The Year Of Getting To Know Us by Ethan Kanin, 1987
The magic trick:
Asking a central question and giving the reader enough information to sort through a potential answer
More masterful work from Ethan Canin’s Emperor Of The Air collection. The story goes back and forth through time, collecting snippets of memories from the adult narrator’s childhood as he reckons with his father’s impending death and all that the man has meant to him and his life. We also get glimpses into the narrator’s current life as a forty-something husband and teacher.
There is a moment near the end of the story where the dad fairly brazenly decides the then-16-year-old narrator doesn’t need to get to know him because “one day you’re going to grow up and then you’re going to be me.”
It’s a dramatic moment, and points the reader toward maybe the story’s key question: did the narrator become his dad?
Because the story so deftly handles time, we have plenty of material to assess that answer.
And that’s quite a trick on Canin’s part.
The selection:
He never taught me to play. I was a decent athlete – could run, catch, throw a perfect spiral – but he never took me to the golf course. In the summer he played every day. Sometimes my mother asked if he would take me along with him. “Why should I?” he answered. “Neither of us would like it.”
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