Okay, I haven’t seen any buffalo wandering around lately. It is the time of year when mule deer start to cross the road in front of me, though.
I arrived home late Wednesday evening and was extremely tired. It was a good trip, and I wrote a lot in my personal, handwritten journal while I was there. I kept a handwritten journal for the first time in ages when I went to Norway in May, and it was a unique, annoying and yet very satisfying experiment in modern-day record-keeping. I liked it. I write a hell of a lot faster on the computer, but there’s something about seeing my own handwriting (including the latent, mild dyslexia that appears only in my journal or letter-writing) that increases the value of the words for me. Not to mention, I’m really only writing it for myself and I don’t have the self-editing mode that I do when writing this blog.
In any case, my decision about Brooklyn was that I want to go back. I’d visited my aunt and uncle in Manhattan a couple times while growing up, and never really had the desire to live or really visit that much. I’m a little tired of touristy things, which may be why I didn’t bother bringing the camera for this visit (stupid, stupid).
But walking around Brooklyn on Monday, when I was forced to not work remotely and therefore took the day off, was great. I was by myself and could do what I wanted, which included spending too much time in a little used bookstore (I only ended up buying two books) and wandering around the central branch of the Brooklyn library just absorbing the full shelves (including many books in Russian, Chinese, Hebrew, French and Spanish), the number of people just walking around or reading, and just the general successful public library feeling. I heart libraries.
The books I took with me to read on the plane were: "She’s Such a Geek" (the one to which I submitted an essay but was not chosen, and while I’m enjoying some of the entries I’m having mixed feelings and mulling over what made their essays better than mine) and "The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade" which was really, really good.
I’m not yet finished with the first book because "The Girls Who Went Away" took a lot longer for me to read than I thought it would. I’m not directly affected by adoption, though I know people who are. The book I’m planning to start over for NaNoWriMo involves research into a family’s history, and as I’m fascinated by the whole process, I started to think about what it would be like for someone who was adopted, or perhaps had a closed adoption in the family that prevented any further searching. Then I came to this book and it was more than I could have asked for as far as real people with real stories of the pain and secrecy involved in their individual situations.
Not to sound like LeVar Burton on Reading Rainbow, but if you are an adoptee or someone you know was adopted or has a parent who was adopted, I highly recommend this book. Even if it was a recent adoption. It’s clear to me that giving away a baby is rarely an easy decision and simply forgetting about it is never, ever an option.
