Lynn's Bio

I am enchanted by names. As talismans, they are pivotal in a hero’s quest, as eponymous adjectives, they rival pictures in descriptive power. As a precocious (my mother said “pert”) child, I labeled my chores Herculean and felt my efforts to charm or please my perplexed family Sisyphean.  I thought “quixotic” meant all the flavors of “curious”, or perhaps just “inexplicable” and didn’t realize until lately that there’s a certain level of fit there for me.

I was disappointed early on by the weakness of my own name. It alluded to nothing, no “elven-wise” as in Alfred, or “beloved of God” as in Benjamin. My limp offering for the acrostic name poem that teachers assign after the inevitable “summer adventures” essay would be: “Um… I’m Lynn….  and I’m (just so very) lucky… and I have yellow hair…. and… I’m new?” A trove of allusion lay hidden in my older siblings’ names: “Guy Duane” (pronounced initially in the French manner) and “Darcy Careen” and even more in the Civil War homage given to my seven years’ younger little sister, “Sheriden Leigh”.

My first name is not as richly elegant as my siblings’ but even so my family found it just a little too fancy for everyday use. It’s Annette, as in the Mouseketeer.  My being unmusical and unlikely to wear a bikini ever, I’d say any spell casting by the name fairy failed pretty fully. Even my parents sensed the lack of fit because I was “Lynn” from the first day home from the hospital. That fairy may be granted some small prescience: when I met my eventual sweetheart in high school, he spelled his last name—Finkelstein—to the tune of “Mickey Mouse.” I was amazed by that for years into our marriage until he pointed out that any name with eleven letters works).

The powerful names of the heroes of myth and legend were totems that drew me further into a mixed-up imagined world of Greece and Britain and Arabia. I lived entirely in Arthur’s Britain, Robin Hood’s Sherwood, and Aladdin’s lamp. I would hazily emerge from the lands of fable to find my mother had given up calling me to my list of chores and my sister was plotting revenge for having had to pick up the slack.

I tested myself with the didactic children’s classics even though I never fell into them as completely as my beloved fable and fantasy. Hans Christian Anderson would test my infant sense of justice with his devastating consequences of choice. Louisa May Alcott taught me to catalogue my flaws and those of others and I hoped, as observed of Demi-John as he fell asleep nursing a handful of popcorn kernels in Little Men, that my faults were of the better sort. Since I try not to be one of those who lie in their own journals (I wish I could remember what character said that of another; my memory is a slow accretion of literary bits and pieces without the possibility of attribution), I will admit that secretly I believed I had no faults. I was the pure and honest principal of every tale in every color of the Andrew Lang fairy books that I gorged on.

My obsession with fairy tales kept me in a middling state of moral and intellectual development: I would be rewarded for goodness and kindness, for patience and sacrifice. I can’t blame fairy tales alone, though, for my early and persistent belief that I could live in an imagined world. If I believed truly and tried purely, everything was possible said parents, teachers, Disney. I supplemented magic with a dogged but haphazard empiricism with Leonardo Da Vinci as my model.  His paintings were otherworldly, his illustrations of the natural world fantastical.  His being a left handed Virgo as I am was incidental to my emulation, just a pleasing lagniappe . Faith and faulty reasoning made me an endangered disciple. I observed slow moving desert reptiles and catalogued the insects inside and around our slump-block military housing unit. I mixed invisible inks and concocted love potions. I stared directly at the early morning sun on my way to school just to see how long I could do so before looking away. I wanted to soar like a bird but before attempting flight, I tried swimming—and breathing—like a fish. I’d been told there was oxygen in air and a little less in water. I assumed the percentage was the crucial difference, and I just had to try hard enough to breathe underwater. After my mother hauled me choking and spluttering out of our backyard vinyl pool, I accepted that if the lack of gills mattered so much, the absence of wings might more, and I’d best foster a facility for dream-flight.

Partly by inclination and partly through circumstance, science fiction was the natural next step in my literary evolution. The public library on Davis-Monthan, the Air Force base where my father was stationed, had a small children’s room, but most of the collection was tailored to the young airmen who were its primary clientele. My previous aimless and unsuccessful experimentation had pushed me away from the hard sciences, and in intermediate school I immersed myself in the social science fiction of Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin and Roger Zelazny. Fantasy was inter-shelved with science fiction in that tiny library. After discovering and devouring the four volumes of Tolkien, I read them over and again more than ten times straight, and refused to believe there were no more. I checked out books on the “T” shelf with similar titles by other authors hoping they would prove to be sequels. This led to some unusual discoveries, and raised eyebrows from the librarians, who had given up shooing me back into the gaily-decorated room with the shelves of Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers.

From my tweens through teens, I continued to marinate in genre fiction mixed with 19^th century British and Russian classics. My taste broadened to include contemporary novels, and the discovery of magical realism bolstered my sense that reality was really quite flexible. (It did seem as if I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in real time, that one was a little chewy).  I married early, and my young husband learned early, as my family had earlier, that it was difficult to get my attention. Possibly thinking that it was easier to join me than change me, he proposed that we read aloud in the evenings. Not yet out of our teens, we adopted the Spanish custom of reading Don Quixote on the threshold of adulthood, anticipating a second reading at the beginning of maturity, and a third time at  at the onset of old age. When we read it that first year in the summer heat in our Quonset hut just off campus, the framed stories from Spanish folklore reminded us of tales also told by Shakespeare and Boccaccio. At forty, it seemed to us to be Sancho’s book. We laughed at his willing seduction by the promise of wealth and admired his earthy wisdom.

We have come now a little early to the third life-stage reading at the present milestone of my retirement from librarianship. Modern technology promises us a protracted old age, so we intend to add a fourth reading in time. In this third trip to medieval Spain I find I have a certain something in common with Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Don Quixote was convinced of the verisimilitude of the fanciful. I am generally aware of the here and now, but am not overly attached to it. Lost in contemplation, I can end up in Ajo on the way to the store. The Knight spent his days wholly in the adventures his creator designed for him. I lose time and space dreamily reflecting on those in all the books I have lived in for fifty years. The ingenious gentleman and I both wander through and around reality.