Category: life

Book Thoughts: Payback by Margaret Atwood

I knew that, in addition to her mind-blowing fiction, Margaret Atwood also writes some pretty decent poetry.  And now I come across her non-fiction book, Payback (Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.)

The book is as thought-provoking as I assumed anything by Atwood would be. (Okay, that sounds a little too  much like “How much wood would a woodchuck…) The book has nothing to do with managing your finances and everything  to do with examining the meanings and origins of the concept of debt.  What do we owe each other and why do we think we owe it? 

Of particular interest to fiction writers will be chapter three: Debt as Plot, which made me think that there aren’t even four basic plots. Perhaps there’s only one, and it is debt. Who owes what to whom, how did they get into that debt and how are they going to get out of it? She begins the chapter by saying “Without memory there is no debt. Put another way: without story there is no debt.”

She goes on to examine the story of debt in various works of literature, her rather obvious starting point being Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Some whopper of a debt there. She also discusses A Christmas Carol, Vanity Fair and, a less obvious choice, Wuthering Heights. Think that last title is about romance and affairs of the heart? Well, Atwood would have us know that the heart keeps a balance sheet.  Then too, Heathcliff uses financial debt to control those around him. 

After reading Payback I find myself examining many of my assumptions about life and human relationships. I also find myself reading fiction with a new eye. Want to  unravel the plot? Follow the debt.

In praise of unstructured being

Haven’t gotten much writing done lately. A cold has been working it’s way through the family, so lots of having the kids home from school. I’m trying to look at it as an opportunity to enjoy having some time with them, though the proliferation of snotty tissues detracts a bit. As soon as both kids were well again, school let out for a teacher work day. I’m off work from my steady paycheck job on Fridays, and I usually try to get in at least a morning worth of writing.  But again, I decided my kids won’t be around forever. They’re 13 & 10 right now, and the older one especially is gravitating more toward friends than parents. But yesterday, I had them to myself.

Besides, the weather did a turn-around.  Tuesday’s overnight low was around 6 degrees F.  Friday’s daytime high was around 67 degrees F. The 10-year-old needed a haircut. Since the salon we used is next door to a sandwich place, I decided we should pick up some lunch there.  My daughter (the teenager) suggested taking our food to a park for a picnic.  It was at this point that I realized how easy I am. All it took for me to swoon with joy was finding out she still wanted to do such a thing with her family.  

It was one of the happiest afternoons I’ve had in a while, a day at the park with the kids. We had no pressure, no agenda, no school or other activity for which we had to rush off, no goals to accomplish, nothing to do except enjoy the weather and be with each other.  We ended up at a creek that was still thick with inches of ice, despite the warm day. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, so the thaw was slow. The three of us spent a good hour sliding rocks and sticks on the ice, then throwing rocks to see if they’d break the ice, and occasionally examining rocks for fossils. 

Did this activity educate us in some way? Don’t know.  Did it improve their chances for future employment? Probably not. Was it worth the time we spent on it?  Absolutely. At the end of the day, I was in a better mood than I have been for ages. The evidence shows the kids were, as well. 

My favorite memories of family time all involve unstructured, unplanned, informal hours  of doing not much more than hanging out. We all recall with fondness a night we set up an indoor tent using bed sheets tied to furniture, then took turns sitting in it while other family members made designs on the top with glow sticks. I can’t remember who first thought of doing it. It’s not something you’d find in a magazine article about enrichment activities for your child. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen spontaneously. 

Sometimes I think we tend to get so scheduled and so concerned with development or enrichment or improvement or whatever that we don’t leave ourselves time just to be. But it’s okay sometimes not to be able to give a list of accomplishments for the day.  Sometimes it’s okay, and even preferable simply to hang out, to spend some time enjoying our existence.