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Also, I had only the vaguest sense of time – they’re wearing jeans, and they jump trains, so sometime between 1930 and now. There doesn’t seem to be a social worker when the girls drop out of school, so sometime before 1980. Does it matter? It did to me. I actually went to Wikipedia later to discover that I was supposed to know that a novel one character was reading was published in 1954, so I would then know roughly when this story takes place.

And this narrator, who dropped out of school and doesn’t show evidence of mighty reading or checking a dictionary when she does, drops words like immiscible, fenestration, lucifactions, calyx, spillet, and parturition into her story. Hearing those words in her voice was jarring for me. Part of the story is about the reader’s discovering how Ruth’s interpretations of events (“finding” the rowboat, what flooding meant for the house’s foundation) doesn’t match our interpretation (stealing the rowboat, the foundation is unsafe). That her narration uses these words makes it also untrue, as if some smart person were trying to pass herself off as this dreamy, drifty woman. These sort of words are all through the book, and each time I passed each one and wrote them on the inside back cover to look up (me, with the master’s degree in English), my faith in the narrator weakened. By the end, I thought she was a big pretender and I’m not sure what she says happened in the end really happened.

I was also put off by the “promises” the story starts with that it doesn’t keep. For example, at the start of the story there is deep detail about the narrator’s grandfather, then his grandmother and all her daughters. They are so lovingly detailed I expected we would hear more about them, but we don’t—or not all of them. One became a missionary and disappears out of the story (not even a note, that I remember). I read this over a weekend, and remember waiting to hear something later about this missionary-daughter, who was so important she got a description at the start, but never did. Why is this daughter even in the story? To paraphrase Checkov on playwriting: Don’t have a gun on the wall in Act 1 if you’re not going to fire it in Act 2.

The one that led me to close the book for the night, though, comes later:

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again.
(HOUSEKEEPING, Picador 1980, p. 111)

Argh! I just spent time picturing this dog, making her history, guessing what part she would play in the story, and she’s not in the story ever again. This is the sound of a book hitting the wall.
This is why Crip is in the story:

She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods. (p. 111)

Again, beautiful, beautiful writing. And again, unbelievable. I’m more inclined to think that the experience of being caught outside overnight with no shelter and trapped by dark dreams would be a better explanation for the “somberness.” If it wasn’t for book club, I would not have read on; I’m glad I did. But I’m not running out to pick up another of these books.

One of the many things that worked for me was the consistent imagery of water as dangerous, deadly, dark, mysterious. I know that is true—every time I step into Lake Michigan I think of all the dead mariners somewhere below—but I quickly shake off that image with my preferred view that water is life-giving, healthy, and good, and dive in. The cumulative images and descriptions in the text did a great job of persuading me to the other point of view, to a better balance.

I also liked being reminded that a person outside looking through a window at a cozy family inside is not always envious, not always wanting the same thing or anything like it.

Also, there are so many great lines: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds true workings.” (p. 116) “They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.” (p. 131) “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” (p. 159)

Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver

But I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they do not vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. It is this, and not senility, that is the real second childhood. … As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.
(THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY, 1970, Penguin 1990, p. 233)

And Davies gets off so many great lines:

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain—in short, a man. (p. 3)

But before Paul’s birth, he had loved her because she was the blood of his heart; now he seemed to love her on principle. (p. 38)

After the marathon reading, and a great discussion during book club, I find the lure of the next two books in the series, THE MANTICORE and WORLD OF WONDERS, nearly irresistable. Especially intriguing is the idea that the next book has a different narrator, so we readers will see old scenes (and the first narrator) in different lights. What luxury!

But my new year’s resolve has not yet slaked, and I know first I must finish the second half of NORTH AND SOUTH, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story is set very close to the time I set my latest work-in-progress, and she uses the same great reportorial eye and style she did in MARY BARTON, which is set earlier. I’d gleaned great ideas and details and modes of speech from the first half of N&S, but somehow had stalled out on reading it. I blamed holiday travel and a fierce dive into first revisions (for story) on my WIP, but opening it again, I remember the real reason. She is just too good.

“You think it strange. Why?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (NORTH AND SOUTH, 1855, Norton Critical Edition 2005, p. 109)

Gaskell also shows raw emotions expressed through action, as in the so-painful scene where Margaret turns down Mr. Thornton’s offer of marriage (pp. 174-8). And, the part that makes my head spin, she’s writing contemporary, not historical, fiction.

The darkness of January descends: I can’t match this historical accuracy, this raw emotion, I shouldn’t even try. I should write about my own time; after all, the themes I’m working are resonant now. But my attempts at contemporary have been clumsy, and I’m so slow that neither of the two contemporary manuscripts I’ve finished works for plot now: In one, the woman is a reporter in a style that was true when I was a reporter, all of five years ago, but isn’t true now; in the other, written four years ago, the protagonist invents a new app on the computer that somebody real invented two years ago. But if I want to say anything “real,” and be believed, I should do it in my own time.

I know the counter-arguments, and I have good reasons for writing historical (like I do want to write about Peterloo), but in the darkest days of the year, these arguments feel ephemeral. And there’s a snowstorm, so I have to shovel. And N&S sits unread.

And then my company announces it is closing its only office in town and laying off nearly all of us. So I flee.

I land in the last Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell I haven’t read, BEFORE THE FROST. This too, is an alternate-view story: Wallander as seen and felt from his daughter Linda’s point of view. She describes his hair-trigger anger, and we see it reflected in her own expressions of anger. I especially enjoyed how she resolves her childhood impressions of him with how she sees him working as a detective, and how she tries to resolve her choice to become a police officer with what has come before. Other father-daughter relationships in the book trace other trajectories. As always, I wonder how much I miss because this is translated.

Done with that, and still skirting N&S (which continues to travel back and forth to work in the messenger-bag), I glom onto AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. He’s been in the news, and in love, and I remember he does that hyper-real detail thing even in the stories that carry a lot of fantasy, as well as solid storytelling, and the book has been on my shelf forever and is recommended by the spouse (who says read ANANSI BOYS right away after). And, like Davies, this story wonders at why people want marvels, how they create their own marvels, and how people who feed them their marvels fare. Fun read, watching the stories told and re-told, and seeing how a longer form can carry a lot of short-story structure (like history passages that don’t slow the main narrative drive), you just have to remember to wrap it up better at the end.

So I’m cruising along and bam—on p. 99—he uses the word “manticore,” which is, you’ll remember, book 2 of the Deptford trilogy. It’s a Sign, so I seek out our copy of the trilogy, but spouse is deep into it and won’t give it up and aren’t I supposed to be reading N&S? Fine. I return to AG, and enjoy the “that’s my life!” references to the northern midwest (pasties, yoopers, those sports-team signs) as well as references to the potential that “It’s a Wonderful Life” could be a depressant and – hello – references to brain science:

She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought that when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
…
“I bet it’s like the space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow.
(AMERICAN GODS, Harper 2001, p. 133)

Soon enough, I’m through the book and dashed if it isn’t another snowpocalypse outside, saving me the trouble of immediately deciding which follow-up book to read (N&S is now under a pillow on the living room couch). This morning, no newspaper delivery so we’re reading books at breakfast, and the spouse shouts and chortles several times as he finishes WORLD OF WONDERS. “You must read this now,” he says, “so I can talk about it.”

But first, just one little chapter of N&S.

After I clear some more snow.

How the writing is going: Stuck in pre-revision molasses, but better to slowly look at everything now than rush like last time and discover my “fixes” messed up the plot. Ran through all the pages looking for plot points that don’t pay off, then noting characters that have too much or too little weight. This week I look at locations and setting.

Next book-club book: HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson

It gave me so much to chew on (the story of modern India, travel, what it means to be family, what superpower I would want, whether if I dropped to part-time to concentrate on fiction writing I could produce something even remotely like this about my country), that I haven’t read any fiction in more than a week. I keep picking up novels and reading the first few paragraphs at most, then setting them down, not quite ready to start. (OK, that’s published fiction. I did read my NaNo novel through twice already, as part of revising it, but that’s editing, not travel and adventure and escape.)

I didn’t like but did enjoy the narrator, telling his own story as if it were the center of the Indian universe, which, in perhaps less-extreme form, we all think of our own stories.

If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of that nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?
(from MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, (1981) 2006 Random House trade paperback edition, p. 319)

(I like how when I typed that in, Word said, “run-on sentence. Change?” Actually, no.)

My favorite story-parts included the grandfather’s courting his bride (and the various iterations of a sheet throughout the story), the sister’s childhood strength and her mutation to Jamila Singer, and the crazy-ghost Sundarbans jungle scenes. I didn’t enjoy the “present day” parts, where Saleem is writing and annoying his girlfriend Padma, but even that thread brings a fun part right at the end, as she giddily recognizes herself in the narrative.

Saleem’s final wrap-up metaphor sees his years, and India’s, as a series of flavors of pickles, “special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans . . . believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.” (p. 530) (Rushdie’s ellipses, my bolding–I’m adopting this as my new retort!)

As a victim of too many writing seminars, I also loved this line: “From ayah to Widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victime, persists in seeing himself as the protagonist.” (p. 272, italics Rushdie’s). Saleem could not be the hero of a series romance; they are required to act, and usually act heroically. He reacts, and often even his reaction is passive, yet he believes he and his fellow children, born in the first hour of India’s political rebirth, are “the gods you never had” (p. 504).

While the book doesn’t end on a happy note, and one of its themes is that optimism is a disease, still there is the promise of the new generation of gods, including the baby Sinai, who should be grown to young adults by now. Do you see them?

Next up for bookclub: FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been doing. I cannot answer as you want me to do, and yet I should feel so sorry if I vexed you.”
(From NORTH AND SOUTH (1855) Norton critical edition 2005, p. 58)

She is just as direct about what she as a southern stranger sees in the northern town of Manchester, as the city girds for a factory-workers’ strike:

“You think it [Manchester society] strange. Why?”

“I don’t know—I suppose becaue, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.”
(NORTH AND SOUTH, p. 109)

While “vexed” may date the first extract, there’s nothing in the wording that would make you think it was written more than 150 years ago. And it’s just as true now, feels just as impossible, and just as sad.
This story wasn’t deep history to Gaskell; hers is a “contemporary novel.” Reading it challenges me to see if I can write such a clear commentary on my own times. After my first couple of manuscripts came out so flat, I decided I couldn’t, and my next ones and this new NaNo one I’ve planned are set as historicals. They still treat common themes (meaning of family, definition of home, roles of women, one’s place and duty to one’s society) that are relevant in my times, but at a safe distance.

Maybe it’s time to try for currency as well as relevance again. Or maybe this is just cold-feet-just-as-the-writing-project-starts pondering; a familiar refrain. We’ll see how I feel on the backside of a month of novelwriting frenzy.

p.s. Our bookclub read this month was BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat. Lovely but slight, it read to me like a lyrical series of short stories with not much sinew between. A great voice, and another story of generations of women struggling and surviving, as in our previous reads, HOUSE OF SPIRITS and BRIEF, WONDEROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO.

Next month (Dec.): MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie.

The narrator catches up with Oscar in college:

He seemed like the same to me. Still massive–Biggie Smalls minus the smalls–and still lost. Still writing ten, fifteen, twenty pages a day. Still obsessed with his fanboy madness. Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In F***ing Elvish! (Please don’t ask me how I know this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De Leon, you gotta be kidding. Elvish?

Actually, he coughed, it’s Sindarin.

Actually, Melvin said, it’s gay-hay-hay.

(From THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Riverhead Books edition, pp172-3)

I can see how the writer might have wondered how to structure the story, with so much that is powerful in the past of the main story, but what he came up with works well. A long short story that ran in the New Yorker in 2000 shows how the structure changed over time.

Some in my group weren’t fond of the footnotes, but it was an efficient way to get backstory on Trujillo and sidetracks into the book and yet not mar the breakneak flow of the story. I liked the notes, the way I liked the geek references, because they brought me back to the time I encountered them first (in this case of fun footnotes, in David Foster Wallace essays in the Atlantic). I do wonder, though, if this sort of page layout will translate onto an iPhone or eReader–will books with these sort of footnotes be among the last that really do need to be published?

Another footnote-related thought came out of my other reading this month. I bought editions of both MARY BARTON by Elizabeth Gaskell and SHIRLEY by Charlotte Bronte that contained footnotes and endnotes, explaining history and literary references in the text, because I don’t know all that much about England in the mid-1800s. OSCAR WAO is so rich in detail and “insider moves”; will even today’s readers who aren’t in the exact demographic read it and miss the implications inherent in his observation that times had changed for Oscar because the stores were selling Magic: The Gathering rather than D&D paraphernalia? Will this book require a Norton critical edition before its 10th anniversary edition? Or can we make do with just the online “annotated Oscar Wao.”

I also enjoyed reading about writing and writers with persistence, especially the image “paginas en blanco” for missing history, whether a country’s or a family’s or my own. And this little gem:

What is it with Dictator and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar–Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X–Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.
(OSCAR WAO, footnote, p.97)

Next up: BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat

Wow, what a difference from SHIRLEY. Though both Bronte and Gaskell use a chatty omniscient first-person narrator as a frame and talk about mill owners and workers, Bronte’s feels more internal, more about character growth and, even as it is angry and biting, more hopeful. In Gaskell’s story, the happy people leave England for Canada at the end, leaving us with a cold dish of hope. Life for working-class people in Manchester was so hard they had their own word for pinched with hunger, starving to death: “clemming.”

Gaskell starts slowly, setting her characters at home and among friends, building empathy for them in us, and then grinds us down in the intimate details of their wasting poverty or deluded riches. By the end, though, we’re galloping, over the waves in a race to catch a sailing ship, and in the courtroom as a man is tried for murder and other melodrama. All her characters are closely woven, from Mary and her stormy love-life to little Charley, the boy who soaks up all the town’s gossip. Jem’s mother, for example, is loyal and true, but also broken and short-tempered and not above a little maternal blackmail, and we empathize with both of them:

“Thou’rt old enough to please thyself. Old mothers are cast aside, and what they’ve borne forgotten, as soon as a pretty face comes across. I might have thought of that last Tuesday, when I felt as if thou wert all my own, and the judge were some wild animal trying to rend thee from me. I spoke up for thee then; but it’s all forgotten now, I suppose.”

“Mother! you know all this while, you know I can never forget any kindness you’ve ever done for me; and they’ve been many. Why should you think I’ve only room for one love in my heart? I can love you as dearly as ever, and Mary too, as much as man ever loved woman.”

(from MARY BARTON, Norton Critical edition 2008 (1858))

Can you believe a guy says that beautiful line — “only room for one love in my heart”? Tough Jem (who performs a daring rescue during a fire) and dandy Harry Carson can seem a bit verbally overexpressive, but there are plenty who can be more reticent:

Job had never written; indeed, any necessity for his so doing had never entered his head. If Mary died, he would announce it personally; if she recovered, he meant to bring her home with him. Writing was to him little more than an auxiliary to natural history; a way of ticketing specimens, not of expressing thoughts.

(MARY BARTON, p. 294)

One of my favorite scenes is too long to quote here, but starts on the last line of the Norton edition page 208 and runs through 213. Mary opens the door to her long-missing Aunt Esther and they have a surreal visit, both of them so full of the terrors of being found out by the other and the pretendings in their own minds that they miss or misinterpret every gesture and word of the other, for the whole scene. It’s a funereal Monty Python scene.

The text carries a lot of Manchester dialect and describes how people dropped in on each other and offered one another tea, how the table was set and how much tea-things cost, all in service to the story. I hope I can do this sort of meaningful description half as well in my settings. But I don’t know that I can give as good advice, such as why we shouldn’t comfort the grieving with the words, “it can’t be helped:”

Of all trite, worn-out, hollow mockeries of comfort that were ever uttered by people who will not take the trouble of sympathising with others, the one I dislike the most is the exhortation not to grieve over an event, “for it cannot be helped.” Do you think if I could help it, I would sit still with folded hands, content to mourn? Do you not believe that as long as hope remained I would be up and doing? I mourn because what has occurred cannot be helped. The reason you give me for not grieving, is the very sole reason of my grief. Give me nobler and higher reasons for enduring meekly what my Father sees fit to send, and I will try earnestly and faithfully to be patient; but mock me not, or any other mourner, with the speech, “Do not grieve, for it cannot be helped. It is past remedy.”

(MARY BARTON, p. 215)

I’m not sure if Gaskell’s NORTH AND SOUTH would add much to my research (and I’m starting to feel that the research should be ending and the writing beginning soon), but I hope I have time to read it for pleasure someday. This one, her first novel, is stunning.

I don’t know why I’m still surprised, but of course writers using distant omniscient point of view could well describe the thoughts and motivations of their people, treat subjects and events with realism, and experiment with form. Bronte, as in the more-famous JANE EYRE, breaks the fictional wall by talking directly to the reader (“Reader, I married him” being the classic line from JE). A paragraph into SHIRLEY, we read:

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you, something unromantic as Monday morning…

(from SHIRLEY, Penguin Classics edition 2006 (1849))

Of course, part of the story is a romance, and melodrama. The characters must suffer mightily, in deed and in mind, before some find their happy ending. And Bronte even includes a sort of epilogue, showing a few characters further on in life, reaping what they sowed during the story.

Some parts rang so true they made me laugh out loud. In my day job, I read about a lot of cognitive science research, including the benefits of exercise on the brain and mind. Not that it’s anything new:

‘My dear! You are surely not superstitious?’

‘No, Mrs Pryor; but I think I grow what is called nervous. I see things under a darker aspect than I used to do. I have fears I never used to have — not of ghosts, but of omens and diastrous events; and I have an inexpressible weight on my mind which I would give the world to shake off, and I cannot do it.’

‘Strange!’ cried Shirley. ‘I never feel so.’ Mrs Pryor said nothing.

‘Fine weather, pleasant days, pleasant scenes are powerless to give me pleasure,’ continued Caroline. ‘Calm evenings are not calm to me; moonlight, which I used to think mild, now only looks mournful. Is this weakness of mind, Mrs Pryor, or what is it? I cannot help it: I often struggle against it: I reason; but reason and effort make no difference.’

‘You should take more exercise,’ said Mrs Pryor.

(SHIRLEY, p. 227)

A big theme is the place of women in the world, or as heroine Caroline Helstone, 18, puts it ‘Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it?’ As is still true in some societies, most women in the early 1800s weren’t taught much and many weren’t expected to do much–certainly not go to work, if they were ladies. For a person who thinks and strives (and already has a staff to do all the housework and child-rearing), that doesn’t leave much.

And their worst tyrants were often of their own gender (I’m reminded of those morality-police ladies at the Iran-Germany women’s soccer match in the documentary ‘Football under cover’). Any straying from the path is called-out and castigated, if silently, as in this scene of Shirley singing a ballad containing words of passionate love:

Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness; she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one.

On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat — semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her — none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunneley looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was is proper to sing with such expression, with such originality — so unlike a school-girl? Decidedly not: it was strange; it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.

(SHIRLEY, pp 509-510)

The tone is aggressive, ironic, off-putting, pessimistic and sometimes angry. In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Lucasta Miller describes the many ways it is so different from Bronte’s first, JANE EYRE, with its tighter narrative and first-person intimate voice. But the canvas of SHIRLEY is wider, and the external conflict far greater–between classes, between manufacturer and labor, between women who won’t fit a mold and their elders and youngers who would force them to.

Here’s about half of the floor. Sales totaled more than $60,000, all for charity.

Next day starts the marathon of workshops, mixers, luncheon speakers and happy mayhem culminating in an awards ceremony for published and unpublished authors at the top of their game. Don’t know if my feet can hold out for that one (there’s often dancing after–and during); a sorry attempt at wearing fancy shoes has left me with double back-of-the-heel blisters. But there’s nothing wrong with my hands, and I’ll be taking notes and taking names for the next four days.