Suzanne’s Dear Reader column this morning really hit a chord with me. When Rudi and I first moved away from Connecticut to D.C. so he could pursue grad school, I was lonely and miserable (and unemployed).

But we were about to enter an election cycle and I’d read about a group that was forming, so I went to an organizational meeting. We divided up into groups and I joined the “visibility committee,” which was charged with raising awareness about the candidate. The guy who was organizing the group at large asked for a volunteer to head up the committee and there was silence. I hate that silence. It inevitably means that the person who asked the question is going to get stuck doing all the work – so before I knew what was happening, my own arm was up in the air.

“I have some time,” I said. “I can do it.”

And, indeed, just as Suzanne noted in her column, it was good for me, despite my reticence to volunteer for it. Before I knew what exactly was happening, I was accosting strangers with flyers, organizing “small” crowds of 150 to meet the candidate at events, marching in parades, and standing on tables exhorting crowds to reclaim their party through involvement. For ten months, I slept four hours a night. But I suddenly went from lonely and sad to over-involved and recognizable on the street. Literally, strangers would come up to me in Dupont Circle and say, “Hey, Kirstin, that was a great speech you gave last night,” or “I have some time. I’d love to get involved.” And, in fact, people whom I can’t remember ever meeting still approach me. And on the night of the election (when we lost), a whole bar full of people sang “Happy Birthday” to me.

The people in that political group became my surrogate family down here and remain close, even though the campaign has now been over longer than it lasted. We have barbecues. We go to ball games together. We go out to dinner.

So whenever I notice a void and feel myself guilted into volunteering to fill it, I try to remember that sometimes those experiences can be the best ones.

Each Thursday brings three new beautiful things from my life:

1. A few years back, I asked Gramma to write out some of her recipes for me as a Christmas present. She obliged, and I find that now that I don’t see her several times a week, I turn to it for inspiration on a regular basis. On Sunday, we went to dinner at Phillip’s house and I was asked to bring dessert. So I thumbed through Gramma’s cookbook once again, looking for a recipe that didn’t call for fruit (Susan doesn’t like fruit), and decided on cream puffs. Now, whenever Gramma made them, I was under the impression that she’d performed culinary magic. But the truth is that they’re very easy to make. She laughed when I called to tell her of my success and said they’re actually the easiest dessert to make. If you don’t believe me, check out the Washington Post‘s cream puff article, which, incidentally, appeared in yesterday’s paper. (Visit BugMeNot if you need a login.)

2. Rudi and I went out for a walk around sunset on Monday and as we surfaced from The Burrow, we noticed a bat flying around the neighborhood. He pursued his dinner for a while and then settled back near the neighbor’s fire escape. I don’t know if he was actually hanging from the fire escape or if there was a hole in the house where he was hanging, but he just disappeared. It was very cool in a Dracula kind of way…

3. When we lived in Middletown, our house was right across the street from the local pizza joint. We were regulars, calling up every Friday night (or any time we couldn’t resist the smell) to order dinner. And on nights when we were making pasta, it was simpler (and at $1.50 almost cheaper) to order garlic bread from them than it was to go to the store in pursuit of bread to make our own. (Plus, who can argue with garlic bread made by actual Italians?) Just after we moved away, the restaurant closed briefly and switched ownership. Apparently they couldn’t survive without us. (Or maybe they just chose not to…) But on Saturday, when I’d made some hummus and didn’t feel like making my own pitas, it was a nostalgic feeling to walk the two blocks over to Zorba’s and order some of their homemade pitta bread. $1.19 bought me three hot pitas. Yum!

Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved, has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature.

Kudos to Paterson who had the longest lines at the National Book Festival signing booths two years ago.

(Via BookMoot.)

ides: The 15th of March, May, July, or October or the 13th day of the other months in the ancient Roman calendar. (From the Latin idus, a possible derivative of an Etruscan word meaning “division of a month.”)

Apparently, the Romans only considered three days a month important: Kalends (the first day of the month), Nonas (the 7th of March, May, July, or October or the 5th of the other months), and Ides. You then counted backward from those dates to keep track of the other days of the month.

The dates were lunar and monetary in origin. Kalends, from which the word “calendar” is derived, itself came from the word Kalendrium, meaning “account book,” and was the day on which debts were due. Nonas was traditionally the day on which the moon was half-full. And Ides was traditionally the day of the full moon.

The difference in dates (5th vs. 7th and 13th vs. 15th) seems to correspond to how long the months were in the Roman calendar. March, May, July, and October were 31-day months, while the rest were 28 or 29 days long.

The Guardian, the best paper to read if you like literature, has published a list of librarians’ must-read books.

Librarians were asked by the Museum, Libraries, and Achives Council, “Which book should every adult read before they die?”

The complete list, with those I’ve read in bold (those I’ve read parts of are marked with a single asterisk):

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
   
2. The Bible*
3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
   
4. 1984 by George Orwell
5. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
   
8. All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
9. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman*
10. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
14. Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
15. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
    
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    
17. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
    
18. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
    
19. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
    
20. The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
21. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
22. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
23. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
    
24. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
25. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
26. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
27. Middlemarch by George Eliot
28. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
29. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
30. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

If we include the two I’ve read parts of, I’m halfway through the list, with a strong emphasis on the classics.

Granted, it’s clear from this list that books originally written in English and those written by Brits themselves get a higher priority than on lists that other groups would create. But that’s still okay. Because it’s fun to see what others recommend.

You know it’s spring in Washington not when the cherry blossoms start to bud, not when tourists flock to the Mall, but when the Madison Lively Stones return to their spot at Dupont Circle. The Lively Stones is the trombone shout band associated with D.C.’s United House of Prayer for All People Church. (Visit this website if you’re interested in hearing what a shout band sounds like.)

We stumbled upon the impromptu performance during an evening walk.

I was restless, seeking something I could not name. Apparently it was the band because after 45 minutes of sitting under a full moon with a cup of hot tea watching a community united by their music, my soul felt lighter.