Today, a student asked me to be his valentine. It would have been precious, but the student is in Grade 6, somewhere around 12 years old. I told him he's too young for me, so he put his arm around my shoulders (he's almost my height) and said, "But if I was your age...?" Um, still no. Nice try, though.
I started Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth today (the Lit teacher reads in her spare time...can you imagine?). She's a favorite author of mine, having first read from her collection Interpreter of Maladies in a Creative Writing class, then again in my Senior Seminar class. In between the two, my best friend gave me the book upon her return from a semester in India. Lahiri's kind of a big deal in the literary world and I'm a big fan of her take on the human condition. I'm anxious to see how she continues to prove her mastery of short story in this collection.
It sort of had me at hello, however.
Check out the epigraph:
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. --Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom-House"
They just don't write 'em like they used to. Sigh.
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