Matthew M Cornett

Tag: book-reviews

  • “Year of the Cat”

    I’m going to start out this week by making a confession and I don’t care if you laugh. I one hundred percent have a “soft spot” (pun intended) for 1970’s Soft Rock and I know exactly who to both thank and blame. Give me a sappy 70’s love song soaked in pop sentiment and polyester, and I’m right back there in that front room on Northside Drive, sitting in my mother’s lap in that ugly exorcist green chair, listening to her favorite 8 track cassette tapes on a rainy Fall day in 1976. Those kinds of moments probably made me the sappy 53 year old I am now but I’m good with that.

    I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in 1972 and my sister is two years older than me which means that she started kindergarten in the Fall of 1975. From that moment until I started Kindergarten in the Fall of 1977, it was me and my mom during the day. Those days were spent playing, reading, listening to music, watching The Electric Company, and napping which I hated. Making me sit still was the worst punishment and I think my mom invented “time out.” Thinking back, I couldn’t have had a better childhood. I define my life by the beautiful memories I have and those are the earliest and most self-defining. What a gift my mother gave me. 

    The music that stands out to me from those days comes from artists like The Carpenters and Barry Manilow (again, I already said to go ahead and laugh). Hearing them and basically any mid 70’s Soft Rock song immediately transports me back to those days. To me, those songs feel like a warm cozy blanket on a lazy rainy day. If you don’t get that from some kind of music no matter how corny, I feel sorry for you. I do have a couple of playlists you can check out though so let me know!

    In chapter 6 of my book If We Never Meet Again, I tell the story of Hannah. She had terminal cancer and was only a few years older than me. As I stated early in her story “Hannah was the one patient who changed everything for me. The others before her were powerful experiences that taught me about hospice but Hannah changed me. She imprinted herself on my soul” (41). When I go to patient homes, I always end up looking at the pictures they have around and the older, the better. I’m fascinated with older pictures of times gone by. When I went to Hannah’s house for the first time, I noticed this picture of “Hannah and her sister dancing outdoors at some celebration, each with a gorgeous smile on their faces laughing right at the moment the photo was taken. Hannah was dressed in silk like material that glistened in the camera flash” (42). The photo was a beautiful moment and I don’t think I will ever forget that smile on her face. 

    As fate would have it, somehow I ended up at her house one night so her brother could get some rest out on the couch. I didn’t know it then but she was actively dying and I was there holding her hand:

    “As I tried to settle back in the chair to keep her company while her brother rested, Hannah stared straight up at the ceiling. A tear started out of the corner of her right eye and then she looked over at me. I could see that she was terrified. She opened and turned her right hand toward me. I placed mine in hers and patted her lovingly with my other hand doing my best to give her my most comforting and sympathetic smile. Our eyes were locked onto each other, hers filled with fear, and mine attempting to be strong. “It’s going to be alright Hannah. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere. Close your eyes and try to rest.” She never did. We sat there for at least three hours locked in that embrace with her eyes going from mine, to the ceiling, around the room, then back to mine again. Everytime our eyes met I smiled at her trying my best to comfort this woman I did not know (45).”

    When it came time to choose a song from my playlist to represent Hannah, it was an easy choice because of that photo of her. I have always loved Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” from 1976. Al Stewart is a fascinating Scottish born musician. If you get a chance, watch some interviews he has done. He is a genuinely down to earth guy that you could hang out with at a local pub. According to the video “Al Stewart talks Year of the Cat” you can find on Youtube, he grew up wanting to be in rock and roll like Duanne Eddy who inspired him to pick up the guitar but felt his early rock and roll work was awful until Bob Dylan came along and “saved his life.” He says “He (Dylan) couldn’t play and he couldn’t sing either but he could do things with lyrics that were magical.” He set off to be a folk singer and found success in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He was later influenced by Paul Simon as well. He eventually found himself on tour in America supporting Linda Ronstadt. He began work on what would become “Year of the Cat.” He based it off a warm up riff his piano player kept playing. The record company didn’t like his first version about a british comedian who had committed suicide and they asked him to rewrite the lyrics. His girlfriend at the time had a book on Vietnamese Astrology and the page was open to a chapter called “The Year of the Cat.” He thought to himself, “that to me looks like a song title.” Casablanca was on the television and he “started playing with it.” The rest is history. He felt the song wasn’t that great so he made it the last track on the album but the song was a hit and resonated with listeners. 

    I have always loved the song. Its opening piano riff that takes its time to build up to the moment is a masterclass in pop musical set up. Modern music with its short attention span desperately trying to catch the listener’s attention within the first 15 seconds could learn from him. When it finally kicks in to the drums, bass, and electric guitar it has a perfect feel and flow. And I have always loved its sound: crisp, clean, and pure. It sounds like a less perfectly engineered Steely Dan recording, which is not a putdown in any way. By the time he sings “On a morning from a Bogart movie” you realize that this is truly something special. But what really gets me is when he says what I think is one of the best lines from any pop song to ever describe a woman:

    She comes out of the sun

    In a silk dress running

    Like a watercolor in the rain

    Don’t bother asking for explanations

    She’ll just tell you that she came

    In the year of the cat 

    That line is mesmerizing. “Out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain.” The alliteration sun and silk…the rhyme of sun and run…the image of a watercolor in the rain. Dang. It’s Shakesperian. It’s as perfect a line as I’ve ever heard in pop music. In my text I wrote “I don’t have any idea who Al Stewart was describing in those lines but it should have been Hannah in that photo” (42). 

    The ladies group at my mom’s church back in Lexington, Ky, read my book for their book club and I had the privilege to go back home there in March for their meeting. One of the women asked me which death was the hardest on me. Without a hesitation I said “Hannah…it was like watching my own sister die.” At the end of the chapter, I wrote:

    People come in and out of our lives for all kinds of reasons. I think Hannah came into mine to truly personalize it for me. When Mr. Miller died, it was simply a culmination of a life well lived and there was comfort in knowing that he was at rest. Hannah wasn’t much older than me; she could have been my sister. Her death felt more tragic. In the world of hospice, you start to see death so much that it just becomes part of the job but even after all this time, I’m still not over her. I hope I never will be. 

    I can honestly say that sitting here writing this, I’m still not over her. Her sister-in-law was right. I would have loved to have known her before the brief time that I did. But I can honestly say that her death was one that influenced me to begin writing these stories. It’s not much, but it is her legacy and that makes me happy. 

  • Literary Inspirations

    In preparing for this blog entry, I have come to the conclusion that I am truly the sum of everyone who has influenced me over the years. The people in our lives, the events that take place, and the time into which we are born are things that are both defining and inescapable. They make us who we are, both for the better and the worse. Yes, we make choices and we eventually develop as our own individual, but can we ever escape those early influences? Thankfully, I have no desire to escape mine. I embrace them as they were and celebrate what they are.

    I love literature and have from an early age. When I think back to those times, I remember the people who shaped that love for me. It all started with my Mother. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap and her reading to me. There’s a warmth in those memories for me and the lifelong gift that she gave me. I remember reading circles in 1st grade with Ms. Locker. Other than recess, that was my most favorite time of the day. In second grade there was Mrs. Bowles who made me memorize “When the frost is on the Punkin and the fodder’s in the shock” which I still proudly remember to this day. The sing-song nature of Riley’s language imprinted on me. By the fourth grade it was Ms. Fox who read The Hobbit to the class…a chapter a day, and that was life changing.

    Around that time, my older brother Andrew took over. He’s five years older than me and was always way cooler so naturally, I wanted to imitate him. One thing about Drew is that he was a reader and his room was full of books. He had The Empire Strikes Back novel which I devoured as a 9 year old kid. He also had the Narnia books, Tolkien, and then eventually, he had the entire Conan series that they republished in the 80’s. I was probably drawn more to the girls on the covers initially, but then I started reading those as well. By 1984, he bought the Dune collection and took me to that movie as well. I read the first three but then it got too weird by the fourth book for me. He shaped a love for sci-fi and fantasy that I still have to this day.  

    High School in the 80’s had a more prescriptive approach to English classes so it was mostly grammar with a little literature thrown in every so often but Mrs. Waller let us do book reports on whatever we wanted. I remember reading a lot of Shakespeare on my own my junior year. In 1989, I had the fateful job of working at a movie theater. We got a movie called Dead Poet’s Society, and the rest was history for me. I bought a book called Poems that Live Forever (which I still own) and began devouring works by Byron, Shelly, Tennyson, Thomas, and Frost. Those poets changed me. I started listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and began trying to write and publish poems of my own. They set me on a course that I’m still on at 53 years of age. 

    When I went to the University of Kentucky in the Fall of 1990,  I thrived in my literature and writing courses. Intro to British Lit and Intro to American Lit created a love for the classics. I ended up being so dorky with the classics, I even wrote my Master’s Thesis on Fourteenth Century Arthurian Poetry and I loved it. When I got to the point it was time to choose a career path, I realized that literature was one of the things I was really good at so I started teaching.

    As a high school teacher in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I had to eventually morph into a writing teacher so I didn’t get to teach much literature. And as for reading? All I read were essays. Six classes of 25 students each, three major essays a semester, and rewrites which were necessary for my students to grow as writers. Seriously…during the school year I ate, drank, and slept college essays and they always hung over me like an impending rain cloud. If I had free time, I had zero desire to read anything. People would always ask “So Cornett, what are you reading right now?” My answer was always “Essays.” 

    But moving to the beach and starting a second career where I didn’t have to read college essays every time I turned around allowed me to rekindle my love for reading. If you look closely at the picture on my webpage of my bookshelf you can see my inspirations. For my classics, I love Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dickens, and Wharton. My more “current” stuff is Chandler, McMurtry, and right now? A lot of Pat Conroy. I live in the perfect area for reading him on the weekends sitting down by the water. 

    Like I said, I am the sum of everyone who has influenced more over the course of my life. If you have people out there who did the same for you, reach out and thank them. You are more indebted to them than you may realize. I only hope that I have had that kind of impact on others as well and that they will pass it along to continue the cycle.