How It Was

The year was 1990. I’d taken a leave of absence from work, and moved from New Jersey to Virginia, to a little town where no one I knew lived and only one or two people I knew had even heard of. (I’ll tell that whole story later.) I’d been in Ashland for a few months, living on savings and nothing else, while working on my first book.

Suddenly: crisis.

Oh, no: This wasn’t the sort of crisis which threatened life or even limb. Governments would not stand or fall depending on the outcome; there was no weeping or gnashing of teeth involved. (Well, perhaps a little gnashing of teeth. But all of that was highly localized.) No, it was just the late 20th-century WASP preoccupation which loomed as every calendar year rolled, inexorably, to its end: What in the hell was I going to get everybody for Christmas?

I couldn’t afford to buy anything. I had no handicraft skills. (There would be no handknit scarves, no lathe-turned lamps.) And although I’d moved several hours away from everyone in my family, I’d moved only several hours away: it wasn’t like I could count on my simple, y’know, being there to be gift enough to assuage my conscience.

When it got right down to it, in fact, unless my family wanted databases built or COBOL, Fortran, or C programs written, I had absolutely nothing to give them.

But, hmm, I could write a little…

Starting, then, with Christmas 1990, and for the three Christmases thereafter, I wrote a series of four little booklets encapsulating what I remembered about growing up in my family, in their corner of New Jersey, in the period from 1951 to the early 1960s. Each booklet focused on the events of a single season: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Christmas.

Yeah, I know. Christmas isn’t a season. But these were written from the point of view of a boy somewhere between five and eleven years old. And at that age, in that corner of the world anyhow — and certainly in that boy’s eyes — winter didn’t really exist as a season in its own right. There was a brief prelude to Christmas, the grand Thing Itself, and a protracted “Damn, it’s over already…” three-month block of post-Christmas letdown until the trees began to leaf again.

“Christmas” was the first of the four books in the How It Was series. (I didn’t know it would turn out to be a series, of course; I thought I was solving just that year’s Christmas-giving problem.) In writing it, my immediate dilemma wasn’t coming up with memories, which remained sharp and had become especially so after my dad died in 1988.

My immediate dilemma was how to refer to the central player in the comedy. This wouldn’t be a memoir, strictly speaking, so to say “I did this” and “All of us in my family” and so on felt, well, false. Ditto to just call him “John.” Giving him a fake name fell at the other end of the problem, though: this stuff didn’t happen to somebody else. It — or stuff an awful lot like it — happened to a specific boy. It happened to me.

And then I came up with a gimmick which solved my problem: don’t name the “protagonist” at all. He wasn’t really me, maybe, but he also — for sure — wasn’t anybody else. He wasn’t just any boy. He was The Boy.

Years later, I took the whole How It Was project through a writers’ group I participated in at the time. One guy, who’d joined the group fairly recently, wondered (at first) about what he called the “arch” tone of the writing, in the first excerpt he read. (No, Mac, I never forgot that.) It tends to distance the reader, he said — he himself certainly felt distanced. (He later recanted.) And probably the chief ingredient in that distancing is to call the “hero” simply The Boy.

Other people in the group, who’d read more of the series, didn’t share that perception. I hope when you read it, you won’t, either.