How It Was: Rake’s Progress

The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.”

With Running After My Hat, I sort of reversed that process.

As of today, as you can tell just by lurking for a few days, the blog is pretty much about… umm… well…

*crickets*

But when I started it up in the spring, I had a grand vision of what I would accomplish. I meant to launch an experiment in electronic publishing — not that no one else had never done the same thing, but that I hadn’t.

Specifically, I wanted to introduce to some portion of the world a series of booklets which I wrote over a few years in the early 1990s. Collectively, the series goes by the title How It Was. (Several variants have popped up from time to time, the most durable being Jersey Boy: How It Was.) Each booklet is a quasi-memoir of growing up in a particular small town in a particular corner of southern New Jersey in a particular decade of the mid-20th century.

The protagonist of How It Was, identified only as The Boy, has an entirely secret inner life which he superimposes on his daily activities. A bicycle becomes a World War II bomber, for instance; and, for another instance, he views (many of) his teachers with a baffled but stubborn suspicion utterly at odds with his compliant exterior.

And yet, for all his self-fantasies as (alternately) a hero and a villain and a vacillating sprinter between those two extremes, The Boy remains consistently (and unconsciously) a soft-hearted romantic, touched with nostalgia decades before he deserves it.

Each booklet in the How It Was series describes events in a particular season of a single year — seasons as The Boy recognizes them: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Christmas. Actual, “true” events interleave with ones which never happened, or happened much later; The actual Boy ranged in age from around eight to around twelve, while The fictional Boy ages no more than a year — he may be ten, plus or minus a year.

Early readers of the book (those outside The (actual) Boy’s family) sometimes are put off by what one once described as the “arch” tone. But The (actual) Boy is gratified by how easily they seem to get sucked in as they read along.

I posted an excerpt (a long one) from the Spring booklet early in RAMH‘s (so far) short life, but since then I’ve pretty much ignored the whole subject (and ignored electronic publishing, for that matter). Yet at this time of year, even (or especially) with North Florida temperatures dropping overnight into the 20s, I can’t help thinking of New Jersey in the fall, 40-odd years ago. And so now feels the right time to revisit How It Was, with an excerpt (a much shorter one) from the Autumn booklet.

This is a brief portion of the section called “Rake’s Progress.” By this time in the Autumn storyline, The Boy has successfully negotiated the first few months of the school year. He’s gotten through Halloween, triumphantly (in his own eyes).

And that secret inner life is running in high gear: trying, desperately, to justify the annual torture of raking up the leaves from the front yard, shifting them from the yard to the street, along the curb, where they will soon be burned. (More innocent times, those. Sigh.)

Enjoy.