#590 Geese- ZZ Packer

#590 Geese- ZZ Packer

Dina is young and wants to get out of Baltimore. “Back home, money was the ony excuse for leaving.” Well, she didn’t have a plan for money, in fact she had no plan at all. However, with nothing but the adventure of youth, she went all the way to Japan. She found temporary work at an American themed amusement park. She didnt make much money but she made a friend, Ari.

After that job finished, she couldn’t find any work, and Ari allowed her to move into his small apartment while she looked. Over the next several month the apartment filled with other foreigners needing help. Ari seemed to collect lost causes. It was like the island of misfit toys. There was an ex model with a damaged face, a broken down Hungarian body builder, and a Moroccan man that fled his family after marrying the wrong woman, a woman who has now left him.

Together they were jobless, moneyless and starving. They became indigent, and the epitome of everything that the locals resented about foreigners. Forced by fear, shame, and need, Dina turns to the thing she didn’t want to resort to. But at least it isn’t Baltimore?

Notable Passage: “There were two types of hunger—one in which you would do anything for food, the other in which you could not bring yourself to complete the smallest task for it.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#555 Speaking in Tongues- ZZ Packer

#555 Speaking in Tongues- ZZ Packer

Tia was a religious girl. She lived with her aunt and played the clarinet. She and her friend Marcelle were the only girls at Rutherford B. Hayes High School to be “Saved,” but she didn’t feel the spirit. She couldn’t speak in tongues like the others at her church, and she didn’t want to pretend. She wanted to really feel the Lord’s presence.

“You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at home, but nothing worked.”

She felt lost and abandoned. She decided to run away from home and look for her mother in Atlanta. She was on a quest not only to find her mother, but to find salvation, faith, and truth. What she found was a city too big for a fourteen-year old girl toting around a clarinet case with only a few dollars in her pocket. She fell in with a drug dealer and a prostitute. She narrowly missed irreparable damage and while not finding the things she set out to find, she may have found more valuable truths about life.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total=32

#527 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere- ZZ Packer

#527 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere- ZZ Packer

This is a story about alienation. Dina is an outcast at Yale. Being a black woman in this environment made her automatically different, but her isolation—mostly caused by herself—led to a very lonely college experience.

Another girl, an outsider herself, reaches out to her, and Dina reluctantly allows her into her world. “The girl turned to face me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in that fact that she was able to at all when she was accustomed to crying.”

Heidi is gay, and Dina is inexperienced in any sexual or romantic way so she is confused. She is hiding, figuratively behind a strong, gruff personality and hiding literally in her dorm room she rarely leaves. Heidi may seem meek but she is self-aware and honest about who she is. Dina pretends.  She won't let a boy walk her home, because she is afraid he’ll see her poor neighborhood; she is ashamed of being week, so she tells her mother she lost the food stamps; she watches the coming out rally from her window.

Dina denies all opportunities to become less isolated, becoming more and more selfish with each rejection.

Notable Passage: “Constantly saying what one doesn’t mean accustoms the mouth to meaningless phrases.”

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

Spurgeon has to bail out his father again from jail. Ray Bivens Junior fancies himself a revolutionary, but he’s nothing more than a dead-beat dad and a hustler. Spurgeon is a great student, never missed a day of school, is the star of the debate team. His father, with no money and a revoked driver’s license convinces him to skip school and the debate match to take his mothers car and drive them to the Million Man March 700 miles away.

At the march he’s pissed-off and argumentative with the older men trying to get him to see the power of the day. All he sees if that his dad forced him to come, not to feel the power of the day, but to sell some rare birds his father stole. All he wants to do is go home, but his dad gets drunk, beats him up, and steals the car—and doesn’t even pay him the money he owes after selling a bird.

This was the point of the day for Spurgeon. His dad can talk about his revolutionary past all he wants, but if you can’t eve be a good father, what’s the point.

“Atoning for one’s wrongs is different from apologizing…one involves words, the other, actions.”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

Lynnea finally got out of her backwoods Kentucky town…only to end up in Baltimore. Her freelance writing job wasn’t paying enough so she took a teaching program and ended up at a public High School.

Teaching public High School in a poorly funded, weakly supported bad part of a city like Baltimore isn’t as bad as you might think; It’s a thousand tomes worse. It is definitely not the place to go to find yourself, or figure out your own life. Children are self-centered creatures, they are supposed to be that way, that’s their job. If you can’t find a way to keep your own insecurities out of the classroom, things will spiral out of control.

I think that’s what happens to Lynnea in this story. Of course the children should behave, of course they should show respect, and want to learn. But if they don’t, is really isn’t their fault?

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#450 Brownies- ZZ Packer

#450 Brownies- ZZ Packer

This is the first story in Packer’s collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  A troupe of Brownies (younger girl scouts if there is someone who doesn’t know what that is) attend a camping weekend. They are from a predominantly black south Atlantic Suburb and they fixate on an all white Troupe 909.  The “leader” of the girls says she heard a racial slur being thrown in their direction, and she rouses the others into action.

What follows is a pretty great description of child group/peer/tribal behavior. Social archetypes play their rolls: the leader, the peacemaker, the troublemaker, the follower, the goody-two-shoes, quiet moral one, etc. Although race is at the heart of the conflict, it does not seem to be the heart of the meaning of this story (although the race dynamics shouldn’t be overlooked). Group activity and peer pressure are a huge part of growing up, especially at a Girl Scout camp.

Notable Passages: “The word ‘secret’ had a built-in importance, the modifier form of the word carried more clout than the noun. A secret meant nothing; it was like gossip: just a bit of unpleasant knowledge about someone who happened to be someone other than yourself. A secret meeting, or a secret club was entirely different.”

“Even though I didn’t want to fight, was afraid of fighting, I felt like I was a part of the rest of the troop; like I was defending something.”

 “When you’ve been made to feel bad for so long, you jump at the chance to do it to others.”

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#295 Every Tongue Shall Confess- ZZ Packer

#295 Every Tongue Shall Confess- ZZ Packer

Often it’s the purest souls that are the most ostracized, even amongst the devout, perhaps especially amongst the devout. Thus, Clarice found herself alone in the Brothers’ Church Council of Greater Christ Emanuel Church of the Fire Baptists.

Looked over and taken advantage of by the Pastor, she held onto her faith and led the choir. She lived a life of service, in the church and as a nurse. When faced with ridicule, she turned the other cheek, for as long as she could. Sometimes ridicule becomes a test too hard to overcome. “Cleophus Sanders was just another one of those patients that disrespected the lord.”

Humans are sinners, and even the purest has imperfections, and those often come to the surface at very inopportune times.

Notable Passage: “This was how Satan worked, throwing you off a little at a time.”

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26