SUMMER ON BLOSSOM STREET Prompts Trip Down Memory Lane

It was the cover art on SUMMER ON BLOSSOM STREET that caught my attention during a recent visit to the library. It was a visual counterpoint to the weather outside, a typical winter afternoon in Virginia, cold and wet,

The author? Debbie Macomber. I’d seen the author’s name before, but never picked up one of her books. During the checkout process, the librarian held up the book and said, “You’re going to enjoy this one.”

I did, but it took me a while to figure out exactly why.

To say the book is a little bit outside my reading zone is an understatement. And I found reading it was different experience. I did not become drawn into the language. I didn’t find myself racing through pages to see if the hero did escape death and capture the culprit.

It took longer than usual to finish the book. I was reading in shorter sessions, but found each one stirred up something comforting that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It took a couple of days after finishing the book to figure out what it was.

The book had drawn forth childhood memories of my mother in our kitchen. The radio was always playing while she worked, tuned to what she referred to as stories about our neighbors. I could remember sitting at the kitchen table, eating a PB&J, listening to the radio programs, but none of the details.

I had to do a bit of Googling to dig out the names. As I read the brief descriptions of Ma Perkins, Pepper Young’s Family, Stella Dallas, and other radio series from the 1940s, 1950s, I made the connection.

Debbie Macomber’s SUMMER ON BLOSSOM STREET is a literary version of those radio programs. The stories in the book are told without dire warnings and predictions about global warming, economic collapse, or any of the other “end-of-the-world” predictions that is delivered by the media on a daily basis.

It’s stories told on the level where the majority of people exist, about neighbors, ordinary people living ordinary lives, dealing with things both ordinary and extraordinary, things both pleasant and sad, things satisfying and terrifying.

And there is a moral to the stories. The good guys get their rewards. The bad guys get their punishment. And life goes on. The reading and thinking also brought back the memory of a comment I often hear growing up. The secret to getting on in life is to simply keep getting on.

Pat Conroy's SOUTH OF BROAD Delivers A Universal Message About Life's Reality

It’s early Tuesday morning, February the second, two aught ten. My houseguest has left after a three-day visit. When dawn arrived last Saturday morning, the world was wrapped in the snow that had fallen overnight. Sand-sized sleet, driven by a strong north wind, was swirling through the neighborhood like a dust storm.

The weather was quickly forgotten. Pat Conroy once again arrived to tell me another story. This one was called SOUTH OF BROAD. Now that Pat has left after telling me his latest story, I am left with the feeling that it will be the last one from a man who has been a part of my life for the last thirty-four years

My wife and I first met Pat Conroy in 1976, within the pages of THE GREAT SANTINI. Reading about the Meecham family and their respective relationships touched a responsive chord. My son was not quite three years old, at an age when my wife and I were still coming to grips with the responsibilities and duties involved in being a mother and father.

The purchase of our first home, my switching professions, and the birth of my son had consumed our lives to the point we had had missed Conroy’s first novel. It was an error of omission that was quickly rectified. THE WATER IS WIDE, published in 1972, was the story of a young teacher and his experiences with students in the classroom and with the officials in the fiefdom of the school system.

My wife, a public school teacher at the time, had been part of a school system in the late 1960s that resisted integration until an ultimatum by the federal courts ended the charade. Again, Conroy’s writing struck home. He seemed to a writer who was looking over our shoulders.

These first two novels were also a painful reminder of what I had left behind⎯the sheer joy of cobbling words together to tell a story. I had traded a typewriter for a calculator, abandoning the newspaper business and writing to join the business world for the increase in income needed to buy our first home and support a family.

We grew to realize Conroy was not a book-a-year writer. It was another four years until THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE (1980) appeared. In it, Conroy had written about a young man who starts his college career with the dreams of being a writer and basketball player.

At the beginning of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, my wife was still teaching, and I was back writing as much as my day job as a public official allowed. Our son, now age seven, was in elementary school. College for him was still a decade away, but reading LORDS OF DISCIPLINE was a reminder of our days at college and what was to come for our son.

The next book, PRINCE OF TIDES, published four years later in 1986, gave us one of our most memorable and enjoyable moments; Mrs. Wingo's retaliation to a less than admirable husband. The obedient, subservient wife, doing her expected chores, served her husband a plate of well-fried dog food for breakfast.

My wife and I laughed and joked about that scene for years. And during those moments of our husband and wife “discussions,” she would smile and tell me if I were not careful, I might have to start paying more attention to what she served me for breakfast.

By the time we read BEACH MUSIC, published nine years later, in 1995, we had taken a family vacation to England and France. We understood what Conroy was saying when he wrote about the lure that a foreign land can have, how the idea of living in another part of the world, another culture, can be appealing.

The last half of the 1990s passed into history, and a new century was in its second year when we read the story in MY LOSING SEASON. It chronicled the author’s experience gained as a member of a collegiate sports team. Again, Conroy was looking over our shoulders. Our son was in college, and we had experienced what it means for a young man to participate in college-level sports.

Reading the twenty-two chapters in Conroy’s next book, THE PAT CONROY COOKBOOK (2004) was a tag-team effort. This book is as much about Conroy as it is the culinary arts. My wife and I kept swapping the book back and forth with the comment, “You’ve got to read this chapter.”

It’s not a book that a person would expect to find on a nightstand by a bed. But that’s where one lady told me she keeps her copy, turning to it often to read a chapter before going to sleep. I understand why. It’s that kind of book.

SOUTH OF BROAD was not an easy read. My wife will not be reading it. It's the first Conroy novel about which we will not be sharing comments. She was killed in a vehicle crash in 2006.

I’m not a literary critic. I can only react when a story strikes a responsive chord. To those who have written that the 64-year-old’s latest novel is “uneven,” or “rambles,” or is “rusty in spots,” I can only say, “So is life.”

Its message can be best summed up with this quote from the book. “We’re human. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes.”