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jrcbaker
, December 29, 2016
(view all comments by jrcbaker)
Carolyn Wood, whom I knew in the olden days--my stepfather treated her mononucleosis--is fast on her feet and swims at the deep end.
"On the way to France [walking the Camino de Santiago to the ninth century cathedral in Spain], I stop first in Louisville to visit my son, now a professional actor, where he's preparing for Long Day's Journey into Night, an apt title for what lies before me."
She won a gold medal swimming in the 1960 Olympics. While at the Olympics, she read Battle Cry and On the Beach and saw Diary of Anne Frank and The Young Lions.
Later in a literature class at high school, she "loved the sprawl of Moby-Dick . . . recognized Holden Caulfield's alienation and Stephen Crane's experiments in observation." The Sound and the Fury set her "inside someone else's mind as it drifted through thoughts, sensations, and memories."
"I was seventeen, a senior in high school, already a world traveler, happy to be out on an adventure. Ahead lay college [the University of Oregon in Eugene] and the ever-unfolding future--teaching English [discussing Holden Caulfield and phonies], a year with the Robert Kennedy family, marriage, motherhood, divorce and complications of coming out, finding a life partner and losing her."
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