What's it About?

September 18, 2009: No -- I say this in response to myself from yesterday -- I think the blog is a good thing to play around with. It gives me a place to figure out the rest of the story -- as when Steinbeck wrote a daily letter to his publisher before beginning the real writing for East of Eden. I have that book of letters -- Journal of a Novel -- and I read it right along with the novel several years ago. His own two boys had a big influence on the writing -- who knew?

For some reason I thought this morning about a book I read in college -- Chauncey? -- about a mentally retarded gardener who seemed to say all the right things, unbeknownst to himself of course, and was therefore greatly admired by others and even made upwardly mobile in the social world. He kept being misinterpreted and lauded at each new level -- a pre-Forrest Gump kind of book. My English professor wanted us students to discuss the great and hidden meanings.

I was far too shy to say anything, much less something, about what I really thought. I had grown up with real-life Paul, my older brother whom no one ever mistook for clever or wise. There is no mentally compromised person who does not show some physical hint to give his self away before anyone has a chance to misinterpret what comes out of his mouth. I was an angry student sitting there the day of that discussion. I knew what it was like -- there is no glamour, no upward mobility, no wise words or magic. If I'd been a different sort of angry young student, I might have screamed, "You Fools! It's not like that at all! Chauncey is make believe -- book glamour! Book glamour!"

As it was, I sat there in my damaged, quiet soul, comfirmed to solitude and hiding. I listened to Fools talk about the wisdom of fools -- and I don't say that disparagingly. No one would believe what it was like to watch your own brother be taken for exactly what he was -- and worse.

My mother always insisted, "These people (like Paul) have a lot to teach the rest of us." I think she spent most of her life trying to figure out what that was.