About “Life Could Be A Dream”
My favorite among all my novels is Life Could be a Dream, named after a popular song from the early fifties. I take a semi-autobiographical look at growing up in the San Gabriel Valley during this era. My main character, nine-year-old Robby Barnaby has his summer lined up: baseball and digging forts with his older brother. An underage fifth grader, on the last day of school he plays in the all-star game of players chosen between the fifth and sixth grades. Trying to score the tying run at home plate he breaks his left wrist, which launches a series of unfortunate events that radically change his life.
My novel is a meditation on loss and adaptation through the eyes of a pre-adolescent. His fifth-grade teacher, Thelma Oliver (a lesbian living with a second-grade teacher) takes a special interest in Robby after he skipped the fourth grade and struggled with his new situation. She gives him well paid jobs at her home and takes him out for his tenth birthday after his father forgets.
His neighbor Marlene’s mother had been murdered two years ago. She became withdrawn and isolated, hating the false solicitude that is really morbid curiosity. Robby helps her to return socialize with supportive friends. The summer takes a change for the worse as Robby’s mother dies of surgical complications. His father, Malcolm, is no help but his family eventually steps up to meet the challenges facing four boys without a mother.
They move to a new city with no youth sports and nothing to do but contrived chores that satisfy Malcolm’s fantasies of living off the land. In response to the situation Thelma offers to adopt him. When his father refuses she tries to take him to her family home in Wisconsin and is arrested for kidnapping. Robby’s grandparents, aunts and uncles intervene, quashing Malcolm’s abusive behavior.
At the start of the next summer Robby visits his previous home in Watertown, California and reconnects with his friends. He stays with Alan, who was a good friend, a talented ballet dancer and cartoonist. He visits Marlene, now living in a trailer park a mile from Alan and reassures her that she can still make something of herself. Robby attends the Fourth of July fireworks at the Coliseum with Alan’s family, experiencing an epiphany from the display of pyrotechnics.
PS, I Have written a sequel, Marlene in which she recruits Robby and his friends to solve her mother’s murder. It is a darker study of life in the nineteen fifties, but once again, with the help of family and friends he solves the murder but must deal with an amateur hit squad that the criminals hire to murder his family.
