Book 31: An American Childhood

Annie Dillard again: An American Childhood. I started reading this last summer, and read four pages before abandoning it. This time I loved it! It's a great autobiography of a girl who's interested in science, drawing, history, boys, detective work, and finally reading and writing.



I love her straight-forward sincerity as she tells us that growing up everyone was convinced that Pittsburgh was the greatest place in the country, and a sure target if the enemy ever dropped a bomb.

On books: "A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds."

[As an aside, I just started I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, at the suggestion of my friend Sparky, and I feel like I could read all 900 pages at one sitting, if I had nothing else to do. It is no dud.]

She goes on to say how adults did not know how to choose books for children. "Any book which contained children, or short adults, or animals, was felt to be a children's book." Dillard was forced to default to nonfiction, since fiction was so often disappointing.

This piece reminded me of little Tonya: "I believed then, too, that I would never harm anyone. I usually believed I would never meet a problem I could not solve. I would overcome any weakness, any despair, any fear.... Everything was simple. You found good work, learned all about it, and did it."

I wish I could feel that way again now! Some days everything seems so complicated, but as a kid, the answers were obvious. Just be a good person and do the right thing. If you need to fix something, just learn how to do it and then do it. I still feel that way about some things, like when I fixed my sewing machine. It was broken, so I just took it apart and fixed it. I didn't have to think about it and hem and haw and debate. I would like to feel a little more matter-of-fact about a few other areas of my life, including looking for a job. Just figure out what I want to do and then do it!

Dillard also made me remember my own regular disbelief about adults -- as she said, so many things were wrong with them and they were totally unaware of it. One thing that bothered her was that their skin was too loose on their bodies. One thing that bothered me was that some of them seemed to just give up. I thought that we should all keep learning our whole lives, and striving to improve ourselves, and by the time we died, we'd all be just about perfect.

It horrified me to see adults throwing little tantrums or yelling. They should know how to behave by now!

It disgusted me when the minister couldn't read the big words in the Bible. He'd make me or Brian (who shares my birthday, but is one year older than I) read the big words. A grown adult whose job it is to read the Bible should know how to read it!

I was also embarrassed for his wife, who had no eyebrows and had to draw them on -- but here's the part that should have been embarrassing: her hair was brown, but her eyebrows were bright orange! By the time you are an adult, you should know how to apply makeup properly and choose colors that look good.

I was pretty shocked when I was in third grade, memorizing the times tables, and my mom couldn't remember 7x6! I thought that once you knew something, you knew it forever. I thought, and so did Dillard, that I would always remember everything forever. (Man, was I wrong! I can't believe how many things I've forgotten, just in the past few years.)

Dillard writes, "As a child I read hoping to learn everything." I also thought I could someday learn and know everything (at least everything I was interested in). Of course, I also thought that if I tried hard enough, I would catch up to my 5-years-older sister.

A major theme of this book is "awakening," as in just going through the day and then suddenly being self-aware. It happens over and over again, into adulthood. We are just driving along or watching TV or whatever, and realize, "I'm driving around. This is my life. I'm alive."