Today we welcome author Molly Best Tinsley who is promoting her book Entering the Blue Stone. Click on the banner above to check out the rest over her tour!
Publisher: Fuze Publishing
Date of Publication: May 2012
What happens when one's
larger-than-life military parents--disciplined, distinguished,
exacting--begin sliding out of control? The General struggles to
maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson's disease;
his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown
children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves
of the perfect solution: an upscale retirement community. But as
soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the
many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.
Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir, Entering the Blue Stone dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.
Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir, Entering the Blue Stone dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.
Molly writes:
I spent a lot of my childhood overseas, beyond the reach of
television. Books from the Air Force
base library were the main source of entertainment, and I was addicted as a kid
to mysteries and baseball fiction, particularly a series modeled on the Brooklyn
Dodgers back when there were Brooklyn Dodgers to battle the New York
Yankees for the pennant. Every month or
so my mother would pry one such book out of my hands and replace it with a
“classic.” Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre. I remember reading Gone with the Wind
over a weekend, curled in a particular wing chair in the living room.
My mother was an avid reader too. Over-educated and underemployed as a
stay-at-home mom (where else was she going to be with four children?),
constantly having a work of literary fiction or a biography going must have
kept her brain challenged and alive. She
took her reading seriously, too—she was a one-woman book club. That was a far
better alternative than attending a meeting of the Officers’ Wives Club back
then, when one program consisted of a demonstration on how to make a penguin
centerpiece from an eggplant.
Reading
wasn’t just a matter of pleasure; books were also connected to education, and
education was my parents’ obsession. My
mother’s father had been an immigrant from Spain, his English heavily accented
and ungrammatical, a source, I suspect, of embarrassment when she was
young. Her achievements in school,
capped by a full scholarship to Barnard
College, paved the way
out of the lower class for her, into acceptance and respectability. My father’s parents were well-educated—a
physician and a teacher—and he went to Princeton. The Air Force might have seemed a strange
choice for a Princeton grad, but it offered
the opportunity and technical resources to pursue meteorology, his intellectual
passion and a higher priority than making a lot of money.
Today I’m grateful to my parents for the high value
they placed on books and learning, their emphasis on the life of the mind. Their relative indifference to material
things gave me the gift of freedom. I
don’t watch television because I can’t stand the barrage of commercials; I
rarely set foot in the sacred shopping mall.
Thanks to them, I’ve stayed off the consumer merry-go-round, which keeps
upping the price of the ride.
About the author:
Kari, thanks for featuring Molly today.
ReplyDelete