Sick Call and Book Report

I was at a supermarket, picking up food for dinner on the way home, and the cell phone went off. It was my dad, talking about how my mom had a bad cold for several days and then fainted today, so the doctor put her in the hospital. Dad didn't make a big deal out of it and I assumed it was partly her being 77 and partly her smoking for the last 63 of them. In other words, this was A Call, not The Call. So I went home, grabbed dinner, and went to the hospital. My sister was there too, and we all had what I'd call a nice visit. They're basically doing supportive stuff, and she might go home tomorrow. It's' just part of life. On the way to the hospital, I was stopped at a certain boggy crossroads that's usually the place where I hear the spring peepers for the first time. I heard them tonight, and it was the first time this year, and I smiled. When I left my mom, she was smiling too. She was in the damn hospital, but her kids had made a point of visiting and cheering her up, and it made her feel good. Things could be worse.

Last night I finished reading Rascal, and it confirmed my belief that if you remember a book fondly from your youth it's usually worthwhile to search it out and read it again when you're an adult. If you're not familiar with it, it's the true story of a 12-year-old named Sterling North in a small Wisconsin town in 1918. Faux idyllic? Not really. His father is an abstracted and often absent widower, he remembers with longing his kind, highly educated mother, who died at 47, his sisters mean well but meddle unhelpfully in his life, and his older brother is fighting in France, there are bullies to deal with and neighbors who threaten to shoot his pet raccoon for whom the book is named.

In other words, the book is not a plea for us all to return to a time in the distant past when everything made sense and nobody wore metal through their faces or tattooed themselves all over like circus freaks or gleefully used foul words in prime time. But it's a charming evocation of a young boy enjoying the outdoors when there was more outdoors to enjoy, and a lucidly written memoir of an interesting and affecting family in a particular phase of their lives. Naturally it begins with the boy's acquiring a juvenile raccoon, and ends when he realizes that his pet is now mature and should return to the wild. I read the book when I was about 12 myself, and couldn't understand the author's wisdom, couldn't accept that he and his friend had to part. I understand better now, of course, being older. And understanding better makes the book all the more affecting, and its author more admirable in my eyes. He lived out the last years of his life in a town near where I went to college, and I could have visited him, I imagine, and told him how much I liked the book. If I had known that Sterling North was just a few miles down the road, I would certainly have considered it.

I found that I remembered any number of vivid passages from the book, any number of thoughts and ideas and incidents. In particular I remembered a scene where a phone call comes in the early morning from his uncle's farm. It was "case weather"—heavy fog—which gave the farmer an opportunity to move the dried tobacco leaves from the drying shed to a more compact storage area without breaking them. Family members drove through the foggy night to help, and young Sterling did his part until he got tired and dropped a heavy pole full of tobacco thirty feet to the floor, barely missing the adults working below. Gently banished to his aunt's kitchen, he talks with her about how he's not a little boy any more, and she asks him if he's chosen a profession. He says perhaps he'll be a doctor, and she says he's much too tenderhearted. She and he are both aware of a farm worker who got his arm caught in machinery and had it amputated at the kitchen table they were sitting at. Sterling allows as how being a doctor might not be right for him. The next part I'm going to quote verbatim:

"I think I know what your mother would have wished," Aunt Lillie said. And she looked so much like my mother as she said it that I wondered to whom I was talking in the lamplight of the fog-enshrouded world. I listened as though it were indeed my mother speaking. "I think she would have wanted you to be a writer."
"A writer?"
"And then you could put it all down," Aunt Lillie said, "the way it is now ... case weather, the fog, the lantern light ... and the voices of the men—hear them—coming in for breakfast. You could keep it just like this forever."

Writing isn't easy, or done well often. But the best reason to try is just that. You experience something, and you can't bear to let it go and be lost. You strive, as best you can, to keep it like this forever. A foggy morning in Wisconsin in 1918, frozen in loving and tender amber. It's a good book, OK?