Andrew Martin > Recent Status Updates

This is probably the best book I haven’t finished.

Evidently the narrator was saved from the side of the road by a man named Jesus Lopez Perez. The kids are unimpressed when she shares “Jesus saved me,” but Leo laughs. For as long as she spent stranded, this resolution is… vague. And brief. And a weird jump in time.

“The fact that sometimes I make nutty cinnamon buns for people who DON’T have problems with nuts, the fact that soon they’ll want me to make a sugar- and butter- and flour-free version for people on a diet, and an air-free version for people allergic to air, and a beef-liver-flavored version for pets, but at some point you just have to say “These are the cinnamon rolls that I make.””

Another vignette of the lioness. Here, she meets, loves, and mates with a robust and caring lion, but she eventually grows restless and wants some of her own independence back.

Still stranded. “The fact that Leo loves me, and that comforts me, the fact that that is a constant source of comfort, even when I’m dying of hypothermia… the fact that he says he misses me all the time too, when we’re not together, the fact that his love exists in a world where nobody else gives a hoot about me”

Narrator has been stuck with a flat tire for quite a few pages now. It is 30° in February. She regrets that men won’t stop and help her on the side of the road because they can tell, despite her winter clothes, that she is a middle-aged woman and therefore only “vestigially sexy”. She muses that the men should save her because her pie delivery will save many gorgeous blonde women from starving.

Not sure if we already knew this: The narrator’s oldest daughter is from a relationship with someone called Frank, not the current husband Leo. Plus, a long tangent about the plight of the Abominable Snowman.

The dentist appointment really was for the narrator, not Jake, and at that she had a particularly traumatic time.

It appears that the narrator is now taking her youngest son Jake to the dentist for the first time. She mentions that more snow is on the way and she has many baked good deliveries yet to make.

We get the narrator’s original bakery promo flyer which was humbly attached to a PTA bulletin board and exploded in popularity. The words and Wingdings on the flyer form the shape of a two-layer cake on a stand.

From 170-175, Narrator off-and-on discusses the origin of her home baking business, which has grown to a very time-consuming enterprise without her ever really meaning or believing that it deserved to.

Title has been mentioned again. Second time as I recall. Not really sure what it means.

“When Mommy was sick, we were all a mess, somebody once brought over an undercooked chicken and told us to “finish” cooking it ourselves at suppertime, or whenever, the fact that even we knew that was unsafe, the fact that the last thing a destroyed family needs is salmonella, or E. coli or whatever”

“Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder of the 1944 St. Louis Browns, became a dramatic symbol of the wartime manpower shortage. Organized baseball totally ignored the two-armed, able-bodied Negro League athletes. In light of both the international embarrassment caused by segregation and the need for ballplayers, pressures mounted for baseball to drop its color barrier.”

“Within the empire of Jim Crow, black ballplayers carved out their own game, a distinctive entity in which baseball attained some of its greatest moments, only to see them ignored and forgotten. But the ability to survive and sustain a flourishing culture in the face of discrimination does not erase the stain.”

“Racial and ethnic exclusion often constituted a means to define the distinctiveness of a given profession. As baseball attempted to establish itself on a secure institutional footing, players and owners defined the attributes of a respectable, professional game. The national pastime would be wholesome, free from the taint of gamblers, and the exclusive preserve of white athletes.”

“Baseball was one of the first institutions in modern society to accept blacks on a relatively equal basis… An examination of the forces that led to Robinson’s hiring, the reaction among both blacks and whites, the institutional response of the baseball establishment, and the resulting decline of the Jim Crow leagues reveals much about the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.”