Birds swooped over the prairie—black birds with red stripes on their wings, lemon-breasted birds that teetered on tall grass stems burbling out notes of joy.
That’s a sentence from page 52 of my first novel, Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation, describing the scene that greets Anders Gunstensen when he arrives on the Illinois frontier in 1853. Anders, having grown up in Norway, does not know the names of American birds. He only knows how they look and sound—and that’s what I was trying to capture.
When I wrote it, I thought it was a pretty ordinary, workmanlike sentence. But of the thousands of sentences in the book, this is the one that pierced the heart of a reader.
A Loved Sentence
We were at the gala book launch for my new middle-grade book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, and Stephanie Hofer, the mother of our former next-door neighbor, approached me to get my signature on her copy of the former book, Price of Passage.
She made a point of showing me that sentence, which she had starred and underlined on page 52 of her copy.
“I just loved that sentence!” Stephanie said.
She did not say she observed, admired, respected, or judged that sentence extremely well-wrought.
She loved it.
Gentle Reader, there are not too many rewards in this author game. Most of us do not get famous, and heaven knows we make no money at it. We have to take our satisfactions where we can. When a reader truly connects with something I’ve written, it thrills me to my core. This is why we write—to connect with another soul.
Eastern meadowlark singing. Photo by Gary Leavens, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
Stephanie grew up on the Great Plains, where there are miles and miles of tall-grass meadows filled with red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks. “I remember seeing meadowlarks,” she said.
I am a city boy myself, even though my cities have always been small or medium-sized ones. But my in-laws used to have a place in the country near Dodgeville, Wisconsin. We would go out there on weekends to relax. About that time of my life I got interested in birds and spent many hours on their wooded hillside and the adjacent grassy meadows, binoculars in hand, early mornings or late afternoons.
Many’s the time I’ve been greeted by a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm from a meadowlark perched on the thinnest of stems, just a foot or two above the prairie. That’s what I was thinking of when I imagined Anders the Norwegian tramping across the Upper Midwestern farmlands for the first time.
I knew exactly what I was describing, and Stephanie knew it, too.
Majestic Sentences
I am a writer, and justly proud of my sentences. In the book Stephanie asked me to sign, I planted a few corkers. For instance:
This time of year, the cold earth fights you for every chunk of granite you try to pull up (page 2).
Or how about:
She seized Anders’ head with both hands, as an eagle grips a big fish (page 10).
Or who could forget:
He studied how to wear his blue uniform, how to tilt the hat, how to tie the neckerchief; how and when to salute an officer, how to stand at attention, how to speak with “aye-aye” and “sir” in every sentence; how to call things by naval words—decks, bulkheads, hatches, fore and aft, starboard and larboard, abaft and abeam; how to give proper respect to every officer and petty officer; how to tell time in bells and speed in knots (page 281).
But the one that endeared the book to Stephanie Hofer was the simple one on page 52 about prairie birds.
So What?
Sometimes a single sentence may endear a story to a reader. The part vouches for the whole. And you never know which sentence it will be.
Therefore it behooves a writer to pay attention to sentences, to try to craft each one as well as it can be written.
Winston S. Churchill, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, famously wrote in a memoir:
The young Winston Churchill. Public Domain.
“[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell—a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great—was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”
It’s hard to think that Sir Winston was less than brilliant, even as a boy. But there can be little doubt that learning to write sentences was a key to his great success.
Long ago there lived a boy beleaguered by the world. Everything was a potential threat. Bullies and demons lurked everywhere.
Grownups were no help; they had their own problems. It was better to keep your head down.
If life was good, why were so many people so sad?
The more he learned, the more confused he became. By the time he was a teenager, he was downright bewildered.
This boy came into adulthood a bundle of neuroses and labored through the next decades to unlearn misconceptions about life and gradually to attain the art of contentment.
The Long View
When he grew old and retired from work, when no longer besieged by the trials of midlife, the boy looked back on the whole span of his life. Oddly enough, recent years had become a messy blur; but he saw the childhood era with crystalline precision.
He saw much of pain and sorrow, but even more of joy and zest. He wanted to stand before his Maker and say, “Oh . . . now I see how this caused that, and how one thing led to another. . . .” Above all, he wanted to have it all make sense.
But it didn’t. It was just a life. No matter whan angle he took, no matter which way he looked at it, there was nothing in his growing up that explained how he had arrived at grownup responsibilities with such a skewed, anxiety-ridden outlook that it took all his life to get over it. There was no rational understanding of that.
Well, that wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot.
Writing Therapy
When the boy decided to try being a serious writer, his dearest project became a reconstruction of that bygone era—one in which the joys and sorrows of a rather ordinary childhood balanced out and cast a benign new understanding across the mind-screen of the past. He would write a story where the forlorn hopes and muddled yearnings that lingered in his soul across all the intervening years could find a comfortable home at last.
And, after a great deal of work, this strange project proved possible!
The catch was (there’s always a catch, ask Yossarian)—the catch was, it wouldn’t be the boy’s actual life. Oh, all the incidents of childhood would be there, accurately portrayed in an exact replica of the original setting; yes, of course, a few names would be changed to protect the innocent, as the announcer on “Dragnet” used to say; but every detail would be true. They would just be juxtaposed in such a way that there was a veiled form of causality. The things that happened in the story would have meanings that related to one another, and those meanings would form themes, and the whole thing would be immensely satisfying.
It would be a fiction. But satisfying.
Isn’t that why we tell stories, Gentle Reader? To resurrect our past, but in a better way?
The story became a book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, about a twelve-year-old boy living in a small town in the 1950s. Izzy has to try to keep his family together, but what he most wants to do is fit in with his schoolmates. And all the adjustments he has to make to reconcile those conflicting goals give him an opportunity to grow a larger perspective.
The Fifties are so long ago now that the book counts as historical fiction. It’s also, as a matter of form, what we call a coming-of-age story (or a bildungsroman when we’re being snooty and pretending we know German). From a bookseller’s perspective, it is a middle-grade novel, because it’s axiomatic that a story about a twelve-year-old boy must be targeted at nine-to-twelve-year-old readers. Yet, as someone who remembers the Fifties quite clearly, I must tell you this book is a Nostalgic’s delight. Grandparents will enjoy it as much as their grandchildren.
It came about simply because a boy grew up confused and was left with unsatisfactory longings.
Whooppee!
I am sworn to secrecy on the identity of the boy, but if you’d like to meet him and hear about his journey as an author, boy and man, and maybe even buy a copy of the book and get it signed,and maybe win a fabulous, Fifties-themed door prize, I commend you to the Izzy Strikes Gold! Launch Party, 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, July 24.
Dear Reader: My second novel—a coming-of-age story set in the 1950s, called Izzy Strikes Gold!—will be released on Wednesday, July 24. Publishing a book requires many preparations on the part of publisher and author, who ideally work together hand in hand. Fortunately, I have an excellent publisher, Kira Henschel of Three Towers Press.
Be that as it may, the demands of publishing and selling a book do not exempt an author from Step 2 of my widely-heralded “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood,” namely: WRITE.
The simplest, most accurate definition of a writer is “one who writes.”
Publicizing is not writing, even though it involves some sales-oriented writing. Selling is not writing, even though trhe product you are selling is what you have written.
Two or three months ago I was purring along like a literary machine, cranking out pages and chapters of first draft on my work-in-progress, a World War II novel. But as Izzy’s publication date drew near, the detailed plans for getting this already-written book into print and onto buyers’ bookshelves began to suck up all my time and attention.
It was a relief to take time out last week for coffee with my friend Mary Behan—the wonderful author of Abbey Girls,A Measured Thread, and Finding Isobel. (Rush right out and buy them, or put them on hold at your favorite lending library. You’ll be glad you did!)
Mary reminded me that we are, first of all, writers. She mentioned a writers’ book called What About the Baby—Some Thoughts on Fiction, by Alice McDermott, a National Book Award Winner. So I rushed right out and got it. So far I’m about two-thirds of the way through.
Alice McDermott says thoughtful, even profound, things about the art of writing fiction. Her main message is that you have to get deeply and passionately into writing down those words of which your story is made. You may do other wonderful things—research, editing, or just thinking—but writing is what gets you where you want to go. It brings to life the wonder and delight of a story well told—a story you didn’t even know you had in you.
That’s really why we write, after all. For that thrill.
I was so inspired I picked up my laptop keyboard and rapped out a new chapter of my WWII novel, which I have duly sent to the members of my two writing critique groups, who will give me feedback this week.
It’s good to be back in the saddle again, pardner.
By the way—if you cannot attend the fabulous Launch Party for the book Izzy Strikes Gold!, may I cordially invite you to follow along on the livestream via Crowdcast, at this link. If you find you can attend, there may still be a ticket or two left.
I travel with grandchildren named Elsie and Tristan. And their mother Katie. And their grandmother Joelle, to whom I have been married more than fifty-four years.
Gentle Reader, if you’re exhausted by the mere mention of such treks, welcome to the club.
“Pantaloon – The Sixth Age Shifts into the Lean and Slippered Pantaloon” engraved by William Bromley. Public Domain.
. . . The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. . . .
—William Shakespeare, “the Seven Ages of Man”
The Native Hue of Resolution
In all innocence, we decided to celebrate our Golden Wedding Anniversary in 2020 by going to Italy. We would take Katie and her kids along to help us celebrate. It would be fun, we thought.
Also, it would be educational—broadening, don’t you know?—for the children. Katie had traveled widely in Europe but had never experienced the grandeur of Italy. Elsie and Tristan, ages ten and seven, had never been abroad at all.
“The Prince’s Cicerone.” Sir Walter Lawrence, 15 June 1905, Vanity Fair illustration by Leslie Matthew Ward (English, 1851-1922).
Young men from Britain or the Americas used to take long European sojourns as way of capping their formal education. This practice, known as “the Grand Tour,” had roots in the burgeoning world of the mid-17th century. It continued through the complacent era just before the outbreak of the First World War—a time now remembered as “La Belle Époque.”
“The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in its exposure to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. It also provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A Grand Tour could last anywhere from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor,”
says Wikipedia.
Being the Astute Reader that you are, I’m sure you already know the Grand Tour was experienced only by scions of wealthy families. Who else could afford such a long ramble and the expensive company of a personal tutor? Moreover, it was only the sons, not the daughters.
Democracy in Action
But, this is America! This is the Twenty-first Century! Travel has been democratized. Even if we can’t go in high style, at least we can travel. Ignore the fact that we swelter in giant sardine cans hurtling through bumpy skies while we watch epic films on seven-inch screens, with prefabricated salads in our laps; at least we are going.
We will get there. We will be there. We will come back. Millions of us.
We hoped to expose Elsie and Tristan “to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent.” We, ourselves, would be the cicerones.
What happened next, Dear Reader? Can you guess? . . . That’s right:
COVID.
Starting on March 13, 2020, all transglobal sardines’ wings were clipped. No Grand Tour could be scheduled.
For the benefit of readers from afar: Door County is an idyllic peninsula in northern Wisconsin—a sort of stretched-out Martha’s Vineyard—that hosts thousands of visitors every summer. In late spring of 2020, Door County had not yet become alarmed about covid; it had hardly touched their peninsula. Business—that is, tourism—went on, with just minor precautions.
We took the kids to Door County. We swam and dined and shopped and campfired to our hearts’ content. Tristan, now 8, and Elsie, still 10, enjoyed themselves immensely. We came home, illness-free, just as the pandemic was getting worse everywhere.
One year later, we tried again. But we still couldn’t schedule Italy, which by then was melting down with covid. So we went to Alaska instead. Alaska has plenty of fresh air. The grizzlies and moose at Denali National Park posed no threat at all, from a public health perspective. Local precautions were bearable. The good folks of Alaska were touchingly glad to see us. With all cruise ships lying idle in their home ports, we had America’s Last Frontier almost to ourselves. The kids—now 9 and 11-turning-12—really, really had a great time.
Liberation
Early in 2022, Joelle started her third attempt to plan our Italian anniversary vacation. Covid by now was in retreat everywhere—even Italy. At last, two years late, we celebrated our fiftieth anniversary by taking our grandchildren to Italy. We added Croatia and Slovenia to the itinerary. We had to mask up on public transports in Italy, but otherwise it was all clear. Despite Europe’s hottest summer in living memory, Elsie and Tristan—who by now were 10 and 12-turning-13, loved every minute of their democratized 21st-century Grand Tour.
We were greatly satisfied by the whole, long-delayed, itinerary.
Britannic Majesty
However, since we as a family, unlike wealthy young men of old, could not stay in Europe for months on end, some bits were left uncovered. The British Isles, for example.
Tristan and Elsie, continents apart. Larry Sommers photo.
So this year, after a one-year hiatus, we took Katie, Elsie, and Tristan to Ireland, Scotland, and England—with a clever little layover in Reykjavik to see Iceland’s Golden Circle. It was wonderful. We saw Geysir (the original geyser), Gulfoss the rampaging waterfall, Thingvellir where the European and American plates come together.
British military band prepares for the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Larry Sommers photo.
In Ireland, one or more of us went to Blarney Castle, the Guinness Brewery, the Titanic Museum in Belfast, and the Giant’s Causeway. In Scotland, it was lovely old Edinburgh with its mighty castle, followed by a visit to Oban and the exciting islands of the Inner Hebrides. Then on to jolly old England: Derby in the Midlands, followed by several days in London—Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, the Harry Potter studios, the Tower of London, HMS Belfast, the Churchill War Rooms. On our last day, we went to see Wicked on the stage of the Apollo Theatre.
The London Eye never sleeps. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.
The kids loved the whole trip—so far as we could tell. We had no way to know, since they were always two hundred yards ahead of us. Did I mention that now they’re 12 and almost 15?
“It’s hard traveling with old people,” they confided to their mother. We were slowing them down, you see. Katie reminded them they would not be traveling at all if not for the old people.
In former times, I would have added, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” But I’m reformed. No more promotion of tobacco products.
#
Neither Joelle nor I gained any weight while on vacation—a first! We ate copiously, but the travel was just so strenuous. We huffed and puffed along in the wake of individuals who had not even bothered to arrive on Earth until after we retired.
Suddenly, it’s fifteen years later. Our age has begun to dawn on us.
Nevertheless, we’ll probably do the whole thing again. There are still places to go, and tempus does indeed fugit.
Tempus shown in mid-fugit. The Sinnington sundial by Pauline E, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0
Henry Van Dyke wrote, “London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air. . . .”
Maybe that’s why 177,000 people troop down to Buckingham Palace every morning to see the Changing of the Guard.
Panoply of power: Buckingham Palace. Photo by Chiugoran, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
What happens, over a period of forty-five minutes: Some guys in red coats and tall black hats perform various ministry-approved silly walks while a couple of bands play brassy songs, some other guys troop through on horseback, and dark-suited policemen in lime yellow day-glow vests yell at the hoi polloi to get down off the fences.
Changing of the Guard, a worm’s-eye view. Photo by Jo Sommers, used by permission.
That’s power.
All these people would be doing other—more sensible—things, were it not for the heady aroma of power emanating from Buckingham Palace. That’s because the king lives there.
The main part of London is chockablock with gargantuan buildings in marble and other heavy stones. The Houses of Parliament stand for tradition and the vox populi. Westminster Abbey weds sanctimony with magisterial authority. The Tower of London has nine hundred years of experience as the enforcement branch. Endless corridors of bureaucratic power stack up along Whitehall.
And it’s all watched over by the unsleeping London Eye.
The London Eye never sleeps. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.
Even a strong man might get vertigo.
A Chequered Past
Londinium was established about 47 A.D. by the Romans, who knew a thing or two about power. After a brief destruction by the Iceni under Queen Boudica, the city was rebuilt and grew rapidly in subsequent decades.
Under the Romans, “Londinium was an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, including natives of Britannia, continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa,” according to Wikipedia.
This cosmopolitan city was infiltrated and overrun by the Saxons over several centuries’ time, captured by Vikings for a few years, and eventually incorporated into Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in 886.
The year 1066 saw the introduction of Norman law, customs, and language. The next nine hundred years or so crystallized the existence of a distinct Englishness that spawned a world-wide empire with leaders like Nelson, Wellington, and Churchill.
In the process, “being English”—or even “being British,” a broader label—was distilled into an essentially white and Anglo-Saxon identity.
Then, the World Changed
By the middle of the twentieth century, the British Empire (“Im-paahh,” in Etonian/Oxonian) was impoverished and exhausted. It was hard enough to hold the British Isles together, let alone India, Kenya, and the bloody Irish. The Empire was reduced to a “Commonwealth” of nations sharing a nostalgic attachment.
Natives of Commonwealth and other nations increasingly migrated to London for economic opportunity, and the same thing that has happened to other major cities happened to London as well. It became jumbled up, ethnographically.
When Joelle and I visited in the early 1970s, the typical Londoner was pretty much the man or woman we had seen on our television tubes—a blend of Stanley Holloway, Robert Donat, and Mrs. Miniver. A few Indian restaurants were the only visible outposts of brownness.
Today, fifty years later, London is alive with Britishers of all races, colors, and national origins. Stand on a street corner near Victoria Station, and in ten minutes you will see everybody in the world walk by. London has again become “an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from” . . . just about everywhere.
Gentle Reader, here we are again—this time with a new, new update.
As a devotee of this site, you no doubt recall my post of May 7, 2019. It featured the curious curio pictured above—a telegraph key that looks like . . . well, like something else.
It is a Foote, Pierson & Co. Twentieth Century key, put on the market in 1901 and widely known as a “speed handle” or “pump handle key.” It came down to me as a family heirloom from my grandfather, William P. Sommers, who was a railroad telegrapher. The odd-looking device was one inventive response to a work-related stress injury known as telegrapher’s paralysis—which I innocently supposed to be just another name for carpal tunnel syndrome.
Oops!
After an email from David Pennes, a physician in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I stand corrected.
Penne has been tracking this historical affliction of railroad telegraphers for years and is just about to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
Telegrapher’s paralysis, says Penne, was not carpal tunnel syndrome. It was either (1) task-specific dystonia or (2) compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. Maybe a combination of the two.
This diagnosis took a lot of detective work, because as Penne points out, “[t]he condition was never described in medical journals of the day.”
Lacking such professional data, he says, “I used a database of 60,000 searchable .pdf pages from the union and trade publications, whatever medical literature was out there, and was able to track down a handful of individuals who either had the condition or worked with people who did, which put a human face on it.”
In the course of his research, Penne encountered my 2019 post erroneously equating telegrapher’s paralysis with carpal tunnel syndrome. He also ran across a fleeting reference to my grandfather in a 1901 publication from the Order of Railroad Telegraphers—a sort of fraternal guild Grandpa Sommers once belonged to. I have his membership card somewhere.
Penne’s email correspondence with me straightened out another point as well. I had assumed that Grandpa had the key in his possession because the railroad let him take it with him when he left their employ. In fact, Penne says, “Anyone working for the railroad wishing to use anything other than the employer-supplied straight key had to buy their own.”
So Grandpa must have owned the key outright, having laid out the heavy sum of $8.95.
Why?
But that raises another conundrum. In 1901, when the Twentieth Century Key experienced its brief surge of popularity, Grandpa would have been only seventeen years old—having worked as a railroad telegrapher since age fourteen. Three years’ work would not have included enough tappings of the standard telegraph key to give him telegrapher’s paralysis, whether task-specific dystonia or compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. So why did he buy it?
Well, you had to know Grandpa. He came from a technological family, had the highest regard for his own brains, and was apt to back anything he considered a good idea—or a sound, well-engineered solution to a problem—even if it cost good money. Things he bought over his lifetime included a Pierce-Arrow Touring Car, several Studebakers, lots of fractional partnerships in oil-drilling operations, and a weird ultraviolet light device imagined to cure rheumatism.
He would have been aware of the old operators’ complaints about “telegrapher’s wrist.” Thus, he took a flyer on a new key—one that might spare him the anguish suffered by others.
All this is supposition, of course. And every once in a while, Your New Favorite Writer is reminded that he ought to beware of suppositions.
Not every sore wrist is carpal tunnel syndrome.
Whatever your calling, Dear Reader, take care of your digits. One day you’ll grow old and you’ll need them to keep on buttoning your buttons.
Flight of Honor participants in Raleigh, NC are welcomed back by crowds. Photo by Rtphokie, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
You know what I’m talking about? Maybe not, since honor flights are a recent invention.
Military veterans from a locality are flown, free of charge, to Washington, D.C., on a given day, ostensibly to view the nation’s war memorials. At the originating airport, on board the plane, and at the destination airport—Reagan, Dulles, or Thurgood Marshall—they are drenched with applause and special treatment. Veterans thus honored are often moved to tears.
The original notion was to honor men and women who fought World War II—the “Greatest Generation.” The National World War II Memorial had been completed in 2004, yet few WWII vets had gone to Washington to pay a visit. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of that vintage were growing old and infirm. How many would live long enough to visit the memorial expressing the nation’s gratitude to them and their fallen comrades?
The Honor Flight Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was founded by Earl Morse and Jeff Miller, two younger-generation veterans. Wikipedia says it “grew to a veritable forest of volunteerism, fundraising and goodwill toward the Greatest Generation veterans, who had been too busy building their communities to demand recognition for wartime service.”
Why Me? Why Now?
Since its founding, the progam has naturally progressed to recognizing veterans of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts as well as World War II.
Although I was involved with the Vietnam War, I never thought of going on an honor flight.
Those junkets are laid on for doddering old men, I thought. Which certainly does not describe yours truly.
Moreover, I was hardly a gung-ho troop in the first place. In the years when I wore a uniform, bellyaching was the more fashionable posture. I was only too glad to gain separation from the U.S. Air Force 55 years ago. Since then, I have been mostly absent from veterans’ events, organizations, and affairs.
So why am I listed on the manifest to ride the Badger Honor Flight this coming November?
One good thing about living so long—I’ll be 79 tomorrow—is that one gains perspective. One mellows.
Being a Veteran
Though never vocal about claiming respect as a veteran, I have come to realize that there is a point to it. Those who donned the uniform when called upon, whether we endured horrendous combat or performed other tasks, rightly earned our nation’s gratitude.
The historian Steven Ambrose described a particular outfit in World War II using words lifted from William Shakespeare: “band of brothers.” The phrase evokes an intense, unbreakable bond among those who have borne the battle, be they Britons at Agincourt in 1415 or Screaming Eagles at Normandy in 1944.
King Henry V and his band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Painting by John Gilbert (1817–97). Public Domain.
The whole corps of us who served, doing any job at all, in the armed forces, may not rate such a heady epithet. The totality of U.S. military veterans, I think of as a “gang of guys with a certain sameness.”
A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.
We have all been yelled at by noncommissioned officers in boot camp. We learned how to stand up straight and how to salute. Even decades later in civilian life, we align the plackets of our shirts to our belt buckles and trouser flies to achieve a straight “gig line.” Every one of us can still work the official P-38 can opener that was issued with tinned field rations in the days before the introduction of plastic-pouched “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs).
These tokens held in common must not be taken lightly.
But, What’s the Point?
Even so, when my late friend Jerry Paulson, a fellow Vietnam-era veteran, came back from his honor flight a couple of years ago and insisted I should sign up, my reaction was skeptical. I am no doddering old man. But then, neither was Jerry, and he’s no longer among the living.
When I learned a bit more about the process, I changed my mind. You see, a veteran doesn’t just go on this trip. A veteran is accompanied every step of the way by a volunteer “guardian.”
If you need help walking or boarding the airplane, even if you need a pusher for your wheelchair—your guardian is there for that. But what if you happen to be in tip-top shape? You get a guardian anyway!
It’s right there on the website: “BHF uses a 1:1 Veteran to guardian ratio. We do this to for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” I suspect they simply don’t want to pick and choose which vets need help and which ones don’t.
The program has volunteers ready to act as guardians. But—this is what snagged me, Dear Reader—you can nominate your own guardian. It can be a member of your family. It can’t your spouse, which would amount to an expense-paid holiday for two. But it can be your son, daughter, niece, nephew, or friend.
I thought of our only child, Katie. Suddenly the project became compelling.
My Guardian
Katie was almost fourteen when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The First Gulf War, which soon followed, happened when she was a teenager, far removed from any concern with world affairs. By September 11, 2001, she was 25—old enough to fight for her country in the Global War on Terror which followed. But military service, whether compulsory or voluntary, has always been a predominantly male thing. She did not enlist, nor did anyone expect her to.
Though women today serve in all branches, they do not generally grow up with a sense of their own eligibility, vulnerability, or destiny of military service. But young men do.
Historically, our country has provided about one war per generation, and the young men are expected to fight it. Not all of them, but some of them will surely go. The rules of the game—the degree of compulsion or free choice—vary by national policy and historical circumstance. Some are born too late for one war and too early for the next. But all young men live in the shadow of the next war.
War for men is like motherhood for women. We don’t all experience it, but its very possibility shapes our lives. Those who go through it are formed by it. Those who escape it may feel they have missed out on something, even if it is something better avoided.
I have no memories of real combat, thank God, to haunt my days and disturb my dreams. In those days when battle was a live possibility for my generation, I could have burned my draft card and fled to Canada. A lot of men did. The reason I didn’t was not that I was a super patriot or convinced of the need to fight the Communists in Southeast Asia, but only that I wished to continue being an American, subject to our nation’s laws.
(If you want the full rationale, look up Socrates’s conversation with his friend Crito. It’s filed under Plato’s Dialogues.)
Crito Closing the Eyes of Socrates, bas-relief by Antonio Canova (1757–1822). Public Domain. Image file by Fondazione Cariplo, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Katie is still a young woman. She’s had no opportunity to understand the nature of the experience her father went through more than fifty years ago, or the resulting bond among a gang of guys with a certain sameness.
But come November, she’ll accompany me as my volunteer guardian on what amounts to a road trip with a random sampling of that gang of guys. I don’t know who my fellow Badger Honor Flight veterans will be, but I reckon we’ll have a few things in common. Maybe Katie and the other guardians will catch a whiff of what our sameness means to us and therefore to them.
Kindly old Mrs. Winders kept me after class one Friday afternoon in October. She sat me down by the dusty chalk rail and said next Monday morning I must report to the room across the hall.
Dazed by this announcement, I walked home. Skipping a grade was nothing I had heard of before. I didn’t know it could be done.
I told the news to Mom. She knew all about it. She, Dad, the teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist had already talked at length about this plan to make me a fourth-grader.
The only one left out of the conversation was me.
So What Else Is New?
It would have been extraordinary to include a kid in a decision that affected him.
We were to be seen rather than heard. Why would anyone consult us on a matter of importance? We were defective; that is, not yet adult.
“But Mom, I like my friends in third grade. Those fourth-graders are older than me. I don’t know them.”
“You’ll just have to make new friends.”
That was that.
The next Monday, I walked into a classroom where all the kids towered over me.
Where everybody already knew their multiplication tables.
Students practicing penmanship. Fair use.
Where the cursive characters—which I had barely begun to learn—were posted above the blackboards all around the room, from which vantage point they leered, taunted, and dared me to write using them all the time. And to practice “good penmanship,” whatever that was.
Fourth grade was a place where my new teacher, a mean old lady with beady eyes, saw me as an untutored savage, a burden thrust upon her.
Oh, the Humanity
Van Gogh suffering from an earache. Public Domain.
People say artists must suffer. If they never suffered, it’s not art.
Writers are held to be artists. Therefore we must have suffered too.
In this business of suffering I am also defective. I haven’t suffered much. At age seventy-nine, I look back on a life of tranquillity, prosperity, and more than my share of joy.
But in those days when I was an impostor posing as a fourth-grader—both smaller and younger than my classmates, resented by my harsh teacher, expected to know all sorts of things I had sped past in this oddball promotion—at that time, Dear Reader, if at no other, I thought I was suffering.
Making friends was the least of it. My classmates treated me as a novelty—a mid-season interloper with an overgrown brain and an undergrown body. At least they were nice. They showed a kind of mascot-worthy toleration. One or two offered real friendship.
Some other kid, with a different personality, might have used the sudden promotion to take fourth grade by storm. Some folks are outgoing, potentially meteoric, by nature. I am not one of them.
Years and decades have taught me versatility; the skills required to make new friends quickly; the ability to assert my own interests in a pleasant, no-nonsense way so I won’t be huddled in a dark corner when goodies are distributed. But way down deep, I’m still an introvert.
Timidity ruled me in third and fourth grades. I seemed born to be bullied.
“Stand up for yourself,” my parents said.
Now, I know what they meant. Then, I had no clue.
My path to a full social life may have been gradual, but I got here. Gone are my days of quailing and quaking. Life is now good to me.
Yet the wounds of childhood, even many years later, can still sting.
An Altered Ego
So there was a hidden agenda when I set out, a few years ago, to write fiction.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot
I thought through historical fiction—stories set in the past—I could fix the past.
I created a character, Izzy Mahler—a six-year-old boy, beleaguered by schoolyard bullies who shook him down for money, a dime he did not have. “You’d better get it,” said big bully Barton Bigelow.
Izzy’s first, forlorn appearance, from the Saturday Evening Post’s Depression-era art files. Fair use.
The ingenious means by which Izzy got the dime, warded off Barton Bigelow, scored a candy prize for himself, and learned a lesson in finance, became a fount of quaint humor. The Saturday Evening Post website liked the story well enough to publish it as “Nickel and Dime.”
By combining a couple of real incidents from early childhood—changing a few names, facts, and relationships—I had given Izzy a success that had eluded the actual me. How’s that for exploration, T. S. Eliot?
Two more Izzy stories, again bought by The Saturday Evening Post, showcased my flair for creative reconstruction of the past.
Then I caught the bug to write The Great American Novel. My great American novel, Price of Passage, took about five years to complete. All along, I had it in mind to write a book about Izzy’s grade-school experiences back in the 1950s.
And I did it. The result, Izzy Strikes Gold!, is a middle-grade novel that grandparents will also enjoy reading—as a dip into the roseate past, if nothing more.
It’s 1957. Twelve-year-old IZZY, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer COLLUM swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
MOM and DAD are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. THE RUSSIANS launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying LYLE dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking IRMA seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and GRANDPA, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
DEEP IN DILEMMAS, HOW CAN IZZY HOLD ON TO HOPE?
Because it features a child protagonist with a child’s problems, this book is classified by booksellers as a middle-grade novel—one meant for readers eight to twelve years old.
But, Dear Reader, I wrote it for EVERYBODY. I hope there’s enough universality in Izzy’s story that people of any age can enjoy it as a snapshot of a magical time in a child’s life. People my age, who can remember the very different world of the 1950s, will resonate with the events contained in its pages.
I hope they will give this book to their grandchildren—read it along with their grandchildren, perhaps. It may spark wonderful conversations.
Themes
Authors must talk with people about their work. It’s easy to talk about characters and events in a story you have written. It’s harder to talk about themes.
You may not know the themes until the dust has settled.
Long before starting on the Izzy novel, I shared with my friend Christine DeSmet the fact that I wanted to write a “coming-of-age” book which would be mainly about “acceptance.” That desire sprang from the many times I suffered anxiety, hoping my classmates would accept me as a true peer even though I was younger and smaller, and knew bigger words.
But when the book was finished, I found its main themes are hope, friendship, and love.
All these transcend mere acceptance. In fact, taken together, they make acceptance unnecessary.
I thought I wrote about a child’s struggle to be tolerated in juvenile society. What came out was a saga of hope tenaciously held, friendship slowly gained, and love made manifest.
I went in for a penny but came out with a pound.
Having arrived where I started, I knew the place for the first time.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
P.S.—If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on July 24, come to the FABULOUS LAUNCH PARTY. You can buy the book on site and get a genuine author’s signature on the title page. Details here.
Your New Favorite Writer’s second novel, Izzy Strikes Gold! hits the streets July 24, but you can place your order now, for delivery then.
SUMMER 1957: Twelve-year-old Izzy, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer Collum swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
Mom and Dad are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. The Russians launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying Lyle dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking Irma seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and Grandpa, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
Deep in dilemmas, how can Izzy hold on to hope?
A FUNNY, SAD, UNFORGETTABLE JOURNEY, ROOTED IN THE AUTHOR’S OWN BOYHOOD
So What?
I may have mentioned this project once, twice, or three times in this space. That’s because I’m proud of this book. It’s a story that’s close to my heart.
Being the story of a 12-year-old boy, bookstores classify it as a “middle-grade” novel, meaning it’s for kids.
But we were all twelve years old once, and Izzy’s experiences, while unique to him, are darned near universal among Americans of a certain age. His adventures take place in 1957. Whether or not the Fifties were the time of your youth, you are likely to find things in this brief narrative that speak to your memories, and to your heart.
It’s a story about a kid trying to fit in.
How You Fit In
If you will be in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on Launch Day—July 24, 2024—you are cordially invited to attend our gala Book Launch Party at Mystery to Me Bookstore. They will have enough copies for everybody who wants one, and I’ll be happy to sign your copy. Tickets are free, but you have to sign up in advance.
Of course, you can always wait a couple of months and buy it at your favorite local bookstore; you may have place an order through them. Or get it on Amazon, if all else fails (Don’t look, it’s not there yet).
How To Use the Product
Read it. Then read it to, or give it to, your son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, neice, nephew, or all of them (you’ll need extra copies). Some readers of recent generations may be astounded at certain things they will read in this book. You may have to assure them that yes, indeed, that’s how things were, not so very long ago.
Come to think of it, this is a book that could start all sorts of useful conversations.
In case you’ve lost track, you can get it by clicking on the cover image just below:
