Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana and She Got Up Off the Couch and other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana are two wonderful memoirs. I’ve struggled to try to articulate why they’re so wonderful.
Both books are collections of brief essays. Zippy is a collection of accidents, other mishaps, and some wonderful stories. Of course, everything is interesting to Zippy. She Got Up Off the Couch has some wonderful things to say about friendship between girls.
Of course, they’re cute, funny and although I hate to use this word, nostalgic. Not in a syrupy corn-fed way. Kimmel’s achieved a delicate balancing act. Part of the charm of these books is the unaffected way in which Kimmel tells stories from her childhood: much is inferred and little is stated. The charm of children, their blithe willingness to say whatever pops into their heads, is a big feature of the first book and certainly part of the second book.
As a baby, Kimmel had been quite ill after her birth, and I think that that may have made her very special to her father. Her parents were not what I would call well-suited; they were quite the opposite and the story of how they got together would be quite interesting but not as funny as a story starting Zippy.. Her mother was in love with narrative, and a “good” girl who quietly accepted a lot that she found hard to accept. She read voraciously; her daughter reports that she’d check a bunch of books out of the library and when she got done reading them she’d start all over again.
I’d say that like her mother, her father was immensely creative but in a different way. He was a little wild. He loved her intensely and was a very attentive, if sometimes angry, parent. Zippy got her name because she recovered from her illness and became a very energetic toddler.
Here’s a story from the book that I love though I can’t tell it anything like as well as Haven Kimmel tells it. The family had two wonderful dogs, each blessed with a powerful set of lungs, and their nighttime barking was driving an elderly neighbor crazy.
The neighbor threatened to poison the dog.
The next evening, a bunch of trucks rolled up to the house. Zippy didn’t know any of the men who got out, carrying crates with coon dogs in them. High energy hunting dogs, loud barkers, who are incapable of being still unless they’re exhausted. Then another man Zippy didn’t know drove up. When he got out of the truck, Zippy saw that he was so tall and thin that she thought he must have had a tapeworm. He handed something to her father that she couldn’t make out – it just seemed to be a manic furball. When she saw that it was a raccoon, desperate to escape, and a clear and present temptation to the coon dogs present, one of whom got so excited he knocked his crate over, she got so scared she sat down on the sidewalk and put her down with her arms around her knees.
Well, you know the dogs barked all night.
The deputy was called; he came over in his pajamas and his official hat and had a few soft words with Zip’s Dad which reduced him to such an apoplectic state of laughter that he banged his head several times on the official car he drove there.
As time passed, more and more neighbors came over to visit – and why shouldn’t they, as there was no chance that anyone in their tiny town could get any sleep that night. Dad won that round.
A word about She Got Up Off the Couch’s title. Delonda, Zippy’s mother, had really given up and one symbol of her tired resignation was the Delonda-shaped indentation that could be seen in the couch when she wasn’t in it, a couch sometimes littered with tell-tale pork rind crumbs. In the course of She Got Up Delonda tests out of a full year of college classes by taking the CLEP test she sees advertised on TV, gets federal student aid, finds a very scary used car she can afford, just barely (only $200!) and then gets her master’s degree as well. And then she teaches. Delonda went on to become a writer, as did her daughter. And yes, her decision to get up off the couch was heroic.
Delonda’s independence was hard on her husband, who stoutly objected, and after Zippy got to be a certain age, her father withdrew from her. Her parents grew farther apart and they were already pretty far apart when things got going with Zippy’s arrival on the scene. Her dad’s departure is a common phenomenon, but its contrast with his fierce and devoted care of Zip makes this ordinary event more poignant.
Both books are collections of brief essays. Zippy is a collection of accidents, other mishaps, and some wonderful stories. Of course, everything is interesting to Zippy. She Got Up Off the Couch has some wonderful things to say about friendship between girls.
Of course, they’re cute, funny and although I hate to use this word, nostalgic. Not in a syrupy corn-fed way. Kimmel’s achieved a delicate balancing act. Part of the charm of these books is the unaffected way in which Kimmel tells stories from her childhood: much is inferred and little is stated. The charm of children, their blithe willingness to say whatever pops into their heads, is a big feature of the first book and certainly part of the second book.
As a baby, Kimmel had been quite ill after her birth, and I think that that may have made her very special to her father. Her parents were not what I would call well-suited; they were quite the opposite and the story of how they got together would be quite interesting but not as funny as a story starting Zippy.. Her mother was in love with narrative, and a “good” girl who quietly accepted a lot that she found hard to accept. She read voraciously; her daughter reports that she’d check a bunch of books out of the library and when she got done reading them she’d start all over again.
I’d say that like her mother, her father was immensely creative but in a different way. He was a little wild. He loved her intensely and was a very attentive, if sometimes angry, parent. Zippy got her name because she recovered from her illness and became a very energetic toddler.
Here’s a story from the book that I love though I can’t tell it anything like as well as Haven Kimmel tells it. The family had two wonderful dogs, each blessed with a powerful set of lungs, and their nighttime barking was driving an elderly neighbor crazy.
The neighbor threatened to poison the dog.
The next evening, a bunch of trucks rolled up to the house. Zippy didn’t know any of the men who got out, carrying crates with coon dogs in them. High energy hunting dogs, loud barkers, who are incapable of being still unless they’re exhausted. Then another man Zippy didn’t know drove up. When he got out of the truck, Zippy saw that he was so tall and thin that she thought he must have had a tapeworm. He handed something to her father that she couldn’t make out – it just seemed to be a manic furball. When she saw that it was a raccoon, desperate to escape, and a clear and present temptation to the coon dogs present, one of whom got so excited he knocked his crate over, she got so scared she sat down on the sidewalk and put her down with her arms around her knees.
Well, you know the dogs barked all night.
The deputy was called; he came over in his pajamas and his official hat and had a few soft words with Zip’s Dad which reduced him to such an apoplectic state of laughter that he banged his head several times on the official car he drove there.
As time passed, more and more neighbors came over to visit – and why shouldn’t they, as there was no chance that anyone in their tiny town could get any sleep that night. Dad won that round.
A word about She Got Up Off the Couch’s title. Delonda, Zippy’s mother, had really given up and one symbol of her tired resignation was the Delonda-shaped indentation that could be seen in the couch when she wasn’t in it, a couch sometimes littered with tell-tale pork rind crumbs. In the course of She Got Up Delonda tests out of a full year of college classes by taking the CLEP test she sees advertised on TV, gets federal student aid, finds a very scary used car she can afford, just barely (only $200!) and then gets her master’s degree as well. And then she teaches. Delonda went on to become a writer, as did her daughter. And yes, her decision to get up off the couch was heroic.
Delonda’s independence was hard on her husband, who stoutly objected, and after Zippy got to be a certain age, her father withdrew from her. Her parents grew farther apart and they were already pretty far apart when things got going with Zippy’s arrival on the scene. Her dad’s departure is a common phenomenon, but its contrast with his fierce and devoted care of Zip makes this ordinary event more poignant.
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