Red Sky At Morning
It occurs to me that I ought to have given the attribution for the title of this blog. It's from RED SKY AT MORNING by Richard Bradford, one of my most favorite books in the world. I just learned that my brother Clem had never read the book, and so I had to go out and buy him a copy for Christmas. Clem and I don't see eye to eye on some things (his politics are to the right of center, and mine are center-learning-left) but he has a powerful and twisted sense of humor. I think he'll like the book. If he doesn't, I may have to rethink our entire relationship...
posted by Madeleine Robins at 4:19 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for the gloss. (I had wondered, but didn't want to ask.) I have certainly heard about Red Sky at Morning, which has been on my list of books to track down and check out for several years. Is it good for an eleven-year-old girl?
You might want to wait a year or two. I discovered it when I as fourteen, and a New Yorker newly transplanted in the Berkshires. Since the story in certain ways mirrored my own experience (kid taken from urban home to live in rural area; parent not adapting well) I took to it mightily. But it's also terribly funny without my own personal trauma. For years I would haunt used bookstores and stockpile the hardcover edition to give to deserving friends.
The line itself comes from a scene in which the narrator (and his classmates) have to sit through a US Army training film on VD; a guy well-gone in syphillitic dementia keeps assuring the doctor who is interviewing him that everything is just fine: "Hunnerd percent, Doc." This phrase has become part of my household language. I dimly recall saying it to the doctor who delivered Rebecca after she had finally emerged from the Everywhere into the Here, but I may have hallucinated that, and anyway, the doctor had no sense of humor.
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