During a recent overnight with our grandson at Wake Robin Farm, I was lucky enough to experience one of the high points of my life as a writer. Nolan, 5, asked for another shot at having me read my novel Nekomah Creek to him. We'd started in twice before, but both times he'd informed me early on that he just wasn't ready for it. But this time, he was laughing his head off and kept begging for one more chapter. Yeah, okay, he was mostly squealing in delight at the low-hanging comedy fruit of food being thrown by unruly children, but still, it was my book and my grandson, enjoying a story based on his own father's childhood. I ate it up.
I wrote Nekomah Creek ( Delacorte Press, 1991) in an effort to show my oldest son Miles that I truly was sympathetic to the impact of baby twin siblings on a kid who'd been functioning as an only child for almost seven years. By the time it came out, though, Miles was in middle school and mainly wanted to distance himself from his writer mother and any book purporting to explore his private thought processes. "Robby Hummer is you, Mom, not me. You put your thoughts in his head."
Well, he had me on that. It's true for any writer doing a first person story about anyone other than themselves. Robby Hummer was my best effort depiction of Miles at nine, but I consciously added something of myself to the character, a creative streak that was definitely not Miles. In the book, Robby Hummer, gets deeply engrossed in making a diorama showing his house and the bridge over the creek. That was definitely me, and it was spooky almost, to be reading this to my grandson, because he's the one who has my genes along those lines, and seems more like Robby Hummer in this way that his father. I had told him stories of a Japanese doll garden I'd made as a child, complete with a tin-foil creek, and he in turn had already produced several variations on this theme in our backyard art studio. He just loves to make things and I love indulging him with all the art supplies he requires.
"Grampa," he said, between chapters two and three, "Grammie says she hasn't even read this book herself in years and years!"
True, and what an odd, interesting experience this makes for a writer, especially reading the way I depicted the two-year-old twins, based on my own Mary and William, and feeling that yep, those were their personalities. Thirty years later, they're still working with those same traits, Will interested in learning and playing by the rules, Mary boldly looking to flout them. Both darling as ever!
The thing that really jumped out of the book at me though, was my school yard bully, Orin Downard. He mocks Robby by pretending to shoot the wildlife drawings Robby's painstakingly working on—"Blam! Blam! Run li'l Bambi, run!—and takes pride in thinking up and calling everybody names: "Hippie! City Boy! Wimp!"
Why was he like that? Robby wonders. Most of the kids didn't much care whose parents did what. They hung around with certain people because they both liked baseball or Nintendo. But Orin kept wanting to sort people out and divide them up.
Wow. Who does that sound like? When I was working on this in the 1980s, I certainly never dreamed that by the time we were raising a new generation, we'd have for a president an actual schoolyard bully. I'm proud to say though, that at this time, while I was working on the book, ten-year-old Miles had for some reason pasted a picture of Donald Trump in a scrapbook he was keeping and drawn devil horns on him. How prescient was that?
So I like to think the Crews have been onto this joker for a long time. Now I just hope the Republican wimps in Congress (yes, I'm calling names!) will do their duty and help free us from this clearly deranged person we've been forced to suffer as our President. How much more damage are we going to let him do?