Hi. Everyone -- The death of the beloved children's writer, Beverly Cleary, reminded me of a column I wrote many years ago for The Oregonian, our main local daily. In it, I contrasted our older son's upbringing in the Foreign Service with mine in small town Oregon. Who would have thought that Beverly Cleary would be the bridge between our experiences? John is 36 now, and I'm, well, older too, but I hope this still has a little life to it. Best to all, Steve
From our backyard we can hear the muezzin calling the Moslem faithful to prayer in our quarters of Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Our yard is large, like those of most members of the American Embassy community, rich with orange trees and palms, laced with bougainvillea and other flowers whose names I don’t remember or can’t keep straight.
I relax in the long twilight of a summer evening reading to my 7-year-old son, John, who sits across from me in the shade of the mimosa tree. He wears the standard American kid’s summer uniform of shorts and a T-shirt. Except that we got his shorts, I think, in France and the shirt carries the Department of State seal on the chest and, beside it, the traditional words of greeting in Malagasy, the language of our last post.
It doesn’t strike John as strange, these polyglot clothes, just as he takes no more notice of the muezzin or the mimosa than I used to take of fir trees or the sound of a church bell in my home town of Tigard, Oregon.
My son listens carefully, or so I like to think, as I read to him Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins and the Clubhouse. He laughs at the idea of Henry going down the street in a bathtub and seems suitably impressed when Henry’s father gently lectures him on the need to deliver his newspapers on time. For me, it’s fun in this exotic setting, almost a relief, to read of a normal life, or at least what passed for normal when I was a kid.
But my son is full of odd questions such as “What is a U-Haul trailer!” and “How can you catch the wrong bus?” (Embassy kids in Morocco don’t know much about buses).
For the hundredth time I think of how different my son’s upbringing is from my own, how strange and foreign it seems and how peculiar mine must seem to him when I try to explain it.
I read on and slowly become more intrigued by the story, not because Henry is having such fun building his playhouse, but because his life seems even more familiar than I had at first thought. For one thing, Henry lives on Klickitat Street and later in the book, he has to catch the bus on Lombard to make it home on time. I look quickly at the back cover and find that Henry’s creator, Beverly Cleary, grew up in Portland.
My son’s mouth hangs open as I tell him that Henry lives in the same town in which he himself was born, right next to the one where his daddy grew up, that I know Klickitat Street and Lombard.
Fez and Marrakesh and Tangier are places that my son knows well, but Portland has always seemed to him a far-away and peculiar place. I might as well have told him that Tom Sawyer and I painted fences together or that I used to go out with Nancy Drew.
Henry delivers that Journal, and I explain that I once delivered the long-defunct Oregon Journal and that I had taken my brother’s Oregonian route for two months the summer he broke his leg.
John asks, “What’s a paper route?” The only English-language paper my son knows is the Herald-Tribune, which comes in by plane from Paris each afternoon and which he has learned to pick out for me from the racks of Arabic and French-language papers on the newsstands. I explain how I carried the canvas newspaper bags over the back fender of my bike and how I folded the papers carefully before delivering them to a paper tube, and how at the end of the month I collected money from my customers.
My son seems to have come to the realization that if Henry Huggins lives in this Portland place, it can’t be all bad. He seems suddenly intrigued by my explanations, and with returning someday to this town that his father talks about so often, where trees are green the year round and where that are more clouds in February alone than we see all year in Morocco.
Henry Huggins is about 10 years old in this book, written in 1962, just as I was that year. Henry and I are the same age. I wonder where he lives now and whether the fictional son he must have understands him when he tries to explain his youth. Maybe he still lives in Portland and can take his son to Klickitat Street and tell him how it was and show him where the playhouse used to be and how the buses still come down Lombard.
Maybe I’m wrong, though, in thinking that living this far from my roots makes the task of explaining my childhood more difficult than it is for others. Henry Huggins himself might find it difficult making clear how the world was when television still came in black and white or explaining how even our corrupt and uncertain times will seem innocent to him when he grows up, just as children have always lived in the midst of adults’ worst faults without being entirely submerged by them.
There is a limit to what we can communicate of youth to our children because our childhoods are lost not in space, but in time – and I’m grateful. It assures my son his own youth, not something borrowed. I’m incapable of spoiling the freshness of his childhood with recycled tales of my own.
For me, that long-ago time is gone beyond recall, just as it is for Henry Huggins, and I’m grateful that those days will always seem as foreign to my son as the cry of the muezzin and the sight of trees heavy with oranges in the backyard do to his father.
My novels Tangier, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka are available through your local bookstore or the usual online sources. You can now also order them directly on my website here. There's no charge for handling or shipping, so this represents a substantial savings over other online sites. I'll be happy to sign copies if you'll let me know who it's going to.