Ash Mae is a kindred spirit of the dearest kind. We once spent an entire summer swimming, eating pupusas, and talking until the wee hours about everything that moved us--art, love, writing, the people we hoped to become. She also might be the only other person in the universe who was as obsessed with rock tumbling as I was (oh, how I miss 1995). To see or read anything that Ash Mae creates is to fall in love. Her art has the beautiful habit of bringing people together, as evidenced by her forthcoming children's book, The Lost Party. I am honored to share Ash Mae's thoughts on Gilead by Marilynne Robinson with you, dear readers.
The spring of 2007 is the season I will tell my children about when they ask what I did as a young person. During an April dinner that year my neighbor commented nonchalantly that he’d seen my photo in the newspaper, and could I tell him more? My dad, though I still am not convinced, had more recently claimed a place among extreme conservatives. He immediately took interest in asking why I would have been in the newspaper regarding a protest against Dick Cheney on my college campus. My boyfriend, now husband, and I quickly moved through some explanation about the need for diversity and having a voice, but really what we were saying, and what everyone else knew we were saying was that we were activists and protesters, and we loved every minute of it. It’s funny then that this same spring, amidst protests, late night planning sessions, sticking it to the man and liberation that only comes from a little bit of civil disobedience, also came into my life a soft-spoken, completely reasonable, home-spun novel that took hold of the most tender parts of my mind and heart.
I was on a camping trip with my new group of activist friends. They all seemed much more able-bodied activists than I felt. They seemed strong in every conviction, and not afraid of anything. I was still new to my own articulations, and surprised, even startled, by my vehement passions about certain issues. I remember washing dishes in a stream at sunset while my friends read aloud from a book. I listened as my thumb moved around the silver hollow of a spoon. What they were reading was beautiful, and so real. I moved onto a bowl, letting cold water run over my hands, and noticed that two of these friends were crying as one read the words aloud.
It wasn’t so much the fact that they were crying that struck me, because we were after all, a crowd of passionate people, but it was more the words they were crying over. A passage about a father: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” I realized then, as the sun set over the red sands in our little ravine that we were more than a group of young twenties with a mouthful to say and a will to make sure we said it, we were kids trying to navigate our paths, hoping to please our parents, wanting to make them proud.
I went home and immediately bought the book at the bookstore. I read it quickly and with a pen poised for underlining. Gilead, the novel by Marilynne Robinson, has moved with me in the years since. I am almost thirty now, with two kids of my own. When I look back on those years, I sometimes wonder what they were supposed to mean, did I fail because I didn't continue to protest with as much vigor. I somehow don't think so, I think that Robinson had wise things to teach me then and now. To quote Gilead, “My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.”
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If you are interested in writing a guest post about your favorite book for Dog-Eared Pages, please email me at amyleescott [at] gmail [dot] com. I would love to share!
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