The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

6 FOR A WHOLE WEEK, I had to stay in my room from the time I got home from school until it was time to get ready to go to school the next morning. I also had to apologize to Matthew.     My mother drove me to Mrs. Barber’s shop. We walked inside, and my mother said, “Hello, Mrs. Barber. Peter would like to say something to you.”     Mrs. Barber looked down at me and smiled. She was wearing a white...

     “It all happened in the fall,” I began, “a little before supper. It was starting to get dark, and a little fox was on his way home from school. He was rowing his boat along—”     “A fox was rowing a boat?” asked Mort. It was a friendly question, not a challenge. He wasn’t suggesting that he thought it impossible for a fox to row a boat; he just wanted to make sure that this fox was rowing a b...

     The bus came to a halt, and a fat, sweaty man wearing a brown suit and a derby hat lurched down the aisle toward Matthew, Mort, and me. Mort and I gave each other looks of terror. I think it was the first time that either of us had realized that somebody had been driving the bus. We had just been riding along as passengers on a bus beyond our control, a bus that could have been traveling on i...

5 I DIDN’T SEE MATTHEW BARBER again until the first day of kindergarten, and then only at the very end of the day, on the school bus.     It had been an exciting day, and each of us on the bus had a handful of drawings to show mom and dad and a headful of strange events to tell about. Each of us was in his or her own sort of daze: puzzled, overwhelmed.     I rode along, sitting beside a window, on...

4 THE FOX-AND-CLAM EPISODE cost the Leightons several pupils. I was one of them. My mother spent much of that afternoon on the telephone. Most of the time, she just listened to the mothers of children who had been upset by the story—children who were lying on their beds, wringing their little hands, staring at the walls—but by the time she had listened to the fourth anxious mother, she had herself...

     Miss Louisa closed her book with a bang and looked around at us with a big smile, as she always did when she finished reading. I looked back at her, beaming. I was tremendously proud of her. She had turned in a magnificent performance. She had brought it off so smoothly, apparently effortlessly, without hesitation. I clapped my little hands together and said “Yay! Yay!” as if she’d just set a...

     One afternoon, at reading time, we settled onto the lawn, and Miss Louisa opened a book and said, “Today I’m going to read you a story called ‘The Fox and the Clam.’”     “I know that story,” I blurted out, surprised and thrilled. A new feeling arose within me, a warm and pleasant feeling. It was pride. I had already read the story of the fox and the clam, but the other children, to judge fro...

     My mother and Mr. Beaker decided that I had memorized parts of the stories, and that I was making additions and changes to cover up for my not being able to remember other parts. In short, they decided that I couldn’t really read at all.     My mother worried about me. In consultation with the other mothers in our neighborhood, she decided that I had serious intellectual deficiencies that sho...

3 SO DELICIOUS was the pleasure of listening to adults read to me that I resisted learning to read for a long time. Mr. Beaker came to my parents’ house a few times a week to read to me and to try to teach me to read. He would run his finger along the lines of type as he read to demonstrate that it was from them that he was taking his words, and I soon began to understand that he was just repeatin...

2 “WELL, PETER,” said Mr. Beaker, “what did you think of that?”     “It was funny,” I said. I was studying the picture of the fox in the rowboat. I wondered how Mr. Beaker had gotten so long a story out of that one picture, and especially how he had been able to imagine so clearly the hilarious figure of the fox grabbing for the falling leg of lamb and losing his balance. When my father cleared hi...

Have you missed an episode or two or several? * You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide . * You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast . Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. * At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “ My Mother Takes a Tumb...

     Mr. Beaker brought the package from behind his back and put it on the table in front of me. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord. Slowly, he began to unwrap it. My mother tied the belt on her robe and came over to watch.     Before Mr. Beaker had folded the paper back enough for my mother and me to see what was inside it, my father peeked around the corner and said, “Oh, it’s you,...

1 ONE QUIET MORNING, a Saturday, in the spring, when I was three, while Dudley Beaker was sitting on his porch drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper, the thought struck him that it was time I learned to read.     Mr. Beaker was wearing a tan satin robe that my mother had made for him, though she had presented it first to my father, who never wore such things, as a birthday present...

THE NEXT MORNING, I began writing the story down. I think that I might have been able to complete it very quickly if I hadn’t tried to verify some of the facts. When I did, I found to my surprise that I had made up two essential ingredients.     As part of the story as I told it to Porky White, I had included the version of the fable of the fox and the clam that I remembered from the first real bo...

THE NEXT DAY, at noon, Porky and I were standing on the front porch of the cottage. We were about in the middle of Bolotomy Bay, pushing into a headwind, a driving rain, and a nasty chop. Al had suggested that Porky join us in the transbay voyage, because she had thought it would cheer him up. The two clamboats on the port side, the Kitten’s Paw and Means to an End , were taking on water, and the...

     Porky took a swallow of beer and ate another onion ring before he spoke.     “Well,” he said, “it’s like this.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “I suppose it happens to all of us from time to time: we feel utterly miserable for no clear or sufficient reason, you know what I mean? Even those of us who think of ourselves as essentially happy people find that our essenti...

Preface Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and, vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity. No one is so happy that he would not want to change his lot if he gives in to impatience. Such is the bittersweetness of human happiness. To him that enjoys it, it may seem full of delight, but he cannot prevent it slipping away when it will. It is evident, ther...

[Coming on Tuesday, September 21: “The Fox and the Clam” begins.] Have you missed an episode or two or several? * You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide . * You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast . Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. * At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of...

21 GUPPA DIED when I was twenty-five, of a heart attack. Gumma died when I was twenty-eight, of cancer. I still have the radio. I keep it in the cellar, on an old maple table that was here when Al and I bought Small’s Hotel. Beside the table is a wobbly straightback chair. Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go to the cellar and put the earphones on, turn the set on, and sit an...

20 “CLOSE YOUR EYES, GUMMA,” I said. “We’re bringing it upstairs.”     I opened the cellar door and peeked around it to make sure that Gumma had her eyes closed. She was holding her apron up over her eyes with both hands. The kitchen was full of the smell of turkey. I held the door open for Guppa, who was holding the radio in front of him in both hands. He set it on the kitchen table and plugged i...

19 BUT I DIDN’T HAVE TO, thanks to Gumma. When I told her what had happened, she got her slide rule and marched downstairs. She had Guppa and Mr. Beaker and me count and recount the number of windings we could see on the outside of the coil. She looked through the instructions and mumbled to herself. She measured the thickness of the windings on the coil and the thickness of the wire itself. Then...

18 GUPPA HAD SPENT forty-six weekends in the cellar at work on the radio, discounting the time that he had spent pumping the cellar out and drying its contents. He had put eight hundred twenty-eight hours into the project. I had put in four hundred fourteen hours in the cellar and another seventy-eight making onion sandwiches and pouring coffee. I had made one hundred thirty-eight onion sandwiches...

17 LET ME EXPLAIN these coils that were giving Guppa so much trouble. The reason one radio can pick up signals that another cannot is that each of them is tuned to a different range of radio frequencies. The radio that Guppa was building for me would detect signals in the range of frequencies that are called “shortwave.” Now within that broad range lie narrower “bands.” The receiver would be able...

     Most children do not have a good sense of the amount of work required to build a radio from scratch or of the amount of time required to do it or—for that matter—of the passage of time itself. For most of them, time is like a dotted line, with unequal sections of the line itself (events) and unequal interstices (non-events, the periods of waiting for something to happen that make up much of a...

Next episode: Have you missed an episode or two or several? * You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. * You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide . * At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “ My Mother Take...