Curious Charms, They're Magically Delicious!

I wonder if using "Lucky Charms" in today's title would have gotten me an unpleasant visit from leg-breakers at General Mills ... but when I was writing about Phaedra Patrick's debut novel The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (ISBN 9780778319337) that I at first thought I wouldn't read but then sped through last weekend -- and even remembered to make a list of quotes! -- I found myself adding this was a first novel I wish I had written. The title character, a sixty-nine year old retired locksmith, finds a charm bracelet of his deceased wife Miriam's on the first anniversary of her death, and he has no idea what the individual charms mean or meant in his wife's life. Arthur's quest from his English flat to find out takes him to London, Paris, and eventually India certainly broadens his and our horizons.


Passed away was the term that everyone liked to use. It was as if saying the word died was swearing. Arthur hated the words passed away. They sounded gentle, like a canal boat chugging through rippling water, or a bubble floating in a cloudless sky. But her death hadn't been like that. (10)


And like Arthur, I hate the term passed away. With gone to be with the Lord in all its permutations not far behind. (Yeah, as a Christian that surprises me, but not much. I don't want to be that spiritually presumptuous.) It's just easier to say someone is dead or deceased. Eh, we'll just say dead.


Where was I? Australia.


What is it with me and my, dare I say it, fascination with extinct animals? They're also dead and there won't be any more of them, unless some scientists have their way in the lab and shepherds are successful with crossbreeding. Those possibilities are presented along with twelve different species some of whose members are extinct and some have completely died out. The dodo which is a poster child or poster bird of animal extinction gets text in one chapter, but Jeff Campbell's Last of the Giants (illustrations by Adam Grano, ISBN 9781942186045) deals with twelve creatures so prevalent in their environments in their day that their impact can't be measured by size and power alone.


Unless you're in a flock of millions, like passenger pigeons used to fly in.


Apparently they tasted like chicken. I'd at least heard of moa (amplify in New Zealand the biggest ostrich you've ever seen), aurochs (ancestor to modern-day bulls and oxen), lions (two species, the Cape lion and the Barbary lion, known to have died out by the 1960s), tigers (Bali tiger, 1938, Caspian tiger in the 1950s, and Javan tiger in the 1980s), and California grizzly bears (1922), oh my. Steller's sea cows (think a manatee the size of a tank), thylacines (marsupials resembling hyenas that died out in 1938), and baiji (river dolphins living in China's Yangtze River, declared extinct in 2011).


Wow, five years ago. I do not want to tell Martha that story.


It's even possible some of these animals aren't gone, but the more time passes without a confirmed sighting, it's more likely they are. And to keep a volume two of a book such as this from ever being printed, the author repeatedly beats into the reader the need to help endangered species and provides places to go to help them. But, and this is purely from a literary point of view, NOT an index. Of course no one ever wants to see humans appear in a book like this, but if we're able to bring back enough species, why won't they start crowding us out?


On a lighter note, I'd forgotten how BIG a clarinet actually is.


I mentioned that before going to work this morning, that Sarah started practicing with it in her school band yesterday (and demonstrated for us before going to bed as well as showed Jeffrey how to take it apart and put it away; our son's expressed interest in playing the saxophone or drums himself), but keep in mind she's still growing -- it'll look smaller every day! And now at the end of August (two-thirds of the year gone already? How crazy is that?) contemplating that the kids are only a foot shorter than me ... thank the Lord, Martha and I must have done something right with them.


Even though I don't like presuming people will be with Him after they die,

David