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Sunday Matters

The Girl has been in Hawaii all week with her choir and I have been a lady of leisure. No frantic trips back and forth across town. No worrying about what to make for dinner. No packing lunches, last minute laundry requests, or checking her volleyball bag to make sure that she does in fact have her knee pads and her dance shoes for later.

But, I miss her. I go into her room now and then and breathe in the cloud of VS Pink body spray she left behind. The Otter Pup gets asphyxiated if she stays in there too long.

Right Now:

Just sitting here gazing at my bookshelf that needs to be organized.

This Week:

I somehow managed to book two appointments this week. One trip to the orthodontist and a sports physical for The Girl so she can sign up for volleyball summer camp.

Reading:

I read and reviewed Hillbilly Elegy. What a book. My club had plenty to say about it. It’s a great book to discuss.

I am finishing up The Music Shop. What a sweet read. Rachel Joyce also wrote The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry which I loved so I was excited to finally pick this one up. My review should post this week.

Watching:

We saw A Quiet Place this weekend. So much suspense! It’s fun to see these kinds of movies in a full theatre.

I gave the Roseanne re-boot another try the other day. This week’s episode was slightly better but not great. It’s disappointing.

The Walking Dead has two more episodes and that’s it for the season. Hard to believe it went by so fast. It’s getting good again but I still question some of the choices being made.

Making:

I haven’t cooked a thing but I am craving seafood and steak.

Grateful for:

Music. As I’ve been reading The Music Shop, I’ve been adding all of the songs mentioned to a playlist I created on Spotify. Do you ever do this? As a whole, it’s a ragtag collection of songs but I love to listen to the song as the main character talks about it. I do this for Murakami books too because he always references music in his novels.

That’s it from me. What is new with you?

Hillbilly Elegy
By J.D. Vance
Harper Paperbacks, 9780062300553, (Paperback) May 2018, 288pp.

The Short of It:

An important read, even if you think you won’t be able to relate to it.

The Rest of It:

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis–that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. – Indiebound

I had been avoiding this book when it was selected by my book club. Truthfully, I wasn’t interested in it because I knew it would hit too close to home, and it did. I didn’t grow up in the same region as Vance but I could identify with nearly everything Vance encountered growing up: addiction, abuse, poverty, and having what seemed like no other options for living.

But I could also identify with a need to belong, a need to succeed and the well-meaning intentions of some of the folks around me. Vance tells his story with brutal honestly but his story is peppered with hope throughout, which makes this memoir a very interesting read about the long-term effects of class decline on future generations and it begs the question, how can we fix it?

The full impact of this memoir didn’t hit me until the last third of the book. That is when Vance gets to the point. The never-ending cycle of poverty for some, make it impossible for them to rise above it. How could they without the realization that there is more out there? If the norm is poverty and abuse, and it’s all they see, what motivation exists to change their situation for the better?

I know some people will argue with that logic. That people have a choice and they choose to be poor but for many, they grew up that way. They were never shown or given the opportunity to live differently. Vance suggests that the people who manage to pull themselves out of this cycle are the ones who were introduced to something different. I agree. It’s the number one reason why I work with teens and the homeless. I had people in my life that showed me a different way and that made all the difference. I want to be that person to someone else.

Hillbilly Elegy is a powerful read and if you don’t want to read it or think you can’t relate to it in some way, try, because it’s important to know how other people live. For our society to flourish we need role models to show us a better way because no matter where you stand politically, brokenness is evident all around us if you look.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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