Being observant

Over the past couple of weeks, I've read two books that are radically different in tone, in subject matter, and in their intended audience.  And yet I noted a similar feature.

The first book was Instead of a Letter, by Diana Athill.  The second was The Trouble with Heroes, by Kate Messner.

Ms. Athill's book is a memoir of her life, written in her early forties, and published in 1962.  Although written at the age when -- at least today -- many people feel that adult life is just beginning, she writes as though she were closer to seventy in age, gazing back over her entire life span.  The book begins with her happiest years, growing up in a twenty-bedroom mansion on a thousand acre estate in East Anglia, and then attending Oxford.  Then begin long years of sexual desire, obsession, and frustration, urges that she often conflated with romantic yearnings -- years when her life felt to her to be without meaning.  She returns to a point when life seems meaningful to her as she discovers her talents as an author and as a part owner of an English publishing firm.

Throughout, she is haunted by her regal grandmother's question, as the grandmother approached death, "What have I lived for?"

Kate Messner's novel, published just this year, is appropriate, according to Amazon, for readers nine years and older.  I agree that it's not inappropriate for a nine-year-old, but I question how many kids of that age would enjoy reading it.  I think many adults -- and maybe especially parents -- would enjoy it.  I read portions of it with tears in my eyes, but then that's just me.

Finn Connelly is a 13-year-old, in up-state New York, who has just completed seventh grade.  Twenty years earlier, his dad, a firefighter,  became a famous hero when someone took a photo of him carrying a badly injured woman out of the collapsed and burning World Trade Center.  His dad continued to be obsessed with saving people, especially during the Covid pandemic.  He died when Finn was ten, of unknown causes.  

Finn knows he isn't a hero.  He doesn't rescue people.  His main love is baking cookies from his own recipes.  He's sure his dad would never be proud of him.  In fact, he feels, his dad had been there for almost everyone, but not for Finn and his mother.

Finn is an angry kid, a confused kid, and a boy with an almost total lack of self-esteem.  He is failing both English and P.E. because of skipping assignments, and will have to make them up during the summer if he doesn't want to repeat seventh grade.  In his anger, he kicks over a grave marker in the local cemetery --  the tombstone of one of the first female "forty-sixers" -- hikers who have climbed the 46 Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet in elevation.  He is going to face court proceedings, as well as a $2,600 bill for damages.

The daughter of the deceased makes a deal -- if Finn climbs all 46 peaks before Labor Day, all charges will be dropped.  Finn hates hiking.  Oh, and he has to be accompanied by her mother's dog Seymour.  Finn hates dogs.  His English teacher also has a deal -- write twenty poems in various styles about heroes.  Any heroes of his choice.  Maybe even his famous dad.  

Finn is appalled.  Appalled, but resigned, and he prepares for his first hike.  A disaster.  But he perseveres.

Finn's narrative is presented primarily in the free verse that he has learned in class, although we also get a sonnet and a few other poetic forms.  He learns how to hike.  He learns how to relate to the "nannies" -- experienced climber volunteers -- who are required to accompany him but not assist him.  He learns that baking is nothing to be ashamed of.  And he eventually learns enough about his father to understand his dad's aloofness and constant absences

As he climbs, he writes. He writes for his English teacher, and for himself. And he develops confidence in both his climbing and his writing.

When Seymour is almost killed by a bear while attempting to protect Finn, Finn also realizes that he doesn't hate dogs.  Certainly not Seymour.  As Finn concludes:

Because maybe being a hero

Isn't about doing the right thing

all the time -- the brave thing -- the running

into buildings thing.  Maybe it's about

choosing

a path, even when there's no good one.

Choosing anyway.

And sometimes choosing wrong

And being brave enough to try again.

So Finn and the young Diana -- what did they (or, rather, their authors) -- have in common?  An attention to detail.

Ms. Athill, in her forties, either remembers, or reconstructs, memories of childhood in great detail.  Because my own obsession is with the natural world, I notice this primarily in her memories of her childhood life on the grounds of the family's East Anglia mansion, although she shows the same recounting of detail in many other contexts.

From there a footpath ran along the bottom of the back park beside a line of bat willows, planted by my great-grandfather....  This led to the stream, at the point where it slid over a little weir to become the beginnings of the lake.  You crossed it on a broad footbridge, pausing to drop sticks into the water or just to stare into it, and came to the water meadow -- a boggy meadow crisscrossed with little ditches choked with marsh marigolds and ragged robin.  The path here was slightly raised with planks, usually collapsed over the drains which traversed it.  We knew it so well that even in darkness we could tell where we had to take a long stride, or step to the left, or balance carefully because a plank was extra narrow.  At the far side of the water meadow the path rose steeply to the small wooden gate into the farm orchard, and at the top of that was the benevolent Dutch end-gable of the house, curving comfortably above white walls and partly screened by the row of beeches which bordered the back yard.

And as Kate Messner has Finn write in verse:

And whether or not you want to,
you learn about yourself.
Who knew I was a mud-splashing
M&M-break kind of guy?
And surprise!  I have a thing for mushrooms.
I never knew they came in so many colors.
Moonlight white and yellow-gold.
red with white polka dots like a gnome's umbrella.
Once I saw an ear-shaped mushroom
growing right out of the bark of a tree
like it was waiting for me to tell it a secret.
If I had, I'd have whispered
I might like these mountains
more than I want to admit.

And sometimes, the physical beauty turns to metaphor in Finn's hands:

At the top of Redfield, a clearing opens
to the south and you can see 
some smaller peaks beyond,
patterned with cloud shadow
that dapples the foothills
in shades of darker green
Up here, it's beautiful.
But down in that shadow
it's only cold and damp and gray.
If you could see the view from here, you'd know
even down in the dark,
you're surrounded by light,
and if you climb just a little more
you'll be in that again, soon.

When I'm out hiking, I'm alive to the scenic beauty before me.  But, usually, only the "macro" beauty --  the sweep of mountains and sky and forests.  Finn and the young Diana teach me to respond to the "micro" scenes of nature, as well.  To watch for the yellow-gold mushrooms.  The mushrooms with spots.  The mushroom that looks like an ear, eager to hear my thoughts.