The Last Days of Summer

On August 9, 1945, at 9:15 a.m., our make-believe world ceased to exist -- the thunder that destroyed Hiroshima like the clicking of red slippers that sent us back to Kansas, ending our childhood forever. The Last Days of Summer takes place in Kansas, in that summer. It is about a chubby 9-year-old whose parents ignore him so persistently he has stopped talking. A psychiatrist suggests sending him back to the town of his birth - the last place he was happy - as the only possible remedy. If that doesn't work, the boy might eventually totally withdraw, become catatonic, and wind up in a "home for crazies." Then begins that wonderful, terrible summer -- a summer of love, and hate, and hope, and despair, and life, and death. A summer that closed the book on one boyhood forever, and made another everlasting. We see it through the eyes of that fat nine-year-old, fifty years later, as he returns to Independence for the funeral of his Uncle Rip. He tells us of the miraculous 15-year-old blind girl next door he instantly fell in love with... and of the incandescent boy who moved in across the street with whom she instantly fell in love. He remembers The Indian - part Harvard, part half-breed, an unwelcome outcast, and one of the world's first militant ecologists, who saved his life not once but twice. He recalls the tragedy of the Hayakawas - part of the American Japanese who were rounded up by the tens of thousands and committed to internment camps. He remembers his happiest moments, spent shooting his brand new Marlin twenty-two carbine on furnace-hot steel bridges over creeks flowing like butterscotch beneath his feet, with Uncle Rip, his surrogate father, by his side. It is a tale of lost innocence -- by America and the world, as the mushroom clouds rise in the East -- during The Last Days of Summer. Based on truth, it was written by someone who lived it -- who grew up crouching under his desk with his classmates, covering his eyes against the blinding flash we were told would incinerate us. I was irrevocably changed by that, as was the world, as were we all.