Lamb Chops Are Sounding Better And Better All The Time

  I used to love sheep. I had visions of the furry little lambs happily gamboling among calm ewes, and majestic rams standing watch over their families, with wise eyes surveying the horizon for danger. I had fantasies of arriving home after a day at the Frame Shop, and seeing white fluffy dots on the hillside, hearing joyful "Baaaaaa"s as the faithful Border Collie began to round them up, and spinning soft, soft wool into yarn which I would use to knit extremely lovely and highly sought-after sweaters.
  I started out with the Border Collie- a sweet, sweet tri-color boy that I love with all of my heart. He loves me too, unless there is a sheep close by. When he spots one, I cease to exist completely. We attend herding classes every week, and I look forward to getting in the ring with Mac, Ms. Jane Bradley (a very well-respected instructor and just a lovely lady all around) and a selection of sheep. We start out with simple exercises; sneak up on the sheep without spooking them, keep the sheep going in one direction, and don't let the dog hurt the sheep.

  

Couldn't you just kiss her?

  All went well for a couple of months, and if I wasn't the most graceful of shepherdesses, I bet I had the most fun! Watching Mac doing what he enjoys so much, being among the sweet sheep, laughing with a group of people who were enjoying this herding thing as much as I, all made Saturday mornings the highlight of my week.

 Then I turned my back on one of the fuzzy little psychopaths...

 The morning was beautiful, crisp and clean and when the sun came out, nice and warm. We all dragged our dogs and our chairs out to the field and set up for the morning's lessons. The sheep were herded from their big field up to the holding field, and the lucky few were selected. There were three- a mama and two lambs. These were nearly grown babies, and you wouldn't call them lambs if you just walked up to them on the street. They look like regular old sheep to me.

  Mac and I had the first turn. We hadn't had lessons the week before, and had been studying abroad (up in North Alabama) for the two weeks before that, so the sheep were a little frisky. One of the lambs bounced across the pen, pronging in a "Sharks and Jets" kind of gesture. I laughed an indulgent laugh. Oh, the silly child, excited by the weather and feeling it's oats! What a precious sight.

  Then I turned my back.

   How it happened is, Mac lost his mind over the sheep and their unusual flightiness, and began herding them in the way that HE wanted them to go, with no thought as to what I had directed him to do. I stopped to get a pointer or two on how to get things going in the right direction once more, and BAM, the little shit, I mean sheep plowed right into me, and kept going without a backward glance to see if he'd killed me.

A sheep's head is about knee high.

  I heard the crunch, rather then felt it, but I felt my knee bend kind in the wrong direction. It didn't hurt, but I immediately went down. On the way to the ground I had time to think that I shouldn't have enjoyed bending my Barbie dolls' knees backwards so much, and that I'd have to dig them out of my old closet at Daddy's and apologize.

It's all fun and games until someone gets eaten.

                                                                                 * Image courtesy of "Black Sheep" movie*

  In the inevitable hilarity which ensued, someone snapped a photo, Mac continued to chase the sheep, and Ms. Jane caught him and then leaned down and told me not to worry, that I could just go twice during the second round of runs. I think that's when I started laughing.

Notice that my son does not care in the least that I am broken. 

  I hobbled over to the gate and made it to my chair, where I held court for the rest of the morning, foot propped on a cinder block, a bag of ice cooling my knee. Mac finished his lessons, and I drove home. Chris insisted that I wear not the navy exercise pants that would easily raise and lower over my knee for examining purposes, but shorts, because, he explained, they would have to cut my pants off if I wore long ones. I tried telling him that I was not shot, merely cracked, but he has watched too many "Trauma: Life In The ER" episodes, and so I wore shorts.

  We have such kind people at our local ER. Not one of them mentioned that I have not shaved since the first of November, even when their latex gloves caught on my stubble. They just smiled and tugged until the gloves came free, and then patted me on my head or my shoulder,or some other part that was covered. 

   I am thinking that I can just spin my leg hairs into highly sought-after sweaters and gift them to the wonderful ER employees.

   And I am thinking lamb chops for dinner.

  

My very own personal list of 100 books that EVERYONE should read if they want to be "Well Read".

"When I get a little money, I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes."- Erasmus

  I was Erasmus in a former life, I just know it. One time Chris, in a fit of fiscal pique, tried to count the books by my bedside. He stopped, mouth hanging open and arms flapping, when he realized that they weren't just stacked on the nightstand, but beside the bed, beneath the bed, and on the bed. When he recovered his mobility, he went to Home Depot and came home with cute little wall-mounted bookshelves. He nailed them up and started stacking novels, biographies, and a couple of self-help mistakes. Over the years he's added shelves above doors and along walls. Thankfully since I discovered the Kindle, he hasn't had to carpenter much. Once, when we were being vetted by Family and Children's Services in order to take in a set of children for a couple of weeks, the caseworker walked into our den and breathed, "Boooooks!" in an awed voice.

  

One of our bookshelves- thank heavens Chris didn't have to build this one!

  I read EVERYTHING!! I read deep books and books that really don't have any business being called books. I read shampoo bottles in the bathroom and cereal boxes at the kitchen table. Mama read like a fiend, and my brother did too, and when I was about sixteen, my poor father, who is not a reader, tried to outlaw reading at dinner. He'd grown desperately tired of seeing not his beloved family's shining faces at the table, but three books, open and raised to face level, and three forks blindly stabbing around at the evening meal. It didn't last- it can be scary, trying to eat dinner with three sets of cold, narrowed eyes, and three silent, snarling mouths that say nothing, not even, "Pass the salt, please." Poor Daddy caved and ate dinner with whatever we were reading until we left for college.

  So, have you seen those lists of  "100 Books You Must Read Before Whomever Wrote The List Will Allow You To Be Considered "Well Read""? They all have a few of the same old standard titles, and then they wander off into some literary swamp where moldy and purposely obtuse tomes go to die. 

  I usually take the bait and click over to the test, just to torture myself. Usually, I manage to have read around 50 of the listed books. I have scored as high as 75, and as low as 27. And I read EVERYTHING!!  How is it possible to have read two or three books per week for 45 years and NOT be "Well Read"? Well, I looked up the definition, and decided that those quizzes are full of crap. 

         "Well Read: 1) A person knowlegable and informed as a result of extensive reading."

                                                                                                                       -Google Definitions

 I read several definitions, and not once did I see any mention of that damnable "Ulysses" as a prerequisite for earning the title.

  I decided to create my own list of 100 books, but they are the books I consider to have made me well-read, for different reasons, and I will include some of those reasons. You will notice the marked absence of "Ulysses", though "The Dubliners" is on there somewhere. I think maybe 2 people I know have actually read that damned book through, and only 1 enjoyed it, but he was drunk, so he and Joyce spoke the same language. 

  So, without further ado, here's my list of  100 Books That Made Me "Well Read"- (in no particular order)

  1) "Boy's Life" Robert McCammon

  2) "A Prayer For Owen Meany" John Irving

  3) "Rebecca" Daphne duMaurier

  4) "The Prince of Tides" Pat Conroy

  5) "The Little Friend" Donna Tartt

  6) "The Color Purple" Alice Walker

  7) "A Handmaid's Tale" Margaret Atwood

  8) "To Kill A Mockingbird" Miss Harper Lee

  9) "A Child's Garden Of Verses" Robert Louis Stevenson

 10) "Tom Sawyer" Mark Twain (yes, I know that Huckleberry Finn is the preferred work on these lists, but Tom and Heidi listed below are the books I was reading when I fell in love with the written word. I was seven.)

 11) "Heidi" Johanna Spyri

 12) "Madame Bovary" Gustave Flaubert

 13) "Jaws" Peter Benchley (Changed my LIFE! I was swept into this novel and only came up for air when I was done. I still do not go NEAR salt water!)
 14) "The Gravedigger's Daughter" Joyce Carol Oates
 15) "The Exorcist" William Peter Blatty (This book came out in 1971. I was eight. I was already reading Mama's books, and she put this one high, high on a shelf, and exhorted me NOT TO READ IT!! I read it. SCARRED. FOR. LIFE.
 16) "Wuthering Heights" Emily Bronte
 17) "Jane Eyre" Charlotte Bronte
 18) "The Shining" Stephen King (The first book to keep we awake all night.)
 19) "Salem's Lot" Stephen King (The first book to get me into trouble with a college professor. She said nothing worthy had been written since 1900, and I read aloud Mr. King's description of The Lot in autumn, daring her to find fault. She didn't find fault, but I flunked the class...
 20) "Lonesome Dove" Larry McMurtry (A cowboy novel, but a Pulitzer winner. I finished it and without putting it down, turned back to the first page and started again.
 21) "Dubliners" James Joyce (These stories seem to have been written after only a couple of beers, and are a BIT more readable than that other, noxious book he's so famous for. :)  )
 22) "The Complete Stories of Edgar Allen Poe" Edgar Allen Poe
 23) "Shakespeare's Sonnets"F William Shakespeare
 24) "Julius Caesar" William Shakespeare
 25) "Macbeth" William Shakespeare
 26) "Keepers of the House" Shirley Ann Grau
 27) "Interview With The Vampire" Anne Rice (Beautiful, beautiful book)
 28) "Frankenstein" Mary Shelley
 29) "East of Eden" John Steinbeck
 30) "Of Mice And Men" John Steinbeck
 31) "The Great Gatsby" F. Scott Fitzgerald
 32) "Mrs Dalloway" Virginia Woolf
 33) "The Hours" Michael Cunningham
 34) "Girl, Interrupted" Susanna Kaysen
 35) "Beowulf" Anonymous (Gosh, how I loved this epic poem!!)
 36) "Le Morte d'Arthur" Sir Thomas Malory
 37) "A Hunger Artist" Franz Kafka
 38) "Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka
 39) "The Outsiders" S. E. Hinton (How is this book not on other lists?? I mean, just by virtue of the fact that was written by a sixteen year old girl, it should be required reading. I read it about five times in fifth grade.)
 40) "Inferno" Dante Alegheiri
 41) "The Dovekeepers" Alice Hoffman
 42) "The Odyssey" Homer (didn't care for "The Illiad")
 43) "Heartbreak Hotel" Anne Rivers Siddons (Puts "The Help" to shame. Written by someone who was THERE.)
 44) "Life Is A Bowl Of Cherries" Erma Bombeck
 45) "She's Come Undone" Wally Lamb
 46) "Peachtree Road" Anne Rivers Siddons
 47) "We Need To Talk About Kevin" Lionel Shriver
 48) "1984" George Orwell
 49) "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley
 50) "Tarzan" Edgar Rice Borroughs
 51) "A Christmas Carol" Charles Dickens
 52) "Me Talk Pretty One Day" David Sedaris
 53) "All Quiet On The Western Front" Erich Maria Remarque
 54) "Lord of the Flies" William Golding
 55) "Nancy Drew" ( I am including the whole series as one book)
 56) "The Hardy Boys" (Again, whole series, one book)
 57) "The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
 58) "Anne Frank" Anne Frank
 59) "In Cold Blood" Truman Capote
 60) "Water For Elephants" Sara Gruen
 61) "House Of Sand and Fog" Andre Dubus III
 62) "Schindler's List" Thomas Keneally (Originally published as "Schindler's Ark", but I read it after the movie, so my copy is titled as the movie.)
 63) "Giant" Edna Ferber
 64) "Christy" Catherine Marshall (Oh come on, you loved "Christy too, admit it!)
 65) "Centered Riding" Sally Swift
 66) "Old Yeller" Fred Gipson
 67) "The Yearling" Marjorie Kennen Rawlings
 68) "A Girl Of The Limberlost" Gene Stratton Porter
 69) "The Thorn Birds" Colleen McCullough
 70) "Crown Of Columbus" Michael Dorris
 71) "The Hobbit" J. R. R. Tolkien
 72) "The Ladies of Missalonghi" Colleen McCullough
 73) "The Shell Seekers" Rosamund Pilcher (Not even my favorite Pilcher, but this book introduced me to a wonderful, wonderful writer.)
 74) "The Wind In The Willows" Kenneth Grahame
 75) "Watership Down" Richard Adams
 76) "Good Old Archibald" Ethelyn M. Parkinson
 77) "Pinocchio" Carlo Collodi (Not Mr. Disney's version of events, let me tell you!)
 78) "Black Beauty" Anna Sewell
 79) "The Black Stallion" Walter Farley
 80) "Fairy Tales" Hans Christian Anderson (The Little Match Girl and The Snow Queen are my favorites. They'll make you cry.)
 81) "Where The Red Fern Grows" Wilson Rawls
 82) "The Count Of Monte Cristo" Alexandre Dumas
 83) "The Secret Life Of Bees" Sue Monk Kidd (I used to read her stuff alll the time in Guideposts, the little Christian magazine that came every month. Mama got a free subscription every year from the school system as a perk for being a teacher. It didn't take, but I liked reading the stories. I was so moved by this novel, but found her "The Mermaid Chair" quite a let down.
 84) "Little Bee" Chris Cleave
 85) "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" Studs Terkel
 86) "The Bean Tree" Barbara Kingsolver
 87) "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" Sharyn McCrumb (I could list her entire Ballad Series here. Lovely work.)
 88) "Foxfire" Joyce Carol Oates
 89) "Rosemary's Baby" Ira Levin
 90) "The Old Man And The Sea" Ernest Hemingway
 91) "The Sugar Queen" Sarah Addison Allen
 92) "Between, Georgia" Joshilyn Jackson
 93) "Walking Across Egypt" Clyde Edgerton
 94) "Raney" Clyde Edgerton
 95) "Beaches" Iris Rainer Dart
 96) "The Thirteenth Tale" Diane Setterfield
 97) "And Then There Were None" Agatha Christy
 98) "Harry Potter" series J.K. Rawlings
 99) "The Mists of Avalon" Marion Zimmer Bradley
 100) "The Complete Stories" Flannery O'Connor

Whew! Those list-makers have too much time on their hands!
I would love for you to add books to this list! What books make you "Well Read"?

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