After nearly three years of no traveling, not even within the not-so-great state of Florida, we finally, FINALLY, took a trip. It wasn’t the most exciting trip we could have taken, but it was the most important. We went to my old childhood stomping grounds and visited family. As many of you know, my mom is 98. I also have an older sister living with Parkinson’s, and a younger cousin living with Multiple Sclerosis. So this trip was bittersweet.

My mom is in good health, with a strong enough constitution to insist that it would be “ridiculous” (her word) to live to 99 or longer. I know she’s ready to go, but it was good to see her enjoying herself during our visit.

My sister … well, I hadn’t seen her in about six and a half years, so it was a shock to see what Parkinson’s had done to her body. Still, mentally, she was all there, quick to spar with words, get the joke, and say when she was done for the day.

My cousin, I hadn’t seen her in the same length of time. Fortunately, she was feeling well enough to sit through a short visit. She still has her bright, light-up-the-face smile, but wouldn’t talk much about her illness. The visit with her was rich: when she married some thirty-odd years ago, she and her husband built a house and included an in-law section for her mother and father. Her father (my uncle) is now deceased, but her mom (my aunt, my mother’s sister) is still vibrant at 94.

While we were there, my cousin’s nine-year-old granddaughter stopped in after school, to wait for her dad who would take her to judo. At first shy, Farrah was soon entertaining us with stories about her chickens. The best part was watching how she interacted with her great-grandmother. My aunt insisted on sharing her chair with Farrah, and I could see that they had a warm, loving relationship. 

It was, as always, an interesting experience to sit at a table with my mom and my aunt at either end, both hard-of-hearing, playing messenger when one couldn’t hear the other. In fact, most of the people we saw, including ourselves, are hard of hearing. Some who need hearing aids wore them (myself, my husband, my sister); some who need hearing aids didn’t (my mother). I never talked so loud and for so long in my life.

My husband and I consider our trip to be a great success. I didn’t plan anything, just knew generally what I wanted us to do: get my mom and her sister together; meet one of my cousins for the first time (long story for later); spend as much quality time with my mom and sister as possible. Check, check, check.

Now, who knows what the future holds. I feel it stretching before me. I’ve come home to a couple of doctor appointments and not much else, and that’s just fine. I say I’m back “more or less” because part of me is still in New York, still musing about all we saw and did there.

Of course, one of the things I did there was take photos. On our first evening, we took a short walk across from our hotel and saw these lovely wildflowers. 

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This was the view from our window. No, it’s not spectacular, but it was a nice view nonetheless. One evening I watched a rabbit hop around the grounds, probably checking out the picnic table (not seen in photo) for crumbs.

My mom has purple tulips in her little garden.

A purple tulip

Mom’s purple tulips

We flew out of Albany, New York at 6 AM. This is was the view after we’d been in the air about a half-hour or so.

Finally, to my surprise and delight, my onion bloomed in time for our return home.

The onion plant was an experiment. A couple of months ago, one of the onions I had bought for cooking started to sprout. On a lark, I decided to plant the onion and see what would happen. I don’t know if the long stalks are edible (they smell like green onions when I cut them), but I got pretty excited when bulbs appeared on a couple of them. And this is the result.

Thank you for reading. Here’s your reward for reading to the end. 

Hello, everyone,

I’m taking a break from my never-ending, might-never-finish novel to share a review of Kevin Brennan’s latest novel, The Prospect. First, I need to acknowledge that I did receive an advanced copy of this wonderful novel. But I also bought the Kindle version. Just sayin’.

As you might guess from the title of this post, the novel has to do with baseball. But, there’s a twist. In this case (and this is not a spoiler), one of the characters is not your average wanna-be Big Leaguer. He is a phenomenon, what scout Bud Esterhaus would call “the living unicorn of a ballplayer.” The twist is that he is a she.

Are you a baseball fan? Do you lapse into what some might consider a foreign language when discussing America’s national pastime? I’m not, and I don’t. In fact, I know zip about baseball. But you don’t have to know baseball to become engrossed in this story of a young woman who wants to play in the big leagues with the big boys.

The story is told through Bud Esterhaus, a divorced late-middle-aged man whose real mistress was not the Elaine that his wife eventually found out about. No, although Bud argues that Elaine was his wife’s tipping point, the real wedge in their marriage, as well as in his relationship with his son, was Baseball, with a capital B. In bold, 42-point font.

In The Prospect, Bud discovers Joe Carpenter, a slim, small player who, as a military veteran at 26, is considered a bit old for the minor leagues, but that will be the least of Bud’s problems with Joe. From the book blurb, you, the reader, know that Joe is really a woman, but no one else does, which is one of the reasons why this novel is a nail-biting page-turner. Jo aka Joe manages to keep her secret for a good long while with Bud twisting himself into knots to accommodate her “eccentricities.”

What I’d never seen was a player who apparently didn’t want to be seen in any degree of undress. In a place where there’s literally nothing to be ashamed of, never taking off your clothes is bound to arouse suspicion.

I wasn’t above spreading that war-wound idea around. But I wasn’t about to ask Joe either.

When she does slip up and Bud learns of her deception, both the reader and Bud are already committed to this “living unicorn.” We’re all in, and the tension shifts from how long can Jo keep her secret to how long Bud and Jo can keep her secret. One thing to keep in mind, and I found this to be a fascinating part of the novel, is how often people see only what they want to see or expect to see.

Jo and Bud have a number of close calls, adding to the tension of the story and to Bud’s already high stress level. According to Bud, Jo is an “innocent”:

Not so much naive. Just innocent. There’s a difference. To me, a naive girl trying to play pro ball was putting herself at enormous risk but didn’t know it. Jo, the innocent, knew what the stakes were but was going to rely on her brains and her skills to get by. Her innocence was to be found in how she believed it completely possible.

I came to think of Jo as both naive and innocent. She knew what the stakes were and definitely believed in her own smarts and skills to succeed, but to believe she could maintain the deception indefinitely seemed naive. And selfish. She was 26 years old with military experience, yet Jo Carpenter didn’t consider the impact of her secret on others. It was a dream of hers to play pro. She was going to try and make it happen without regard for who got hurt. Bud was putting his own career on the line by helping her, but she never seemed to truly understand the risk he was taking. It wasn’t that Jo didn’t care about Bud. She does, in fact, come to care deeply about him. Still, it’s all about her.

In a way, Bud has the same problem. Bud is all about baseball and finds it nearly impossible to reconcile the fact that his son couldn’t care less about it. Bud does acknowledge that not every boy will grow up to love baseball, but he couldn’t meet Stan even halfway while he was growing up. Bud loved the game and–without regard for who got hurt–he put the game ahead of his family. Bud and Jo needed to find each other and go through this coming-of-age experience together. With Jo, Bud got to experience the kind of bond he had wanted with his son. She validated his need and his ability to be a father.

In turn, Jo got the guidance she needed, not just in how to play ball, but also in how to play Life. When someone believes in you, like Bud believes in Jo, everything seems “completely possible.”

When I get frustrated with a character, when I want to argue with them, that’s a pretty good indication that I’m deep in the story. I’m hooked. Plenty of times I was frustrated with Bud or Jo or both at the same time. But there were more times when I was cheering them on or commiserating with them. Brennan draws his characters so vividly that you believe they could walk off the page and into your life. With these characters, I’d also expect them to grab some beer and drag me to a baseball game. And I’d go with them … happily.

I know zip about baseball, but I know when a writer has hit one out of the park. Kevin Brennan has done just that with The Prospect.

Get your copy now at Amazon: The Prospect