Hippie Kid Lit

When I was little, my dad’s best friend was a fellow Vietnam vet who grew out his hair and beard and drove an old, decrepit VW Beetle.  Rich and his wife Julie owned a leather shop, but don’t get the wrong idea–this was not a kinky S&M leather shop but a hippie leather shop with belts and sandals and wallets and purses.  The shop always smelled like wood, sawdust, leather, cigarette smoke, and beer.  It was the last shop on the left in a funky modernist California redwood and glass building that jutted out into the bay.  Right across the walkway from the leather shop was the Hofbrau, a restaurant where you could get anything you wanted as long as it was a sandwich piled with thick, juicy slabs of roast beef with a little metal bowl holding au jus on the side.

My parents used to hang out with Rich and Julie what seemed like every weekend.  We would sit at the tables outside that overlooked the water, watching the sailboats and seagulls.  Dad and Rich would talk, tell stories, drink beer.  Sometimes I would be allowed to go down on the private docks below the shops and look at the boats.  Sometimes I took my fishing pole–which we got on layaway from the Thrifty store in town–and hang over the edge of the dock to pry off mussels to use for bait.  Once or twice I even caught something, and on one memorable occasion, after I succeeded in pulling in a particularly feisty fish, the tourists watching me from the restaurant above burst into applause.

Once, when I was about 8 or so, Rich called me behind the high counter in the shop.  He had a miniature workshop back there with all kinds of dies to stamp patterns into the leather, knives, bottles of leather stain, needles and waxed thread, awls, and punches.  He pushed aside some scraps of leather that he saved and would someday make into something small, like a little leather ring fastened with a single brass rivet.  Hiding behind the scraps was a paperback book, which he handed to me.  It was small but fat, with pages that were wrinkled from many fond readings and swollen with moisture.  It smelled of leather and moldy paper.  The Wind in the Willows it said in ornate script on the cover.  The ink line drawings inside–pictures of Toad, Mole, good ol’ Ratty, and Badger–pulled me in an made me wish that I could live forever in that neat little world where well-tended fires and tea with lots of toasted bread and dripping butter were inside every snug little cottage.

A couple of years later, when I read The Hobbit for the first time, I felt the same sense of nostalgic homesickness for a home that I had never known.  The Water Rat’s messy but comfortable little place appealed to me much more than Toad’s ostentatious brick pile, and Badger’s meandering tunnels filled me with excited joy, much the same say Bag End made me long for a house with round doors and windows.  The world of the animals, even keeping in mind Toad’s crazy escapade in gaol, seemed both safe and exciting, exhilarating and soothing.  At times I longed so wistfully for animals who could talk to me that I felt ill with disappointment.  I wanted a perfect little house on the bank of a river–or more properly, The River–a small boat to mess about in, and an ever-changing but never-changing view of flowing water outside my windows.

I read the book, which now, upon my second reading seems far too richly complex to be cast aside as “children’s literature,” and handed it back reluctantly.  I was not so much reluctant to give up the book but reluctant to give up the world in that book.  Already I was learning from watching my parents that the world was not a nice place for families and little kids and dogs and kittens, but it was a cold, unfair, heartless place sadly deficient in friendly Badgers and comforting, steaming cups of tea.

A year later after we moved away to Oceanside, a group of older boys whose dads were at Pendleton beat me up because of the little leather ring I wore on my right hand.  “Fag,” they called me and punched me in the stomach.  A few weeks later, the same boys stole my bicycle.  I didn’t have Toad’s friends to help me battle against the weasels and stoats who had stolen my things.  I didn’t really have any friends at all but my books, with their comforting lies and imaginary worlds transporting me briefly away from sad, angry parents, unfriendly new schools, and poverty.

Rereading the book now leaves a bittersweet taste in my mouth.  I can still feel the longing for that world, can still sense the magic in Grahame’s words–a magic my own words are miserably unable to replicate.  Like all old emotions recollected decades later, they have a light layer of parlor dust on them, so light the slightest breath will blow it away.  The colors have faded and mellowed, but inside the goofy little hippie kid displays a gap-toothed smile and settles in with his old friends Mole, Water Rat, Toad, and Badger.