Chad Holley’s Shield the Joyous is a beautiful story of boyhood in all its over- and under-confidence. “How these things crowd in!” the narrator, Michael Haley, parenthetically notes as he recalls another memory.
That nearly says it all.
Being a boy myself who grew up in the 80s and 90s, so much of it was deeply relatable. From the jambox cassette player — both the “let it be so” soft-open version and the “boxy” one the that “sprang open like a mantrap”; to the Honda Big Red three-wheeler, which I can only assume from the descriptions is exactly the one I spent the 90s bombing around the Sidney, Maine farmland on; to the Episcopalian-Presbyterian divide — “We were not merely Presbyterian, but of the unabashedly Calvinist stripe, so I was not raised to believe in good people”; to the casual appearance of .410s and .22s — respectively, the first gun I ever fired, in a pasture across from the house, and, a thousand shells and 25 years later, the last gun I ever fired (hopefully forever), at a gun range for a friend’s birthday; and so much more — this was a torrent and a treasure of memory to read. There were many wonderful smiles and chuckles reading it.
I have mentioned before (in a post on Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual) that I think often of this quote from Julian Barnes, on the front-loaded nature of childhood:
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
True as that may be, there is a much more positive vision than the one found in Barnes. As I said in that post mentioned above, it is out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic childhood sludge that come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”
I think the emphasis for Holley is on plain goodness. The goodness that, even with all the pain and tragedy and death life carries with it, a healthy memory — whether of the past 30 years or of the past 30 seconds — can both find and inspire… and perhaps even create.
Michael Haley may not, as he half-jokingly puts it, have been raised to believe in good people. But he has this to say about the father of the only Episcopalian family he knew growing up, which I think says “it” perfectly:
But good people, I would have to say, are the most compelling glimpse I’ve had of Goodness. And whenever in my life I have chanced to meet or so much as recall him, Mr. Peterson has offered to guide.
I have dwelt on the man’s good cheer. Equally evident, however, was what I think of as his honesty. There was something in the way he entered a crowd, the way he addressed people, the way he looked at you: he just seemed un-subject to the fear that makes others of us ignore things, like people and their pain. About his manner in this there was an unmistakable hint of choice. Perhaps even of formality. Or, better, form. But certainly nothing prim or prepared or, least of all, rigid. Rather the opposite: he seemed to have achieved in his bearing, by his choice, a sustained demonstration of openness, a continual and un-resented relinquishment.[…]
In him it seemed to answer all the oppressive strangeness and beauty of this life in a gentle and knowing spirit of paradox. In him it seemed to say, Yes, existence is indeed a flipping miracle, and if you care to see aught below the surface you must not swoon or rant or panic, but dial it back a touch, young man, and risk the restraint to settle in, deep enough, long enough, to observe the endless and exquisite ramification—from surface to bottom and back again—and even to glimpse, if you should be thus blessed, the true scope and nature of what is so miraculously on offer: what we, crushed by our wonder and our longing and our inability to summon the Name of Names, have denominated Love.