The last two books I finished have my mind on mortality.
I read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie as the first selection of the online book group I’ve joined. I’ve been wanting to read Rushdie’s work for awhile—I always assumed I’d eventually pick up The Satanic Verses—and so was thrilled that this was the pick. I’ll say very quickly that in our online discussion via Facebook, almost everyone said that this was one of the hardest books they’ve ever had to read, but that they were more or less glad to have read it. It has a strange rhythm, an odd cadence, and it took almost all of us more than a hundred pages to get into that rhythm.
But once we did, the results were fascinating. Rushdie’s book is a history of India, of sorts, seen through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, a child who is born at the exact moment of India’s independence from Britain—12 a.m. on August 15, 1947. As Saleem grows, his life very closely mirrors that of India’s history, and he finds himself in telepathic contact with other children who were born during India’s first hour as a sovereign nation. These are the titular children, each of whom possesses some fantastic power.
There were three lines in the book that summed up why it fascinated me. The first is: “Children are vessels where adults pour their poison.” The second: “There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.” And the third—paraphrased—is often repeated: Saleem mentions on numerous occasions how he “creates” new parents for himself, that is to say, he finds new people to teach him, to serve as his example, to lead him.
In light of the mythology of Shiva and Kali, the creator and destroyer, in Indian mythology, I found these lines fascinating: children are vessels where parents pour their children, and children create their own parents—creation and destruction. As a commentary on Indian history, these lines are informative as well: I don’t think Rushdie thinks that India ever really overcame its history of British colonialism, and in fact may have begun to imitate its oppression of the Indian people under the rule of Indira Gandhi, whose eventual assassination was four years away when this work was first published.
As a story, of course, it’s sad as hell, especially in its latter half, when mortality, oppression, and war rear their ugly heads time after time again to beat the character down, down, down. I was glad to have read it, and even happier to be done.
The second book, which I just finished today, was Hokey Pokey by Jerry Spinelli, which I discovered when I heard a story about it on NPR. Spinelli’s story, a young adult novel, takes place in a fictional land called Hokey Pokey, where there are almost no adults to be seen and where children spend their days wild and free. They watch cartoons, chase a herd of wild bikes around the Great Plains, explore, play sports, and more or less live in unadulterated child-ness.
Spinelli’s considered one of the great young adult authors, and I understand why. It’s a beautifully crafted story about a kid, Jack, who wakes up and instinctively knows it’s his last day in Hokey Pokey, that the sound he keeps hearing, the train whistle—which no one else seems to notice—signals the end of his time here. He suddenly realizes that his nemesis—The Girl—isn’t so bad, and that his friends are (at one point, literally) holding him back from moving forward. He spends his last day in Hokey Pokey savoring its pleasures.
This book hit me right where I live in many ways. My childhood really was sorta like this: I spent most of it in a magical world of my own creation, with dinosaurs, and Nintendo characters, and gigantic cities on Neptune, and total freedom. I played. I adventured. I lived on the Great Plains—literally—and dreamed I could fly into those endless Oklahoma skies.
And I was painfully, painfully aware from an early age that it would all end some day. Even as early as five or six, I remember being on the playground, looking around and thinking, “Childhood is very short. I must savor it while I can.”
But there’s never enough savoring, and I knew that too. I had a girl who lived next door with whom I fought, and rode bikes, and adventured, and had an endless war. I had a little brother who liked to follow me around and to provoke me into fights.
It all seemed to slam to a screeching halt when I was ten. I came to school that year—fifth grade, Mrs. Wolgamott’s class. It was like the worm had turned; every other year, all us kids had more or less been friends, had been nice to each other. In fifth grade, there were factions, and teasing, and bullying, and much of that was directed at me. That year, my parents split up, my dad moved into a motel, and then an apartment, and everyone kept telling me, “Well, you’re the man of the house now.”
My yard didn’t look like the dinosaur-infested surface of Neptune any more. It looked like a yard, and I knew: time’s up.
So that’s why I loved this book. As a work of fiction, it’s not perfect, but it spoke to me. It makes me happy to think of childhood now, of Saturday morning cartoons, and the Legend of Zelda (which I still play on a pretty regular basis), and this beautiful world I created in my imagination.
I was reminded of this world last summer. We were at our friends’ cabin in beautiful northeastern Oklahoma for the Fourth of July, a trip we’ve been taking for several years. I was sitting in the back of my friends’ van as we navigated the curving gravel road from the state highway up to the cabin, and all of a sudden a memory hit me, something I hadn’t thought about in more than two decades.
When I was a kid, we drove everywhere. I turned 18 having only flown three times. We used to take these long drives to go fishing, or camping in Colorado, and when we drove through wooded, deserted places, I’d imagine that dinosaurs were chasing the car, playfully, like dogs do. I’d look out my window and see them in the brush, grazing, or hunting, or playfully butting heads.
That day, in my friends’ van, in my 30s, I saw them again for a second, and I just watched, filled with joy. And when we got back to the cabin, and time was up, I smiled and tucked that little piece of joy away, and it was okay that it was over, because I got to have it at all, and it was enough.
