Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life is a memoir in numbered chapters, written down as a life story and then read aloud by its narrator. Installments open by reading out the chapter number and title, and most close by naming the next one, so the whole project moves like a serial. A run of chapters follows the narrator through college, with childhood surfacing at the edges. As a kid he wished for a magic lantern and at ten settled for a ten-dollar 'magic box', bought with lawn money counted to the cent, including a reluctant thirty-five cents from Doom, while baseball cards at Perry's Drugstore kept draining the fund. Later, Boston wins him over and his studies pay for it. Concerts, ball games, protest rallies, the Freedom Trail walked more than once and a hunt for the best pizza in town all come before the library, until he suspects the street is teaching him more than the classroom. The turning point finds him chiseling ceiling-tile glue from a scaffold in a crumbling school, a summer job, when Doom, who had been checking the mail daily, arrives in person with the admissions letter. The new school is all-male and far from everything, which is how a New England kid first hears the phrase road trip. One such trip ends with him pushed into a stream in the Virginia woods by a date who runs off laughing, and a postscript admits the soaked suede boots are what he still misses. Other chapters work the edges of campus life: a stage crew that names itself the Sugar Maples Stage Company, a radio club whose federal exam comes down to one question about transmitter meters, and the discovery that sitting alone with an open mic can throttle a talker's glibness. Music memories carry the period, from John Denver playing Homecoming shortly before he became famous to Nils Lofgren reading a crowd already fed by Springsteen and leaving the stage. The baseball chapter makes comedy out of its own smallness. He makes the team, drives the second van, and gets seven at-bats as a senior, one against a Lynchburg College pitcher who later signed with the Detroit Tigers and threw a ball he could hear but not see. The yearbook ran a photo of the eighteenth player on an eighteen-man team, and he doubts anyone remembers why. Beneath the anecdotes runs an academic turnaround: a transfer who vows to study first, slips in his first semester, then does the reading, misses the dean's list by a tenth of a point and makes it as a senior. Even that success has a footnote: a Fitzgerald term paper put off through a spring of radio, baseball and parties until a thought about Clark, his walking companion to elementary school, shakes something loose. The only blemishes on that record come from the courses of Dr. Theodore Edward Crawley, a campus legend whose classes taxed the mind the way football practice taxed the body. A second part, built from diaries the narrator kept in his twenties, is described as under construction.