Standing in the Rainbow ~ Fannie Flagg

Fannie Flagg is a craftsman with words. She paints pictures of people and places that embed themselves into your heart. Anyone who delights in the stories of families, will find characters that resemble someone they knew and loved. Sitting down to read a Fannie Flagg novel is like spending an evening with your favorite memories, only they are all new ones.

Standing in the Rainbow follows the people and the small town in Missouri from post WWII to the present. There are tears and laughter, joy and sorrow in the days of these all so knowable characters. The book is a journey through life - the searching, the finding, the achieving, the losing. But, Fannie Flagg always shows us the hope and joy that is in our hearts through the journey.

While I was reading this book, I found that I read much of it aloud at the dinner table. The stories were ones we could all relate to and delight in.

I've never read anything by Fannie Flagg that I didn't enjoy. She has the ability to paint wonderful pictures of our country and its stories and people. I just finished Standing in the Rainbow. So much of what she writes I can relate to and feel she is speaking from my heart. At the end of this book is a passage that is particularly wonderful...

"The world he had known was gone. Not only was he living in an alien place, but while he had been busy all these years making a living, someone had changed all the rules. For all he knew, he might as well have gone to sleep and awakened on the moon.

When he'd grown up, everybody had more or less agreed to a certain way of living. A certain standard. You didn't lie, you didn't cheat or steal, you honored your parents, your word was your bond. You didn't try to weasel your way out of things. You married the girl. You paid your bills. You took care of your children. You didn't cuss around girls. You didn't hit women. You played by the rules and it was expected that you would be a good sport if you lost. You kept your house, yard, and yourself clean.

Norma said you have to just swing with it and try not to let it bother you so much. He wished he could but somehow it seemed this new world was easier for the women to accept and adjust to. What bothered him and other men his age and older was that the things they had been willing to die for were no longer appreciated. Everything he had believed in was now the butt of jokes made by a bunch of smarty-assed late-night-TV so-called comedians making a salary you could support a small country with. All he heard was people saying how bad we were, how corrupt we had been, and how terrible white men were. He had not felt like a bad person. But just the fact that he was a white man of a certain age, a lot of people he did not know hated him. He had never knowingly been mean of unfair to another human being in his life. Now is seems he was the oppressor, responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. War, slavery, racism, sexism --- he was the enemy and all had tried to do was live a good and decent life. History was being rewritten by the minute. all of his childhood heroes were now being viewed as villains, their lives judged in hindsight by the current fad of political correctness. hell, now they were even taking Huckleberry Finn out of the libraries, for God's sake. It was all too confusing.

You never saw people anymore, everything was self-service, everybody behind glass windows. and you could not get a real person on the phone. Everywhere you called, a recorded message connected you to another recorded message and then hung up on you. and everybody was mad and screaming about something. He did not know which was worse, the radical right or the radical left. It seemed nobody was in the middle anymore. We used to be on the right track and then we took a wrong turn but he did not know where. Was it the dope or television? Was it having too much that did it? He had tried to read what the experts thought but they did not know any more than he did. All he knew for sure was that after the '40s and '50s when he had been raised, the world had flipped over like a giant pancake and everything was backward. When he was a kid everyone had wanted to be Tarzan; now they all want to be natives. People were sticking rings in the noses --- even pretty little girls were running around with green hair, their bodies pierce everywhere.

And nobody answered a direct question anymore with a simple yes or no. Everything was answered with some kind of rhetoric. And he knew far more than he wanted to know about perfect strangers. Things people used to be ashamed to talk about now sold books and got them on television. Murderers were being asked for their autographs and turned into celebrities. Football, basketball, and baseball players could beat up their wives, take drugs, go to jail, and still stay on the team and make millions. It didn't matter what kind of a person you were anymore. He remembered when a professional athlete was someone to look up to; now the sports page read more like a police blotter.

And never in a million years would he have dreamed that one day baseball players would be wearing earrings. Or that some girl would be singing on television in her brassiere. Life was all so different, with this one having two mommies and another on two daddies.

He did not know what to think anymore. The way it looked to him, the world was not getting better; it was getting worse. He sat there for about an hour and gazed out at the water, wondering where and when it was all going to end.

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and stared down at the sandy ground, as if looking for an answer. After a few minutes he noticed a tiny ant that walked underneath him, struggling to carry what looked like a large piece of potato chip. It was much too big for him to eat, but he was headed somewhere with it anyhow. He watched the ant as it kept going and banged into another concrete bench, went around it, crawling over rocks and other obstacles, determined to get back home with his treasure. It was much too big for him to carry, but he did not seem to know it.

He sat there and watched the ant struggle along until is was out of sight and he smiled for the first time in weeks. 'Who knows?' he thought. 'If he keeps going, the little son of a bitch might just make it.' "