Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

no different from any other town except in the specific ways that everywhere is different from everywhere else.

“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.

“‘There’s no frigate like a book to take us lands away’—

“Here’s the thing to remember about normal. In big times of change, normal is what is being changed. And I can feel that something big is coming.

‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.’

“Stay open, child. 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.

as the world kept threatening but never fully going to hell.

But all of it now seems bigger than our personal mystery, the lessons learned, the truths expanded. Over the years, as the world kept turning and continuing its threat of going to hell, I’ve thought of it as the way evil wins sometimes and in some ways, although not forever, even when it seems it will.

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.