Buckeye by Patrick RyanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book of imperfect people learning how to forgive and be forgiven.
The length of our lives, and the lives of those we love are uncertain, so apologize. Forgive. Love each other while we can. And a book that subtly reminds of that while drawing us into the lives of four individuals in Ohio,--their loves, their losses, their mistakes, and their redemption--is one I will whole-heartedly push on others. Read this.
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Cal was astounded by the impact two inches of leg could have on one person.
was as if he'd been carrying on his back all the things he'd been collecting over the years, and with their combined weight suddenly gone, he was able to lift his head.
Unless breaking his heart again was the point. The way his left arm needed to be rebroken so it could heal properly.
Just realize, you are more.
And he says this, that you have to keep swimming. You're the one in the water and you're the one who has to swim.
So many things had started their unraveling.
"We've never been us," she said, "Ther is no us. We were both pretending."
I'm still me. We're still us.
Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you're alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.
His insecurity and self-pity were holding him back. From what? he'd asked, and she told him flat out: from being a better person.
He couldn't undo what he'd done, and without being able to do that, he had no idea how he would ever convince her to take him back. He'd apologized to her a hundred times, until she'd told him to stop, said she'd heard him, and reminded him that those two words, I'm sorry, were very easy to say and literally changed nothing.
"you're both still alive," Everett said. "It's possible.'
The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right?
Was it dawn, or was it dusk? Just as things were starting to look shiny (for some), the clouds moved, changing the light. Or were they the ones changing, while dawn and dusk played a slow game of paddleball with the sun?
They lived in deference to it, honoring that imaginary pact made by parents everywhere: if we keep worrying, they'll be okay.
in the slipstream of Skip's death, the Jenkinses and forgotten they were still alive, and Felix helped remind them, in increments.
Perhaps craziest of all: it seems important to them that he not think anything has changed.
The lie had done them in, Felix knew. Not the sex.
Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.
Unhappy, because she somehow never felt that she was where she was supposed to be, living the life she thought she would live, loved in the way she thought she should be loved. And she didn't know how to live back...
Margaret had removed herself from Tom's life because she was dissatisfied with her own, and because she'd screwed everything up in such a way that she couldn't bear to be around when it all came crashing down.
Over and over, she'd learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness.
She'd been able to carry on with Cal because she'd trusted that something was going to come along in place of the forgiveness she'd fallen short of, and what had come along was what had been right in front of her the whole time: she know with absolute certainty that she would be sending that message across the divide to him in one direction or another--so, as Everett had suggested, why not send it while they were both alive?
Wasn't it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?
This "vision" was an eight-year-olds. It was nothing more than an expression of hope.
