The Little Boy in the Story

A Note from The Gardener

When I was eight years old, I refused to read.

Reading wasn’t “doing” something. It meant sitting still. It meant waiting. It meant fanning the pages forward, impatiently, after every paragraph, as if I could hurry the story along.

I couldn’t stay still long enough for my mind to get interested.

One summer, my mother bought me The Yearling. She didn’t tell me it was required reading. She simply set me on the bed, waited until I turned the first page, and quietly closed the door.

A few minutes later, I walked out.

“Did you meet the little boy yet?” she asked.

“What boy? There’s no boy.”

“Go find him,” she said. “Then come back and tell me about him.”

That didn’t sound like reading. That sounded like a mission.

So back I went.

I’d return with an answer. She’d ask another question. And slowly, without announcing it, she had tricked me into becoming interested.

The book began to feel less like a chore and more like a place.

The Bus Ride North

In the summer of 1971, between eighth and ninth grade, I rode a rumbling yellow school bus to the Rainy Lakes of Canada for a canoe trip.

The windows were open. Wind rushed through the aisle. Coaches removed the back seats so we could stretch out. Most of the boys disappeared into naps or half-thoughts as we bounced along Highway 71.

I slid under one of the seats with a green-and-white Snoopy pillow and opened James Michener’s The Drifters.

Eight hundred pages.

I didn’t care.

For hours each day, I read while the bus roared north. The wind made conversation nearly impossible unless you sat near the coaches. I barely noticed. I was inside the story.

It was about young people coming of age during the Vietnam era. The draft wasn’t far from our thoughts. The song “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for…” drifted from canoe to canoe on the lakes. The world felt heavy, even if we didn’t fully understand it yet.

I finished the book on the ride home and felt something unexpected.

Sadness.

Like losing a friend.

Some books are like that. Once they’re over, they leave a space behind.

Canoes and Ponchos

We outfitted ourselves from army surplus stores: green backpacks, field jackets, mess kits, canteen cups, ponchos with metal snaps.

That poncho doubled as a sail. Three boys to a canoe. When the wind shifted behind us, one of us would snap the poncho closed, thread paddles through the sides, and lift it upright like a spinnaker. One boy braced himself against the pull, another steered, and we’d glide forward, laughing.

“Do you want to go back to paddling?” we’d ask the one holding the sail if he complained.

No one ever did.

Canoeing, I learned, was about rhythm. About pace. About keeping your back straight when it wanted to slump. About staying in formation, but allowing the group to change shape as conversation changed.

We moved as a malleable group.

I didn’t know it then, but something in me was changing too.

The Fog

Then came high school English.

The classics descended like a fog I didn’t understand.

Othello.

The Crucible.

Long Day’s Journey into Night.

I read the words but didn’t feel the story. I fanned the pages again. The clock slowed to a surreal crawl. I remember thinking, Miles to go before I sleep.

It wasn’t that the books were bad. It was that no one asked me to “find the little boy.”

No one invited me in.

Poetry with Mr. Smith was different. There were pictures there. A direction. A reason to pay attention.

But something in me had already retreated.

Years later, touring high schools with my son Matthew, I saw Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller displayed on a classroom table.

“Oh no, Matthew!” I said out loud.

The teachers heard me.

Too late.

Stories That Stay

In graduate business school, I found Robert Ludlum.

Suspense. Movement. Stakes.

I would read until nearly 3 a.m., glance at the clock, calculate how little sleep I could survive on, and turn the page anyway.

I had rediscovered what my mother knew all along:

It’s not about reading. It’s about entering a story.

Today, Audible keeps me company. Recently I listened to The Correspondent, told entirely through letters. Not continuous narrative. Not straightforward. Just exchanges that slowly reveal the person at the center.

Sometimes she’s likable. Sometimes insensitive. Sometimes fragile. Sometimes authoritative.

Complex. Multi-faceted. Human.

It made me want to buy the paper copy just to underline sentences that painted pictures so clearly.

And it reminded me of something.

We rarely know someone as quickly as we think we do.

A Garden Is a Story Too

You might be wondering what this has to do with gardening.

Quite a bit, actually.

A garden isn’t built all at once. It reveals itself in pieces. In seasons. In small exchanges between sunlight and soil.

Sometimes it’s sleeping.

Sometimes creeping.

Sometimes leaping.

If you fan the pages too quickly, you’ll miss the story.

So maybe this month’s note is less about plants and more about patience. Maybe it’s about finding the little boy in the story. Or the person in front of you. Or the version of yourself that hasn’t quite been introduced yet.

Good gardens and good books have something in common:

They take time. And when they’re finished, you’re not quite the same.

—

John, The Happy Gardener