Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. —Anaïs Nin

Although some things never change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn’t one of them. It’s forever changing, shaping you in ways you can’t control or anticipate. As each year passes, the only wild card is you.

Or it could just have been the way powerful words linger in a well-told story.

And the world you grow up in always feels like the way it has always been and will always be. Until it isn’t.

It was just somehow harder when a book, something you love and covet and admire, throws you, on the strength of words alone, into a dangerous past world—one in some ways not past at all—stirring up roiling emotions and fears you cannot handle all at once.

“A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It’s a book’s boon and bane. But it’s also its raison d’être—its reason for being—to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music.”

There is a young moment when the world can suddenly reveal that it doesn’t revolve around you.

Everybody’s got their own story, she realized as she locked eyes with the driver of a passing car . . . and they’re swirling around me every moment of every day. All she had to do was be open to seeing them.

lie. And that was the problem with lies; they usually begat other lies, and you had to keep them all straight, another reason she was a lousy liar.

“Here’s the thing to remember about normal. In big times of change, normal is what is being changed.

“Feeling bad won’t change things. Life doesn’t always go the way you want it to. And most of the time, it isn’t a bit your own fault.”

“Since Eden, there’s always been a snake in the garden. That’s the world we must journey through, one full of snakes willing to do wrong.”

Don’t let the world close you down. God knows it’s gonna try—and God knows it can do it. Stay open so your heart can do what it’s supposed to do. If you do, I know it’s going to be something good.

All they cared about was ice cream, not equality.

As an adult, she knows how memories can be fickle and sometimes lie as time goes by. But she also knows that they are all anyone has to understand who they were and who they became, whether the memories soothe, thrill, wound, or haunt—and this chunk of her past has done all of those.

Today, as I thought of you, I’ve been thinking about lines. Lines that we stand in. Lines that divide us.

But the people you come to love early, the ones who help shape you into the person you become, never truly leave you, I don’t think. And as time keeps passing, those are the ones who come naturally to mind, the ones you’d love to see once more.

If you’re still in this world with us, and I so want to believe you are, I bet you feel the same tug of mortality and its bittersweet urge to look back.

okay. I know we aren’t the same people we were when we were thirteen and sixteen. Yet I also know, deep down in the ways that matter, we are. We all are.

I have actually lied at times to avoid them, using the “oh, this isn’t goodbye, I’ll see you later” ploy as I disappear to avoid the awful feeling of them. And I would have resisted ours.

Unlike the end of a book that wraps up all the loose ends, though, real life, its loose ends dangling everywhere, always goes on.

Finally, to finish growing up, I had to let it all go. Life went on.

“What you make of tragedy is what makes you.”

had. I found no trace of you . . . as if I’d dreamed it all.

So, once again, I had to let it, you, go.

Life has an awful habit of creating mysteries. And this one, the mystery of the last time I saw you—where you went, who those drunk strangers were in the rattling flatbed truck, and whether one had to do with the other—would just linger, never to be solved.

Hope, as we get older, often feels like a thing reserved only for the young.

I’ll listen to your story, whatever it might be, good, bad, or, as for most of us, something in between, and I’ll feel privileged in the listening.

Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.

“America Willcox. What took you so long?”

A good novel is not about something, it is something,