#9

I love vacation...it's a great time to read.  And I love Elizabeth Berg...she's a great author!  #9 on the year is Range of Motion by, none other than Elizabeth Berg.  Berg's prose is almost like verse; she can weave a beautiful tapestry with vocabulary.  {How I envy that gift} Lainey (short for Elaine {love it}) is such a true-to-life character going through a tragic situation.  Her husband, love of her life, is in a freak accident and in a coma.  We learn of their love through her hope that he will wake up and her desperation that he won't.  She gives her characters roles...and describes them in ways I know to be true but could never express.  Mother, lover, wife, friend, care taker, mourner.  Let me share my favorite quotes:
p71 ~ If I lie on the floor kicking and screaming, who will be moved?  The hard and constant lesson is that we are only observers here.  We do not move the pieces.  We do not chart the course.  We have our little parameters, like an insect captured in a shoebox  We strut back and forth, arranging and rearranging the arbitrary layout of the grasses we've been given.  But with all the head-nodding we do, all the lip-smacking, all the self-satisfied pats to our overfull bellies, all the putting forth of what is really only speculation from our beginning brains, we aren't aware at all of the thing that is before us.
p132 ~ {on giving advice to a friend} But it's not my job to drive Alice's car.  It's my job to verify the scenery.
fl: They say that one of the reasons for tragedy is that you learn important lessons from it.  ll: I am saying that all of this all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.