All That Formative Soil

 

I’ve thought about writing a story that faithfully captures what it meant to grow up during the time when I did.  Where I did.  A story about piecing the world together in the late sixties as a three-year old, remembering the music on the radio, the clothes that people wore and discussions that flash cognizant about Nixon or Vietnam. 

Consciousness unfolds awkwardly across the seventies as America stumbles and marriages stumble and faith crumbles in the adult world around you.  The normalcy of then, remembered, distilled now as exotic.  Remember the kid who moved into the neighborhood who had a thick Brooklyn accent and pungent Italian name who said his father was a “sanitation woiker” only to have all the kids correct him and say: “you mean he is a garbage man.” 

 

Music, television, puberty, considering ethnic otherness and precisely what class distinctions were, and what a pecking order was.  I am not as strong as that guy.  I might be stronger than that guy.  Figuring out how to deflect attention with other topics and sarcasm and funny accents.  Then, circumstances beyond your control, always, you changed aquariums once and then again and ultimately it was the 80’s and you were off in college with all that formative soil, long behind. 

Jonathan Lethem wrote a wonderful novel back in 2004: “The Fortress of Solitude” which had sat on my shelf for the last few months.  My stepmom was wild about the book and kindly procured it for me, recommending it strongly.  I’ve wanted to get back to some China reading for a while now, but I picked it up the other day and quickly discerned that his Gowanus coming of age was contemporaneous with my own Westchester version and, I was immediately charmed by all he’d done to explain Dylan Ebdus progression through the complicated hatchery of Brooklyn.

 

It’s Sunday.  I allowed myself the privilege, which at some other time in my life would have been a chore, to simply lie around and finish off this novel.  Loved it.  Felt like I was reading Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” populated with stoners and muggers and insecure super-heroes.  The language is dense but flows swiftly.  I knew everyone immediately and had quickly populated the book with familiar faces from my own life.  Dylan’s progression no more or less odd than mine.  Convincingly captured it served the purpose of forcing me to reexamine my own as moist plaster

 

 

 

Sunday, 6/13/21