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The
Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War by Samuel Hynes Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Ebullient If you’re looking to read an upbeat
memoir, pick up a copy of Samuel Hynes, The
Growing Seasons. In this fine, short book, Hynes covers the early years
of his life, until he leaves home to join the military. We’re all familiar with
the generalities: the Depression made for hard times, but we were happy even
though we didn’t have much. The specifics for Hynes are a delight to read. He
takes us into the stories of an enchanted childhood, with just the right
balance of mischief and struggle. In Hynes’ fine writing style, the pages fly
by, and when you reach the last page, you’ll wish there was more to read.
Here’s an excerpt 6 (pp. 114-5) that describes a special place for young Sam: The attic was my private place. Nobody else
went there; the windows were never opened, and the air was still, like the
air in a church when there's no service going on, and the sounds of the
street below rose faintly, like whispered secrets. I spent a lot of time up
there by myself, playing elaborate games that I made up, with trucks and tin
soldiers, or just looking out of the window. From that high place I could be
a watcher of the street. I watched the neighbors coming and going, the
Genakopolises from the house on the corner, and Miss La France next door,,
and Charlie Butts, and Mrs. Ford, and Alf De Smidt, and Mr. Delmore and his
black-haired daughter, Denise. I watched the mailman go down the street, and
the milkman, and the man who delivered laundry. And the strangers to the
block: the man with the goiter, and the woman who always wore white (even in
winter), and the old lady with the blue-tongued chow on a leash. The
attic was where things were stored: suitcases (my father called them
"grips")—cracked cow-hide, woven straw, cardboard painted to
resemble leather—the tired companions of two families' poor journeyings; and
cardboard boxes tied with string and labeled in Nellie's handwriting:
"old photos' "children's clothes" "wedding dress."
And a dressmaker's dummy, a torso covered in white muslin representing a
woman's body, but nothing like the shape of any female in our house. All that
stuff was history. You could tell the story of our family lives from what was
there, pushed back under the eaves. My
father gave me a Lionel electric train for Christmas when I was twelve, and
set it up in the attic on a trestle table that was our old ping-pong table
turned upside down, so that its top was a flat plywood surface with a wooden edge round the
sides like a wall. On the table he mounted the tracks, carefully tacking down
lengths of gray inner tube for a roadbed, and connected switches and signals
that turned from green to red when the train passed, and a control for
separating cars from the engine and for backing the train up, and a crossing
gate that closed when the train went by. I painted the table grass-green, and
stained bits of sponge green and stuck them around for trees; I built a station
and little houses out of cardboard, and made a sand road for the crossing
gate. And so gradually the tabletop became a small world entire in itself, a
private reality where the only sound was the small, companionable clickety-clickety
of the train running on its track, around, and around, and around. Even after I stopped playing with the train because
I was too old for such toys, I liked knowing that it was up there in that
other world that my father and I had built, and that I could reenter that world
if I wanted to. Then Nellie sold it. "You never used it," she said
in her practical way, missing entirely the difference between using and
having. I felt my loss bitterly. It wasn't grief, exactly, not like the
feeling when someone you know dies; more like what you feel when a favorite
thing is smashed, or swept away by a stream, or dropped from a moving car
onto a highway, or just left behind in a place you'll never go back to.
Something that was yours is gone forever; and if that can happen, if this thing
you treasured can be taken from you, then everything can. The memoir genre, in the right hands,
brings wisdom to readers. This excerpt about grief early in life shows the
wisdom Hynes presents for readers in The
Growing Seasons. If there’s only one memoir you decide to read this year,
you’ll be glad you chose this one. Steve Hopkins, April 19, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Growing Seasons.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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