"Billy Watson's Croker Sack" by Franklin Burroughs *****

• Book club selection, December 2013
• US author
• Essay/Short Stories
• Settings:  Move back and forth between author's hometown in Conway. South Carolina and his current home in Maine.
• Reference to Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River", a coming of age tale about fishing
• "Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just twice. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon. (Wikipedia)

 

• "A Snapping Turtle in June":  daughter's turtle and memory of turtle from childhood
• "I tended to associate femininity with paved streets.......so that they would not get stuck in the rainy weather, or have their children tracking mud into the house or getting their feet full of ringworm."
• Upon smelling a turtle as an adult..."Instead, it brought back directly a sensation of alarm, confusion, and disorientation, in about the same way that the smell of anesthetic does not bring back the operating room so much as it brings back the vertiginous feeling of the self whirling away from the self."
• p. 18...first reference to a croker sack
• "New England seemed, as it often does, more perfect in the intensity of its seasonal moment, and in the whole seasonal cycle that can be felt within the moment, than any place has a right to be."
• "But what any child will think or remember is beyond anybody's knowing, including its own."............theme of entire collection, in my opinion

• "Of Moose and a Moose Hunter":  neighbor who is a remnant of the individualist in Maine
• "Sometimes you could follow one for half a mile like that, the moose never losing its capacity for undiluted primal horror and amazement each time the car came into sight."......like peek-a-boo at the right age with children
• "The moose would seem to come from some place altoghther different, and that place most resembled the elegiac world of the pastoral painting, an Arcadian dadream of man and nature harmoniously oblivious to the facts of man and nature."
• Vocabulary:
• "Arcadian":   rural, rustic, or pastoral, especially suggesting simple, innocent contentment
• agora:   a popular political assembly 

• Funny? scene when children dress up moose and put chair under its hanging carcass

• "In a Small Pond":big events in a small pond while fishing with his father

• "You must live in a hot, swampy, tidewater sort of a place to know the allure of mountains, to understand the psalmist:  'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my salvation.'"
• "The important thing was not to have a good time."...about learning fishing
• "But upon our entry into them, sanctuaries become microcosms.  We carry the excluded world in our memories and even in our daydreams, and it can suddenly surface in the form of a big mudfish or of the dark cedar swamp into which the Big Two-Hearted River disappears."........symbolic of one memory leading to another
• Big fish.....in a small pond...literal and figurative 

• "Dawn's Early Light":  Opening Day memories and WWII
• "I have an idea that many of the things we do may be like that--more important in their incidental details and accidental associations than at the center, and most important at the remotest boundaries , where your conscious, finite purpose draws its nourishment from unrealized or half-realized impulses and memories."
• "Once in Sunday school we were asked what we would have presented to the infant Jesus in the stable, if we had gone there.  The right answer turned out to be a pure heart, or something along those lines, but I knew inside myself that it would be a pair of wood duck, bright and friendly as the ones Audobon had painted."

•  "Postscript":
• "It pleases me how both the bird and the word have managed to outlast the circumstances that formed them.  We think of nature and history both as belonging to the opportunists, the ones who teach us how to adapt, evolve, seize the day, or fill the niche.  On the whole, we are right to think this way, but the world is also full of quirky and implausible survivors, things that still live, as neurotic people do, by a logic that eludes or defies us, because it is rooted somewhere out of sight."
• "I assumed that it was all common place, universal, and without distinction or interest of any sort.  Now, as I begin to write about it, I more and more conclude that what is undistinguished can nevertheless turn out to be genuinely and stubbornly distinctive." 

• Review:  Do you have places or events which you hold dear?  Which contributed to who you are right now?  Well, find a cozy corner and curl up with this marvelous collection of short story/essays for a few hours.  Franklin Burroughs will take you into his childhood and his adulthood, into South Carolina and Maine, hunting and fishing with men who shaped him and men whom he is impressed by.  Allow the author to beautifully remind you that we never know what lies beneath the surface of our psyche unless we allow it to unfold, just as we never know what we will find when we start to tell a story or to open up Billy Watson's croker sack.  Sometimes the power of a word or tale lies in the periphery of our souls......Mmmmmm.