Comics & The Cove

Today’s newspaper had two comics I couldn’t resist.
The Garfield is funny even though it’s about a medical condition that isn’t at all funny—Alzheimer’s and it’s loss of memory as well as the eventual loss of all bodily functions. But if we can’t laugh a bit at life’s ironies and dark corners, then life wouldn’t be worth living.

The Non Sequitur points humorously at the premise in Prometheus that life on earth originated in an alien sprinkling of dna into our oceans. I’m a great believer in the existence of countless life forms in the universe besides our own. So why couldn’t the idea in Prometheus be as valid as any of the many religious theories that people now bow down to?

I just finished a most unusual novel by Ron Rash, The Cove. It’s set during the American involvement in WWI in backwoods North Carolina. It’s both a romance and a mystery. But it also points out the terrible treatment of citizens of German descent during that time, even worse than the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The cove is a dark place with a huge granite ledge overhanging a scrabbly farm where Hank and Laurel live. The place is shunned by people from the nearby town of Mars Hill, believing it to be bewitched, that the purple birthmark on Laurel marks her as a witch. Hank has lost an arm in the war and finds it difficult to do farm chores. And into this mix stumbles a German musician who had been part of the orchestra aboard the huge German liner Vaterland that was docked in New York. When the U.S. entered the war, he and the crew had been taken into custody and put in an internment camp in North Carolina. He escapes and finds his way to the cove, where he pretends to be mute and illiterate. He stays to help Hank tend to the farm until the war ends when he can be free again. Most unusual, and I recommend it to any readers out there.