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Wild Blueberries , livre ebook

Boku Books LLC - Peter Damm

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100 pages

English

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Great Lakes Great Reads Award Finalist; Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist in Autobiography/Biography. In this beautifully written and illustrated collection of generous, poignant and humorous stories, Peter Damm recalls the joys of fishing on a northern lake, the rigors and confusion of childhood, or feasting on blueberries in autumn. These vignettes of growing up in small town rural Michigan, and a closely observed portrait of mid-century America are not just pretty postcards. Damm's family experienced difficulty, alcoholism and loss, and he writes with a survivor's compassion. These are tales for all the senses, held in place by strands of memory alternately steel and gold.

"Peter Damm's memoir, Wild Blueberries, is a joy to read. What emerges is a lyrical, rich and complex account of growing up in rural Michigan. The story of his Catholic coming of age is skeptical in tone, at times amusing, and yet we see how a sheltering tradition can comfort and unify. I read Wild Blueberries in two sittings, held by its directness and simplicity. It was a pleasure to be in the hands of an intelligent and generous author." Leo Litwak-Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Jewish National Book Award and the 1990 O. Henry Awards 1st Prize

"In Wild Blueberries Peter Damm tenderly sketches out the delights and tribulations of a seemingly quiet Midwestern childhood. Wrestling with the riddles of his Catholic inheritance, we hear the questions of a smart, sensitive young man trying to puzzle out the mysteries of sin, sex, and spirit, and make sense of the adult world. There is a gentleness and humor to Damm's stories that invites the reader to reflect on their own journey to maturity." J. Ruth Gendler-Writer, artist, teacher. Author of The Book of Qualities, Changing Light and Notes on the Need for Beauty

"Peter Damm's stories about growing up in Michigan made me laugh aloud, cry, and occasionally wince when they hit too close to home. He infuses his stories with a deeply felt sense of place. The lakes and forests of his Michigan youth take on the presence of characters in his narrative. This is a lovely collection, well conceived and beautifully told. The clean economy of the language and its cadences possess a quality that is almost poetic. Wild Blueberries is a gem of a book." William Rodarmor-Award-winning journalist and translator

"Like a brisk and invigorating breeze or an oven-warmed dessert, Wild Blueberries reminded me of the best of a child's sensibility: daring mischief and a fabulous imagination, openness to sensual experience, commitment to understanding adult mysteries, sensitivity to siblings' and parents' suffering. This book is a carefully crafted, emotionally intelligent piece of literature. I literally treasured every page of Peter Damm's memoir. I shall keep it close by for rereading."

"What a beautiful and deeply moving book. From the first page to the last, I was captured by how these seemingly ordinary events of childhood and adulthood became transformed into extraordinary, magical tales of wonder and sometimes bittersweet loss. Written lovingly with a tender respect for the innocence of childhood and one's own coming of age, as well as a wry and wicked sense of humor, the book opened my heart and made me both laugh and well-up with tears. What a pure pleasure to read Wild Blueberries."

"Reading this book made me feel like I was sitting outside on a porch during a summer evening, listening to a master storyteller spin his yarns. You get caught up in the beauty, or the humor, or the poignancy, or the honesty of the stories. I was captivated by this book."

Part I

Rosetta Stones

Rabbits 15

Roll Call 19

Father 25

Superstition 31

Baseball 33

St. Michael & The Blessed Virgin 36

Susan 40

Mother 44

Snowballs 56

Hell 64

Animal Crackers 68

Fishing 74

Holy Orders 87

Tigers 94

Putsy 103

The Little Ones 120

Sin 123

Tribes 131

Wild Blueberries 138

Holy Communion 146

The Knothole 153

Playing 160

Dreaming 166

Ancestors 171

Leaving 179

Part II

Moonrise

Weather 187

Father 195

List of Photographs 219

Acknowledgements 221

About The Author 223

Sujets

Lettres et linguistique

Informations

Publié par	Boku Books LLC
Date de parution	20 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780966843149
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0010€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

W ILD B LUEBERRIES
W ILD B LUEBERRIES
T ALES OF N UNS , R ABBITS & D ISCOVERY IN R URAL M ICHIGAN
P ETER D AMM
O’BRIEN & WHITAKER E ASTSOUND, W ASHINGTON 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Peter L. Damm
All rights reserved.
O’Brien & Whitaker Publishers
PO Box 1299
Eastsound, Washington 98245
info@bokubooks.com
Design by Marian O’Brien
Illustrations by Suzanne Anderson-Carey
Author Photograph by Meoy Gee
Available in print and e-book format.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
In respect for the privacy of various people, some names and/or identifying characteristics have been changed.
Names: Damm, Peter L., author.
Title: Wild blueberries : tales of nuns, rabbits & discovery in rural Michigan / Peter Damm.
Description: Second edition. | Eastsound, Washington : O’Brien & Whitaker, 2019.
Identifiers: ISBN: 978-0-96684318-7 | LCCN: 2019938562
Subjects: LCSH: Damm, Peter L. | Families--Humor. | Great Lakes Region (North America)--History-- 20th century--Personal narratives. | Country life--Great Lakes Region (North America)-- 20th century--Personal narratives. | Country life--Great Lakes Region (North America)-- 20th century--Humor. | Outdoor life--Great Lakes Region (North America)--20th century. | Catholic children-Great Lakes Region (North America)--20th century. | Coming of age-- Great Lakes Region (North America)--20th century.
| LCGFT: Autobiographies. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal memoirs.
Classification: LCC: E748.D36 D36 2019 | DDC: 920.009/04--dc23
ISBN 978-0-9668431-4-9
To Bess and Big John who have slipped beyond the boundaries of this physical world
and
To the memory of Leo Litwak ~ gifted writer, teacher, philosopher, courageous medic in WWII ~ one of the finest human beings I have ever had the privilege and pleasure to know. Leo passed away July 27, 2018 and on that date each coming year I shall raise a toast high to honor this unique and very special man. Goodbye Leo. We miss you.
P ART I R OSETTA S TONES

R ABBITS
R OLL C ALL
F ATHER
S UPERSTITION
B ASEBALL
S T . M ICHAEL & THE B LESSED V IRGIN
S USAN
M OTHER
S NOWBALLS
H ELL
A NIMAL C RACKERS
F ISHING
H OLY O RDERS
T IGERS
P UTSY

T HE L ITTLE O NES
S IN
T RIBES
W ILD B LUEBERRIES
H OLY C OMMUNION
T HE K NOTHOLE
P LAYING
D REAMING
A NCESTORS
L EAVING
P ART II M OONRISE

W EATHER
F ATHER
“If I attempt to distinguish between fiction and memory, and press my nose to memory’s glass to see more clearly, the remembered image grows more illusive, like the details of a Pointillist painting. I recognize it, more than I see it. This recognition is a fabric of emotion as immaterial as music. In this defect of memory do we have the emergence of imagination?... Precisely where memory is frail and emotion is strong, imagination takes fire.”
W RIGHT M ORRIS “E ARTHLY D ELIGHTS , U NEARTHLY A DORNMENTS ”
P ART I R OSETTA S TONES
R ABBITS

I come from a large family, by modern standards at least. Six kids—five boys and a girl. Nine of us altogether, counting my parents and Winky, our dog. Winky was part Collie, part Irish Setter or Golden Retriever and as much one of the family as any of us. Our family would have gotten bigger. My mother had three miscarriages, two after I was born. I’m the youngest of the six who made it. When people found out how many kids were in my family, they always said: “Catholics, eh?” Nobody had as many kids as Catholics.
I remember reading a newspaper story about Sonny Liston, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He would soon be laid flat by the then Cassius Clay with a phantom six-inch punch nobody saw. The story said that Sonny was the 24th of 25 children. “Now that’s a big family,” I said to myself, thrilled that my own seemed small by comparison.

“Those Catholics are just like rabbits,” I heard people whisper. At first I didn’t understand what they meant. But later I realized they were talking about having babies. Rabbits had lots of babies and so did Catholics. But I couldn’t understand why rabbits and Catholics, in particular, had so many babies and why Methodists, for instance, or Presbyterians, did not. Or nuns. It was the nuns who baffled me most. They were women and Catholics, yet they never had babies. When I was in Catholic grade school I tried endlessly to solve this riddle. I even applied my version of Aristotelian logic to the problem. The syllogism went something like this:
Women have babies;
Catholic women have lots of babies;
Nuns are both Catholic and women (and holier than the rest, and babies are a blessing from God)
Therefore, nuns should have lots and lots of babies.
But they didn’t. Figure that out.
I played a little poker as a kid. Let’s be truthful. I played a lot of poker as a kid. So I had some grasp of chance and mathematical probabilities. I spent hours trying to figure the odds that, given any random group of women, including nuns, only the nuns would never get pregnant. The odds seemed impossible to me, like drawing an inside royal flush a hundred times out of a hundred. I’d never had a single royal flush in my whole life. The probability had to run in the millions.

Something else must be at work here, I decided. But what? Perhaps it was supernatural. Maybe God and the nuns had made a deal that they simply wouldn’t get pregnant. This was in His power to do. He had decided, after all, to make the trees green and the sky blue. He could have made them purple and chartreuse instead. He told the Angel of Death to pass over the Jews’ houses in the Old Testament. He could also order the stork to pass the nuns by. That way, women who didn’t like children could become nuns. It was a perfect arrangement. This explained a lot about the way the nuns treated us at school.
I finally decided that the key to the mystery lay in the layers of long robes and habits that the nuns always wore. They actually got pregnant—we just couldn’t tell. The nuns weren’t called penguins for nothing. They wore floor-length black robes with starched, pure white collars that were a foot long and looked like chest protectors. On their heads they wore long black habits that flowed down like capes.
They could be pregnant with triplets and no one would ever know, I thought. I started watching. I looked for signs of expanding bellies beneath the black robes. A few times I was sure that I’d discovered a pregnant nun, one who looked plumper and plumper. But in the end I could never be certain. Just when I thought the evidence was getting really conclusive, we’d go on summer vacation. By autumn the particular nun would be transferred to another school (so we were told) or not look as large as I remembered (which meant she’d had the baby over the summer).
I always wondered what happened to these babies the nuns had. Finally I figured it out. They must quietly give them to Catholic families all over the diocese. That would explain why the Catholics had so many children in comparison to the Methodists and Presbyterians. Those religions didn’t have nuns who were constantly adding to the number of babies being born. Maybe there were some of these “nun-babies” in my own family. Two of my brothers were redheads and didn’t look anything like the rest of us. But that was alright. We were all Children of God and Steve (he and Mike were the redheads) built model airplanes and ships that I loved. But every now and then, when he had one of his redheaded temper tantrums, I wished the nuns had given him to someone else.
R OLL C ALL

I grew up in a small town: Flushing, Michigan. When I met kids from other places during the summertime, I was always embarrassed. They would ask me where I lived. I would say Flushing and could tell by their smirks that it made them think of toilets.
When I was twelve we moved to another town thirty miles away, but this didn’t help much. The town was named Grand Blanc—pronounced “Grand Blank” in Anglicized Michiganese. But I had to admit that there was a certain pathetic accuracy in the description, an instance of life imitating phonetics. Grand Blanc was “The Big White” to the French trappers who named it, but to those of us growing up there it was simply “Grand Blank,” the Big Zero. I was afraid the name would taint me, that I would become a grand blank as well. “Why can’t we live in a town named Moccasin Flat, or Grand Heritage, or View from the Top of the Mountain?” I wondered. Something that sparked the imagination in a more uplifting, lyrical way than Flushing or Grand Blanc.

I have always been sensitive about names. If you’d grown up with a last name like “Damm” you’d be sensitive too. I hated my name. I felt like I bore a scarlet nameplate on my chest. It spawned dozens of jokes, repeated hundreds of times. “Damn, nice to meet you.” “Hot damn!” “How’s the whole Damn family?” These were always followed by guffaws of laughter. Everyone thought their joke was the first.
Having a name like Damm and also being Catholic creates certain...complications. These were amplified by the 1950’s. If you’ve forgotten the Fifties or were not yet born, it was a time of staid moral conservatism. Dwight David Eisenhower was president. The Cold War iced its way across the political landscape. Joe McCarthy kept America fixed upon the Communist scourge, and a single gyrating pelvi