MAKING MUCH OF LITTLE

EMILY HIESTAND HAS TRAVELED MUCH IN WINTHROP, CAMBRIDGE, AND IN THE PRECINCTS OF HER OWN PAST

Author: By Jeanne Schinto

Date: SUNDAY, July 5, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

The same could be said of Hiestand, whose enviable gift is to squeeze every droplet from the least of her own life experiences. In a previous book, the 1992 collection of travel essays ``The Very Rich Hours,'' she recounted extraordinary journeys to Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece. This time, Hiestand has stayed close to home -- in Winthrop, where Angela was her surprisingly level-headed neighbor (``It's a good job, hon. I'm the headliner''), and in Cambridge, where, Hiestand admits, she now lives ``a life so marginal, I can spend most of a day watching blue jays nest.''

By birth Hiestand is a Southerner, so she has the storyteller's gene. This other home has also provided her with more material -- a rich array of relatives and neighbors. (Or is it Hiestand's comic genius that makes them so?) She writes of driving with her great-aunt Nan Dean Blackwell of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., who employed the death-defying pump-and-coast method of acceleration but lived to be 100. She recounts deliciously the childhood prank she played on her hoity-toity neighbor in Oak Ridge, Tenn., squirting her with a garden hose from behind a privet hedge, and feeling such ``savage glee'' that, four decades later, she wanted to go back and thank poor Mrs. Bayliss for having played the dupe so unerringly.

Oak Ridge, home of the atomic bomb, is where Hiestand's father took a job ``lawyering'' for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, the year Hiestand was born. Oak Ridge children were paid to catch lightning bugs (``penny a bug''), since these sources of cold light were needed for a lab. Winning a science-fair prize was ``the route to popularity'' in her adolescent world. And she and a friend could well dream of building a rocket ship ``for which we had most of the parts we needed.''

Yet Oak Ridge in the mid-1950s, for all its forward-looking familiarity with neutrinos, was still just another segregated town. And when Hiestand was 8 or 9, she and a white playmate drank from the ``colored-only'' fountain in an act that was ``a combination of scientific interest -- calmly testing to see what would happen to ourselves or to the five & dime if this curious division were breached -- and a child's inborn antenna for the weak places in adult logic.''

Hiestand has never lost this sense that every so-called grown-up custom or belief bears scrutiny -- and jettisoning, when found lacking. It leads her, as an adult, to have neon tubing installed on the underside of her car, even though a salesman of the product cautions her, ``It's only boys who buy this stuff -- you know, ethnics, Hispanic boys.'' Her refusal to ``get stuck in history'' also brings her to join a predominantly African-American church.

She travels easily, unselfconsciously, not only among regions and races but also social classes. That's why she appreciates Angela's artistry, and celebrates the history of her triple-decker, relishing the idea that its former owners, the Granchelli family, soaked themselves in the selfsame bathtub.

You'll feel like a misanthrope if you find her too cheery. Cheerful even in the copy shop? Even in Star Market? ``I wish I could hug her,'' she says of the woman handing out samples of Mr. Hummus spread on crackers. You may wish you could shake Hiestand and say, But hey, what about the dark side of life? Though she understands that ``ours is a paradoxical paradise, that all times, all lands, all selves are an alloy of scar and grace, that blight may turn to beauty and beauty to blight,'' a word like ``misery'' is not in her vocabulary.

``Tristesse,'' on the other hand, is. But she doesn't flaunt her erudition. And without it, she would not be capable of describing a turtle crossing the road as ``a tragic-comic amalgam: Mr. Magoo and Oedipus at Colonus.''

Like her Tuscaloosa progenitors, Hiestand believes ``the basic building block of the universe had long ago been discovered and named: it was Talk.'' She listens to people the way her Fresh Pond neighbor, a linguistic anthropologist, does. She hears ``not so much the facts of their narratives, which are the ordinary facts of our lives -- met your grandfather, tended the post office, nuts and oranges in our Christmas stockings, Papa very particular about his shirt-collars -- but how they talk, how life's watersheds and minutiae are phrased.''

One of the most delightful features of ``Angela the Upside-Down Girl'' is a direct result of Hiestand's hypersensitive antennae: its bounty of speech patterns and sounds, and her commentary on them. Great-Aunt Nan Dean, for example, pronounced ``die'' with ``an extra syllable and a springy uplift at the end (like a fancy ice-skating jump),'' the word suggesting to Hiestand ``not a mournful event, but a rather enticing activity.'' (I told you she was relentlessly cheery.) ``You should taste joumou before you cook him,'' says Joe Bain, the Haitian owner of the mom-and-pop store across from her triple-decker. ``You might not like him.'' As for the rejoinder ``No problem!'' -- well, it ``wants a whole essay for itself,'' says Hiestand.

Many personal essayists today try to capture our interest by being confessional but run the risk of revealing, like clumsy strippers, what we'd really rather not see. Hiestand has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian, and produced a tour de force.

Ooouuuweee! as her cousin Bill would say. What a good book this is!