THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200258
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: DIANA LYNN DIEHL
LENGTH: Short : 41 lines
SLEEPING AT THE STARLITE MOTEL
and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home
BAILEY WHITE
Addison-Wesley. 238 pp. $20.
WE SHOULD ALL be first-grade teachers like NPR commentator Bailey White (Mama Makes Up Her Mind) and have summers free to gaze at ``spectacles of the natural world'' as she does in her charming new book of adventures, Sleeping at the Starlite Motel. We, too, should soak our tired bodies in a Western Virginia hot spring, admire the simplicity of a Vermont one-room schoolhouse and smell the ``hay and cracked corn'' of a Tennessee walking-horse farm.
We should experience ordinary seasonal pleasures, taste ripening peaches at the ``Produce Stand'' and reconnect with extended family in Virginia: Along the Rappahannock River at the home of White's newly rich cousin Mandon - one of many quirky relatives - an unlikely reunion of distant cousins and eight heirloom Chippendale chairs takes place.
White reveals amusing snippets of herself as a girl as she travels ``the way back home.'' In ``An Old Lepidopterist,'' Mr. Harris teaches her how to observe butterflies while Mrs. Harris introduces her to the ``torment of needlework.'' In ``Horror Stories,'' White's mother takes her to movies in which ``strangely familiar'' objects and ``things I had heard said only by people in my own family'' emerge. (Her absent father wrote film scripts.)
``The Starlite Motel'' is a place where ``sleep will come easy,'' there's ``a breeze you can count on'' and a ``comforting combination of generosity and spareness'' await the traveler. Not unlike this book. by CNB