"The Honey Bus" by Meredith May

The journalist Meredith May writes for the “San Francisco Chronicle” and in recognized quality (winner of PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism , nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). Now she has published her memories of her difficult childhood in an autobiographical novel, and this book is a success, it tells but a touching story in felicitous literary form.

Meredith’s parents are two contrary characters. Sally is spontaneous, outgoing and adventurous, while David is acting cautiously and thoughtfully. Both find each other’s opposites interesting.

In 1966 she married 1970, Meredith was born in 1973, her brother Matthew. Since the contrasts have long since torn deep chasms, the upper hand marital problems. David has found an engineering job after his Navy time, but offers neither security nor prosperity. Even more dissatisfied than about Sally is hanging remain about her role as mother and housewife, in which all work. That her patient husband absolutely nothing brings out of the rest, drives them to rage and aggression that enable children in permanent alert.

In February 1975, the marriage is finally shattered. Sally flies with the two children to California with her mother Ruth and whose second husband Franklin. The two are an odd couple. Granny is a teacher, a disciplinarian of order in the house, “exclamation perfect attitude,” the great importance to appearances and even bigger laying on her reputation. Grandpa other hand, finds its fulfillment in the great outdoors, where he tinkers in tattered, stained clothes and not bothered by dirt edges under the fingernails. The two live in a red cottage on a large plot in Carmel Valley Village in Monterey.

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For the five-year Meredith separation from her beloved, now sky distant dad’s excruciatingly painful. She ponders what she might have even done wrong to put all now in such a mess, and strives to be particularly good for the family to perhaps comes together again. But it is itself not entirely convinced, because she feels that her mom has changed. “Somewhere ten thousand feet above the center of America had given up trying to be a mother.”

Life in the new home worse develops, could be feared than Meredith. While Granny takes the children and provides them, but their true attention is entirely their sensitive, deeply wounded daughter. Sally investigated promptly refuge in bed, pulling the curtains to and sinks “curled like a fetus” in darkness – for years. After the death of the grandparents to be received in a nursing home in a very precarious state of health. With 73 years it dies after it has, reconciled with her children, for she could be a mother never and wanted to be.

How does it on a daughter when she tried out for many years, a little love to erheischen by her mother, is always only repelled? Meredith would have to listen to her mom without the kids a very different future had – “our existence gave her the feeling of having failed inexplicably.” Knowing “that I did not have to love just because she was my mother,” the girl there to run after her mom, is at a distance, is no longer willing to endure their incessant whining their aggressions, their egoism, petrified internally , But her guilt sit deep. Convinced mental suffering for Sally to be responsible, Meredith accepts the offer her dad that she could join him in his new family with Matthew, not so much she would like. But they is hopeful reunite with her mother one day as the reincarnation of an earlier Mom.

It is Meredith’s grandfather, who sensitively captures his granddaughter in all their needs. When they despaired of unusual behavior of the mother, are in school because of their poor clothes from the thrift store left is left, looks terrified in their own future, he gives her affection, guidance, strength and peace. He has opened a wonderful talent show convincing alternatives with a light hand that bring the oppressed girl on enjoyable thoughts, ways out, give hope. He does sometimes with a wink. are thought of as the fathers in school their professions, it stings the others from smooth, as he tells the story of whaling adventures of the great-grandfather and herself stylized as “superheroes”, the dangling secured on the cliffs pipes. He puts Meredith by the way into the center of the classroom community.

His trump card he draws from his hobby of beekeeping. He taught his granddaughter for generations passed on knowledge of the useful, industrious and socially organized insects peoples – and Meredith May in many entertaining Portiönchen us readers on what you should know about the division of labor, hierarchy, communication and other interesting things in the hive. Otherwise believe than many Hypersensitive, these animals are not threatening or even malicious. Rather, it is the people who are destroying self-interest or indifference to fellow creatures whose habitats and foundations. Scarcely any one type is irreplaceable as bees. Without them, we humans are barely survive.

Relaxed, friendly and respectful Grandpa comes to his bees, which he quartered in an old bus in the garden and he teaches his granddaughter him do the same. As a side effect of this quiet, considerate treatment of nature experiences Meredith that you can only be happy with himself -. While other people “hell” can be.

Until 1987 lived Meredith May in their Californian grandparents and her book describes extensively in many small episodes, the atmosphere of those years and those legendary, idyllic location on the Pacific, where non-conformist hippies worked as a teacher, crime was unknown, the common people lived sparingly. With such contrasting memories of their early years, where she found her own way, Meredith May could write the ballast of the alleged own failure from the soul. Today she cherishes with devotion the last hives her grandfather.