The Boy on the Green Bicycle: A MemoirMemory can distort, diffuse, simply omit. Or it can clarify, confirm, preserve forever fragments from the flow of our lives. From such pieces, Margaret Diehl has re-created the enchantment of her large Southern family settled in the North whose four siblings are exquisitely joined: We each had our place in the family, each of us a different age, like a step, connected, and nobody else anywhere related to us as we were to each other. It was a metaphysical pleasure. They are by turns innocent, naive, joyous, bumptious, young, then suddenly slashed, stricken by a reality that attaches permanently, especially to her, body and soul: My book of hours.Her older brother, the most exceptional, the best-loved, the bright shining light of the family -- and her absolute champion and hero -- is killed. He is fourteen, she nine, and her small young sour is sent careening through the world in some entirely new and frightening way, imbued with an overwhelming sense of his absence from her enternity on earth. |
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