Robert Root

 

In the spring of my junior year, my college literary magazine, The Experimentalist, published "The Stone," my first work of fiction to go public anywhere. It begins with a boy named Jimmy exploring a quarry near the neighborhood his family recently moved into. "He moved along the ridge in anxious exploration, the fringe of his imitation buckskin outfit flapping as he walked. He held his flintlock tightly in his fist and pushed back his furry cap with the imitation-coonskin tail when it started to slide down his forehead. Halfway around the rim he stopped." Already in the first paragraph I remember where these details come from.

 

The house I grew up in backed up to a city park with a playground, two softball fields, a log cabin, tennis courts, and a vast winter ice skating rink. Neighborhood kids and I often pretended to subdue imaginary villains there while dressed like favorite comic book or movie heroes. For a western adventure, we might costume ourselves like the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, the Durango Kid, the Black Rider, Black Diamond, the Lone Rider—we preferred masked heroes; once I spent so long dressing up like the Ghost Rider that most of my friends tired of the game before I entered it. In "The Stone" Jimmy clearly is dressed like Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett; I once photographed my brother wearing a costume like that in our front yard.

 

The second paragraph introduces the title object: "On the ground before him lay a white stone. Jimmy picked it up and examined it. It was smooth and even, a pure white oval. Jimmy looked upon it like a jewel. He was many minutes examining it, and then he began to look around for others. There were many stones with white but none so immaculate as the thin stone in his hand. When he could find none to match it, he sat down on a boulder and gave all his attention to it. He looked up when he heard voices."

 

The voices come from some neighborhood boys, strangers to Jimmy, also sporting toy rifles. Somewhat reluctantly they invite him to play on one of their teams in a pretend gun battle. Only one boy, Jerry, stands up for Jimmy when another boy cheats on him and he later fetches him out of hiding when the game ends without his knowing. Climbing out of the quarry a couple boys kick stones at Jimmy and call him dopey; Jerry alone dawdles behind the departing others long enough to say something apologetic to him. Jimmy scrambles up the hill to show Jerry the stone he found and urges him to keep it, then invites him to look for more stones with him the next day. Jerry is reluctant to commit himself; when, trying to hide his tears, Jimmy asks, "See ya tomorrow?" Jerry shrugs. The story ends with this paragraph:

 

"Jimmy's tears came faster and sobs rose in his throat. He tried to smile, but he couldn't. His facial muscles had to stay tight, or else he would bawl. The first time he said, 'See ya,' it came out choked and muffled. He called it again, and Jerry said, 'Okay.' Then Jimmy waved. He turned and disappeared over the rim, trying to reach the bottom of the slope before his sobs overtook him."

 

I suspect that the stone shows up early in the story to suggest something of Jimmy's personality beyond the frontier costume he's wearing and, at the end, it intimates the depth of his loneliness —he gives away something he values in hopes of persuading another boy to befriend him. I have mixed feelings about the final interchange between the two boys at the end, uncertain if it's intended to be more positive than it appears or to be construed as open-ended. Jerry doesn't actually commit to seeing Jimmy the next day, only acknowledges that he might see him sometime.

 

Reading the story now, a half-century after it was written and published, I'm aware that its setting is a familiar one, a quarry my friends and I sometimes played in along the banks of the Erie Canal in our hometown. I can't be sure there wasn't some background conflict among us then that spurred the narrative—by the time I wrote the story I was no longer in touch with anyone from that neighborhood. But I also recall that William Melvin Kelley, a visiting novelist who taught the fiction workshop I was taking, found the ending too sentimental, too positive—he thought my sympathy for my characters made me resist a more realistic, more unsettling outcome. His critique haunted me each time I reviewed my later fiction. I wonder now how much of me was in the story—was in Jimmy.

 

Notes: Bob Root, "The Stone," The Experimentalist. Volume XI (Spring 1965): 27-32.

 

The Literary Magazine Project. A Look at Geneseo's History Through Student Publications.

 

Though I was the oldest of the children in my generation, my sister and my brother both married before I did, my sister in late summer, my brother the following winter, I the next summer. My brother's marriage was the most solid of them all and lasted 54 years. His three siblings accumulated five divorces and one annulment between them—only one of them was mine.

 

For the few years my first wife and I lived in the city and/or the county in which my siblings and I were born, we often visited my brother and his wife and soon his first daughter and later his second daughter across town. I remember helping my brother hide abundant Christmas presents for the girls in the top of their apartment. A few years later, when I started graduate school in the Midwest, my brother and his family drove all the way from western New York to eastern Iowa to visit us, a more arduous trip than our having crossed town on our frequent visits.

 

My parents seemed to keep more distance from my brother and his family. My father worked around the clock, a clothing salesman from nine to five, a house painter in the evenings, even a trash dispenser late in the night; I don't know how often he got around to David's house. My mother paid more attention to my sister and her family, who lived first in Alaska near her husband's Air Force base and later in Saratoga, New York, near his family, though she did visit my brother's family from time to time and encouraged my wife and me to stop in to see her and our much-younger adopted sister.

 

My brother's in-laws, on the other hand, were a close and interactive family of several sons, several daughters, and a tendency to gather together. My wife and I were often included among my sister-in-law's siblings for very good holiday meals, cooked largely by my brother's mother-in-law, Bertha, a tall woman of my parents' generation. Her husband Leo was much shorter and more energetic, a factory worker like my brother—my hometown then was rampant with industry, especially Harrison Radiator, a division of General Motors where one of my grandfathers and three of my uncles and my brother (eventually) worked. During World War II my mother also worked at Harrison's.

 

What partly drew us to those family gatherings of my brother's in-laws was the tendency for the evening to evolve into games. What I most remember was Leo telling his wife and daughters to clear the table so he could start dealing the cards for Rummy. It was a lively, jolly game which Leo made sure we all paid attention to. Family closeness was habitual among my brother's in-laws, and my wife and I were lucky to be included.

 

Leo didn't long survive retirement, but Bertha did, settling into Bradenton, on the west coast of Florida, near other children of hers. Over time, after my brother's eldest daughter died, much too young, my brother, his wife, and his granddaughter all moved to eastern Florida to be closer to their younger daughter and her family. After our daughter moved to Sarasota and started her family, from time to time my wife and I would see Bertha and her West Florida group when my brother and his family visited. His in-laws kept in touch with one another and from time to time we would be included some of their gatherings. We also often crossed the state to visit my brother's family there. It was good to feel connected to such a large and sprawling family as my brother's was.

 

Much has changed since those early Florida days, most painfully in regard to family losses. My brother, who had suffered from diabetes for decades, died on June 2, 2020, and later in the year, October 11, we learned that my sister-in-law's mother had died, aged 101. I can't yet bring myself to appreciate the sense of loss my sister-in-law must be feeling after 54 years with her husband and 73 years with her mother, both bonds severed in a single year.

 

Over the sixteen months of this extended pandemic year, when many family photos record the masks on the faces of loved ones, we haven't been able to actually visit my sister-in-law and her daughter's family and her granddaughter and her great-grandson. We'll hope to see them all in person in the fall of this year. Our distance adds to our grief especially when awareness of loss opens up memories of how good it was to have my brother in our lives. He died just over two weeks before his 72nd birthday. His 73rd birthday would have been today.

 

 

It's occurred to me that, when I was young and inclined to write, I usually wrote fiction. Literature textbooks collected short stories and poetry and college creative writing courses were usually devoted to fiction and poetry—drama was the province of the theater department, except for Shakespeare. Nonfiction writing was not considered a literary field then, though we studied essayists in composition classes; even decades later, when I taught creative nonfiction to college students, the courses were categorized as composition and rhetoric. Because fiction and poetry were the main literary genres and drama regarded as the third genre, when Mike Steinberg and I published the first edition of our creative nonfiction anthology, we called it The Fourth Genre. He started the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction soon after. Most of my literary writing has been in this fourth genre, including posts on this blog.

 

In terms of "creative writing" I wrote fiction for a very long time, beginning with superhero and horse paragraphs in childhood. I eventually composed a short novel in my gap years after high school and crafted short stories for writing classes throughout undergraduate college. I continued writing fiction as a high school teacher, spent a short time focused on it in graduate school, and picked it up again at the start of my college teaching career, until the need to seem scholarly for employment purposes ended that habit. Some manuscripts I accumulated eventually succumbed to basement flooding and mold, but I still have file boxes filled with partial or complete drafts of short stories, as well as the various creative and academic and journalistic and pedagogical writing I've also done. Somewhere, too, are copies of the one literary journal that published my fiction. Lately I've been leafing through those file boxes, curious to see what still survives after all these years.

 

Narrative may be the most common way we communicate. We're exposed to storytelling early in life, beginning as toddlers with picture books and the stories read to us exposed us to adventure and excitement and fun and silliness. It's always story—fiction or narrative—never drama or essay—and story is part of the poetry and songs we hear; Sesame Street's characters usually perform their interactions. Often our games are make-believe stories, imitating what we've read or heard. I remember the kids in my neighborhood all dressing up like cowboys and costumed heroes of comic books and tv shows and movie serials to track down invisible imaginary villains. We didn't have to write our stories down because we had the liberty to act them out.

 

Eventually, my friends became less interested in that kind of play and I became more absorbed in books and films and radio shows and television series. My favorite films were The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and, most influential on me later, Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Both were about outsiders and I identified with both, most especially with Jim Stark in Rebel. I read Evan Hunter's novel The Blackboard Jungle and his short story collection The Jungle Kids. I spent a lot of time alone, often skipping school to read two or three books a day. I thought a lot about the cliques I would never be a part of and the relationships I wished I could be involved in. Eventually I wrote a 97-page novel, David Gable, alluding circumspectly to my sexual growth and romantic imagination. It had a teenaged hero confused by his connections to two school mates, one a good girl, one a troubled girl. I'd read many books in which heroes were challenged by such conflicting desires but usually ended up with a good girl. I doubt whether such confusions were deeply explored in my teenage fiction.

 

In college I started to take myself more seriously as a writer. I'm uncertain about how much of my youthful fiction I still have—I wrote a satirical column and short stories as an undergraduate and wrote short fiction as a high school teacher, as an MFA candidate (briefly) at the University of Iowa, and (also briefly) as a college professor. It may be possible to find some of that writing stored somewhere in all those boxes in our garage. I wonder what my manuscripts can tell me about who I thought I was when I did that writing, what was on my mind that I felt the need to share, what I thought the world would be like for someone like me. "Once a writer of fiction . . .": his manuscripts likely suggest something about his identity when he composed them; they may reveal something about his outlook on life then and, perhaps, something about who he is now.

 

 

 

Having launched competing chores of decluttering old files and reviewing past writing, I've noticed how modes of preservation changed over my lifetime. I pull various kinds of typescripts from folder after folder—dittoed or photocopied handouts from different courses I taught, texts of conference papers I once delivered, duplicates of memos and journal submissions and correspondence. Most recent are printouts of email communications, items I somehow needed to physically preserve. The mass of paperwork set aside for recycling makes me feel guilty in a way that creating typescripts and handouts and correspondence never did.

 

I perhaps overdo preservation of my writing. Since I began using computers, I've stored most of my files first on floppy disks, then on hard disks, then on CDs and DVDs, then on external hard drives. Now, each time I move a file from my "desktop" into a folder on my HD, my laptop asks if I really want to do that, warning I'll remove it from iCloud, an ethereal storage haven maintained digitally somewhere. Wherever it is, it isn't the same place as the desktop BobFolder where all my texts are stored. Why aren't I reassured that work not cataloged in my folders simultaneously exists elsewhere? Would I be the only person able to access them?

 

Such questions arise because of abundant spam notices arriving in my email. I'm informed daily that Microsoft will cancel my email account if I don't click a specific button. I empty my junk mail and deleted items folders regularly (just digital decluttering, after all), don't get much personal email, so I'm not much alarmed by the prospect of losing the account. But I'm increasingly aware of how much connection I am encouraged—even forced—to have beyond the confines of my home. I searched for step ladders online an hour ago and a half-later an ad for one emerged on Facebook.

 

We watch television mostly on streaming channels, glad to avoid advertising but often thumb the remote clicker for minutes to learn where we are in the programming. Most programs are always there, not requiring a specific evening or hour for viewing. It's easy now to watch way too much televised programming any time we want. And we do.

 

I am still a reader and still buy physical copies of books, more often during the pandemic ordering online to get them by mail. I haven't been in a bookstore—or for that matter, a library—for at least a full year (since I've had both vaccine shots and still possess stout masks, I may go in person soon). I seldom read books on my Kindle (a gift), but I downloaded one in about three minutes the other day. Sometimes I'll look something up on my iPhone if I have a question about something we're watching on tv ("How many novels are in the Grace series by Peter James? How many were filmed?") without having to go into the study to search on my laptop.

 

Preparing to post my reactions to fiction I wrote when younger, I found a typescript of a—to me, memorable—story once published in my college literary magazine. Uncertain if that issue is stored anywhere deep in our clutter, I searched the college website for mention of the journal, found every issue now available online, and downloaded five issues from the mid-1960s with my writing in it, including poetry I'd entirely forgotten. If I had been able to find a physical copy of the issue with that story in a library, I could have photocopied the story to print out on site, then scanned it into my laptop at home. But since it's online, I can view it through the internet, post a link to it on my blog or on my webpage, and make it available to the whole wide world. The whole wide world is not likely to read it, but the opportunity will be there.

 

My undergraduate library has, for now, preserved the story by physically preserving the issue. A printout of the published copy of the story would further preserve it among my cherished clutter. But do I need to physically duplicate what will be readily available online? Should I download a copy of my own to store in the Cloud? Should I clip a printout of the online version to my old copy of the typescript to file in one of my writing folders?

 

And what about this blog? Should I create physical printouts of these posts as back up, since I may someday need to copy them to some new mode? What new mode is likely? How long will any of these modes of preservation preserve my writing? How much energy and time should I devote to resisting impermanence?