A bit of light summer reading for your pleasure

A bit of light summer reading for your pleasure
                        

Imagine how the history of American fiction would have changed had Harper Lee titled her only novel, “To Kill a Lightning Bug.”

Children might not have scoured backyards in packs at dusk, catching and sealing them in Mason jars, understanding that all lightning bugs did in their two months of life was mate and reproduce. They didn’t bite or sting or carry diseases; on the contrary, they were among the most peaceful of beetles, giving off a phosphorescent glow that always signaled summer’s arrival.

But she went with mockingbirds, which is probably just as well.

It’s difficult to picture Atticus Finch intoning, “Shoot all the blue jays you want, but remember it’s a sin to kill a lightning bug.”

And Miss Maudie doesn’t tell Scout, “Lightning bugs don’t do one thing except make a little nighttime magic for us to enjoy.”

Forgive my prattling on about revising a classic story. As an old English major, though, it’s part of who I am, or at least, who I was.

When it came time for me to declare the discipline that would carry me through the last three years of study, I had very limited options. My freshman year had demonstrated several deficiencies in the curriculum that all but eliminated math and science, and after getting a pink slip in U.S. history after the first grading period, I knew that “D” had the potential to be my personal scarlet letter.

I thought about philosophy, gave theology a test drive and even considered political science for a while, but in the end, I went with what had gotten me into college in the first place: reading books and writing about them insightfully for page after endless page.

My typing skills were, at best, rudimentary bordering on the embarrassing, but I knew with practice I’d get better.

There was no journalism major offered, which I knew before I mailed in my application to Notre Dame, so that closed off a thoroughfare I had explored when visiting several schools including Kent State, Ohio Wesleyan and Wittenberg, all of which accepted me, something that made me happy. Things got all crazy, though, when I heard from the admissions office in South Bend.

I would have wagered anything I’d get rejected. I mean I didn’t even make the National Honor Society in high school. My extracurriculars — student newspaper and radio station, two years of JV baseball, and some work published in the “literary magazine” — didn’t exactly make me look all that great, but something happened. For years after I got the acceptance letter, I harbored a suspicion Dad had gone all “Godfather” on some admissions officer, holding a pistol to his temple, assuring him that either his brains or his signature would be on my application before he left.

This, of course, was nonsense.

My father was a peaceful man, though he did parachute out of a glider behind enemy lines on D-Plus Two Day, something he hardly ever talked about unless, presumably, he was with his buddies from the 101st Airborne, known as the Screaming Eagles.

However it transpired, my future took an unexpected turn, and I spent the next four years experiencing what college had to offer, keeping in mind something Mom had told me before I left home.

“College isn’t a job factory,” she said, blinking back her tears. “Live it all, enjoy everything, keep asking questions and, most important of all, you call home every Sunday night at seven.”

My mother was an Irish Catholic Democrat with a flair for the dramatic and a soft spot in her heart for her first-born child.

She also was, not so coincidentally, an English major as an undergraduate at Ohio State and went on to earn her master’s degree in the same field, writing extensively (and expertly, I would imagine) on the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser, particularly his magnum opus, “The Faerie Queene.” One summer I tried to find a way into that sprawling, dense forest of words and headed immediately for my copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Books were in nearly every room in the house where my brother, sister and I grew up, and we were never too far from a newspaper — Dad subscribed to four of them — or a magazine, everything from Time to Commonweal to The Saturday Review to Punch.

Conversations around the dinner table were animated, and when voices were raised, which wasn’t often, I was usually to blame.

Looking back on those suppers, I’m amazed my father didn’t bury a steak knife in the back of my hand when I started criticizing the war in Vietnam or the way the president was breaking the law.

That was another lesson I learned … respect for others’ opinions.

It’s something I tried to carry into my professional career as a journalist, a willingness to listen before rushing to judgment.

And as I near my 70th birthday and I’m back home after living an endless summer for 23 years on the Carolina coast, I think back on those June evenings when the scent of freshly mowed grass mixed with the smoky aroma of dying charcoal embers, and time stops.

My wife came downstairs the other night and whispered, “Come on outside … the lightning bugs are everywhere. It’s beautiful.”

I thought back to winter’s chill and welcomed an Ohio summer.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where discussions are always well-reasoned and smart.


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