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

6

AT THE END OF THE DAY, I made my way out the front door of the school, in a crowd of boys and girls. Mrs. Graham was standing beside the door. “Peter,” she called. “I’d like to speak to you for just a minute.”     She took a step toward me, advancing into the stream of boys and girls. A boy in a wrinkled white shirt and brown corduroys stumbled over her foot. Without taking her eyes off me, Mrs. Graham caught the boy with her right arm and stood him upright, gathering his books in against his chest. The boy continued on.     “You know, Peter,” she said, “I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea for you to practice your times tables.”     “Oh?” I asked. I had had the hope that I had heard the last of the times tables, that all of us in Mrs. Graham’s classroom had discharged our obligation to the times tables that day and would be going on to something else—drawing maps, perhaps, or carving swans from soap.     “Yes, I think you were just nervous today, but it would be a good idea for you to practice the times tables until you can rattle them off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t you think so?”     I clutched my camera tightly. I understood, if only vaguely, that she was giving me a chance to pretend that I knew the times tables, to avoid having any passing boy or girl realize that I didn’t know something that I should have known. I was going to thank her and say to her simply, “Mrs. Graham, I don’t know the times tables at all.” But just as I was about to speak, Clarissa walked through the doorway. When I saw her, I blushed. When she saw me, she blushed and bent her head so that she was looking down at the white fur muff in which she held her hands. Mrs. Graham saw me blush and turned to find the cause.     “Oh, Clarissa,” she said. “I was just telling Peter that I thought it might be a good idea for him to practice his times tables. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”     Without looking up, Clarissa said, “Yes, I guess it would.” It seemed to me so beautiful a remark, spoken so liltingly, that it could have been made into a song.     “Maybe it would be a good idea for you and Peter to practice together for a while each day,” said Mrs. Graham. “How would that be?”     I tried not to look at Mrs. Graham, but I couldn’t help it. I was awestruck. How could she understand everything so well? How could she make things turn out so well? The woman was uncanny.     “I think that would be fine,” said Clarissa. She raised her head and looked into my eyes.    “I think it would be great!” I said.

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* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     “Hello, Peter,” Clarissa said, so softly that when I responded I spoke in a whisper.     “Hello, Clarissa,” I said. I held my hand out. To be honest, I didn’t just hold my hand out, I reached for her hand. I didn’t intend to shake it; I wanted to hold it. She hesitated for the briefest instant, and then she gave her right hand to me. I held it between both of mine. She kept her left hand on the muff.     “You can call me Clare if you want to,” she said.     Tiny droplets of sweat formed on my upper lip. I stammered when I spoke. “Oh, th—that’s okay,” I said. “I th—think Clarissa is beautiful.”     She blushed. So did I. I heard Spike mutter, “Oh, brother.”     With the introductions over, Mrs. Graham went back to what the class had been doing before I arrived.     “Peter,” Mrs. Graham said, smiling at me, her cheeks glowing, “we’re just practicing our times tables.”     “Oh, great!” I said, smiling right back at her, smiling with all my heart, ready to do anything to show this woman how happy I was to have been allowed into the fourth grade, to be in her classroom, to sit beside Clarissa, to have my heart ache like this. But even as I said it, a chill spread through me. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had never heard of the times tables before in my life. I smiled, but the sweat continued to form on my lip, and when I wiped it off with the back of my hand, it came right back again. When my turn came to do whatever I was supposed to do, I was going to make a fool of myself in front of all the kids that I had just met, and worst of all in front of Clarissa. My happiness would end as quickly as it had begun.     I tried not to do anything that would betray my anxiety, but something—my irregular breathing, the sweat on my lip, or the mad, twitching smile that I was struggling to maintain—must have given me away. When I glanced sidelong at the boys and girls around me, I saw that they were glancing sidelong at me, and from the moue Clarissa wore, the way she was stroking her muff, I thought she must know that something was wrong.     “Peter?” Suddenly I realized that Mrs. Graham was calling on me. I looked up at her.     “Yes?” I said.     “Do you know the answer?”     I didn’t even know the question. I had been so firmly in the grip of my fears that I hadn’t even noticed what was going on. I said, “Uh, well—”     Some tiny movement caught my eye. Maybe Spike hadn’t done anything more than move her hand, but I saw it, and glanced ever so briefly at her desk. I saw, on a piece of paper, where her hand rested, the number 54. Another tiny movement caught my eye. On a piece of paper on Veronica’s desk I saw the number 58. I was on the horns of a dilemma, but not for long. I didn’t want to do anything that was going to offend Spike, so I decided on that basis alone to take the answer that she offered.     “—fifty-four,” I said. I tossed it off as if it had been nothing.     Mrs. Graham looked at me for just long enough before she spoke so that I could tell, though no one else probably could have, that she knew how I had gotten the answer.     “No, Peter,” she said. “That’s not right. Seven times eight is fifty-six.”     I blushed. “Oh! That’s right,” I said. “I guess I just forgot.”     Without turning around, Spike shrugged her shoulders and covered the number she had written. Veronica looked genuinely puzzled.

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.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

5

THE CLASS gave me a greeting that they had rehearsed, and Mrs. Graham pointed out a seat for me at the back of the room. I made my way to the seat in a euphoric state, for Mrs. Graham had made me feel secure, even confident. I sat down and stretched myself out nearly straight so that I could keep my feet on the floor and my elbows on the desk top. Mrs. Graham had the boys and girls stand, one at a time, and introduce themselves. Three of them, three girls, were to play particularly memorable roles in my life.     The first was Veronica McCall. She stood slowly when her turn came, placed one foot in the aisle, brought the other out to meet it, turned, tossed her head to clear her straight, dark hair from in front of her left eye, and then pushed it aside with a flip of her hand for good measure. She laughed and shrugged as if to say, “Isn’t it amusing that we all have hair, but only mine falls in this odd and alluring way in front of my eye, only mine is this fine, this straight, this dark?”     She said, “Well, hello there!” and she rippled her fingers through the air. She reversed the set of steps that had brought her to her feet and slid herself into her seat. As she sat, her dress tightened across her bottom and along her legs, and I obtained a photographically precise and durable impression of the outline of her underpants.     The second was Lily O’Grady. She had hair of a color that my mother referred to as “dirty blond,” though her use of dirty in this way may have been only partly a description of color. Lily called herself Spike. She was the class bully. She led a gang of crewcut and muscular boys named Biff, Studs, Chuck, and Knuckles. I never quite figured out which of the boys in the gang was which except for Biff, who had a scar down the side of his left cheek. It was said that Biff got this scar when Spike fought him for the leadership of the gang. (Quite a few years later, at a reunion of my class at Babbington High, I asked Biff whether that was, in fact, how he had gotten the scar. “Heck, no,” he said. “It was a very democratic gang. We elected the leader by secret ballot. I got the scar while Spike and I were counting the votes.”)     Spike stood slowly. She was chewing gum, and the muscles along her jaw and at her temples rippled impressively. She looked me up and down. Her head bobbed as if her neck were a coil spring. Finally, she dropped her jaw, pulled her lower lip in over her teeth, and shook her head once, in a gesture that told me, to my enormous relief, that she considered me beneath consideration. “Hi, Pete!” she shouted, though I was only a couple of feet away from her. She started to sit down, but a thought occurred to her, and she got to her feet again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not so hard. I’ve been here a few weeks already, and I understand almost everything. Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be okay.” She gave me a wink. I resolved to keep my mouth as shut as possible.     The third was Clarissa Bud, who made my heart ache as soon as she raised her eyes toward mine. She was small and fragile, with skin as pale and smooth as moonlight on the Bolotomy. She moved as if she were moving through water instead of air: she rose to her feet as if she were allowing herself to float upward. Her eyes were enormous, wide and surprised. Though the weather was mild, she had on her desk a white fur muff, on which she rested her left hand, rubbing the fur between her thumb and forefinger, drawing from the muff the kind of comfort that I got from clutching my camera. Clarissa seemed so frightened and retiring that she made me feel strong and bold. She was, Mrs. Graham pointed out, also new to the classroom, and in fact new to Babbington, the latest stop in Mr. Bud’s progress from one important position in the food-processing industry to another. Clarissa’s desk was beside mine.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

4

THE SCHOOL was an old one. I had begun attending it in kindergarten, and for a long time I had thought that the people who had gone to the school years ago must have been much bigger at my age than I was or than any of my friends were. Everything in the school seemed taller, wider, higher, or heavier than necessary. My friends and I struggled to climb the stairs, stood on our tiptoes to use the water fountains or the urinals, sat on the sinks to look into the mirrors. I had grown accustomed to seeing the building as too big and the boys and girls as too small.     When I opened the door to Mrs. Graham’s room, I was struck at once by the fact that the boys and girls fitted their desks. Their elbows rested on the desktops, and their feet reached the floor. The fourth grade, I could see, was what the school was about. When you reached the fourth grade, you would fit. I wasn’t going to fit, and everyone would know it as soon as I sat down.     Mrs. Graham was standing beside her desk. She had a book in her hand, a book with a navy-blue binding, an arithmetic book that I would soon come to regard with a deep, quiet, enduring hatred.     On Mrs. Graham’s desk was a large vase made of milk glass, and in this vase were flowers, lots of flowers. I don’t remember what kind of flowers, but there were always flowers in the vase, sometimes so many flowers that, if Mrs. Graham sat at her desk, I couldn’t see her at all from my seat at the back of the room.     “Peter!” cried Mrs. Graham. There was so much pleasure in her voice that I felt at once that I must know her, not merely that I must have met her, but that I must have known her for a long time, that somehow circumstances had separated us, and now fate had at last brought us together again, to our surprise and delight. I was immediately as happy to see her as she seemed to be to see me.     “Hi!” I said, gleefully. She closed her book emphatically and tossed it toward her desk. It struck the vase, which tipped and rocked, and looked as if it might fall to the floor, but a boy in the front row leaped from his seat and steadied it. Before he sat down, he shook his head a couple of times and smiled indulgently. Mrs. Graham never noticed any of this, since all her attention was focused on me.     She was an enormous woman. She was not fat; she was just constructed according to a giant set of plans. Good nature and affection seemed to burn within her: her cheeks glowed red, and she approached me with the awful momentum of a locomotive under a full head of steam. She scared me to death, yet she was irresistible. I was drawn to her, and so strong was her attraction that I held my arms out as I walked toward her, as if I would hug her as I hugged my mother.     As Mrs. Graham advanced, boys and girls pulled their feet in safely under their desks. At one point in her advance she stepped on a piece of chalk that was lying on the floor, and it exploded under her shoe, sending chalk dust flying outward to form a starburst pattern that the janitor never succeeded in removing.     We didn’t hug when we reached each other. Mrs. Graham stopped, took a deep breath, extended her hand toward me, and said, “Welcome to the fourth grade.”     I put my hand in hers and she shook it. “Thank you,” I said. I loved her at once, respected her, and feared her. I knew from that moment that I would do anything she asked me to do, told me to do, or even hinted that perhaps I should do. And I knew she’d make sure that I got through the fourth grade all right.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

3

I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME, and in a watery haze I walked down the hall, away from the familiar, toward the unknown. I wasn’t crying, but there was a lump in my throat, my eyes were watering, and everything ahead of me was blurry, indistinct. I had closed the door of Room 218 behind me, but in a larger sense I had closed a larger door, and the echoes of its closing reverberated in the hazy corridor that lay ahead of me. I had closed the door on third grade, on a part of my childhood, forever. I was walking toward an uncertain future, and I couldn’t make out where I was going.     From my right, I heard Matthew Barber’s voice. “Peter,” he called, “watch where you’re going. You’ll fall down the stairs.” I felt his hand on my arm. He stopped me from going farther. “Come on,” he said. “Come into the boys’ room.” I followed where he led me, and after I had dried my eyes and washed my face I felt better.     “I feel better now,” I said. I clutched my camera a little tighter for strength, stood up straight, and added, “Let’s go to the fourth grade, shall we?”     “I don’t know, Peter,” said Matthew. “We’re probably making a big mistake. Do you think they’d let us back into the third grade?”     “Aw, come on, Matthew,” I said. “We would have gone into the fourth grade eventually anyway. We might as well face up to it now. Besides, I don’t think they’ll let us go back—there was something about the way the door closed behind me—and the way it echoed in the hallway.”     Matthew stared at the floor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard that too.” He sighed. “We should have left well enough alone,” he said, shaking his head. “Things usually turn out wrong.”     I gave him a knock on the shoulder, as if to say, “Chin up!” and said, “Baloney, Matthew! Things are going to be great! We’ve got a great future ahead of us!” I was beginning to believe it. “Fourth grade, here we come,” I said. “Room 231, here we come!”     “Two thirty-four,” he said, still looking at the floor.     “No—231,” I said. From my shirt pocket I took a manila card. Matthew took a similar card from his shirt pocket. On his card was written miss MISS FIORE, ROOM 234. I showed him my card. On it was written MRS. GRAHAM, ROOM 231.     “I should have known,” said Matthew. “I let myself get excited about this, I let myself be happy, and look what happened. I should have known. I should have known.”     He walked out of the boys’ room, and I followed him. He walked down the hall to the door of Room 234 while I stood in the hall watching. He never lifted his eyes from the floor, and he was still looking at the floor, shaking his head and muttering “I should have known,” when he opened the door and walked in. I wondered how on earth he had been able to tell where he was going.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

2

ON THE DAY when I left the third grade, my classmates threw a party for me. Everyone had brought cupcakes or cookies, and they had collaborated on a card that said GOOD LUCK, PETER. I was pleased, embarrassed, and moved. When it was time to go, I stood at the door with my hand on the knob. I swallowed hard. I thought that I ought to say something.     At this point I had one of those flashes of inspiration that go off in one’s brain now and then like a flashbulb or a bolt of lightning. I said, “I’d like to take a picture of all of you so I can be sure that I’ll never forget you.”     I had all my classmates gather at one end of the room for a group portrait. I spent some time moving them around to get a good composition, and then I said, “Okay, everybody, that looks just perfect. Now everybody smile.” Everybody smiled, and I held the camera to my eye. The familiar uncertainty gripped me, and my finger trembled over the button. I clamped my teeth together, closed my eyes, and pushed.     “Okay, everybody, you can relax now,” I called out. I wound the knob on the bottom of the camera. “You know,” I said, “snapshots capture your memories forever.”     I wasn’t using film in the camera, of course, so my memories began to fade as soon as I walked out the door.

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* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

1

WHEN REPORT CARDS were handed out at the Babbington Grammar School, some of my classmates fell into a whimpering terror, instinctively cowering and covering their vulnerable spots, as skittish and apprehensive as squirrels. Others began whooping and crowing, pounding one another on the back, and totting up their spoils. At the time it didn’t occur to me to pity the first group, but I certainly envied the second, for my parents considered it a Principle of Child Rearing not to reward my accomplishments in school.     When I brought a report card home, I got small praise for even the best of grades, and almost nothing in the way of tangible rewards. My father would say, looking at the best report card in my class, or even in the whole school, “That’s what I expected.” Sometimes Gumma or Guppa would slip me a dollar, or my mother would give me a hug and whisper, “I’m proud of you, Peter,” but these tokens seemed insignificant indeed beside the handsome cash prizes some of my friends collected. Some were paid for meeting certain standards, negotiated with their parents in advance, standards that were often, it seemed to me, quite low for the loot involved. Others were rewarded for showing any improvement at all; quite a few made out pretty well just for getting through six weeks without being sent to the principal’s office; and still others could collect a metal dump truck or a movie pass just for compiling a decent attendance record. It didn’t seem just.     However, on the extraordinary occasion when Matthew Barber and I were, after three weeks in the third grade, moved ahead to the fourth, I did get a reward: a camera, the first I had ever owned. It was small, well suited to the hands of a third-grader, but it was an unusual possession for a child in those times, a sophisticated gadget even for a fourth-grader.     The camera was made of black plastic, the kind called Bakelite. In overall shape, it was a cube, but a cube on which every edge had been smoothly rounded, as if the designer had streamlined it in case the photographer had to use it in a high wind. On each side was a vertical slide of bright metal that traveled in a channel molded into the Bakelite, so that, by moving these slides toward the top, one could separate the front and back halves of the camera to load or unload the film or to examine the interior. At its upper end, each metal slide terminated in a circular lug, through which were threaded the ends of a braided plastic strap. In the center of the back was a round window of translucent red plastic through which one could see the numbers on the paper backing of the film.     At the center of the front half was the lens, smooth and limpid, inside a crater of plastic. A short cream-colored shaft projected from a protuberance on the body. The top of the shaft was flattened to form the button that one pushed to take a picture. On the bottom of the camera was a knurled knob, also made of cream-colored plastic, that one turned to advance the film. Across the top of the camera, mounted in a channel molded into both halves of the body, was the viewfinder. When one held the camera with the viewfinder to one’s eye, the forefinger of one’s right hand fell quite naturally on the shutter button, and the middle finger fell quite naturally over the right half of the lens.     I loved that camera. I carried it with me everywhere for nearly a year, because holding it and looking at it reminded me that I had done something my parents regarded as extraordinarily worthy. But as much as the camera pleased me it intimidated me. A statement in the instruction booklet said, “Snapshots will capture your memories forever,” and I understood at once that the snapshots I was likely to take would capture forever memories of my childish ineptitude as a photographer, the evidence of my awkwardness and uncertainty. Clearly, the wise thing to do would be to avoid using film until I had acquired some poise, if only enough so that I wouldn’t take pictures I would really regret, so I put the film in the back of my sock drawer to save until I felt confident enough to use it.     For practice, I took filmless photographs, hoping that I’d become familiar enough with the camera to be able to handle it with skill and nonchalance. I trembled whenever I brought the viewfinder to my eye and tried to frame a picture. My finger froze on the white plastic button that would capture this memory forever, or would have if there had been film in the camera. I wanted to push the button, but some small consideration would always make me hesitate.     Maybe it would be better to aim a little higher, in case I might be cutting off the top of someone’s head.     If I waited just a moment, maybe Guppa would smile.     Was I too close?     Should I wait until the sun came out from behind that cloud?     Had I remembered to turn the knob after the last picture?     Maybe I should wait for another opportunity altogether.     Maybe I didn’t really want to preserve this memory at all.

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* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

Preface

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs . . . . Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us.

Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

BLUSHING plays an important part in the pages that follow. I do some of it myself, perhaps too much, but I should probably do some blushing here as well, because I have described Veronica McCall inaccurately. I have described her as she appears in my mind’s eye: I have let myself be seduced by the image that remains there, and I have presented it as if it were accurate, have even claimed that the image was recorded and preserved with particular precision, although logic tells me that it can’t be accurate at all.     In my mind’s eye, Veronica is wearing—on the occasion of our first meeting—a beige knit dress made of thin, soft wool. It has long sleeves, and the neckline is a wide scoop, so wide that the dress falls off one smooth shoulder. Surely my memory can’t be correct about this dress, about the fullness of Veronica’s hips in it, or about the way the dress clings to her. All that must be part of a much later memory, since I met Veronica in the fourth grade.

Peter LeroySmall’s IslandDecember 28, 1983

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

Peter Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each has added to his developing self a little of the other.

“The Fox and the Clam” is a wonderfully wacky ringing of plot changes on the kind of idiotically moralistic fables that used to fill the pages of elementary school readers. John Stark Bellamy II, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“The Fox and the Clam” tells us how Peter learned to read, with many versions of the “Fable of the Fox and the Clam;” here Peter plays Candide to his cynical classmate Matthew Barber; it is all about happiness and despair, and it is exceedingly wise and exceedingly funny. Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine

Clamming is the chief industry of Babbington; the town’s driveways are paved with crushed clamshells, and shapely shells are recycled as knickknacks by Bivalve Byproducts. . . . The apotheosis of clamdom is reached in “The Fox and the Clam,” in which the clam clearly represents only one thing—being happy-as-a—but does so in a set of thematic variations (ranging from a Saturday-afternoon cartoon about a happy hippo and an unhappy one to a deadly competition having to do with skipping third grade) that raise complicated farce to the level of calculus. Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker

Get the eBook edition of “The Fox and the Clam” for free on Apple Books.

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* 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.

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* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

THE NEXT MORNING, my mother drove me to school. Together we went to Mr. Horne’s office. Mrs. Barber and Matthew were already there. Mr. Horne talked at some length about how proud he was of Matthew and me, but after he said that both of us would be moving up to the fourth grade I was so intoxicated by the news that I missed a lot of what followed. I did, however, recover in time to hear what Mr. Horne read from Mr. Grundtvig’s report, which had been the deciding factor.     Of Matthew, Mr. Grundtvig had written: “One is struck at first by his attitude of blank despondency, his apparently chronic melancholia, but one is delightfully surprised to find that this somber little fellow actually has a lively imagination and a well-developed comic sense.”     Of me, he had written: “Although on the surface he appears to be unbelievably naive, with only the most frivolous and trivial thoughts, one discovers upon closer inspection that he has depth, that he harbors a profound understanding of the absurdity, the pain, and the misery of modern life.”

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.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.