I got to ride my bike all over our town, to the local swimming pool and the Carnegie library. No one worried that I'd be kidnapped.
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| Tomah Public Library, built 1916, and considered a good example of "Prairie Modern" architecture |
No television programs scheduled to air that night interrupted the flow of the summer calendar. My mother's zinnias filled the dinner table with their bristling energy. Her garden yielded fuzzy green beans and writhing zucchini.
The secret of effective parenting is to create a closed bubble of filtered reality for that beloved child. Broccoli tastes wonderful when there are no MacDonald's fries to compare it to.
And that's what I got. As rough-elbowed as my family's parenting style was, they did not think they needed to amuse me. That was my problem to work out.
The 1950's Midwestern childhood, the stone-smooth cliché of literature, was mine and I lived it heedless. I took a box of Wheat Thins and a new book and spent the hot Wisconsin afternoons enthralled with the power of narrative.
Do you recognize this? No? Does this help?
How I loved these books. To this day, I cannot put down a mystery. Who did it? Why? And the satisfaction of the ending, and the sweet regret; the suspenseful burden is undone.
I envied Nancy her freedom - a car, an attentive boyfriend, no powerful oxygen-sucking mother. The lesson of Nancy was: she was autonomous, focused on the great world. And I got that.
Actually, that was my mother's lesson, all along, now that I think about it.
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