June 21, Sunday afternoon -- Reading Margaret Mascarenhas

At Baker Beach
Reading The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos, by Margaret Mascarenhas, about a teenage girl who disappears into the Venezuelan jungle.

If she were to write her own book, it'd be about the life of her grandmother. When she was a child her grandmother would, in the mornings, call her over to lie in bed together and she'd tell her stories about the depression. Her grandmother was a poor child who went to a rich school where the other girls wore fur coats and had shiny patent leather shoes. Her grandmother wore lace up boots. When her grandmother had a birthday, her mother invited over all the girls in the class and bought three kinds of ice cream. They waited in the driveway for all the girls to arrive, but they didn't. There was another party going on that day. Childhood is hard. Her grandmother, though, died a happy woman.