Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I’m finally getting to the review I’ve been putting off, folks, because I’m finally alone in the house–sort of. (Meaning that my oldest, the service missionary, is home sick, but she’s still sleeping AND she’s more responsible for herself than the others, so that doesn’t count at the moment.) When I visited my mother in September after my dad went into memory care, I brought along a stack of juvenile nonfiction, thinking I might read something aloud to her if she was interested and wanting to have plenty of options for her to choose from. Interestingly, she told me she loves being read to, and she picked Sally M. Walker’s Blizzard of Glass: The Halifax Explosion of 1917 for us to read together. It took us most of the visit, overall–we were doing other things, of course, and we moved more slowly through the most devastating parts–but we finished it before I went home.

For those of you (like myself, before reading this book) who aren’t familiar with the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbour, it was the largest man-made explosion on earth until the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945. Two ships collided through a series of mistakes/miscommunications, one of which was carrying an incredibly full load of munitions to be used overseas in WWI. Over 1700 people were killed and hundreds were blinded, having been watching the initial fire from their windows when the explosion blew those windows into tiny shards of moving glass. Relief efforts were hampered by a blizzard on the following day, and all in all, it was both fascinating and heartbreaking to read about. Heroic acts and miraculous survivals mingled with devastation and loss, and while (in hindsight) it was perhaps a questionable choice for the time, it was riveting. (Walker’s tone felt occasionally young for the topic–as in, explaining words and concepts in ways that readers tackling such a subject might find condescending–but the topic was gripping enough that moving past those bits wasn’t terribly difficult.) People should read this book–or others on the topic–because this is a piece of history that we should know.

I found myself thinking, in fact, that there should be a class covering the important bits of history that few of us seem to know about any longer, like (among other things) such disasters; then I smiled and shook my head, because my dad taught a ‘human response to natural disasters’ class at Rhode Island College for years, which means that such classes do exist. (Not that a man-made explosion would qualify for that particular class, but you know what I mean.) And then I was remembering my dad.

As for our weekend, I did a good bit of cleaning on Saturday, my senior took my youngest out trick-or-treating while my son went to a friends neighborhood, yesterday was calm and rainy, and I took my middles to a multi-stake fireside with a former member of Vocal Point (BYU’s male a cappella group). Good times!