connections

Is it spring yet?

I don't know what it is about February.... the taste of still-grey days that stretch past an 8 a.m. dawn and 4 p.m. dusk, the cold that continues to whip brutally against your thighs..... It's as though spring is fighting its way out of winter. But it's a long freaking battle yet.

Maybe that's why I long to be somewhere else, if only through reading. I want a $15 ticket to sunshine and warmth. Even mugginess and perspiration. Anything to get away from the feeling that my toes are actually separate from my body, or that the skin on my right index finger will crack apart enough to reveal bone.

I'm reading David Bergen's The Time in Between.

I probably shouldn't talk too much about it here, on the off-chance members of my book club are reading this.... but suffice to say it's a mystery of culture and understanding and love rather than the mystery of a missing person's case....

Ada and Jon are in Vietnam to find their father, Charles, who has disappeared.

Bergen, a Canadian, eases the reader into an unsteady relationship with Vietnam; the country becomes something of a lover you know you can't trust. This lover certainly cheats on you, is always looking for something better than what you have to offer.

Anyway, I find this graph, about how Charles perceives his oldest daughter, fascinating:

".... He worried about her; she was too aware. She watched him, and by doing this she gauged the tone of her own life. He was afraid she would end up desperate like him."

**source of photograph