Oct 31 2002
Trust Fall
Essay by Brian Charles Clark
I always fall in love with the girl in the book. When I was five, I fell in love with Sal, in Blueberries for Sal. She filled her pail with berries and then ate them all, saving none for later. That’s the sort of self-indulgence I can identify with.
When I was twelve, my biblioamour was Eowin, the warrior princess in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Eowin dressed up like a boy in order to escape the confines of her gender, so that she could go out and fight the good fight. Later it was voices on the radio, like when I was ten and fell hard for Melanie. That was around 1968, and when she belted out a chorus to, “Candles in the Rain,” I understood why people sometimes said, “I’d lay my life on the line”—for her, to protest the War, to ensure that we can each love whom and when we want. At about that same time I came to the realization that love can’t be restricted, at least not the way that, say, grammar can be prescripted. If the culture I was born into seemed to insist that boys fall in love with girls, I was certain, at nine or ten, that this must be some sort of misunderstanding. Continue Reading »
