HOMESICK RESTAURANT HOMEWORK

 

It's Saturday now, and I spent much of the day writing a pretty spiffy entry for the windmills, if I do say so myself.  So I haven't spent much time thinking any more about the book assignment.  Here's what I think:  this is really completely impossible.  So, given that, I'm just going to go with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.  We are all, as someone else said in his/her comment on this at the original assignment, like onions - made up of layers and layers.  Or like quilts, made up of so many different bits and pieces.  No one book can really do it - if I choose Anne Tyler it leaves out how important and life-sustaining gardening is to me (The Secret Garden), also how important the family of sisters in which I grew up is to me (Little Women), how I have come to regard organized religion, and especially foisting one's religion onto others, as absolutely dangerous and almost evil (The Poisonwood Bible). 

But here's what Anne Tyler's novel tells you about me:  the importance to me of my family of origin, no matter how disfunctional and crazy it was, especially of my mother, no matter how difficult and downright impossible she was.  This is one of the main themes of the book, and all the others are related to it.  For Ezra, one of the three siblings in the story, food becomes a symbol of love, of family.  He runs the Homesick Restaurant, and no matter how often his dream is interrupted, he dreams of getting his whole family together around a table full of wonderful food and having them all stay there together - no fighting, no one slamming up from the table and out of the room - eating, talking, enjoying one another. From the book jacket copy:  "...and gentle Ezra, his mother's favorite, with a dream of a homesick restaurant 'where people come just like to a family dinner' - except that whenever his own family gathers, meals are left unfinished, appetites dissipated insquabbles and tempests." 

I have a lot of Ezra in me.  Like Ezra I have homesickness for a home that perhaps never really existed, a home I am still trying, not to recreate, but to create.  I thought of this past holiday weekend when I was thinking of this assignment, and I realized I had actually managed to make the dream come true, as -at the luminous end of the novel- so does Ezra.  From the book:  "Cody (one of the siblings), ...happened to look toward Prima Street and see his family rounding the corner, opening like a fan.  The children came first, running, and the teen-agers loped behind, and the grown-ups - trying to keep pace - were very nearly running themselves, so that they all looked unexpectedly joyful...'They've found us,' he told Beck.  'Let's go finish our dinner.'" 

I have a large family, being the oldest of six siblings, most of whom have created their own families; adding G's sons, sisters, and their families into the extended tribe.  My parents are long since gone, but there are still squabbles and tempests when the rest of us assemble.  There are, however, those times like the past weekend, when I am there, at the Homesick Restaurant, and my family "opens like a fan" and I know what matters most to me, no matter how crazy, how impossible, those people sitting at my table, brought together by food, by love, by unexpected joy.

And here's the second part of the assignment:  the book people kept recommending to me that was a total disappointment, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  It could have been a really good book, but was instead poorly written and entirely boring.  I was working in a little mystery bookstore in P'town on Cape Cod at the time this book was popular, and was constantly mystified at how it stayed at the top of our best seller list.  People raved about it.  De gustibus.....I guess.