Word: boyhoods
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...poor, misunderstood, only child Hajime meets just one other only child in his boyhood: Shimamoto, the beautiful girl with whom he shares a love for music and a rather precocious sense of his own sexuality. Their separation at the beginning of high school only adds to the turmoil of both lives, as we will see later in the book. For the time being however, we are left to watch the mildly painful spectacle of Hajime growing up, still slightly obsessed with the memory of Shimamoto...
...stumbles through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly...
...those special minds that succeed with both the particular and the general, with individual and collaborative pursuits. His boyhood in San Francisco was spent roving vacant lots, searching for specimens. An only child, he began growing caterpillars into butterflies at the age of six. At eight he became a student member of the California Academy of Sciences. At 12 he joined the Sierra Club. At 15 he discovered a member of the heather family, a Presidio manzanita, which had not been seen for 50 years. This subspecies, Ravenii, was later named for him. He did his undergraduate work at Berkeley...
...should acknowledge that Pat, a friend of mine from Kansas City who was in the flour business, regularly had ideas that some people, particularly his wife, did not take completely seriously. For instance, the deterioration of his boyhood neighborhood gave him the idea that, for a modest sum, he could buy the house he was born in and turn it into a national shrine...
...have to say. I would, of course, feel square saying it. Pat would groan, and just to let him know that I was not completely lacking in the imagination to appreciate an inspired idea, I'd tell him how much I had always admired that scheme for turning his boyhood home into a national shrine...