Very Sweet Long Days
Chloe has been living in her black-and-yellow soccer jersey for 23 ½ hours when I turn the page to “The Sweet Long Days,” one of the final chapters in David Maraniss’ collection of articles and essays to be published in January 2010.
The book itself is titled INTO THE STORY: A Writer’s Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports, and Loss (Simon & Schuster) It’s a delightful and emotional sampling of some of the journalist’s most impressive pieces of writing, from poignant chapters of his most famous books (They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and American, October 1967; First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton) to raw personal essays published in The Capital Times.
By the time I reach The Sweet Long Days, I’m practically out of breath, having sprinted like his famous character Rafer Johnson (Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics that Stirred the World) through the first thirty chapters on life, politics, sports and loss. Those are the four words Maraniss uses to frame the works he chose—the subject matters, if you will, that have defined his personal and professional baby-boomer path.
His stories on politics and politicians are sublime studies of history, people and the forces that shaped them. For Bill Clinton, of course, it was his modest and rocky roots in Arkansas that bred the famous triad of empathy, ambition and egoism.
In the chapter titled “Nice Tie,” published in The Clinton Enigma (1997), Maraniss recounts an awkward encounter with the president, who was declining interview requests from the writer after an apparent disaffection for First in His Class, published two years earlier. The scene, featuring both George Stephanopoulos’ frank interpretation of Clinton’s comment about Maraniss’ tie and Elliott Maraniss’ rebuke of the president in defense of his son, is, to me, this masterful writer at his best: working loose the soul of his characters like a sailor untying a knot in a tangle of rope on turbulent waters. He is acutely aware of his surroundings and their significance to the plot. And as he does so simply and brilliantly in “Nice Tie,” gently coaxing life’s ironic moments into speaking for themselves. In the case of Clinton to show, rather than tell, how an innocuous compliment captured the dichotomy of a man.
“It was often tempting to try to separate the good from the bad in Clinton, to say that the part of him that was indecisive, too eager to please, and prone to deception was more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that was tireless, intelligent, empathetic, and self-deprecating,” writes Maraniss. “But they could not be separated. They came as part of the same package.”
Maraniss comes by his predisposition to journalism honestly. His father and mother were longtime editors at The Capital Times and the University of Wisconsin Press, respectively. The non-fiction narrative was the family business, and Maraniss began honing his own skills at the Cap Times during summers in college at UW–Madison. Madison was then and is now a fine place for practicing intellectuals, and the Maraniss family molded into the culture nicely, a family of five enjoying middle-class life on the west side before the student left and the law enforcement right would disturb the peace of a small Midwestern city. Back then the worst thing that ever happened to young David Maraniss was an unfortunate incident involving a prized baseball and an elephant named Winkie (who would later become infamous) at the Henry Vilas Zoo.
It is in Chapter 31 of the writer’s journey, which bears the same name as the book’s title, that I find more than a universal truth in Maranis’ body of work. It is an essay on growing up in a sleepier world, “the sweet long days” of childhood that no longer exist in the play-dates and Amber Alerts of a new, hyper-charged America. Unorganized—perhaps disorganized is the better word—sports in Vilas Park (where Winkie disemboweled the baseball that landed in her cage), bicycling around Camp Randall and swimming in Lake Mendota were among the many freedoms Maraniss and his band of brothers enjoyed.
He writes about loosely organized baseball leagues sponsored by the rec department but umpired by teenage boys and rarely attended by Elliott and Mary Maraniss, or any other adults.
“It was just something about that time and place that allowed them and the other parents to stay way with no apparent psychological bruising on either side of the equation,” writes Maraniss. “Childhood in Madison was for children.”
Maraniss has captured the culture change eloquently, and yet the image of him and his teammates wearing their “beloved jerseys” everywhere, every day is the same one I am staring at in my own Madison home five decades later. A dirty blonde kid reading the Sunday comics on the couch, wearing the soccer jersey she wore to the game a day earlier, the friend’s house Saturday night, the farmers’ market the next morning and the Packer game in the living room that afternoon. But not for school the next day, she would rise and shine in the colors of the Hummingfish.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Maraniss’ book is a testament to that when it comes to life, politics, sports and loss. And we revel in his take on this bittersweet truth.
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