Bummer - my new deck chairs are actually beach chairs! I didn't realize how short the legs are until I put them out on the deck. Not sure I am going to be able to get out of it once I get settled. Better make sure I have my Diet Coke in the cup holder and my pretzels on the low table next to me before I get comfy out there with a book.

Spent the day freezing my bippy in my ECU office. Just couldn't bring myself to stay home to work as I would have had too much time to think about 5 years ago when I woke up to Mary's phone call to turn on the TV and her asking me where Steve was. He was supposed to be in the World Trade Center and I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit. Until I found my cell phone and heard his shaky voiced message that he was okay I was running around the house screaming I couldn't find the phone, with Mary trying to calm me down and telling me I was on the phone. We hadn't been dating for long when that happened, but just that glimpse at the possibility we might never had seen each other again caused us to get closer very quickly. He proposed that Thanksgiving on Mustique and we married the following May barefoot on the beach on Anguilla. Sure wish we were together today.

My latest reading is on the dark side - Julius Lester's Time's Memory. Lester's writing is so intense and so heart wrenching that I had to set it aside a couple of times so I could finish it. The thought of a slave's soul, the nyama, wandering about the South, without the expected wooden statue to settle into as a protector of his/her loved ones is very disconcerting. As I read of the unhappy confused souls haunting the slave quarters of the Chelsea plantation and Nathaniel/Ekundayo being able to see them the hair on my arms raised and I got the creeps. The novel begins in an African village when the slave traders murder the hogon, the religious chief, and his nyama seeks refuge in the body of his daughter where it resides until she arrives in the South and Ekundayo is brought to life by Amma, the creator god. Lester's personal interest in, and research of, the religion of the Dogon people of Mali adds such emotional depth to this novel set during the pre-Civil War years. There is so much more to this novel than a timeless love story between the white daughter of the plantation owner and the black cook's grandson. This is one I am going to have to set aside and read again as it is so beautifully written and so thought provoking that one reading is just not enough.

Okay - now I can open that clearly-a-book box that was waiting for me when I got home. Hope it is my Cary Grant book. I was born in the wrong generation!