Fit Company for Themselves

In addition to editing “The Pastor’s Kids,” I’ve begun to let the sequel creep into my consciousness. I know what will be in it to some extent, but I haven’t let myself imagine the actual incidents. In a way, this, the “making up” part, is my favorite part of writing. First though, I’m dealing with the title.

For a while the second book has been called “Bound Away” from the American folk song “Shenandoah.” Bruce Springsteen has a version I’ve been listening to:

            “Shenandoah, I love your daughter

            Away, you rolling river

            I’ll take her across the water

            Away, bound away

            Cross the wide Missouri.”

But if you don’t hear it as part of the song, you might think it was a matter of “bounding away” like a rabbit across a meadow. My characters actually make the transition from a 19^th Century to a 20^th Century world view in this second book. But it isn’t without a certain amount of anguish. No one bounds away with delight. It is more a matter of being dragged, taken away.

I toyed with phrases from Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, which show the pain of beginning to be your own person, such as in “Kathy’s Song”:

“And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true.

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you.

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die,

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I.”

Or the lightness and attempt to hold the sweetness and irresponsibility of youth in “The 59^th Street Bridge Song” (if you can’t hear the melody as you read these lyrics, look the songs up on YouTube!):

“I've got no deeds to do,

No promises to keep.

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

Let the morning time drop all it's petals on me.

Life, I love you,

All is groovy.”

But Line, Marty and Paul just aren’t there yet. In the second book there is still a formality which hasn’t fallen away from their lives. Intellectually they are moving into open space, but tradition holds them. In the second book, Line and Marty go to college and Paul finishes high school. They are full of ideals inherited directly from their European ancestors, and they know no others. The epiphanies that come to them they don’t yet understand.

An English proverb states, “Learning makes people fit company for themselves.” A liberal arts education doesn’t help one earn a living as much as it helps one’s understanding and love of life. Line, Marty and Paul were treated to such an education in the early 1960’s. Thus, I believe the title “Fit Company for Themselves” reflects the cultural story space in which we will find them in the sequel to “The Pastor’s Kids.”