Something Different!

Decided to try something a little different for lunch today. Soup!

1. corn chowder
2. bread and buttah
3. apple with unpleasantly tough skin

I also finished Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult) today. Weird timing. Here's the story.

The girl child has been asking to volunteer at our county's animal shelter. I finally gave in, because I'm a good mom, and she scheduled herself for orientation on Saturday. It's pretty far from our house, too far to just drop her off and come back home so I decided I'd just bring a book and wait for her there. I'd just finished a silly little book about a woman that accidentally hired a prostitute. And had sex with him. And paid for it with the PTA credit card. Heavy stuff. Anyway, I was between books so I just grabbed a couple off the "to read" pile and away we went.

Well, the first book sucked, the second book was worse and nobody would talk to me on twitter. Things were dismal indeed. Then I remembered the emergency book in the trunk. Okay, I don't really keep an emergency book in the trunk but I remembered seeing one in there when I was hiding Christmas presents a while back. And there it was. Nineteen Minutes. A shooter story. Some kid goes wack and guns up his high school. On the very same day that some kid went wack in Tucson and gunned up the congresswoman's event. Weird right? Then on the way home we pass a restaurant named "King Wah" which was also the name of the psychiatrist's character in the book. Creepy.

And then it got worse. Now honestly it wasn't a good book. The plot went here and there and back and forth and nothing was satisfying and it was exhausting to read (like this post) and the back story seemed contrived and the ending, well the ending was just dumb and by the time I got to it I pretty much hated them all and just didn't care too much what happened to any of them. But here's the thing. The book focused a lot on the kid's parents. His mom in particular. Lacy. The author took great pains to show her as just a regular mom. A regular mom that made a few mistakes but did her best and loved without question and still failed. The ultimate failure of parenting I think because really, what is worse? If there is such a thing I'm grateful for the inability to imagine it.

And now I keep thinking about the Tucson shooter's parents. His mom in particular, I believe her name is Amy, and I wonder. I wonder how she's surviving this? How she's managing to pull in that next breath, and then the one after that. Knowing what she knows, my mind mixing her with the fictional mom I came to know. But I don't let myself wonder too much, I don't examine too closely or for too long before I pull back and look away. It's too horrific. Too real. Too imaginable.