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Muffins and Mayhem, Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life
AUTHORBUZZ: Discover new books, "meet" the authors and enter to win: Goto: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
Dear Reader,
Not only can you find a great book at the library, you might even find out how to get engaged, too. Welcome to author Melissa Fay Greene, today's guest columnist. Melissa would love to "meet" you. Be sure to drop her a line at: mfgreene1@gmail.com and she'll personally reply, and your name will be entered in a drawing for one of 5 copies of her book No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (previously featured in our NonFiction Book Club).
Take it away, Melissa...
One evening in 1978, I called home long-distance from Savannah, Georgia, to tell my mother, Roz Greene, in Dayton, Ohio, that I was planning to move to Athens, Georgia, where my boyfriend was in law school at the University of Georgia.
"Oh, sweetheart," she said wistfully. "Couldn't you get married first?"
"Married?!' I scoffed. "Mom! This is the seventies! No one gets 'married' anymore!"
"Oh," she said sadly, and then offered: "Couldn't you at least get engaged?"
This caught me so off-guard--"engagement" a concept that had eluded my consciousness completely during the consciousness-raising years--that I didn't instantly dismiss it.
"Engaged?" I asked. "Well, what does that involve?"
"I don't know!" she cried with happiness. "But I'll go to the library first thing tomorrow morning and look it up!"
This was typical of my mother, a lifelong lover of books and of libraries. She was a young mother; she'd only attended one semester of college at the University of Georgia before dropping out to get married in 1948 at 19; and she never took another class or studied another subject. But she held books and libraries in reverence. I grew up within a wonderland of children's literature, first in Macon, Georgia, where I was born; and later in Dayton, Ohio, to which we moved when I was six. My mother read to me at bedtime; and she sat on the closed toilet-lid and read to me as I splashed in the bathtub; and she read aloud to me and my brother on family trips, turning around in the passenger seat as my father drove; and when I was sick, she sat by my bed and read herself hoarse in long marathons: The Five Little Peppers, The Wind in the Willows; Winnie-the-Pooh; Peter Pan Raggedy Ann & Andy, The Velveteen Rabbit magical worlds coming to life along with the steam curling towards my ceiling from the humidifier that she plugged in whenever I was sick. My first job (urged upon me by my mother) was at the Montgomery County Public Library in Dayton; at 16, I became a "page."
"Are you still a Page?!" roared my father in high humor every night. "Are you ever going to be promoted to Chapter?!" He laughed, but my mother glowed with pride that I worked at a library.
My mother and her beloved books and libraries are, without a doubt, the reason I became a writer. She didn't live, alas, to see my greatest library moment: last spring, I was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, housed in the magnificent University of Georgia library. Now my portrait hangs in their archives beside true giants of literature like W.E.B. Du Bois, Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, Margaret Mitchell, and Alice Walker. My mother... well, I feel tears rising to my eyes at the thought...my mother would have been proud.
Meanwhile, on the night in 1978 that she promised to go to the library the next morning to look up the art of getting engaged, I called my boyfriend, Donny Samuel, and said, "I think we might be getting engaged."
"Really?" he asked in surprise. "Wait, don't I have anything to do with it?"
"No. My mother's going to the library tomorrow to look it up."
"Okay," he said cheerily. "Just let me know."
My mother went to the library the next morning, checked out Emily Post, called me back, and Donny and I not only got engaged by phone later that same day but were married five months later. We just celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary. Without my mother and the Montgomery County Public Library, it might never have happened.
--Melissa Fay Greene
Melissa is an award-winning author of five books of nonfiction, from serious literary journalism about the civil rights movement and the HIV/AIDS pandemic--Praying For Sheetrock, The Temple Bombing, Last Man Out, and There Is No Me Without You to her recent hilarious and touching family memoir, No Biking In The House Without a Helmet. Melissa and her husband live in Atlanta and are the parents of nine.
Send an email to Melissa, say hello, she will personally reply, and she'll enter you in her book giveaway. Email: mfgreene1@gmail.com
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Warmest regards,
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.muffinsandmayhem.com
* This month's Penguin Classics book is FOOLS CROW by James Welch. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin totebag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/May12Classics
AUTHORBUZZ: INTO THIS WORLD (Fiction) by Sybil Baker
Determined to discover the truth about Mina, her adopted sister, Allison flies to Seoul, yet Mina--and Korea--are nothing like Allison imagines. Over the next three months, Allison and Mina will unearth thirty years of family secrets--and Allison will discover in Mina the sister she never embraced and in herself, the stronger woman she can be.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on INTO THIS WORLD to read more and to email author Sybil Baker, you'll get a reply.
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