The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

 

Three people are employed as caretakers in a mothballed research center somewhere in the arctic. They are supplied by helicopter once a week, are cautioned against going outside, and spend their days doing make-work jobs like checking the doors to see if they work, or chairs to see if they are sittable.

Thirty-eight pages into this book, that is described as “mesmerizing” on the cover, it becomes just plain numbing.  The characters are semi-zombies, the setting is bleak, and the dialogue is stiff.  Life is too short and the number of available books too large to keep reading one that fails to interest the reader.  I found myself not really caring whether there was something in the snow or not. Now it might get better later, but I am not inclined to wait that long. If you wish to discover more about The Thing in the Snow, go for it. It is back in the library.  

Jim De Young   12/22/22

 

The De Young Family Christmas Letter

 

Volume XLIX                                                                                                 December 25, 2022

 

Christmas 2022

We begin this 49^th epistle on the surprising note that the most-read post on my blog (stirringthepudding.blogspot.com) in the last year was the one about moving to Iowa. Hardly anyone but our daughter knows us in Iowa, so the high readership must have come from folks in Illinois who were happy to learn that they had finally gotten rid of us. 😊 No, not really. That’s a joke, because the worst thing about our move to Iowa has been the severing of daily ties with the many close friends we made in Monmouth over the years. 

We remain convinced of the truth in Tom Stoppard’s admonition from his play Arcadia that “Life goes only forward, never back.” Accordingly, we now reaffirm that our journey to Grand Living at Indian Creek was the right decision at the right time for us. Beyond that there was satisfaction in the decluttering required in making the move. Only those who have accumulated stuff by living in the same large house for fifty years can know the freedom that comes with trying to adopt the philosophy of the guru of the Arts and Crafts movement William Morris who said long ago “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

This brings to mind another quote. “If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.”  Now I doubt we have changed the world, but I have had a fellow paddler for 63 years of marriage. My wife Jan has been the mainstay of our family and my life. She is once again branching out to make a difference in our new community. She helps run a reading and writing group in our building and is committed to helping new residents acclimate to life here. Meanwhile, we are both helping to keep the community library in order and going outside our residence to help in our daughter’s first grade classroom. Jim will be joining the resident council here in the New Year and continues to write a family history and finish a murder mystery novel that he started twenty years ago. And, would you believe it, both of us are involved in a play to be done at our Christmas Eve celebration.

Our daughter Amy and her husband Todd continue to live in Marion, IA, about a ten-minute drive from us.

 Amy still teaches first grade at Hiawatha Elementary School in Cedar Rapids. Challenges remain in all levels of the educational system, but she has the talent, commitment and resiliency to face and conquer them in that most critical period of early schooling. Husband Todd has continued to deal with major back problems. He has had more surgery this past year and now has added water therapy to his list of remediations. Even though he is now officially disabled, it has not kept him from doing a lot of the household cooking and making deer jerky for his friends. 

Their son Mikel is now a junior at the Upper Iowa University.

We feel he has become a more committed student this year. He has narrowed his career focus down to the environmental resource area and has found some professors who are mentors. He hopes to work for the Iowa DNR again next summer.  

Taylor Brown, who in his youth was TJ Brown, continues to work for the Baytown, TX, fire department as a firefighter/paramedic. He recently attended classes to update his national paramedic credentials and we have just heard that he has received the Baytown firefighter of the year award for 2022.  This was partially for his leadership of the department’s Explorer Troop, which focuses on introducing young people to careers in firefighting and emergency medical care. What an honor!   

 Meanwhile, in far off Helsinki, Finland, our son David, his wife Lotta, and their family continue to grow.

 And when I say grow, I really mean grow as David and Lotta are expecting their 3^rd child in early January. Daughters Frida and Selma, now 10 and 7, are growing too.  They can take hikes, ride bikes, hunt mushrooms, cook, skate, ski, and play the piano. Their lives are just plain full of school and outside activities.  Covid still lingers and David continues to work from home a number of days each week. On the other hand, business travel is picking up again, and he was sent to Singapore last month, He has also completed an MFA degree in Poetry offered by New York University in Paris, which goes along I guess with his degree from Grinnell College ages ago. That does remind me of a student from long ago who said “I’m going to graduate on time no matter how long it takes.” Lotta also continues to study and does private gestalt therapy appointments. We miss all of them every day.  

And that’s the year that was. We have been blessed in our own lives this year and wish the same to you.  That doesn’t mean we have forgotten about the terrible war in the Ukraine or that our planet remains locked in a battle to salvage a livable environment. We can continue to think about the challenges ahead even as we celebrate our own good fortunes at this holiday season.      

 Jim and Jan De Young

e-mail us at dramajim@gmail.com or  janetwdeyoung@gmail.com

 

The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch

 

The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch is the ideal Victorian outing for readers who prefer their  detective novels pretty much free of gore, violence, swear words, and sexual escapades. The upper-class amateur sleuth, Charles Lenox, is a likable aristocrat who has a knack for treating people from all levels of society with respect.  He is carrying on a courtship with Lady Jane Grey that is so chaste that it would seem downright amusing if it were not taking place in Victorian London.    

There are two plots and both, thankfully, can easily be kept track of. Mr. Lenox is running for a seat in parliament in Stirrington, a fictional location well to the north of London. This gives you the added opportunity to soak up details of how by-elections were run in those days. Meanwhile a mystifying double murder of two newspaper men in London keeps drawing Lenox back to town to grapple with a villain who he has wanted to pin multiple crimes on for years.  

Finch gives you the just right amount of local atmosphere to make his country settings come alive and they are populated with the kind of wonderfully quixotic characters that always seem to inhabit them. On the city side, anyone who has read London history or visited the city, will revel in Lenox’s visits to Berry and Rudd, Wine merchants and the famous Cheshire Cheese public house just off Fleet Street.

This is the third Lenox mystery and like a cup of warm cocoa before bedtime, it will bring a sense of cozy satisfaction.  I am going to search out the first two.  

Jim De Young    12/11/22