3Rs: A Sentimental Journey

But she did understand how a book in my pocket could be a secret that would keep me out of trouble and thus defeat the prophecy of the awful 6th grade teacher who told the whole class she was sure I’d end up in prison. I still see that teacher’s face, withered & cracked by Nebraska’s unkind light, living on candy she stole from children.

Lesson Two: Sentimentality

I don’t really understand how vicious writers can be when they tear the soft meat of the underbelly, attacking one another’s sentimentality, sometimes rightly for all the cruelty done in sentimentality’s name. I understand that we earn respect by learning to endure great pain with subtlety and a modicum of complaint. But sometimes I think we don’t know how to deal with loss, so we invent a mysterious quotient to avoid excessive feeling. I remember a football coach who told me to fight through the pain unless you broke a leg. How is this different from our writerly requirement that sentiment must be “earned”?

Lesson Four: Old Age and Bitterness

When I was young, my mother asked me: “If you’re so bitter now, what will you be like when you’re an old man?” I knew she was talking about her father, who lost jobs and farms and the love of his family, who sat by the refrigerator all day smoking his Camels, who died out of spite when they cut off his leg.

I didn’t know how to answer my mother, but I remembered a story my grandfather told all his grandchildren about how he made the cigar box banjo, and his own father, a preacher, broke it as a lesson to his congregation about the devil’s music. Later I wondered if we all have music that someone breaks, or maybe to be bitter is to be without song.

“Your mother taught me how to read.”