(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)
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Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world wider than his own, and what The Boy thought he knew about this wider world was this:
Somehow, weirdly, this other world continued to spin on its axis even without The Boy at its core. Presidents, artists, convicts, detectives, and saints walked on this strange world’s uncracked pavement (their mothers’ backs forever safe). It was a world where movie musicals were filmed, where automobiles functioned as their manufacturers promised. A world where eating caramel candy by the bagful led straight to smiles — yes, as in The Boy’s own world — but never to a dentist’s chair. A world where he would fear neither the shadows of the night nor the heavy climbing rope of gym class, a world in which no one he loved would ever die, and there was no ham.
The people in this wider world spoke in exotic tongues, their melodic speech lacking the sweetly nasal twang and erratic rhythms to which The Boy was accustomed. Their hair (even beneath the helmets, war bonnets, and coonskin caps which many of them wore) was combed and coiffed immaculately. Some of these people had children, or were children themselves, some of whom were children that The Boy might eventually (in that murky future when he and they had ceased to be children) come to know and even to love.
This wider world lay not miles but whole light years of imagination from the town where The Boy lived, remote and untouchable, far beyond the range of his parents’ battered car (any of their half-dozen sputtering, wheezing, gear-grinding cars) which bore The Boy and his family through his own world’s dark heart.
Yet The Boy knew deep in his own heart that what separated that wider world from his own was not geography, but ignorance. Its people, even its children, knew nothing at all of his world. They did not (and would never) know of the boundaries of his life: the town, the neighborhood, the intricate web of human eccentricity which cross-hatched the map of The Boy’s daily wanderings.
They knew nothing, for starters, of the river and the creek which framed his existence.
