America Moved. Booth Tarkington

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America Moved - Booth Tarkington


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Very Young Man Goes West

      When, at probably less then eighteen months, I looked out of a window at the first snowflakes of that year, I was disappointed because of their smallness. I was disappointed because I then remembered snowflakes that had been as large as the palm of my hand, and these now weren’t half that size. Thus, though I don’t remember the larger snowflakes that fell when I was less than a year old, I remember that when I was less than eighteen months old I did remember them, and that at less than a year old I had observed their size as compared to the size of the palm of my then hand.

      I didn’t tell anybody about this, hence nobody told me about it later; I remember it. The suggestion is that the youngest baby has more than what are called “prenatal memories”; that he’s not only thinking, he’s already recollecting, and that conscious memory is an activity within us at birth.

      Uncle Newton made much of me; so did the circle of gay early Californians surrounding him. Toys almost glutted me; I heard tales loudly told of me, saw groups of expectant faces about me awaiting the delights of my wisdom; and bearded men, as well as hourglass-shaped ladies, professed themselves ravished by photographs of me in kilts and velvet jacket. The flatteries I received might easily have convinced me that I was a philosopher, or a wit, or a great beauty. They did. I thought I was all three.

      The Way of a Transgressor

      In that whole year in the golden land, my happiness was as unclouded as my self-esteem—except for two slight setbacks. These were caused by social errors on my part that evanescently dimmed me; and both are now known to me mostly through hearsay, though memory brings flickerings. The first of the two episodes reflects even less credit upon my innate character than does the second—which was, morally speaking, disgraceful—for the first seems to show that I deliberately tried to be funny. Humor isn’t accomplished in that way.

      A lady, a stranger to me, was making an admiring to-do over me; and we two were the center of a group after lunch at my uncle’s. Conspicuous to me were her nose and a beautiful gold tassel at the end of a chain about her neck. In response to her courtesies, I asked, “What do you wear that pretty gold tassel for? To dust your big ugly nose with?”

      Out of a startled hush my uncle for the first time spoke to me sharply. He said, dumfoundingly, “Tut! Tut!”

      In a panic, I spoke hastily, “I mean, do you wear that tassel to dust your little pretty nose with?”

      I was hustled away, crestfallen; but later in the day my vanity was again inflated. What I’d said to the lady I overheard repeated by several people—and not as a reproach to me. From all I could learn I had behaved excellently.

      There comes to me faintly, faintly a picture of results: wholly unexpected dreadful illness, expressions of indignant solicitude uttered by those who put me to bed. I suffered; and yet—and yet, as days passed, there stole into me from without—perhaps from heard whisperings—more than a suspicion that again I had done something remarkable; that once more, in a manner of speaking, I had distinguished myself.

      The gilded year in California ended; my mother and my sister and I came back to my father and to Indianapolis—and to something near penury. Calamity was upon the country, for that was the first year of a great depression. The word “depression” wasn’t used; everyone talked of the “panic,” and the period became, historically, the Panic of ’73.

      We didn’t return to our fine brick house on Meridian Street; it was lost to us—taken away by the panic. My father, whose commencement address at college had made him secretary to the governor of Indiana, was a “rising young lawyer,” when, unfortunately, he accepted a judgeship. Though for the rest of his long life his fellow citizens never spoke to him or of him except as Judge Tarkington, in our Hoosier way, the title was inadequate compensation for the clients he lost through his term on the bench. When he returned to the bar he’d begun to get some of them back; but the Panic of ’73 banished legal fees to the realm of illusion.

      The Frown of Fortune

      Suddenly we were poor, lived in a small wooden house; then moved to a side street, where we occupied only a lower floor, with another depleted lawyer and his family over our heads. We still owned our two loved horses, Gray and Fly—my father could never bear to sell a horse—but they were economically in the country, at pasture, and we were no longer carriage folk.

      Present-day little children, born into this depression, the day of the New Deal, unemployment, and terrible wars, will have their memories of the bad period even if they live long enough to emerge into another Golden Age, as we did after the long pressure of the Panic of ’73. For these present-day children, too, there may come a time when the world again seems settled, responsible, and solid, when politicians and dictators will not be upsetting everything, threatening every hearthstone and


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