Recently my 9 year old son read Louis Sachar’s Holes. I was vaguely aware this was a popular book with kids his age but it took me a while to realize it was the same author as the Wayside Story books, which I’d read him a few years before. They have the absurdist, irreverent, anarchist spirit he’s always loved, the way Richard Scary does, where you notice there are kindly cop characters, but also that those cops are stealing the bread at the very moment they are arresting Bananas Gorilla for stealing . .. well, bananas.
But the name stuck with me for a while: I thought I’d heard of it somewhere, even though I was too old to have read Holes as a kid. Then one day, I remembered a cover of a paperback. There was a picture of a girl with curly hair on the beach wearing a yellow sweater and rolled up jeans, sticking her bare toe into the ocean. Someday Angeline. I looked it up and sure enough it was by Sachar, and published in 1983, the year I was the same age my son is now. I remembered little of the story, but I remember that there were a lot of puns, and two characters named Bone and Boone, that Angeline skipped school to go to the aquarium and I remember that it was about shame and embarrassment and that I’d identified with Angeline completely. I asked around but no one seemed to have heard of this book. Working in the literature factory like I do, I shouldn’t be surprised that a well-known author has titles no one knows, but it still struck me.
A little while after this, my dad asked me to go through some childhood books and sort out which to keep and which to give away. I kept getting to the end and then he kept bringing out new boxes. Some I remembered vividly and some not at all and oh boy were there are a lot of didactic books for elementary school kids that have not aged well. Each time a new box came out, I thought, well, this will be the one that has Angeline, but no. Of course not. Later I ordered a copy, but it had a different, brightly colored graphic cover that felt all wrong.
“Octopus” is the first word of the book, and baby Angeline’s first word. As soon as I read that first word, the plot details rushed back: her mother’s death from drowning and her father’s overprotectiveness, how her father drove a garbage truck which she loved, but got angry when she took on the trash monitor job at school, how her teacher humiliated her until she figure out she liked it better when she gave wrong answers. I even remembered some of the jokes. Why don’t you get hungry at the beach? Because of all the sand which is there.
I was expecting to find out whether the book “held up,” but I can’t answer that. I wasn’t experiencing it from a distance, seeing how my perspective had changed. I had some vague sense that an adult reading the book might find it more funny than sad, that they not feel a white hot flash or recognition when Angeline tears up the classroom in anger and can only stammer out “I wish to resign as trash manager.” But I could only access such a response intellectually.
Sometimes I think I don’t remember a lot about my childhood. Now that my older kid is an age that’s well within the realm of memory, and the younger one is headed there, I find myself trying to pull things out: what was I doing on that birthday? That summer vacation, when we went to Yellowstone, what was I thinking about?
In one of the Before movies, which I recently rewatched with a similar lack of distance to the younger self who had once watched them, (appropriately enough I don’t remember which one), Celine recalls rereading a childhood diary and realizing she was exactly the same person – how she thought, how she experienced things. And how we read as well. In Before Sunset, Jesse says, about his night with Celine, now nine years behind him, that he remembers more about that night than he remembers of some years of his life. Remembering a book isn’t quite like remembering a day, but it’s something like that, except that remembering the right book isn’t really a memory at all. Even with the wrong cover, it’s a portal.
