Applegater Spring 2014
5
New child-care facility
The Old Became New
Kid In Around
The old became new
first a loud crack
then a deep breaking
a pause...
and then a huge crash
by mICHELE mATHIS
Does anyone happen to know a
full-time child-care facility located in the
Applegate Valley?
The answer is now “Yes.”
Kid In Around is open and offering
full-time child-care and development
services at 7208 Highway 238 in Ruch,
OR. Kid In Around is the perfect place
for children to play, learn and socialize
with others.
All activities are designed to keep the
children’s interest and provide hours of
educational entertainment. The preschool
education will help prepare younger
children before they enter kindergarten.
Owned and operated by an Applegate
resident, the goal for Kid In Around is to
provide children with an environment that
is enriched with age-appropriate education,
playful activities and social opportunities.
Every day is carefully planned to provide
a comfortable, routine and dependable
structure on which children can rely.
Kid In Around offers child-care
services from 6 am to 6 pm, Monday
through Friday. In order to maintain
security precautions, tours are by
appointment only.
If you are in need of child-care
services and would like to take a tour of our
facility, please call 541-899-0500. Space is
limited for summer care so please reserve
your child’s spot early.
Thank you so much Applegate
community for your encouragement and
support.
Michele Mathis • 541-899-0500
m.mathis77@hotmail.com
The storm has brought down
an old grandfather snag
quick as describing it
the vertical is horizontal
after so many years
A new environment for
the forest floor
and its creatures
The forest is all pungent
with the first rain in months
Two grandfathers
one a grateful witness
Greeley Wells
greeley@greeley.me
BOOK & MOVIE REVIEWS
— Book —
Giving Up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel
There has been a continuing laudatory buzz in the English book-reading world
about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, her award-winning historical
fiction about Henry VIII, as told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Before that we
had Mantel’s magnificent 749-page A Place of Greater Safety, also historical fiction, which
follows the lives of Robespierre and two other movers and shakers during the French
Revolution. It is sometimes difficult to accept historical fiction, with its rendition of the
thoughts and unrecorded words of persons who lived several centuries past, but Hilary
Mantel does a superlative job of making the reader feel viscerally connected with these
people. You believe they thought those thoughts and said those words.
Having read her thoroughly researched and intimate looks at English and French
aristocracy, I had assumed that Ms. Mantel was to the manor born. But, au contraire, I
recently read her autobiographical Giving up the Ghost (Henry Holt and Co., 2003), in
which I learned that her young life was anything but aristocratic. She grew up poor, Irish,
and Catholic in the mean little Northern England mill town of Hadfield, Derbyshire, in
a family that can only be described as highly dysfunctional. Classmates and neighbors
did not hide their prurient curiosity about her family household sleeping arrangements.
The climate of the area is cold and damp, “battered by the four winds. Its streets
were steep, its small houses gray and stony.” The social life is as pinched and narrow as
the pocketbooks of the denizens of the little mill town. Mantel writes of an entertainment
of throwing rocks from the nearby bridge at presumably coddled Protestant children
from the better-off town on the other side.
“In Hadfield, you knew before you could walk which you were: us or them, Catholic
or Protestant…. Our religion didn’t require us to throw petrol bombs or for the men to
kill one another on a weekend [in contrast to Northern Ireland]. But it did allow us—us
Catholics, that is—to luxuriate in the knowledge that our neighbors were damned.”
Mantel’s grandmother had become a mill worker at the age of 12, and her mother
and father each worked in the town’s textile mills. Hilary attended the rigidly Catholic
local school and convent. “The school was constant stricture, the systematic crushing
of any spontaneity…. I was conscious, from the first day in the first class, of the need
to resist what I found there. When I met my fellow children and heard their yodeling
cry—‘Good mo-or-orning, Missus Simpson,’ I thought I had come among lunatics; and
the teachers, malign and stupid, seemed to me like the lunatics’ keepers.”
She remembers, “…childhood was a sort of gulag for me; I was cut off, adrift…. It
wasn’t particularly anyone’s fault. Few people acted with malice toward me. It was just
that I was unsuited to being a child…. My adult reasoning and my small status were at
odds. One day [the teacher] hit me so hard in the face that she propelled me across the
room, and spun around my head on the stalk of my neck. Ho, fisticuffs, Madam! I said
to myself. I put a smile on my face and turned my head the right way round again….
I was eight then: blinking back the automatic tears that arise in response to a blow, in
case they would be seen by her as a vindication.”
But Hilary Mantel also tells of what she gained there in how to write with clarity
and precision. She quotes a prayer: “‘When the last tear, the forerunner of my dissolution,
shall drop from mine eyes, receive it as a sacrifice of expiation for my sins; grant that I
may expire the victim of penance, and in that dreadful moment, Merciful Jesus, have
mercy on me.’ Note that excellent semicolon. People ask how I learned to write. That’s
where I learned it.”
Amazed to be informed at the end of grammar school that she had passed a
scholarship exam and would be moving on to attend the convent school, she writes,
“I was still more amazed when I got there, and found that the nuns didn’t punch you;
not even the lay teachers seemed to want to go ten rounds with a six-stone opponent.”
She writes lovingly of a grandfather, a railway man, who tells about Robin Hood
and about American slaves and the Confederacy; who had been to far off places such as
Palestine: “In the desert my grandfather rode a camel. He commanded it with certain
words in Egyptian, known only to camels, now imparted to me.” This grandfather stayed
with her family for a time. And she writes from the puzzled and cryptic view of a child
when that grandfather tersely departs, seemingly in disgust at the living arrangements
of the household.
Hilary Mantel suffered from long-undiagnosed endometriosis from her young
preteens. In her mid 20s, she underwent surgery, which left her unable to have children,
and subsequent steroid treatments caused excessive weight gain. She tells of anguish
over her inability to bear children, and she continues her battle with weight. She wrote
in Learning to Talk: “I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and
made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary
to write myself into being.”
She went to law school in London, married, lived in South Africa and in Saudi
Arabia, divorced—and later remarried—her husband. And wrote! Did she ever write!
Mantel has been showered with literary awards, and that includes twice winning the
highly prestigious Man Booker Prize. The historical novels give readers a most readable
understanding of turbulent past times; we read them and feel enlightened. But her
autobiography tugs at our hearts.
Julia (Helm) Hoskins • 541-899-8470 • julmudgeon@aol.com
Ed. Note: The reviewer is the author of She Caves to Conquer, a book about a young
woman who escapes the Midwest, moves halfway around the globe and finds caves that have
been occupied for nearly 4,000 years.
— Movie —
12 Years a Slave
Reviewer rating: 5 Apples
1 Apple—Don’t bother
5 Apples—Don’t miss
Drama, Epic and Historical
R (Restricted. Children Under 17 Require Accompanying Parent or Adult Guardian.)
Opened: October 2013
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson,
Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard
Director: Steve McQueen
Written by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northup
An uncompromising, merciless, riveting film! The brutal tale, which takes place
eight years before the start of the American Civil War, comes from the 1853 memoir by
Solomon Northup. The third feature of British video artist Steve McQueen, 12 Years a
Slave is an historically important picture and a powerful one at that. Solomon Northup
(Chiwetel Ejiofor), a violinist by trade, lives as a free man with his wife and children in
upstate New York. He is abducted and sold into slavery, bought by the most brutal of
slave owners, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Solomon struggles to stay alive while
also trying to retain his dignity. Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt), a Canadian abolitionist who
meets Solomon, ultimately changes his life.
“12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery,”
writes The New Yorker’s David Denby, who, like other critics, sees McQueen’s movie
as finally and decisively dethroning Gone with the Wind in that category. A somber,
meditative, almost poetic film that delivers the horrors of bondage stripped down and
head-on, 12 Years a Slave is both a devastatingly shocking and a truly important film.
Sharon Thompson • thompsonsharon99@gmail.com
Ed. Notes: The reviewer is an ardent moviegoer—often watching the same movie in the
theater multiple times. With nine nominations, will 12 Years a Slave win top honors at the
Academy Awards?
