almost as an afterthought, as if she had forgotten my presence. And why not? I was Mike’s father, not Mike. “Say hello to Mrs. Croft,” she said, easing herself off the stool. “And to Julie.”
I watched her walking toward the door: the faded jeans, the long hair, the jacket emblazoned with a school name. You couldn’t tell her from a million others. The sadness remained as I finished the coffee. I looked into the mirror and saw my reflection there: Mr. Croft,
you’re a nice guy
, like a million others. I saw the lines like parenthesis marks enclosing the lips, the receding hairline, the small tugs of flesh beneath the eyes. And thewisps of gray in the hair. If all the young girls looked alike, then all the fathers looked alike too, didn’t they?
I paid for the coffee, bought the evening newspaper on the way out and wondered whether I had been feeling sad all along for the wrong person. And I told myself: Except when you’re shaving, don’t look into mirrors anymore.
President Cleveland, Where Are You?
INTRODUCTION
There’s a sentence in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” which is probably the most significant I have written in terms of my development as a writer. The sentence echoes back to a lost and half-forgotten story I wrote in the days when I was scribbling stories in pencil at the kitchen table. The story was about a boy from the poorer section of a town who falls desperately in love with a girl from the other side of town where the people live, or so he thinks, grandly and affluently. The story was told in the first person, the narrator was a twelve-year-old boy.
The problem concerned description. The narrator (and I, the writer) faced the problem of describing the girl’s house, a thing of grandeur and beauty, white and shining, alien to the three-story tenement building in which the boy lived. How to describe such a house? I knew little about architecture, next to nothing at all. The house had an aura of graceful antiquity—was it a relic of some earlier era? It seemed that I had seen such houses in books—but what books? I knew nothing about researching such a subject and, anyway, I didn’t
want to burden the narrative with a long description of the house. In fact, this would not only be fatal to the forward thrust of the story but would not be consistent with what a twelve-year-old boy would know about architecture. Yet, I wanted to describe it as more than just a big white house.
The problem brought the story to a complete halt. I walked my hometown streets, desolated by the thought of all the things I did not know. How could someone so ignorant about so much ever become a writer? Back home, chewing at the pencil, I read and reread the words I had written. The lean clean prose of Ernest Hemingway and the simplicity of William Saroyan had affected me deeply, and I always told myself: Keep it simple, don’t get too technical. So, let’s apply those principles to the girls house. Forget architecture—what did the house look like? Not what did it
really
look like, but what did it look like to this twelve-year-old boy?
Yes, that was the key—the viewpoint of the boy and not the writer. And from somewhere the description came. It looked like a big white birthday cake of a house! I knew this was exactly the kind of image I had sought. I felt the way Columbus must have felt when he sighted land.
In that moment, I had discovered simile and metaphor, had learned that words were truly tools, that figures of speech were not just something fancy to dress up a piece of prose but words that could evoke scene and event and emotion. Until that discovery at the kitchen table, I had been intimidated by much of what I encountered in books of grammar, including the definitions of
similes and metaphors. Suddenly, the definitions didn’t matter. What mattered was using them to enrich my stories—not in a “Look, Ma, how clever I am” way, but to sharpen images, pin down emotions, create shocks of
I watched her walking toward the door: the faded jeans, the long hair, the jacket emblazoned with a school name. You couldn’t tell her from a million others. The sadness remained as I finished the coffee. I looked into the mirror and saw my reflection there: Mr. Croft,
you’re a nice guy
, like a million others. I saw the lines like parenthesis marks enclosing the lips, the receding hairline, the small tugs of flesh beneath the eyes. And thewisps of gray in the hair. If all the young girls looked alike, then all the fathers looked alike too, didn’t they?
I paid for the coffee, bought the evening newspaper on the way out and wondered whether I had been feeling sad all along for the wrong person. And I told myself: Except when you’re shaving, don’t look into mirrors anymore.
President Cleveland, Where Are You?
INTRODUCTION
There’s a sentence in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” which is probably the most significant I have written in terms of my development as a writer. The sentence echoes back to a lost and half-forgotten story I wrote in the days when I was scribbling stories in pencil at the kitchen table. The story was about a boy from the poorer section of a town who falls desperately in love with a girl from the other side of town where the people live, or so he thinks, grandly and affluently. The story was told in the first person, the narrator was a twelve-year-old boy.
The problem concerned description. The narrator (and I, the writer) faced the problem of describing the girl’s house, a thing of grandeur and beauty, white and shining, alien to the three-story tenement building in which the boy lived. How to describe such a house? I knew little about architecture, next to nothing at all. The house had an aura of graceful antiquity—was it a relic of some earlier era? It seemed that I had seen such houses in books—but what books? I knew nothing about researching such a subject and, anyway, I didn’t
want to burden the narrative with a long description of the house. In fact, this would not only be fatal to the forward thrust of the story but would not be consistent with what a twelve-year-old boy would know about architecture. Yet, I wanted to describe it as more than just a big white house.
The problem brought the story to a complete halt. I walked my hometown streets, desolated by the thought of all the things I did not know. How could someone so ignorant about so much ever become a writer? Back home, chewing at the pencil, I read and reread the words I had written. The lean clean prose of Ernest Hemingway and the simplicity of William Saroyan had affected me deeply, and I always told myself: Keep it simple, don’t get too technical. So, let’s apply those principles to the girls house. Forget architecture—what did the house look like? Not what did it
really
look like, but what did it look like to this twelve-year-old boy?
Yes, that was the key—the viewpoint of the boy and not the writer. And from somewhere the description came. It looked like a big white birthday cake of a house! I knew this was exactly the kind of image I had sought. I felt the way Columbus must have felt when he sighted land.
In that moment, I had discovered simile and metaphor, had learned that words were truly tools, that figures of speech were not just something fancy to dress up a piece of prose but words that could evoke scene and event and emotion. Until that discovery at the kitchen table, I had been intimidated by much of what I encountered in books of grammar, including the definitions of
similes and metaphors. Suddenly, the definitions didn’t matter. What mattered was using them to enrich my stories—not in a “Look, Ma, how clever I am” way, but to sharpen images, pin down emotions, create shocks of
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