Perks - Pagan Time: an American Childhood
Here you can read online Perks - Pagan Time: an American Childhood full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York;New York (State);Adirondack Mountains Region, year: 2012, publisher: Counterpoint Press, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Pagan Time: an American Childhood
- Author:
- Publisher:Counterpoint Press
- Genre:
- Year:2012
- City:New York;New York (State);Adirondack Mountains Region
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Pagan Time: an American Childhood: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Pagan Time: an American Childhood" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
With little more than a run-down Jeep and their newborn baby in tow, author Micah Perks parents set out in 1963 to build a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school would become known as a place to send teens with drug addictions and emotional problems, children with whom Micah and her sister would grow up. This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires -- especially for the children involved. How could the campaign for a perfect home and family create.;CHAPTER ONE: How to get there; CHAPTER TWO: And the walls became the world all around 1967-1968; CHAPTER THREE: Warrior bride 1969-1970; CHAPTER FOUR: Inuit adventure Summer 1971; CHAPTER FIVE: Midnight hour Winter 1971-1972; CHAPTER SIX: The last battle 1973; CHAPTER SEVEN: The marriage of Boadicea and Abraham Lincoln 1953-1963; CHAPTER EIGHT: Happily ever after Summer 1973; CHAPTER NINE: The new mother 1973-1974; CHAPTER TEN: Im rubber, youre glue 1974; CHAPTER ELEVEN: Do not cling; Acknowledgments.
Perks: author's other books
Who wrote Pagan Time: an American Childhood? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Thrasher
Miller
Kaushal Gyandeep
Bach
Pagan Time: an American Childhood — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Pagan Time: an American Childhood" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
For Naomi, Joe, John and Bekah.
Though their costumes change, their generosity
and good humor remain.
Though their costumes change, their generosity
and good humor remain.
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize me and I cant stand it. I been there before.
MARK TWAIN
Do you know what you really want? Ill tell you. You want to be took home and took care of. And I guess thats all there is to say.
EDITH WHARTON
CHAPTER ONE
how to get there
THE TIME of my childhood was the nineteen sixties.
I know what youre thinkingmarijuana, free love, Woodstock and Watts and Vietnam. Because you know the sixties. You were young then, or raising children, or not even born yet, but in any case, youve seen it on television.
The sixties are black-and-white rerunsKennedy rearing back in the convertible, King falling into the balcony, Malcolm X colliding with the podium; a grainy leap from spaceship to moon; white cops not holding back German shepherds as they attack black protesters.
Or the sixties are finger-painted in psychedelicsthe color of an acid trip, of blue-tinted granny glasses, of long blond hair and afros entwined with rainbow love beads.
Or the sixties are peace signs in a commercial for a fast food chain, bell-bottoms on a Barbie doll. The sixties are a retro fashion statement, a clich, a quaint cul-de-sac, over and done with, lets move on.
Wait.
Youre right, but theres more to it than that. Im ready to tell you secrets. I want you to see. This desire has been pressing for a long time. Sometimes it seems like Ive spent my life searching for the words that will open my childhood for you.
Im in ninth gradeyou are a handsome senior driving me home. Youre wearing chinos, a polo shirt and loafers. Rain is tapping on the roof, sliding over the windshield. You ask me where I lived before, and I begin to explain. It was a school for disturbed adolescents. But I wasnt disturbed. Well, we were all a little disturbed, but not in a bad way. Actually, it was more like a commune. More of a farm, really....
You laugh nervously, say, Gosh.
I close my mouth and watch the wipers control the rain.
Or, Im just out of college, in a field, sharing a sleeping bag with you. This time you have beige hair, blue eyes, a snub nose, callused hands. Weve just made love for the first time. Everything glowsred fire, green fireflies, white moon. You tell me about racing bicycles, about growing up rich and Quaker in Philadelphia. I try to tell you about the valley school.
You say, Im sorry, that sounds rough.
I say, That was the best part of my life (best is not quite accurate, but I dont know what other word to use).
We lie on our backs, mummied in the sleeping bag, close but not touching.
Its always the sameeven as Im trying to use my story to knock down the wall between us, I can see that Im turning myself into a freak, my childhood a sideshow.
Let me try again.
In my time, in my place, a valley surrounded by thousands of acres of dark trees, we would join hands to create an Eden.
This is an old story. My mother could have been Adam, Gods chosen one, riotous, keeper of harmony. If my mother is Adam, then my father is Lilith, Adams first wife. Lilith was Gods first mistake, a rule breaker, a seducer. Before God even finished patting Lilith together out of mud, she had wriggled out of His grasp. In the old stories, Lilith lights out for the territories, alone.
But what if Adam and Lilith attempt a daring escape together? In darkest night while He sleeps, they hoist each other over Edens wall, swim the wide, slow-moving river. They stand on the far shore, trailing water weeds. Its their turn to create. Now what?
It goes on like this. If my mother is Natty Bumppo, my father is Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans. Or, they could be Ishmael and Queequeg, making passionate love on the night before setting sail on the Pequod. If my father is Huckleberry Finn, escape artist, liar, my mother is Jim, so angelically maternal you have to wonder whats underneath. Or, my parents are double Thoreaus without the desire for silence. Or, those two old Shaker women, who swore they flew to the moon in their rocking chairs, singing all the while, despite the lack of oxygen, When we find ourselves in a place just right, we will be in the valley of love and delight.
Or they are immigrants, pioneers. Or pilgrims. There would be sun, smacking sails, creaking wood, the plash of grey waves. Dressed in somber wool, my pilgrim parents face forward, imagining the new world. My mothers smile is serene, she is making plans for the amelioration of the unknown. But what is my father imagining? His own coronation? A mutiny? Or is he just happy to be getting the hell out of Dodge? And what kind of an Eden results from the imagination of a people whose first instinct is escape?
Maybe its as simple as this. Two children begin a block tower. Take turns, steady, steady. How high will it go? How long until one child turns clumsy, or bored, or simply can no longer resist the urge to watch it teeter and fall?
Still, in the moment of placing that first block, in the moment of childhood, or of setting out on a great adventure, there is a feeling that transcends all contradiction. Remember that feeling, that shiver in your chest, as if anything were possible? In my childhood everyone I knew seemed to be walking around with that shiver I wont call hope.
Ill just tell you how to get there.
Leave the cities, the towns, drive for half a day, the never-ending curves churning your stomach, the trees pressing tighter and tighter against the narrow roads, to the very eastern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. This land was covered over and over by warm, shallow Cambrian seas and more recently by glacial ice; then the softer sediment was slowly scoured off, baring the grey, hard, billion-year-old rock, the ancient continent.
Here, the mountains are pressed against Lake Champlain by the western weight of trailers, snowmobiles, diners with Budweiser neon, rusty pickup trucks with gun racks, a wax museum, a house of horror, Santas Workshop, Make Believe Land and Frontier Town, ramshackle forests and crumbling revolutionary war forts, the whole brooding mess that makes up the Adirondack park; to the east, a sharp fall down to the plush farmland of the Champlain Valley and the greener mountains of Vermont.
Turn onto the county road, one side a ridge of spruce and rock, the other a slide down to metal-colored water. Watch out for logging trucks, they careen past, shedding bark and branches. (Leonard Canal, a young trucker, lost his breaks right here, on the steepest slope of the road. He pumped them, slammed the horn, felt his truck rattling faster and faster. He decided to bail. He leapt, but this was a miscalculation. His rig ran him over. The logs burst off the flatbed, but the truck came to rest, unmolested, on the narrow shoulder.)
Turn right onto what the locals have begun to call Funny Farm Road. Drive over teeth-jarring washout and frost heave for miles. Say its the late sixties, late June, so blue flag and daisies line the ditches. Your car plows through clusters of white butterflies, wings pumping like breath.
Pass an abandoned brown house. People say they found the old lady starved dead in there a few years back, been eating cat food all winter. Wearing layers of clothes against the cold, no running water so she stank bad. Now, she haunts the house. The hippie juvenile delinquents have broken all the windows.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Pagan Time: an American Childhood»
Look at similar books to Pagan Time: an American Childhood. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Thrasher
Miller
Kaushal Gyandeep
Bach
Reviews about «Pagan Time: an American Childhood»
Discussion, reviews of the book Pagan Time: an American Childhood and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.