by James Kanady
Pissed Again
September 1975 was my first semester at the University of Texas at Austin, and I found Mecca: Half-Price Books. There was nothing like it in the small Kansas town where I grew up.
As I slowly, trancelike, perused book spines in the novels section, a title jumped out at me: “Praise The Human Season. I pulled it out and flipped the pages. I learned it was about a couple in their 70s, Howard and Anne Amberson, taking a road trip, knowing they were getting close to the end of their lives.
Why a college kid like me was drawn to such a story, I have no idea, but I eagerly bought it and started Robertson’s tale that afternoon. I saw my parents in his pages and all those others of the Greatest Generation I was protected by as a kid in the small town of Pratt. Howard and Anne, despite their individual faults, loved each other, and Robinson loved his characters despite their faults.
Take this exchange between Howard and his dying wife’s doctor:
“Anne and I have lived together a long time. Aren’t we entitled to know what it all meant?”
“But why? What the hell difference does it make to you? Why distract yourself? Why distract Anne?”
“I don’t see why we have to die,” said Amberson. His chest hurt.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Dr. Groh, “what kind of thing to say is that?”
Amberson folded his arms across his chest. “I am simply saying what I mean,” he told the doctor.
Dr. Groh leaned back and shook his head. “This is the goddamnedest conver—”
Amberson abruptly stood up. The movement made him gasp a little. “As long as I draw breath,” he said, “I shall remain interested in my life.”
Robertson made me interested in their lives to where they were part of my own family. That was his gift to take the lives of average people and make them breathe, live and sing.
I grabbed all of his books I could (and am still finding them). The massive “Paradise Falls,” about 35 years in a small Ohio town (with so many intertwining lives) starting after the Civil War reminded me of my own hometown. And then “Miss Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe,” “Make A Wish,” “Mystical Union,” “Harv,” “Barb,” and several Civil War novels. His brutal “The Ideal, Genuine Man” surprised me, which it should not have, for Robertson always had his finger on the pulse of America, be it joy or horrendous violence born from this country’s ugly underbelly. How terrible that this book seems almost commonplace these days. America is now numb to horror.
But I have a special place in my heart for his trilogy about a young boy living in Cleveland, Ohio, “Morris Bird III: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread,” “The Sum and Total of Now,” and “The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened.” If they ever put this trilogy on film, we’d speak of it with the same fondness as “A Christmas Story.” I smile every time I think of the image of Morris hauling his little sister, Sandra, around in a wagon.
In fact, it was that image that drew me to reread Robertson’s “Victoria at Nine” last month. Victoria’s mother is Sandra, and in the novel, she speaks fondly about her brother, carrying Morris’s memory around her like a second skin.
Victoria has no friends except her stuffed animals and dolls: Bear, Cat, Bonnie, and many others. She has infused them with life. They are her world. While other kids at school dress like kids in the late 1970s in Cleveland, Ohio, Victoria favors dresses. She doesn’t shower, she bathes. She slowly walks and never runs. She loves her solitude and her silences. She is blissfully honest and intelligent with an innate sense of right and wrong.
Her problem is adults and their way of beating the pure magic out of children. Throughout the book, I felt her battered spirit waning, her uniqueness disrespected, and it was heartbreaking watching her conform to unimaginative, controlling authority. (I kept playing Harry Chapin’s great song “Flowers Are Red” in my mind as I read.)
I won’t ruin it if you haven’t read it, but the climax left me in tears.
Don Robertson loved people—the more flawed, the better—because we are nothing but flawed blobs of protoplasm fumbling our way through this all-to-brief glorious life we find ourselves in.
Find his books and revel in them. Embrace your humanity in the face of so much ugliness in this century. Again, Howard Amberson:
“I have known love. I have known good people. These last five days, Anne and I have encountered many kindnesses from strangers. We embraced, and we addressed ourselves each to the other’s heart, and surely our love has counted for something.”
Read his books and realize: our love counts for something. In truth, it is the only thing that does.