Support the Nurses’ Health Study #SundaySalon
Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.
How’s the weather?
Hot. Just as expected the weekend of the Fourth of July.
What are you reading?
I’m reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I read it when I was a book-loving kid growing up 30 miles south of Hannibal (Mark Twain’s hometown, called St. Petersburg in the Tom Sawyer books) and a second time for an American literature class in college. I wanted to read it again because next month I’m leading a discussion of James by Percival Everett, a retelling of the story from Jim’s point of view.
I listened to James earlier in the year (the audio version is terrific), so I knew that I would benefit from reading the original. In a very fun way, the original is improved by what I learned about Jim from the book by Percival Everett.
I promised myself that if I ever re-read the story of Huck Finn and Jim, I would make note of what was said about the journey down the Mississippi River when they passed my hometown and when they passed St. Louis, the area where I live now.
It turns out that the reason I didn’t have much of a memory was because it’s all covered in one paragraph. For future reference, I’ll copy it here:
Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house you could see. The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of lights at two o’clock that still night. There warn’t a sound there; everybody was asleep.
My hometown has a river front that probably had warehouses for lumber at that time period. The houses would have, indeed, been up a hillside north of the riverfront where bluffs kept residents safe from floods.
What are you watching or listening to?
We enjoyed the new documentary My Mom Jayne on Max. Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol in a similar vein to Marilyn Monroe.
Her daughter Mariska Hargitay was only three when her mother was killed in a car accident. Hargitay grew up to be an actor, too, but made choices to be a very different sort. She’s most known for her role as Olivia Benson on Law and Order: SVU. She has the unique honor of playing the longest-running character on the longest-running American primetime drama in history.
Hargitay previously made a documentary called I Am Evidence about the unprocessed rape kits in the hands of law enforcement all across the country, so she had the tools, connections, and resources to tell the story of her mother and family well.
I suggest not reading summaries or reviews of My Mom Jayne — it’s more fun to discover the surprises along the way.
What are you doing?
I just contributed to the long-running Nurses’ Health Study based on the news that they they have lost funding as part of the Republican administration’s spat with Harvard. They are struggling to keep the freezers going that hold the samples from this study.
My mother died 20 years ago this month at age 68. I’m 63. If I live past her age, part of the reason will be the information that I learned from articles that used this 50-year study. Several of my lifestyle choices were made based on that information. It would be a tragedy to lose it now.
This Facebook post by A Mighty Girl has details, references, and the link to the donation page.
How are you this fine Sunday?