Book Review: Look Both Ways

Title: Look Both Ways

Author: Hilda Cole Espy

Date: 1962

Publisher: Lippincott

ISBN; none

Length: 191 pages

Quote: "You mean the moon was just to look at and not to go to?"

It's a Mom-Com--a comical memoir of life with children by a mother who was able to capture her children's lovableness in words. This is volume two. Volume one, Quiet Yelled Mrs Rabbit , featured four little girls. In Look Both Ways, the girls are growing up, going away to school, and the mother is at home with the empty-nest baby Jeff.

Some mention should probably be made of the father of these children. Willard B. Espy, known to close friends as Wede, was a semi-famous broadcasting personality who published several books of his own. In his own books Willard was less a writer than a collector of wit. There's relatively little about him in his wife's books, since he was writing for himself, but it's easy to surmise that Willard Espy liked Hilda Cole's gentle sense of humor as he liked those of the authors of the wordplays he collected. Willard Espy probably encouraged his wife to leave in, for example, the otherwise pointless anecdote about how she complained about one of the daughters' trendy-arty, proto-Goth look: "I wish you'd stop looking so beat with those black slops and socky hair," and mother and daughter "began to laugh together, staggering as we crossed the street" because "the phrase 'black slops' was madly apt" for the stretched-out socks the daughter was wearing.

Hilda Cole Espy was "looking both ways," anticipating her soon to be empty nest and sharing leftover memories of the days when the house was full, as she wrote this book. She did not noticeably anticipate what she did do after the children were all grown-up-and-gone, which included divorcing Willard Espy. She contemplated getting a job outside the home, couldn't think of a good one, wrote this book.

Like many housewives of her generation, Espy didn't know how to market her work experience to a world of prejuidce against women. "List recent experience. Okay, helped raise money to build a...church...raised puppies for the shelter, brought up two red-winged blackbirds...worked the lights for...theatrical production, produced a script for...Christmas pageant..." It would not, as she feared, "prove galvanizing to a New York personnel director," although Wal-Mart's online application software now provides free demonstrations of how to translate work into Wal-Mart experience, and those job skills...Helped raise money. Had she but foreseen the number of writing jobs that now turn out to be fundraising jobs in disguise...

(Is it not painfully obvious from the quality of the fundraising warbles and wails, at this web site, that fundraising is just about my most unfavorite job in the whole wide world, down there in between cleaning toilets and driving a car? The only form of fundraising I can stand involves singing Christmas carols, and unfortunately nobody's invited me to do that in aid of this web site.)

In the course of the book Espy does, nevertheless, find a part-time job she can do competently enough to expect to be able to build it into a career for her middle age.

But meanwhile there were funny stories to write up, like the story of how the preschooler confessed to a crime (blowing up a mailbox) that he'd actually only witnessed but considered cool, the way television commercials "have affected his speech as the cadences of the Bible once affected the speech," the shoeshine man's observation that as commuters started driving rather than walking to the train "the shoes are nice and shiny--but the faces all tired, all worn out!", the short stories Hilda Cole had written for magazines of the past, the year the family tried refurbishing their home in order to sell it and then decided to stay in it.

Mrs. Espy's two books might have seemed obsolete by the time I read them, in the 1970s, but...they didn't. Always pleased to find a resonant insight in an old book, I was delighted by some of Hilda Cole Espy's observations. I think my all-time favorite has been:

"Quietness and companionship move a child to blossom out confidingly, like one of those Japanese clam shells filled with little gardens when dropped into a glass of water."

That was also the point of https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/11/quiet-warmth-pris-reads-e-mail-at-you.html .

I read/heard Espy's stories, as a teenager, the way I might have listened to one of Mother's friends telling family stories, and thought, the way I thought with some of Mother's friends, that I'd like to know her children. So although Look Both Ways was obviously written for mothers first and fathers second, it may appeal to a few children and teenagers as well...and nothing in this book is likely to embarrass adults if their children read it.

Prices may become embarrassing as copies of Espy's books age. What I physically own is a discarded library copy with a damaged binding. For a more gently used copy in good condition, the best this web site can currently do will be $30 per book + $5 per packed + $1 per e-payment, although you can add three more books to that $5 package and potentially encourage three living writers. (For "Fair Trade Books," of which this isn't one, we send 10% royalties on secondhand books to living writers or the charities of their choice. Hilda Cole Espy's books