My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Born February 18,  1931

What a Childhood, What a Writer!

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

In this memoir, author Annie Dillard recalls the freedom she was given as a child. Is this childhood lived in 1940s and 50s, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sort of childhood that helps create artists? From her book I developed the following tenet: Parents who allow their children to be their own person have no equal:

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“I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill” (149).

When she is not even twelve, Dillard and her friends, the Fahey brothers, form what they call iceballs and throw them at cars for sport. At one point she lobs one that hits a man’s windshield inches from his head. He throws open the door of his Buick and leaves it agape as he chases them block after block until, breathlessly, he catches them:

“‘You stupid kids,’ he began perfunctorily.

“We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever.

“But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North American until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?” (48).

I witnessed a similar event one year, when a man who lived next door to my elementary school in Wichita stacked dead branches in the area of land between the sidewalk and the street. When a kid picked one of the large branches and began to drag it down the street, the man raced out and dragged the boy toward the school to report him to the principal. Just watching that act of violence froze me to the sidewalk. I could never have thrown a snowball at a Buick traveling haplessly down the street. Perhaps Dillard’s childhood equipped her with a certain courage many of us do not have. Parents who leave their children alone can produce results that go a variety of ways. For Dillard it seems to have helped to produce one of the most creative writers in America. I'm sure I’ll read this work again.

WEDNESDAY: A PHOTO AND A SHORT ESSAY