Writing down a childhood
By Christine Halvorson
Monadnock Ledger Staff
When he was 12 years old, an elderly neighbor said to author
Sidney Hall, "You are going to be a writer when you grow
up." And about that, Hall writes, "What a thing to say
to a twelve year old boy. I laughed at her for at least ten years.
We should rejoice that Hall stopped laughing and started writing. In his book, Small Town Tales: A Brookline Boyhood, Hall has created a memorial to childhood and small town living in general, and to his father in specific. What could have been a sappy, sentimental, nostalgic glance backward to the innocence of a lost time is instead a touching paean on the poignancy of life, death, and the ethereal essences of childhood that survive even as we become adults.
The book is as light or as heavy as you want it to be. Hall's prose is poetic and complex, yet makes for easy reading. You could pick up one of these three page essays a day, or sit down and read the whole book in less than two hours.
Dedicated simply "to my father," the book is replete with Hall Sr., a gregarious, inventive, happy, musical, funny, loving family guy who kept his five children entertained with pranks and projects when they weren't entertaining themselves with their own typical childhood pursuits.
Mr. Hall appeared to be a man who did nothing in a small way. There was the gigantic kite he insisted Sidney and his three brothers build, the gigantic baloney he won for the family (we're talking six feet long and about a foot in diameter), and the gigantic hit act he put on dressed as a woman at the town talent show. His son's tales are, therefore, a gigantic testament to this man and the family gathered around him.
We never get the full tale of the father's death, long after Hall Jr. and his siblings are grown. In Small Town Tales Hall stays focused on telling the childhood exploits, but a well-placed sentence sprouts now and then to remind us this is an adult writing now, grieving for a father lost.
You can read these tales just for the fun of them, but they go deeper. Hall could have over-thought his stories, staging them against the historical backdrop of their time. Instead he gently tells us this was during the escalating Cold War, the beginning of the turbulent '60s, the first tenuous steps toward complete social overhaul - but that was all happening elsewhere, mostly beyond a New England boy's concern. We get just enough - a dash of it like salt-to enhance the flavor of these stories.
We know it is the time of Kruschev and bomb shelters, but Hall doesn't tell us what to think about it. He simply writes: "It was a big year for sirens and alarms, an eerie sound to be born in the middle of the day in a small New England town. We paused to think about our bomb shelters, whether they were well-stocked with enough Campbell's soup and enough aspirin to cure the severe headaches caused by nuclear bombs. Then we went back to playing and working."
Small Town Tales celebrates the physical miracle of our survival into adulthood. Hall's stories are filled with leaps from barn roofs and rocky cliffs. There are the swarming bees, the telling of great lies, the trying of cigarettes, the pelting of apples at Halloween. "We survived our childhoods by the skin of our teeth, and the grown-ups never knew the tests we passed," he writes.
As another reviewer wrote, Small Town Tales is "family values" that "transcend the political cliche." Hall writes how his father instructed him never to lose his sense of humor. "I don't know if I've heard anything wiser yet. ... Humor got harder for all of us to hold onto. None of us knew what was coming, what, or who, was going. But humor stayed. Some proof that year after year at that big dining room table, my mother and father fed us well."
In his essay "The Wind on the Other Side", Hall touches his father's death, a week before Thanksgiving. "It was as if gravity ceased to work. The center of our lives suddenlydisappeared.... It was hard to fathom why we should give thanks," he begins, and then retells the memories of childhood Thanksgivings as answer to the "why."
A person without a soul might get through Hall's concluding essay without weeping. In "Where the Sweet Birds Sang" he muses on the burning of autumn leaves one day in his youth, and turns a C.S. Lewis-esque thought to this business of growing up and dying. "The fire that is glowing here will turn into the ashes of ourselves. We will be consumed with what nourished us.... I know something from this, and from the smell of the leaves that has crept into my room to stay with me. I know it without thinking it, without being able to think it. Our love is growing stronger by what we are leaving. Love it well, because you will be leaving it yourself before long."
You will be done with the reading Small Town Tales all too soon.