Essay from David Rocklin
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Coming soon to a bookstore near you!
On Thursday, October 20, 2011, I will be in the middle of a reading tour for my novel, The Luminist (pub. date Oct. 1st). Almost exactly in the middle, as it turns out. The middle of the journey and the middle of the country. That evening I’ll be reading at a bookstore in Northbrook, Illinois. For anyone outside publishing, or Northbrook for that matter, that might not mean much. For me, I have the date circled. I grew up there.
When I think of Northbrook, I think of two inextricably linked notions: confusion, and bike riding. There was a lot of both.
I spent ages eight through eighteen in Northbrook, a northern suburb of Chicago. I entered (and some say exited) puberty there – confusion. I began to regard my family as people with lives before me and around me and in spite of me – confusion. I began to hear the words of their fights, not just the melody or decibel level – confusion. I entered high school and found myself among new friends. Their faces inexplicably looked older to me, more adult and maybe a little haunted in the way adults’ faces were. I imagined they too were beginning to hear the words of their families.
These people all seemed, if nothing else, headed towards some sort of clarity that I lacked grievously. They seemed to possess ideas of themselves, now and later, when they were older and out of Northbrook.
At home, I thought about who I was, or would be, or could be. Confusion.
Enter bike riding.
I confined myself to Northbrook at first. Starting out in day, coasting down my driveway on Bob-O-Link (I’m not kidding) and through my neighborhood (a little newer, a little showier) and onto an adjacent street that was as canopied with maple and birch – and prewar memories and blue collar lifespans – as my street was trimmed and newly minted. My house sprang up next door to the older Northbrook, that came out of the war I wasn’t born for, and sent sons to the one I was too young to understand.
I would sail by small craftsman houses and into Northbrook’s heart, its downtown. To the hot dog stand or the Chinese restaurant for something greasy, then to the bookstore, then the park and its tornado slide.
The slide had a chain ladder. It twisted. It had a machine-stamped metal crows’ nest and from up there I could see Northbrook open to me, with roads that traversed it and left it for other places. I could see the stone backs of the store I’d been to for my books – comics first, then the thicker pictureless novels when my own mind began to draw for me. From the top of the tornado slide, I could see how to leave.
I would stay up there until the streetlights came on. I don’t know that I gained any particular clarity at the top of the slide – eventually my rides took me to Northbrook’s train station, and from there downtown Chicago – but I found out something on the bike paths I made from the bookstore outward. I found that I wanted to be many disparate and unrelated things. I wanted to be a great hockey player, Bruce Lee, Jaco Pastorius, taller, smarter, better, away.
The only thread between these random pieces was my writing about them. I went to that bookstore, I got things to eat, and I brought it all to the top of the slide because I wanted to be lifted up from Northbrook, just a little bit, so I could see it all more clearly and write things down that made sense, or didn’t. I wanted the feel of pen to paper. I wanted to see it come out of me. What was happening in there on any given day didn’t seem as confusing when stilled in ink.
Eventually I left Northbrook for good. It felt necessary, like stepping away from a painting in order to see its true shape and scope. It felt like I couldn’t really write until I left the place I’d grown up in. I think it also felt like I could not stay where, for so long, I was yet to be. I needed to leave to become something.
Now I’m returning as part of the journey that has seen this novel published. I’m going to read at that bookstore. I don’t see it as the return of accomplished me; if anything, publication only reminds me of how many more stories there are to write. After a lifetime away, I’m just remembering how lovely it was to live up close to Northbrook, and how good it could look at dusk, from the top of the slide.
The Luminist
by David Rocklin
pub. date October 1, 2011
www.davidrocklin.com
www.hawthornebooks.com
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