A Living Memory of a Way of Life

'Long Gone' revisits the author's boyhood on the farm.

By Richard Willis December 22, 2007

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Long Gone started as an impulse to revisit people and places from my past. Like Emily in Our Town, I wanted to see, visit with and talk with my friends and acquaintances from long ago.

Actors use a device known as emotional recall when they are developing a character for the stage, screen or TV. In searching out material for Long Gone, I did something similar, hoping to bring my old friends, some of them dead for many years, back to life so that I could speak with them.

There is some danger with this method, in that characters and places immediately take on a life of their own. I found myself dragged, on occasion, into events and encounters long forgotten, and in some instances, into confrontations I had no wish to relive. Pain, physical or emotional, however, cannot be separated from the event. It simply becomes a matter of take part, take all.

Doctors Paterson and Brown, for example, are interesting in themselves, in addition to which they were participants in my "minor surgery" -- circumcision and tonsillectomy. At the age of seven, circumcision is not quite a minor matter, and the tonsillectomy is best characterized by a comment made many years later by an Army surgeon during a routine examination, "Someone sure slashed hell out of your throat." Still, the old doctors were doing the best they could with what they had at hand. The event reflected accurately the conditions in a small Midwest town during the Depression years.

Take Stock of What You Have

Worse things had happened within living memory. The accidental loss of one eye by my great uncle, Tom Willis, our landlord, is an example. When he was a boy running a race with his brother, he jumped up on the rear of a hayrack carrying bundled grain, but he failed to see a pitchfork that had been left at the rear of the loaded rack. One tine of the fork went into his cheek, struck the optic nerve and left him blind in that eye. The accident happened years before the advent of anti-tetanus vaccine. The fact that Tom did not die of lockjaw was thought to be a miracle.

Some events were worth remembering, even when they were embarrassing. During an attempt to get a little heifer out of a silo where she had eaten her fillof highly laxative fermented corn, my father and a hired man were working together, urging her up an improvised ramp. The old man was behind, pushing, and the hired man in front, pulling on a halter they had rigged on the critter. The heifer got her front legs through the narrow doorway out of the silo. With victory in sight, all parties gave a final heave, and the heifer let go a stream of olive-colored liquid directly into the old man's open shirt. His reaction, immortalized in our neighborhood, was, "You son of a bitch, don't you dare laugh!"

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Laughter recalled in that way is lots of fun, but it is not always easy to be part of things that occurred so long ago, tantalizing though they are -- seeming to be within reach, yet impossible to touch. The philosopher says that is a good thing: Man's reach should exceed his grasp. I guess one must conclude that some pain, even when it is real enough, may also be pleasant.

I wrote Long Gone largely for my own satisfaction and amusement. Ten years of off-and-on labor have given me that, making the whole thing worth theeffort.