Word: boys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Young Parent can barely wait to break out of Medford, Mass., during the late '50s. Outwardly he appears to have been quite ordinary: an altar boy who liked to plink at bottles with his .22-cal Mossberg. Yet his mind has been jump-started by books, especially Dante's The Divine Comedy. "It was not just the blood and gore," he tells a friendly parish priest, "but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable...
...wasn't negative to them -- it was unifying. When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was "nigger." Ask them -- I grew up with them. I remember in the fifth grade a smart little boy who had just arrived and didn't speak any English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that I was black -- a nigger. It took him six months; he was told. And that's the moment when he belonged, that was his entrance. Every...
...vacationing family meets a boy in the Blue Ridge Mountains willing to take a group snapshot. He turns out to be a deaf-mute astrological visionary. High up in the Smokies, the menopausal mother of the family keeps hearing a baby crying out in the woods. After she leaves the tent, the audience hears it too. The family tumbles into its car outside a diner near Amarillo, Texas, and resumes squabbling, only this time father and daughter swap roles and accustomed dialogue, and so do mother and son. The elders squeak about needing a bathroom break. The children trade curses...
...pillars of American civic righteousness are here: the YWCA choir, the Boy Scouts, the 4-H club, the church-sponsored floats, even the pom-pom girls strutting their stuff to the strains of Happy Days Are Here Again. It could, really, be any All-American small town putting on an Independence Day parade on any village green. Except that this truly is, in the strict anthropological sense, a village, and the green here is really, really green. And the girls are dressed in grass skirts, and so too are many of the boys, with sashes of flowers across their oiled...
...much in abundance as water. In the cricket-chattering dusk, John Kneubuhl, a grand old man of the island, who went from here to Yale and then to a screenwriting career in Hollywood, recalls how he used to play hide-and-seek in the ghost-filled dark as a boy. Now, he says, traditions are fading. "It's like a volcano getting ready, not exactly to explode but at the very least to ooze...