"Why should we honour only those that die upon the field of battle when the artist may show us reckless courage by entering into the abyss of himself?" (William Butler Yeats)
"The Summer of My Fourteenth Year", Jim Meaders, Argus Enterprises, North Carolina, 2009.
It takes a particular kind of courage to write about the summer, any summer, of your adolescence. It's tough to think about, let alone put out there for the world to examine. How do you explain the intense necessity of watching ants march by, of vainly trying to comprehend "those two people who were playing the part of my parents", of facing the ridicule of friends who called your first car a cream puff? As if dealing with alien parents wasn't challenging enough, then there's the exquisite torture of seeing neighbors as full-blown reptilian creatures bent on destroying your very fiber.
Jim Meaders has that kind of courage. He had the courage, in 1996, to present an exhibit of digital images of mine in a show called "Jane and Dick Revisited" at the Leu Art Gallery, Belmont University, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Digital art? In Tennessee? Fourteen years ago? and Jane's name comes first before Dick's? Courage comes in many flavors.) Meaders is not only a talented writer, but a painter, teacher, department chair, designer. If the title of his book isn't enough to make you pause and reminisce, here is his second dedication: "'The Summer of My Fourteenth Year' is dedicated to all the young men and women from my generation who died young, especially in Southeast Asia, and never got to grow old and remember the summer of their fourteenth year."
As Meaders recounts it, he was a skinny kid from Florida whose Dad ran a service station and whose Mom used her tongue like a whiplash. This was the world of Rexall Drugstores, of Philco televisions, of girlie magazines and Rambler station wagons, of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Meaders takes us through this hormonal maelstrom with grace. He juggles the dual roles of tremulous adolescent and prescient observer at the same time, with a prose that flows effortlessly. Whereas some of us can hide behind our art, Meaders exposes the dark corners of a teenager's imagination, leaving himself no escape route.
I don't think I can ever again see a fourteen-year-old on a bicycle in quite the same way as I used to, knowing that all hells-a-popping in that hyperactive hyped-up imagination. You may think he's concentrating on Little League and Frisbee tournaments, but Meaders has convinced me that Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut-type adventures fill that young man's brain and make him almost inaccessible to rational belief. I'm glad that Jim Meaders wasn't a victim of America's political adventures, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, for many reasons, not least of which is his moving tribute to those tender young moments that most of us prefer to forget.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2010
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copyright 2010 Corinne Whitaker
