That moment when you're sixteen again, and reading Stephen King during a blizzard

I was thrilled this afternoon when the postman dropped off my copy of the trade paperback of Stephen King's most recent novella collection If It Bleeds, and I found an excerpt from my 2020 Boston Globe review used as a blurb. I've blurbed books before, but for a sometime horror writer, this is the gold standard.

I'd written the review under challenging conditions—because of COVID-19, the U.S. mail service had become untenable, and repeated efforts to get galleys to me for the review failed. I therefore had to read the entire book on my laptop, from some version of a PDF, which is, literally, my least favourite way to read anything. 

I absolutely adored the If It Bleeds, and my review was published in April of that year. The paper had given me an unheard-of 1000 words. I wish I'd had 2000, to do it proper credit.

Looking at my name on the inside flyleaf took me back—way back. As I've written before, I discovered King in 1975 when a beloved babysitter loaned me a hardcover copy of Carrie, rightly thinking that it would appeal to my sensibilities. That novel, and Salem's Lot as well, became cherished friends, read and re-read many times in the coming years. 

Fast-forward to 1978. I was at boarding school in western Canada, a very rugged milieu that had very little time for who I was, and what I loved. I was sometimes lonely, but I had a couple of good friends, my imagination, and my books. 

One Sunday afternoon that winter, I found myself staying behind at the school on a Sunday afternoon instead of going into Winnipeg with my schoolmates. I can't imagine why that was, but the memory is a particularly pleasant one, with no bad associations, so it can't have been a gating or a similar punishment.

That Sunday, I read King's first short story collection, Night Shift, from cover to cover. It might have been the sheets of white snow outside, or the preternatural silence of the school without the boisterousness of adolescent boys, but I utterly lost myself in that book. 

The narratives became my consciousness for those hours, or the other way around. The story "One For the Road" was particularly resonant. A sort of postscript to my beloved Salem's Lot, it took place during a blizzard in Maine that was more or less perfectly mirrored by the one on the other side of the windows of the school's library where I was reading. 

There have been several moments where I'd "decided" to become a writer, as a kid, so I've stopped trying to find the ur-moment. But that afternoon, reading King, was one of them. And I still love Night Shift with a passion. 

If I could time-travel, I would pop into that library on that afternoon, tap that young person on the shoulder in all his loneliness and bafflement about life, sexuality, and gender identity, and tell him everything was going to be OK. I'd point to the blurbs for Night Shift and tell him that if he could just hold on and not do anything drastic, he would become a writer, with books of his own, and, someday, he'd review a book by his then-favourite author, and his name would wind up on the cover.  

While nothing could have made that perfect, snowy day better than it was, it still might have lightened the burden of the few years he still had to negotiate before his real life started. 

 

 

The sweetest marking of the passage time

Imagine the poignancy last night to learn that niece-of-the-heart Kylee, of my Massachussets extened family, is engaged. This morning I am pleasantly haunted by the memory of the tiny size of her, the way she fit so comfortably in the crook of my arm in this picture from the early 1990s, and of the vividness of the intelligence shining in her eyes. In 2012 I was privileged to attend her graduation from Phillips Exeter over the course of a magical New England summer weekend, and then she was off to Tufts, then to medical school. Now, in 2021, she's engaged. In my parents' day, long-distance extended family relied on mailed photographs and announcements to follow the growing-up of beloved children; today, we have social media. I suspect, however, that the effect is the same: joy, pride, and an ineffably sweet, utterly painless awareness of the passage of time—perhaps the only painless awareness of the passage of time—mixed in with a sense of deep blessing at being able to participate in it all, even from a distance. Thank you, Kylee, for allowing me to share a photograph of this moment, and deep love and congratulations to everyone involved, to you and Tim, to your families, particularly your sister, Kaci, and your moms, my beloved Diane and Pam.