Sunday, September 28, 2014

My feminine side

I was going to title this post "Getting in Touch with My Feminine Side" until I realized it sounded like something I might have to have myself arrested for.

But lately I've become more aware of my sensitivity to the things around me. This awareness could be, in part, a condition of my age as I grow older, although I don't know that for sure.

What I do know is that I've been reading my share of chick books lately. Books loaded with pastel colors on the covers and tons of feminine perspective within the pages. Through the hearty recommendation of a (female) friend on Facebook, I went to the library and picked up "Sullivan's Island" and "Isle of Palms" by Dorothea Benton Frank.

Frank is an author I'd never heard of prior to this, but her work shows up now and then on the New York Times bestseller list. She writes descriptively, with a taste of Geechee and Gullah flavoring, of modern life in the Lowcountry region around Charleston and its environs.

I felt a little funny about checking these books out of the library until I saw on their colorful covers that Pat Conroy, the definitive Lowcountry author, described Frank's work as "hilarious and wise" and that "her books are funny, witty and usually damp with saltwater."

OK, I was hooked. My anima was piqued (the anima, as described by theoretical psychologist Carl Jung, is the female inner personality that resides in the male unconscious. I think it's the anima that makes me cry when my favorite football team loses the big game. For the female, it's the animus. I think. I'm waiting for the animus to tell Kim, my wife, it's time for her to mow the yard). Anyway, I breezed through these two potboilers getting heavy doses of what it's like raising teenage girls, menopause, cheating husbands, small business ownership and what it takes to apply makeup correctly.

Hmmm.

This might have been a little more than I bargained for, although I will give Frank credit for broadening my anima horizons. Kim now has my total empathy, if not sympathy. Or is it the other way around?

My reading list, by the way, still leans to the feminine perspective. I finished and returned Frank's books to pick up the ultimate female Southern epic, Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." I've never read it, and it's about time I do. I'm just a couple pages into the 1,000 I still have to read, and I can tell right off that we've reached a different level of depth and perception here.

At any rate, I guess I'm glad I've tweaked my feminine side. I'm ready for glorious sunsets, pina coladas on the beach, cuddling, candles, bed and breakfast inns, to pet a cat, to weep at a sad movie, to just go out and smell the roses.




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