And now back to our regular un-Pandemic programming. Sort of.

I’m reading a lot lately. I mean, I always have one or two or three books on the go but Pandemic reading has taken on a new slant: my library and favorite thrift shop are closed, I hate e-Readers and I can’t spend all our money on Amazon orders. Because: Pandemic snacks are more important.

So I’ve been re-reading, shopping my own shelves. Actually, pre-COVID-19, I had a plan for My Reading Year (yes, I’m one of those people) that I would do a great deal of re-reading. It all comes from the moving thing: packing up all my books, shedding the ones that are no longer anything more than dead weight (that I didn’t want to move to a new house) and musing over the favorites that I really should re-visit. And this year I wanted to focus on writers I love that write/wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Madeleine L’Engle falls into that category. Most everyone who recognizes her name would associate it with her Newbery Medal book A Wrinkle in Time – or the recent Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon/Mindy Kaling movie offering of the same name. A Wrinkle in Time is a seminal book that is often lauded by writers of children’s books. Or sometimes, as in another Newbery Medal book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, it is the backdrop of another story. (A very good story.)

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties before I even heard of Madeleine L’Engle. (I know, right?) A teacher friend lent A Wrinkle in Time to me, plus all the ensuing Murray family books, aghast that I had never read them. And so a L’Engle groupie I became.

Whatever story L’Engle told, her framework was always a moderately conventional family and I think that was a big part of her appeal. The families were like none I knew – ones that discussed physics and tesseracts while their mother cooked stew for supper over a Bunsen burner in their attached-barn-converted-into-a-laboratory. Or where another mother – an ex-opera singer – played classical music records while she cooked supper. Or where the family sat around and discussed theology with everyone from the 5-year old to Grandfather contributing to the conversation. Really, Madeleine?

I haven’t got to a lot of her published journals or non-fiction offerings yet, but any biographical information I’ve read about her suggests that it was exactly the kind of family she was in herself. Minus maybe the space travel and alien abductions. I assume. And Ms. L’Engle always asserted the importance of every person in her fictional families, no matter what their age or how much they misbehaved.

Grandfather, is in fact, one of my favorite characters in Meet the Austins. A retired minister who exudes wisdom, he lives by the ocean in a converted horse stable: the individual stalls are especially conducive to bookshelves that hold Grandfather’s copious book collection. His granddaughter Vicky describes him as a bibliomaniac. (And then parenthetically, tells the reader to ‘Look it up!’ Such cheek!)

Grandfather doesn’t just keep his favorite words in his books or in his head: the most meaningful to him he has transcribed onto the very walls around him. In his bedroom, a quote from Hildevert of Lavardin circa 1125, reads:

“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

This quote is so obscure that I couldn’t even Google it. But L’Engle brings attention to a medieval mystic’s words as effortlessly as Hermione Granger waves her wand and pronounces ‘Alohomora!’ to a locked door. (Look it up!)

In the loft, where the children sleep, a poem by Thomas Browne is painted:

If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, ‘This is not dead’,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, ‘This is enow
Unto itself – ’twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.’

Have I – pre-slow-and-crawling-days-of-Pandemic – been too full of ‘shrewd activity’? Or even now, with my books and my phone and my TV am I ‘replete with very thou’?

There’s something about the writing on the walls that strikes me, the constant reminders of things that Grandfather believed and wanted to remember. In the bedroom, where the first quote is, he has no other pictures except the picture window, because no picture could complete with the ocean view. But the simple juxtaposition of words reminded him of Whose view it was and Who made it.

What do I write on my walls? What do I want to be reminded of?

Besides hanging pictures or words on my walls, I have a way of remembering some of the lovely things I find in books: I put them into another book. My siblings can attest to how I used to cut and paste and make scrapbooks when I was young, sometimes much to their chagrin as ‘the making of many books’ consumed me – and all the homemade flour paste that Mom could make.

I still cut and paste and draw:

It helps me to remember the things that are important:

And not to mistake the wonderful things:

Good writing and good writers can teach us so much, remind us of what’s important and show us what is possible before it happens. The wonderful things can’t last forever but we can remember them and look forward to different, wonderful things.