Updike in These titles mean nothing.

This is the photo that John Updike’s Facebook account is using as a banner right now. Updike has been dead for some years now. He died in his early seventies of lung cancer. So someone else is running his Facebook page. If he were alive, someone else would be doing it too, but he might check it from time to time and have some input into what was on it if he were still among us.

Anyway. Those who know me know Updike is important to me. I’ve read him since high school. It doesn’t take much to get me to relate the plot of the short story Pigeon Feathers or to tell about the night my short-lived writing group read excerpts of that story in the high ceiling-ed meeting room of the library.

Anyway. I followed Updike through my life. I read most of his novels and a lot of his short stories. I loved the way he wrote and what he had to say. I loved getting to know him. To know his family and his life. I loved knowing he existed.

The last trip my husband and I took was on a spring weekend in 2002 to Cedar
Rapids to hear Updike talk and read at Coe College. He wore a tweed jacket with baggy pockets. He read from several works, and answered a few long-winded questions from the floor. He was gracious and seemed happy to be there.

My son, who reads a different internet than I do, says the feminists don’t like Updike. He’s hard on women and does not value them. I don’t necessarily disagree, but there is more to it. Men are hard on women because women matter to them. They try to dominate them because they have to. They are unable to show their vulnerability. They are afraid of losing.

I said to my son, that my solution to male authors who are hard on women is to just pretend I’m a man and read their books from a male viewpoint. My son wondered how far I’d get with the feminists with that theory.

Having said all that. Running across the picture at the top of the page struck me. It’s a young Updike with his first wife and their four kids. Their marriage broke up. He either left her for another woman or she left him because he was having affairs. It pretty much all amounts to the same thing. Her name was Mary.

I regret the loss of Updike’s first marriage. I regret his kids losing him. No one, especially no one as smart and careful as Updike, has four kids without knowing what he is doing, without intending to raise them, without intending on being their father.

He remarried a woman with a family, a woman close to his own age - he wrote once that they both became far-sighted together, had she been younger she could have seen the little things that he could no longer see. He also wrote that sex with his first wife had been stressful. They had wanted to please each other. Sex with his second wife had just been about pleasing themselves.

Of course he did not write about his wives, or about his children. He wrote fiction and the characters in his fiction were not his wives and children. Yet.... of course they were.

Oh and his mother. He wrote about her a lot. She became a fictional character and a real life character. Her farm was very real.

His father is in The Centaur. His father is the centaur. He taught high school science. He so filled that book that he never was written about again. I always assumed Updike’s father had died at an early age because the father in The Centaur did. I’m still surprised to think he lived to be an old man.

Still. I look at the picture at the top of the page and think. It’s not the kids’ fault. They deserved to keep their father.

It’s Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend.

It’s starting to rain lightly.

The corn and beans are planted. Jim says he needs more rain to seal the soil to give the seeds a chance to grow. On the other hand they don’t grow in the bags. John was here to help. He tilled soil and planted some of the corn in the big field at Joana’s.

The cows and calves that are going to away pasture are penned behind the barn. It was noisy for a while until they got themselves sorted out. You want the right mothers and children together. Otherwise - well it’s not a happy situation and it’s noisy.

Grandkids are here too. And Deb of course. And Hans. Will and I walked up to Joana’s yesterday afternoon. We took her some food, sunroasted tomato turkey sandwiches, cheese, graham crackers, an apple, a pear and a banana. It was warm and sunny. I hope we didn’t get sunburned. Katie and John went up to the shed in the woods. Katie pinched her finger in the door.

Now it’s raining more heavily. Good.

Wishes for a good rest of the weekend. A good entry into summer for us all.

If you have some time on your hands and want to read a little more about writers and books and see some cool pictures go here.

Last updated May 24, 2017