Mothers Are Like That...

[From a draft previously titled "John Boy and Me."]
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I'm sitting here watching TV with the whole family. It's been a great day. My wife is sitting beside me in our reclining love seat, and I have just enough time to post something for Mother's Day.

There are two one-hour television shows from years ago that struck a lasting chord with me. Both used a narrative format from the first to the last episode. Both titles start with four letters T-H-E-W: The two shows are The Waltons and The Wonder Years.

The Wonder Years, of course, grabbed me because it was in perfect chronological synchronicity with my life. I was the exact same grade and age as Kevin Arnold (played by the young Fred Savage). Watching the turning calendar pages of each season was like reliving my days at Burton Junior High School. Even his chronic crush on Winnie matched mine with [name goes here], except I did not kiss my girlfriend as Kevin did in that heart-warming episode. Thought about it. Wanted to. Practiced the moment in my mind… but never overstepped the conviction I held at the time that it’s not good to kiss girls just to be kissing girls, a “code” that saw me from adolescence to young adulthood with few regrets.

This Mother’s Day post, however, is about The Waltons. This show was not only a narrative but it included the narrator-as-writer in the storyline. The character of “John Boy,” played by actor Richard Thomas, is a semi-autobiographical portral of Earl Hamner, Jr. [Hamner circa 1980 at right.]

The series pilot "The Homecoming" aired the Christmas of my first year in high school. From that special on, my family ran into the living room at the sound of that theme to watch The Waltons every week for the first five seasons. (John Boy left after that and it wasn't quite the same.) My mom especially loved the show and often said that I was like John Boy. I had begun “writing” at the time (though I had no clue what I was doing).

Mom didn’t miss any of the “mystic” signs along the way. My name is Thomas Richard, and John Boy was played by Richard Thomas. Hamner’s novel upon which The Waltons is based is called Spencer’s Mountain. My family name on the maternal side of my family tree is Spencer. In Spencer's Mountain, the father is building their own home, as were we with our father during these same years. Mom used these details to inspire me to remember things and to write "our stories." As the Bayer commercial from the same era used to say, “Mothers are like that, Yeah, They are.”

I’m no Earl Hamner, Richard Thomas, of "John Boy Walton." Just the same, hearing my mom's encouragement through the years made the fact that I liked to write a very acceptable pastime and influenced my choice to become an English teacher.

It is most remarkable to me that Hamner himself was the actual narrative voice at the end of each show. That may seem only natural, but not all writers are effective at reading their own words. (e.g. recorded readings of Frost and Sandburg). Hamner’s voice, however, is an inseparable part of that long-running show.

To me, narrative writing requires the human voice, but it is not commonly held that “good writing” must read well aloud. I’ve read somewhere that “writers” who read their work aloud tend to include too many prepositional phrases. It's because prepositional phrases (beginning by definition with a preposition and ending always with an “object”) create a natural rhythm like the three heard in “Over the river... and through the woods... to Grandmother’s house we go.”

Keeping that caution in mind, I write with the assumption that narratives are an oral tradition. As I write and especially as I re-write, I read aloud. I narrate the words. It is only then that I know my “voice” is in them. I don’t know whether this approach to writing is a cause or an effect of my fondness for Earl Hamner. I only know that when I hear Hamner read the lines of his life, I'm drawn to his tone and style and rhythms. I feel the same winds, see the same colors, and ache with the same sense that family is the strongest tie that binds.

Words strike wonderful chords of music all their own—words like meadow and autumn and sorrow and kept contain their own blend of notes that becomes inseparable from their meaning. The music of words is what blurs the line between poetry and well-crafted narrative voice. Listen to Hamner read these lines from the last episode, and you’ll see what I mean.

"I have walked the land in the footsteps of all my fathers. Back in time to where the first one trod. And stopped, saw sky, felt wind, bent to touch Mother Earth and called this home. This mountain, this pine and hemlock, oak and poplar, laurel wild and rhododendron. Home and mountain. Father, mother, grow to the sons and daughters to walk the old paths. To look back in pride in honoured heritage. To hear its laughter and its song. To
grow to stand and be themselves one day remembered. I have walked the land in the footsteps of all my fathers. I saw yesterday and now look to tomorrow." Earl Hamner, Jr.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom! Thanks for all the great stories and for bringing out whatever "John Boy" was in me. =) Because of you, I sometimes here that quiet exhaled chord of a harmonica at the end of things I've written. G'night...
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