A Visit to Sunnybrook Farm

I’m sick as a dog and not very happy about it. Sinus headaches, gravelly voice and though the kids were still great today, not easy teaching in this state. Nothing gives me much pleasure at the moment, so I’m trying to escape into a book and TV.

The T.V. part is the remarkable Homeland miniseries. Halfway through Season 3 and addicted like nobody’s business. It really is extraordinary in terms of characters, plot, rhythm, nuance, subtlety, that constant sense that nothing is quite what it seems and people are more complex than they appear. But the subject is rather dark, to say the least—the CIA and terrorism.

I have some promising great books awaiting, but grabbed a John Grisham for the plane ride to Chicago and this one, The Appeal, is all about how rich corporations can buy State Supreme Court elections to protect their privileged, greedy interests, get away with dumping toxic chemicals and poisoning water and such. The scenario is all too real. Dark stuff.

And then there’s the news, the facts that are even more terrifying than these fictions. I can’t even say out loud that apparent rise in the possibility of an insane megalomaniac psychopath ascending to the most powerful position on the planet. Darker than dark times a thousand.

So I’m thinking I should start reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Return to a world of manageable proportions, a time and place and group of people who have problems—who doesn’t?— but more on the lines of a dog getting sick than people intent on killing thousands of innocent people because God told them too or casually threatening to release nuclear weapons. I’m ready for a world more like “Ward, I’m worried about the Beav” than the one the papers trumpet daily.

In short, Sunnybrook Farm sounds like a good place for me now. For all of us. Anyone know the way there?