A Walker in the Suburbs

In The Book of Charlie, journalist and author David Von Drehle tells the story of his Kansas City neighbor, who he first sees across the street in his swimming trunks, washing a car. The man was Charlie White. The car was his girlfriend’s. Charlie was 102 at the time. 

Von Drehle would have seven years to get to know the man — and what a man he was. He was born before radio, commercial air travel and a worldwide pandemic (not Covid 19, the Spanish flu). Despite early adversity (he was eight when his father died in a freak accident), he put himself through college and became a doctor. Though his two first marriages ended (one in death, another in divorce), Charlie married again and became a father in middle age.

Throughout his long and amazing life, Charlie White changed with the times. When World War II came, he served in the medical corps and came out with an anesthesia specialty.  He lived with simple precepts: he took life as it came and always tried to “do the right thing.” 

Charlie White: They don’t make them like him anymore. They almost never have.

(Book jacket photo courtesy Simon & Schuster)

It’s prime reading weather — long nights, cold days — and I recently bought an e-book to keep me company: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die (Volume 1). How could I resist 50 classics for two dollars?

True, I’ve already read many of them. I was an English major, after all. But I doubt I would have started The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte had it not landed on (in?) my electronic nightstand. It’s an epistolary novel, a tale told entirely in letters and journals, and a reminder of how life was lived in an earlier, calmer and difficult-to-be-anything-but-landed-white-male-gentry time.

Though I can’t say Anne has become my favorite Bronte — it would be hard to dethrone Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) — her novel grew on me, and by the end I couldn’t put it down, so thoroughly was I rooting for Helen and Gilbert to marry and find happiness. No spoiler alerts here; you’ll have to read it yourself to find out. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Last night was my book group’s annual book picking, held at a local bookstore cafe. It was fun to meet in person and catch up on news. But as usual, the stars of the show, the books themselves, were in short supply. Since we discuss each book we suggest and pass it (or a description of it) around, this was a problem.

I’d spent an hour or so finalizing my suggestions earlier in the day, printing out a page each for Bittersweet and The Book of Charlie. This was a good move because the bookstore didn’t have the former, a 2022 bestseller just out in paperback, and had to search high and low for the latter, just published and chosen as a best book of 2023 by the Washington Post.