Calee M. Lee

As much as I would like to pretend I’m a regular suburban mom with my fancy gym membership and the overzealous HOA, I’m a ranch girl at heart.

My parents whisked us out of the suburbs when I was seven and even though I attended a crowded high school in the middle of The OC, I still had to feed the pig before I left for class.

I loved ranch living. Not enough to do it for my family, but still, it was great. We rode horses. We climbed trees. And…we developed a relationship with animals that wasn’t necessarily the kind my school friends had. They took their dogs to the groomers. Ours took baths in the horse trough. A classmate mistook my sister’s pet goat for a dog (really!) and many could not believe that we ate food that previously had a name. In the ten years I lived on the ranch, we lost nearly as many cats to coyotes and while I mourned many of them, I developed a certain amount of perspective when it came to the loss of animal life.

This is one big lead up to a very concerning situation that is currently occurring in our back yard. Something is killing the praying mantis population. That something is white and furry and named Pangur Ban, and while I love the kitty, I am distraught over the loss of each big-eyed green bug.

If I would point to a book that has invaded my consciousness, slowly transforming my vision and my soul, it would be Annie Dillard’s  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek .  I can’t remember when I first read it, but every couple of months, I find myself in a garden or forest or the lawn of an abandoned Irish church and her words come to mind.  She writes of the mantis:

“In late summer I often see a winged adult stalking the insects that swarm about my porch light. Its body is a clear, warm green; its naked, triangular head can revolve uncannily, so that I often see one twist its head to gaze at me as it were over its shoulder” (56).

My son has about a dozen recognizable words. One of them is mantis.

We had watched one grow from a nymph the size of a lady bug. All summer, she glided up and down the growing sunflowers, her body growing as she captured gnats and aphids, small spiders and ants.  She grew into a lovely lithe creature and then I found her corpse beneath our dining room table.

Tonight I found our cat’s third victim, not yet dead, but wounded beyond repair.  As a child, Dillard watched newly hatched nymphs duel to the death in an elementary school mason jar. She remembers:

“I felt as though I myself should swallow the corpses, shutting my eyes and washing them down like jagged pills, so that all that life wouldn’t be lost” (57).

Every time I see a living mantis, something in me leaps with joy. They are vicious hunters, but their grace seems so wasted in the lifeless jumble of legs and antennae in my kitchen.

My daughter spent months convinced she would someday be an entomologist. We read hundreds of library books about bugs. I spent many hours listening to stories of her imaginary friend—an ant named Ben.  The bug phase is waning, but she still loves the creatures of our garden. In all the months that BUGS were the big topic of conversation, I made sure to include a little classic poetry amidst the talk of cocoon vs. chrysalis.  If you’re curious about what the great poets have to say about insects, you can save yourself hours of work and check out We Love BUGS: 31 Classic Insect Poems for Kids
, my edited collection. Also, several weeks ago, we found caterpillars and Audrey helped me put together a little story about them.  Caterpillars Don’t Check Email: An illustrated picture book for children is currently available on Amazon for only $.99.

Every time the cat kills a praying mantis, another takes its place. I didn’t think our 80 square foot green patch could sustain more than one, much less three.  Here’s hoping there is always one to greet us.

The internet is jam-packed with book reviews: GoodReads, Amazon, those venerable newspapers—I bet it would take an eternity and then some to read all of what people have said about books, and that’s without cracking any covers yourself.  I’ve written my share of reviews and honestly, I’m not very good at them. Maybe it all goes back to the only “C” I received in my entire academic career—a 4th grade book report where I had finished the book weeks before the diorama/essay/posterboard (I can’t remember the actual assignment) was due and once it came to put pencil to paper, the details were more than a little fuzzy.  I still don’t like to write reviews right after reading. Rather, if I can still remember the gist of the book several weeks/months/years later—now that’s a book that deserves writing about.
I’m calling this space for book reviews “Books that Have Changed my Life” because those are the books I can’t stop thinking about. Their authors have achieved something significant—even if the change in myself isn’t what they intended and even if I hated their argument so passionately it inspired a transverse reaction than what they hoped—every so often words hold the magical power that David Mamet describes so beautifully at the beginning of his book Writing in Restaurants.  (For the record, that passage is the only part of that book I can describe as life changing, but that’s what I’m talking about—a book that inspires a paradigm shift and not a trip to the recycling bin).

Our schoolyard code of honor recognized words as magical and powerful unto themselves…
“Olley Olley Ocean Free” was our South Side Chicago version of the cry which ends a game of tag. I think the phrase frightened us as children.
We knew that an afternoon of kick-the-can or capture-the-flag could only be positively terminated by the adjuration “Olleyolleyoceanfree” but none of us had one idea what the words themselves meant. We only knew they had magical power to cast off the restrictions of the game (to loose us from our vows) and let us go to dinner. (3,5)

The chapter goes on to relate the story of a man, livid with anger, demanding an apology from a YMCA clerk. Mamet declares, “In his anger he had reverted to a universe where words were clearly magic, in which all things were possessed of spirit and where anything was possible (7).”
I like to believe I live in a world where words still retain their magical properties.

I’ll be posting more about books that have changed my life but I want to know, what books have changed yours?

One of the things I’ve realized is that I do a tremendous amount of reading, but very little of it is quantifiable. How many blog posts do I read a day? Maybe 20-30? This translates to what I’m guessing is about 4,000 words (20 x 200) or about 12 pages of double-spaced prose. Seeing that novels range around the 90,000 word mark, I’m guessing (and these are total guesses here) that in my spare browsing time, I read about a novel’s worth of blog posts every 22 days.  Honestly, I think that’s probably low-balling it, but who knows?

There are three major things that facilitate this type of reading:

1. There is an iMac on my kitchen counter. I am easily distracted.

2. My Android phone is ideal for reading short things.

3. With two kids underfoot, I have lots of 3-4 minute interludes. If I start reading something longer, I won’t want to look away to make sure the toddler isn’t headed up the stairs.

4. I am not very ordered in my life, but I am committed to “inbox zero” in my Google feed reader.

How much are you reading online?