We are a little chilly here

The furnace is on and I have a space heater aimed at my legs, because it is 38 degrees here. May 16th and it is 38. I am quite possibly going to go out and get flowers and greenery to pot for my father’s grave today, but I think I’ll wait until it warms up . . . to the predicted 53.

After the winter we have had, I really can’t complain about 53 degrees, or even 38; I will remark, however, that the temperature is making it difficult to get into the swing of late spring and early summer. I am beginning to think that rare day in June may turn out to be a raw day this year.

I just finished reading Out Stealing Horses by an author with a very Norwegian names – so Norwegian it escapes me at the moment. Of course, I have just sighed and will go look. Hold on.

Ah, yes, I have information:
Out Stealing Horses: A Novel Paperback
by Per Petterson (Author), Anne Born (Translator)

and from the NY Times Sunday Book Review.

The review has a good number of literary references; it is a “learned” review. I am always amazed that sometimes the ruminations of a mind can be so dissected and analyzed. It was the type of book that is a “come along with me while I think about my life” endeavor. And the book, like life, went along step by step and left questions unanswered in the end.

Often, when I read, I prefer my introspective essays to be fairly short; when I sit down to delve into something, I like to come away with more than the narrator’s thoughts – I like the treat of answers slipped in when the character is not looking. He may suspect, but I, by virtue of being outside the novel, know.

The reviewer of this book writes that the character makes peace with something in his past; well, when you get to be a certain age and have retired to a cabin in the woods seeking solitude, I would assume that one way or another, you have come to terms with what has been your life. The lead character does not ask someone sitting across the table from him who knows what happened to tell him; he remains silent. Maybe he feels it is better not to know. However, since this fellow has himself left questions for his own family, perhaps he feels if he had no answers for them, maybe he should have no answer to his question.

As I turned the page, only to find out it had been the last one, I almost said aloud, “What!?” Perhaps the curiosity in me is the AmeliaJake in me, or maybe it is the American in me, or maybe the generic busybody in me. More than likely, it is the low-brow that nestles in me.