Review: My Braided Donkey (A Review Of My Little Donkey By Martha Cooley)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Many years ago, decades really, I predicted there would one day be a plethora of dry-as-dust memoirs unleashed on the reading public by retiring Baby Boomers who had led dry-as-dust lives. I imagined tales of childhood trauma like getting a 1965 Mustang with cloth interior for a high school graduation present when they were expecting one with leather interior. Then after a long corporate career they'd be driving around the USA in their monster RVs, pestering distant relatives with "We will be passing through Podunk Junction and would love to stop by for a visit on the 14th!" and yammering on about the books they would be writing about themselves. Martha Cooley's latest book of essays My Little Donkey picks up (and repeats) where her last essay collection left off, and she's really pushing the 'old sage' act for all its worth. The generation before her—that includes Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski—spent their young years out on the road living wild lives that made great stories later. Cooley, safe and secure with her pension, now regales us with stories about strolling around the Italian countryside where she and her husband have retired to.

 

Cooley bought a fixer-upper in Castiglione, Italy, not far from Florence where even the tourist bureau has gotten sick of tourists. She says of emigrating to another continent, "It's not an experience about which I'm willing to bray," which is exactly what the purpose of My Little Donkey is. However, there really isn't a lot for a retired couple to bray about:

 

Each day we walked the city for hours. In the evening, we reversed the process to return to the island. This travel had its own rhythm, and we took pleasure in its repetitions—the steady engine sounds, the uplift and swoop of birds, the skitter of wind across the water. During each leg of the trip, we passed a series of wooden posts called bricole, which mark the lagoon's deeper channels. For centuries these bricole have been an essential feature of Venice and its watery surround. Today, over ninety thousand bricole, many in need of repair, rise from the water. Neither Venice's canals nor the lagoon would be navigable without them. 

 

Cooley also mentions the submerged tree trunks beneath Venice that literally prop the city up. "And if those massive logs were to dissolve? The whole place would collapse..." Recent investigations have found a slight amount of damage to the wood, but it isn't rotting, primarily due to the absence of oxygen in the anoxic mud and clay at the bottom of the Venetian lagoon. They aren't quite petrified, but they have hardened over the centuries due to absorption of minerals from the silt and saltwater. The engineers that designed the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida could've learned a thing or two from the fifth century Venetian engineers. (The Champlain Towers South broke apart and collapsed after just forty years in June of 2021, killing 98 people.)

 

The term "braided essay" was popularized by Brenda Miller and Susanne Antonetta in their 2003 book Tell it Slant. Braided essays "braid" two or more (at least somewhat) related topics into one essay, the topics segueing into each other. Cooley's braided essays pinball the reader around to different topics and it isn't apparent they're related until we collide into the tie-ins much later in the essay. The essay "Bonnie and Clyde" is about two cats with those names, and also a dog named Bonnie. Then we jump to her father's love of classical music. Then to a portrait of Franz Schubert, and it may be related here because a dog is in the portrait. Then we jump to Virgil's (Cooley spells it Vergil, the favored spelling of Latin purists) epic poem Aeneid. Then we're at a book festival in Italy where Cooley meets a child named Enea, which is the Italian version of Aeneas, the main character of Aeneid. This coincidence strains credulity somewhat, one can't help but wonder if she's making it up to more tightly braid her essay, even though by that point the essay feels more like square pegs being pounded into round holes than a braid. Then we move on to an overweight violinist who once played for Schubert, and Cooley even shoehorns in that Beethoven died of alcoholic liver disease.

 

Cooley keeps her essays trendy and current, taking a couple of shots at Donald Trump, first to mention how bad the traffic is in Bedminster, New Jersey when Trump is in town to play at his Trump National Golf Club there. She also vents her rage at the cutting down of trees at Trump's other golf club in D.C., ostensibly, Cooley says, so golfers could have a better view of the Potomac as they play. Later, in an essay about her horticulturist maternal grandfather, she takes a more subtle shot at Trump: "Something about weeds growing into the center of a saxifrage plant unnerves me. The image summons the idea of corruption from within, or something suppressed taking its revenge. Or both. Come to think of it, the image seems made for the United States." Cooley even implies her move to Italy was partly to escape Trump and American culture, saying she's "not a pure product of America, but sort of. A product always sort of hating and sort of loving the sham and shambles formally yet mistakenly referred to as the United States of America, a nation whose residents are incapable of being at peace with each other. And emigrating doesn't resolve the problem, as I've learned." 

 

My Little Donkey serves its purpose as the chronicling of a retired Baby Boomer's life, Cooley even details luxurious spa treatments at a thermal water center an hour from her Italian home. (The water is sulfuric, so of course she braids in a lesson on gunpowder, too.) The essays here are voluminously filled out with quotes and excerpts from all the books she wants us to know she's read and she of course peppers in a few Italian words to chase non-Italian speaking readers to Google Translate (vaporetto: public water bus). In an essay titled "Falls" she tells us she's fallen four times in the last fourteen years, her latest fall resulting in a broken hip. It's really hard to guess about what topics her future essays will cover, trying to run out the clock in retirement doesn't seem like it offers much to write about. Before Cooley left New York for the final time to begin her retirement in Italy, she took her cat, Zora, to the vet to have her euthanized, reasoning that nineteen-year-old Zora was too old and feeble to make the transatlantic flight with her. Can't sit around waiting on your cat to die when you've got a fixxer-upper on the other side of the world ready for you to begin drawing your pension.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.