I’ve long felt a sort of kinship with John Cheever, for many reasons; reading Falconer, finally, serves to remind me that he worked with Carrara marble; I work with Mississippi mud at best. Rock River effluent most days. However, I was barely eight when the scum from Spring Creek, gurgling through concrete pipes that assumed mythical status then, to lead across rocks deemed ancient in our prepubescent authority to rocks speckled with fossils, the meaning of which we were discouraged to inquire after. At that age, everything of any significance comes from Middle Earth. Those lands were more real than our mundane little worlds.
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