Sunday Life

This will be short because my newest blogging goal is to blog three times a week, Mon., Wed., and Friday BUT I got an award from Michele Emrath at Southern City Mysteries and I want to fulfill my duty to this honour. Thanks Michele for giving me my favourite stroke (she said on awarding me this that I was 'honest no matter what'). I am required to say ten true things about myself - yep, it's one of those. As if blogging wasn't self-centered enough!

So my ten things are going to be the ten characters from books who have affected my life.

1. Anne of Green Gables fame. Yep, that spunky red-headed snippet keeps up a steady presence in my life - telling me to live with imagination.

2. Cap O'Rushes, from an Irish fairy tale - this young woman introduced me at a very early age to the qualities of persistence and how we must travel far and labour low to get our rewards.

3. Jane Austen's Emma. For those of you who are Austinphiles - yes, not the usual choice but Emma is important to me because she realizes mid-book how she has let her self-importance and meddling hurt good people and she CHANGES!

4. Jane Eyre for showing me that a person can fashion a parent from books and a kind servant - not that I needed to but it has been very helpful in my role as a therapist.

5. Thomas Fowler, a British journalist living in Vietnam, from the novel

The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I don't think I can tell you what I learned from him because it is beyond words. He isn't a hero - he struggles with many faults but I love his search for peace and truth.

6. The Mouse Army in the amazing novel, The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson - cyber punk cum steampunk - the Mouse Army is an army of little orphaned girls in a futuristic China. They remind me that one can affect great change in community.

7. Madame Wu, the protagonist in Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women. She reminds me that although I would like a life of contemplation - I am a householder and attached to those I love and care for and that can also be a spiritual life.

8. Count Almasy from Ondaatje's The English Patient, who understands that time and space and life itself are no barriers to love.

9. Scarlet O'Hara from Gone With the Wind - who might be a selfish tart but has a great indomitable spirit!

10. The Teeny Tiny Woman, from the nursery story of the same name, who dares to yell at a ghost bone...

And I pass this award on to Hart (tartlett to me) at Confessions of a Watery Tart - she is the epitome of scrappy honesty in my book! And tartlett - in the interest of being a rebel angel - you can write ten true things if you like or you can invent something or nothing else to do!