Word: gabe
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Liquor shortages do not faze Arpad. New Year's Eve he will get tiddledy-boo drunk again. His nephew, Gabe, will have to pick up the pieces, pack Arpad safely home. It happens every year...
...this one, with a drawing of Arpad watching Gabe arrange sandbags: "These are, of course, nerve-racking times. . . . Today the Weather Bureau reported: 'This afternoon slowly rising temperatures. No snow or rain. Tonight not so cold. No precipitation.' Who asked them if there would be snow or rain? Who asked about precipitation? No one. They have begun anticipating. . . . Soon they will be sending stories out saying that there will be no sun in Hoboken, or no daylight in Canarsie...
Walk Like a Mortal is the story of ten quietly crucial months, some year in the '20s, in the life of 17-year-old Gabe Mackenzie. It gains no little through a fact sparsely precedented in U. S. fictional adolescence : that its hero is neither a Harold Teen, a neuraesthete, nor a tragicomic boob, but merely an intelligent, quite normal high school student...
...start, solid citizen though he is, Gabe is more seriously captured in his mother's love than he realizes. At the finish, with his graduation from high school, he has come soundly through to the edge of independent maturity. In between, he has had a lot to please him, plenty to trouble and toughen...
...complete with quarrels, cruelties, grandmotherly interference, his own tortured and split allegiance. He has seen his mother walk out with a hollow, sad character named Charlie Cobden. He and his father have left their dead apartment to live with Uncle Henry and a menagerie of individualistic cousins, and there Gabe has had his first taste of vigorous family living. He has seen his father, who had been a kindly, negligible ghost, take on resonance and certainty. He has seen his hard mother break down and abjectly beg him to come away with her; and he has painfully made his choice...