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Tuminello nostalgically recounts his years growing up in a small town in rural Louisiana. Hailing from a second-generation German-Sicilian family, he writes of the prejudice he encountered from neighbors in the shadow of World War II. Familiar childhood rites of passage are lovingly recorded, such as his first fumbling attempts to attract the attention of girls, the loss of his virginity in a loft he had built, dull mornings at church, and the joy of owning a real balsa wood airplane.
One of the book’s funnier scenes describes a period of several days he spent digging a ditch for the pure fun of it, enduring the bemused scorn of the local girls but enlisting the dogged support of his male friends. In another, he “scams” summer Bible schools of various faith traditions, attending each one in turn and making professions of faith at the altar in the hopes of being rewarded with ice cream. He also writes poignantly about encountering the mysteries of life and death for the first time. For example, shortly after a beloved cat dies, young Tuminello digs up the body and is surprised to learn that it hadn’t gone to heaven.
The author writes with a homespun lyricism that evokes coming-of-age classics like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield. “Like everyone else on God’s green earth,” he writes early on, “I was born … This was the beginning that would become my life.” The folksy dialect in which the book is narrated reads like a strategic choice on the part of the author, lending it the air, at certain moments, of a great work of fiction. What elevates it above other memoirs in this genre is the poeticism of Tuminello’s prose, the overflow of a mind completely saturated in the work of the major poets, and his remarkable gift for narrative detail, which lends the book a specificity that prevents it from descending into abstract flights of sentiment.
Tuminello’s powers of observation and recall are astonishing, instantly conjuring the minutiae of daily life on the Gulf Coast in the early 1960s: culverts brimming with crawdads, snakes, and turtles; pear and pecan trees, pines and cypresses; moss and algae hanging on a fence to dry; clusters of mimosa and honeysuckle; squirming salamanders; sheet-metal factories; pastries made from a fig tree that grew in the back yard. All this is leavened by Tuminello’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the mundane, which makes him a sort of Walt Whitman of the bayous. For instance, he marvels over the endless varieties of spaghetti sauce, a laundromat with a movie theater in the back, sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and white butcher’s paper, and the pleasures of walking across a freshly laid road. An entire chapter is devoted to the unspeakable magic of electricity, which fascinated him to such a degree that he became a professional electrician.
Interestingly, his insistence that the America of the early 1960s was a “kinder, gentler place” is belied by the sudden acts of violence that proliferate through the narrative. On the whole, though, this is a book to be savored. It is fully immersive in its evocation of a lost time and place and rings with an earned sentiment.