On Keeping A Reading Journal

Living with Hazel Motes and John Ames Boughton

Jan 09, 2025

Hazel Motes is on a train, sitting on a green plush seat when Hadley calls and asks me where my Costco card is.

Green and plush are the first details I notice and underline. Green for growth. Is that why Flannery O’Connor chose that color? Plush is comfortable, right? But Hazel isn’t comfortable. He’s sitting forward at an angle volleying his head between the window outside and the aisle inside the train.

“Why do you need my Costco card?” I ask Hadley, and she tells me she wants to get a cake for her Pre-Calculus teacher, and her AP Physics teacher told her that Costco is the place to get the cheapest and most delicious cake around.

Hazel isn’t just looking out the window. Flannery writes that he looks as if he wants to jump out of it. The train is moving fast. It’s “racing,” Flannery tells us. The sun is setting and Mrs Wally Bee Hitchcock who Flannery says seems to resemble a pig says this is the most beautiful time of day. She wants to know if Hazel agrees.

I tell Hadley the Costco card is in my wallet.

“When are you coming home?” she asks, and at my sharp inhale she begins to apologize but that doesn’t stop me from saying, for the millionth time that day, I won’t be home for a couple of hours. I’d made a hair appoingment - the first one in about 11 months - at a time when I’d confirmed would work for Hadley because Jesse is out of town, Harper needs to be at swim, and then Driver’s Ed, and also I have a meeting at church, and Hadley has a soccer game. I needed Hadley to help me with all of it so I can get to all of it. Last night, Hadley and I worked it all out. She would help me with the driving so that I could have it all and do it all - career, beauty, motherhood, volunteering.

But now Hadley wants my Costco card and I am fuming as I watch my well laid plan - our well laid plan - fly out of the window of this coffee shop and race down the sidewalk into the setting sun.

“I’m tired of looking like a before picture!” I tell Hadley.

“I know my responsibility,” she tells me. “Can you please take a picture of the Costco card?”

“Identity is a theme that runs throughout these initial chapters [of Wise Blood],” writes the authors of the Super Summary Study Guide. I read the summaries before I read the book, and then I go back and read the analysis. This is not something I like to admit but for books like this - Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare - I have to do it. I probably wouldn’t have read the book at all if it hadn’t been for my friend Melissa, who texted me early in the Spring and asked if I wanted to read Wise Blood together.

Melissa is the one who shared carrots with me on the bus ride to St. John’s campus my first year of graduate school. She is the one who saw me cry that first time when, over wine and cheese and looking at the Santa Fe mountains, someone asked me if I missed my children and probably I said yes, but all I remember were tears falling and my head nodding as if moving it would keep it on.

I didn’t want to admit to her that I’d use a study guide for our little project, but when I did she said she’d get it as well. And then later she told me that reading the summaries were grounding and just like that, she put a shiny twist - that part of the spiral slide that always sees the sun and shoots warmth up your legs and back as you shoot toward the ground - into my old and tired narrative that I’m always telling myself.

Maybe Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock is trying to do the same for Hazel when she tells him that this part of the day, the golden hour when shadows and sun somhow work together to bring forth the depth of beauty in the world, is her favorite. That’s the kind of beauty that’ll ground a person; probably change a narrative or two after witnessing that kind of gold. Maybe she was trying to change her own narrative and was looking to Hazel for a bit of help. Indeed, he might say, this is the best part of the day. When the work has been doen and it’s time to go home and make a nice meal. Maybe use someting from the garden, maybe sit around the fire and sip something slowly with friends or family. Maybe tell a few stories. Hazel isn’t interested. Or maybe he is, but he doesn’t have the luxury to usher in the evening. Hazel is lost.

“Nobody was confused back then,” a guy sitting at a table next to me says. I want to tell him to be careful - doesn’t he know where he is? And also, how does he know nobody was confused back then? When was back then? I don’t say anything to him. Instead, I close Wise Blood, take a picture of my Costco card and send it to Hadley, and head to my hair appointment.

This is how it goes most days: I read a little and I write about what I read. I do it with poetry, too. Like when Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer tells us in “Humble Aliveness”:

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Someday I will miss a morning like this,
when I rise in the dark to slice apples
and scrape ice from the windshield
so I can drive my daughter to school....

I write the entire poem in my Reading Journal and then I try myself:

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Someday I will  miss an afternoon like this
Hadley calling me while I'm still teaching
"I'm on an earlier plane to Italy,"
and if I want to say goodbye
before she flies across an ocean
I must leave now

Or when I’m reading the New York Times magazine and an ad for Poltrona Frau tells me that a chair is “made of stories” I write that down in my Reading Journal, too. And then I ask, “What happens when the preposition changes?”

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Made for
from
next to
around 
under

If the chair is the subject, what does it do to the story when the preposition changes? If we are the subject, what does it do to our stories when the preposition changes?

Saturday morning I’m reading Jack by Marilynne Robinson. This is the third of her books that I’ve read of hers in 2024 (though I’m finishing Jack in 2025), and I’m intrigued by how she seems to balance deep conflict, even tragedy, with domesticity. Della, for example, is making pancakes for Jack on a morning when he slept on her couch. He’s not supposed to be there, and she knows it and he does, too. He calls himself the Prince of Darkness. She loves him. He loves her. She makes him eggs and coffee, too. “I bring problems on myself,” Della tells Jack. “Some of the them are worth it.” She serves him the pancakes. He carries over the mugs of coffee. He thanks her for the breakfast and she says she’s just trying to keep him alive. “You don’t have to do that,” Jack says. “Try, I mean. You keep me alive already. Just the thought of you.”

Jesse comes home from a workout, starts his tea. He walks upstairs to where I am and says good morning. He is holding a book and I ask him if he is going to read. He says yes. I get up and walk downstairs to sit on the couch with him and we read our books. He’s reading about the Great Lakes.

Hadley’s still sleeping, and Harper’s at swim practice and Jesse says there’s still leftover strata and he’s put it in the oven. The smell is turning the house into something warm and savory and this is how it goes - I read and see myself in the story and my life becomes a story.

We have dried cherries and roasted sliced almonds, and buttermilk, too. All of it leftover from our Christmas feasts and snacking. While the strata warms, I make a batch of cherry almond scones, my first time making a recipe that I don’t follow. This one is all my own.

Read in 2024: