The Behavior of the Hawkweeds

Playing truant again. This time from painting the fence at my parents' house. Winding lengths of rough wood planks waiting to be primed or feeding coffee addiction and reading? Well, if I'd picked option a, this blog would have a different title and I would be a better person.

So, I'm sipping coffee at Panera and listening to French music (is Edith Piaf a substitute for my French language cds? I'll note unfamiliar words to appease my guilt at shirking study) while reading stories by Andrea Barrett. "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds" is my favorite so far. I love stories within stories. There is the realism of the main plotline, with its university setting, the main character's straightforward-yet-stilted relationship with her husband, her attraction to the young student. Then the author entertwines another story from another time, a story that, despite its scientific basis, feels tinglingly like folklore. Andrea Barrett got her bachelor's degree in biology, and although she didn't make a career as a biologist, I'm guessing she chose the major because science intrigued her in some way, and continues to do so. It is only a writer's passion that could pique my fancy about something as esoteric as the genetic code of peas and hawkweeds and a nineteenth-century scientist named Gregory Mendel.

[Ah, PAUSE, unfamiliar word in the Edith Piaf music: "plaisirs".... per google translation, pleasures. See, I'm studying, responsible, other-self. Meanie. I'll call her CR, for Christina Rose. She's the driven one. All I want to do is sip my coffee and she all like, gurrrrrl, you gotta be studyin'... (apparently she's also fond of ghetto speak) ]

ANYway, yes, so Andrea Barrett's writing enchants me and brings me closer to believing that you can be (which I intellectually know you can, but for some reason have never been able to completely believe) passionate about both writing fiction and also about science or perhaps economics or maybe math (like that story by Joyce Carol Oates about the girl who is fascinated by numbers...what was that story?). I just always think of the restlessness necessary to be a writer (a good one) and the groundedness necessary to be a good anything else somehow mutually exclusive. But maybe scientists aren't as grounded as I thought. Maybe they have to be dreamers too.