decided we needed to plan what we would buy.  Hoping to discourage this, I gave him as tiny a window as I could for when I could get together and “plan,” but he made it work.  He printed out all 28 pages of the index of plants that would be for sale and we went through every frigging cultivar, a word I now know, to draw up a list of roughly 35 plants we would get.

“There’ll be map of where everything is so we can—“

“Oh god,” I interrupted him. “It says we are issued wristbands for our entrance time.  Are we even going to be out of there by noon?”

Everything, it seemed, was getting piled on the Tilth Sale until in my imagination it became as big, noisy, crowded and as gigantic a parking nightmare as the Puyallup Fair. 

Saturday morning I woke up feeling nauseated and the sky looked like it was timing itself to dump on Wallingford at 8:00.  I wasn’t actually vomiting and I didn’t think I could convincingly call in sick so I got in my car and drove down the street to pick up Tim.

He got in the car. “Now I’m dreading this,” he said.  “I looked on Google Earth and the place is already crowded.”

We drove gloomily to Wallingford.  Here’s how the morning went:  I found a place to park a half a block from the sale.  We were 20^th in a line that numbered 200 by 9:00. The (bad)music didn’t start until close to 9:00 and then after a half an hour or so it either stopped or I (unaccountably) stopped hearing it.  We had some fun conversations with interesting people.  I took a lovely walk around the Good Shepherd Center while Tim held our place in line. 

The organization of the tables of plants was a thing of beauty. And I have to say that I am glad we planned.  Otherwise I would have thrown up from sheer overstimulation. The sale was swarming with cheerful volunteers in bright orange vests, easy to spot, knowledgeable, and willing to do anything including hauling flats of plants and standing in line with them. When I called out “Hey orange person!” to get their attention, they laughed merrily. It didn’t rain. We were out by 9:50.

We came home happy and satisfied, bubbling over with plans to plant. I can’t wait til next year’s sale!

All Present Song Circle knows so many songs that we can’t get through them all in a session so last week we started at the back of the song sheets.  That was a bit of a mistake in that the sheets are confusing enough without having to work through them backwards.  The singers have a way of fidgeting with their sheets between songs so they lose their places.  I’ve re-worked the sheets four times trying to make them dementia friendly and I still haven’t got the right scheme. 

Jim dangled his 24-page songsheet by one page and and gave me A Look.

“What?” I said.  “You’re looking at me like you think I’m crazy.”

“You are. So am I.”

“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?”

Jim always wants to sing “The Old Rugged Cross.”  I told him that when I was studying voice and learning to sing Handel and Rossetti, I’d go home to my parents and demonstrate “Una voce poco fa” or “Let the Bright Seraphim.”  My mother would say, “Now sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’”

I never sang it for my mother, but I’ve sung it with Jim three times.  We only sing one verse.  I haven’t let on that I can’t get the other three out of my memory.

Jim seems to know every song I’ve thrown out there. 

“You’re amazing,” I told him.  “I know verses to gruesome hymns from growing up going to church three times a week and you know every word of Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

Most of the members of All Present are in their 70’s but there are a few from my generation.  Ex-flower children who want to sing Joan Baez and Dylan.  Roger especially wanted Dylan songs.  I asked him for titles. 

“I can’t think of any right now, but I have a book at home.”

“Can you bring the book? All I really need are titles.  I probably know all of the songs.”

Quizzically: “You didn’t get that in church.”

The last group on the song sheets are songs from musicals like Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, and My Fair Lady.  Last week The Other Jim and I sang “If I Loved You” from Carousel. The Other Jim has one of those golden tenor voices with Wagnerian power behind it.  I had penciled in some harmony notes for me and did my best to blend with him.  What emerged was unexpected and moving. 

The Other Jim punched the air. “Yes!!” he exclaimed.  He still had it.  He could sing!

When we sing songs like “Over the Rainbow,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (and especially “O Danny Boy”) we take inventory of who is crying and who needs a tissue.

“You’re so bad to make us sing these!” Helene said this week, tears running down her face.  She was beaming.

The next song was “Shall We Dance” from The King and I.  I grabbed Larry who was sitting on the end of the circle. “Dance with me,” I said.  Too late I realized he needed a cane to balance but he held on to me with his other hand and we danced.  Not quite like Deborah Kerr and Yul Brenner, but that’s a dance enshrined on film.  This was now.

That’s their great gift to me: All Present is just that.  It’s just for now.  It’s not for a performance later; it’s not to record and listen to. It’s just for that hour and a half when we sing and we can’t stop smiling at each other.

This first series is almost over.  We have one more session and then we sing on Saturday, April 26 at the Dementia Talent Show at the Ravenna Senior Center between 2:00–4:00 PM.  The public is invited.  They’ve given us a whole half hour.  At first I wondered what we would do, but then it came to me. Of course.  We will be All Present.  We will sing the songs we like the best, and we’ll do whatever occurs to us to do.  We may dance, we may cry, we may be crazy, but we won’t miss being present in the moment.  That’s more than just kind of nice.

Two huge raccoons raced in front of me last night when I was calling the cats.  The cats were sitting three yards away and refused to look at me, the person who feeds them.  They were like people at a sports event waiting for a moment they had anticipated and fantasized about all season.  The Running of the Raccoons.  For the next six months at ten o’clock at night, my cats will be in their lawn chairs with their Mojitos, waiting for the show.  They will ignore my calls for them to come in so I, the person who feeds them, can go to sleep.

It’s spring, the great turning of the earth.  The earth’s rotation to be sure, but there’s also been a great turning of the earth in my garden.  New beds have been dug and old ones expanded.  Seeds and starts are in the ground. Bare-root trees are showing signs of life.  I have done all I can to discourage scab, codling moths, and maggots to my Spartan apples. 

I don’t remember when I have been this ahead of the game.  It’s because for the first time since arthritis ruined me for ten hour days in the garden I have help.  A friend of mine whom I will call Tim (his name is Tim) recently moved into downsized digs six blocks away from me and for the first time in his life is without a garden.  One day last year he e-mailed out of the blue to say he can’t go another year without the earth and did I have any large gardening projects he could embark on.  You might well ask how did I get so lucky but I have no answer for that.

Last spring and summer was a process of exhuming a garden that had been neglected for several years and putting in a few new things.  I am not a great planner so except for a few plants, every day in the garden is like Christmas morning to me.  I tend to plant things and think, “OK, now that I’ll remember,” and neglect to set a marker.

I have showpieces: a tree peony, some magnificent lilacs, the Himalayan honeysuckle that I grew from a slip, the designer dahlias called “Wheels,” and the Peruvian Scilla.  When I found the Scilla several years ago, they were clogging up a small patch of garden in a sea of lawn.  Ever since I freed their great clumps of bulbs and planted them all over my property, they have rewarded me with great royal blue starbursts in sun, in shade, in pots, and with or without water.  They reward themselves with sexual orgies all winter long. 

Every February I get a purple carpet of early croci in pretty much every bit of yard that hasn’t been mowed. And finally there’s the Clerodendron (Glory Bower) that I grew from a sucker of my neighbor across the street.  I gave a sucker to Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything.  Thanks to this triumvirate, our section of Crown Hill smells like the perfume counter at Nordstroms on warm summer nights.

These are the highlights of what was there, if neglected, when Tim came in the gate, so to speak.  Since we’ve been collaborating, Tim has made a serious dent in the dandelion population, done a great deal of judicious transplanting and fertilizing. (The yard smells like a fish market.)  He’s attended to details that I don’t realize until weeks later, if at all.  However it did not escape my notice that he built a rock wall, which I call The Grotto, using hunks of concrete we have scavenged from the neighborhood and the great hunks of cement that once housed fence posts.

The story of those fence posts is this: I paid a former student a smallish amount of money to learn to build a fence.  He wanted the experience, I wanted the fence.  It worked out beautifully until two years after the fact and he had moved to California, the fence came down in a windstorm and crashed on my raspberries. 

When I paid a great deal of money to have a proper fence built, the builder said he would try to leave the hunks of cement in the ground.  When it proved impossible to work around them they got a new life as an unsightly heap in the southwest corner of the yard and began collecting moss.  Tim worked them, moss and all, into a garden wall, gradually building up raised beds, which we are filling in first of all with sub-soil from the cemetery next door, then topsoil from another part of the yard and finally compost.

Besides Tim whose organic gardening creds go back years and around the world, I have Matt, the yard guy who Gwen and I employ one day a week between us to do some of the hard and admittedly tedious work of the garden. The most recent addition to the Team Garden has been Little Miss Scarecrow with plastic bags stuffed into her waterproofed gear. What’s so nice about having help is that then I feel able to do what I can.  When I think I have to do it all, it’s so overwhelming that I don’t do anything, which pretty much describes the situation in the last several years.  Now I can do the things I most enjoy: weeding, and holding the hose in one hand and a Scotch in the other.

Expect to hear more.  Like how Tim almost murdered my kerria japonica and how I am spraying tender starts with a mixture of Neem oil, cayenne, and Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap.  And double feature night: The Running of the Raccoons and the Dancing of the Opossums.

The Grotto

Clerodendron

The Magnificent Lilacs

Wheels

Peruvian Scilla

The Early Croci