Imagine living on a small family
farm in a tiny, isolated community in southwest Michigan during the 1950’s and
1960’s. Imagine a world consisting
almost exclusively of family life, work on the farm, attendance at a two room
country school and participation in weekly services at the local church. This was the world of my childhood, the world
described in my memoir. Our Dutch
Reformed community was small and close-knit, and most of our social life was
limited to visiting close relatives and other members of our church. Occasional excursions beyond our local
community were thus exciting adventures.
Riding with my dad to a livestock auction, a trip to a drive-in
restaurant in a nearby town or a yearly visit to a county fair were special
occasions to be anticipated and savored for weeks.
In this setting I grew up with my
parents and two sisters. My dad was a
full-time farmer until my teenage years, and my mom was a full-time homemaker
who struggled with chronic and undiagnosed health problems throughout my
childhood years. I was a skinny,
red-haired boy who was usually more comfortable at home with my family than in
some new or unfamiliar social setting.
My book contains many stories about
life in our family and on the farm, in school and in church. It records the terror of a runaway sled ride,
the challenge of trying to devise projects to make money on the farm, the
excitement of learning to drive a tractor for the first time, and many more
interesting experiences.
The book
concludes with my graduation from high school in 1969.
The initial inspiration for writing
my memoir was simply the thought about how much life had changed since I was a
boy. I remember shoveling coal into the
furnace downstairs to keep our house warm and my mom using her wringer washing
machine every Monday morning when she did the laundry. I thought it would be a good idea to record
what life was like at the unique time and place of my childhood.
As I began to work on the memoir,
however, it also became more of a personal journey for me. How were the joys, challenges and
disappointments of adult life prefigured in my childhood experiences? Did my hopes and dreams as a child have an
important influence in shaping how I approached and experienced life later
on? The deeper I got into my childhood,
the more connections I could see with who I am today.
3) A good memoir isn't just a story of an interesting life, it also explores universal themes that can engage readers from a variety of backgrounds. How does your memoir speak to readers who don't share your background?
My memoir describes many values
affirmed by my family and community.
Experiencing, challenging and living out our inherited values is a theme
many readers can appreciate. Having a
family that stayed loyal to each other and remained intact in spite of serious
challenges is a value I celebrate, endorse and recommend to everyone. Growing up on a farm also taught me that
responsibility and hard work were necessary parts of life. Picking pickles as a boy was a task so boring
that at times I didn’t know if I could endure it any longer. I thought the boredom would permanently warp
my brain. But my brain and I both
survived in good shape, and I would like to think that enduring that experience
equipped me to endure other difficult and boring tasks I have faced as an
adult. Although my Christian faith has
developed and changed in significant ways since my childhood, it, too, has
continued as an essential part of who I am as an adult.
When a small boy, I occasionally
dreamed that I could begin flapping my arms like wings and fly above my
astonished family, our house and our farmyard.
It was an exhilarating experience to rise above the normal, human
perspective and see reality from a bird’s-eye view. That experience inspired me to imagine the
fantastic possibilities for my life, and it gave birth to the title of my book,
The Flying Farm Boy.
My dream was almost laughable. I was part of a very ordinary family living
in a tiny, obscure community far from any prominence or power. And I was a skinny, red-haired boy deficient
in athletic prowess and in social skills.
I was so shy that I had to advance to the mature age of twenty before I
first dared to ask a girl out on a date.
But I kept dreaming, anyway. Not
all of my dreams have come true, but the power of my childhood dream has motivated
me through much of my adult life. Thus
my dream of overcoming my isolation and insecurity is a primary theme in my
book.
A secondary theme is the difficulty
of learning to affirm myself as an individual in distinction from what my
family and society expected of me. For
example, the stern Calvinistic God of my childhood often scared me, and I
didn’t understand how to make peace with him.
Sometimes I didn’t know if I could even believe in him anymore. Was faith a real, living part of my own
fabric or was it merely part of the air I breathed in my community? When I reached maturity, would I discard my
childhood faith as something I had outgrown or would I reclaim it as my own?
It was also sometimes hard to know
if I did certain things simply because it was expected of me or because I
actually enjoyed them. As a teenager I
participated in the annual fall rite of pheasant hunting simply because it was
expected of me. I went so far as to skip
school on the first day of pheasant hunting even though this meant all my
grades were docked for doing so and even though my grades were much more
important to me than was hunting. I had
not yet matured enough to know that I should follow my own heart rather than
conform to social expectations.
There is an older, out-of-print
memoir by Ronald Jager called Eighty Acres. This book is a record of life on a Michigan
farm for the generation before mine, and, as such, it encouraged me to think
that such a project was feasible for me, too.
More recent memoirs I enjoyed include Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes
and James McBride’s The Color of Water.
Although both of them deal with family circumstances more challenging
than were mine, they nonetheless encouraged me to consider the possibilities of
the genre for my own situation.
6) Please tell us about your other projects.
In the past I have published
numerous essays in religious magazines, a few poems and one short story. One of my current ongoing projects is a blog
called “Rural Ramblings” at www.danielboerman.authorweblog.com.
I hope to do something in the future to tell the story of Christianity
in a way that appeals to our postmodern culture, but I have not decided on the
format for that at this point.
7) Do you have an excerpt you'd like to share?
One morning when I was ten years
old, Mom took me for a ride in the family car that I will never forget. I watched the early spring scenes of muddy
fields and patches of snow sail past the window of the car as if in a
dream. Would I ever enjoy these familiar
sights again? Would life ever be the
same again? Mom was driving me to
Zeeland Hospital to get my tonsils removed.
During the past years I had a lot of
colds and sore throats, and Dr. Yff decided that getting my tonsils and
adenoids removed was the cure. Since Dad
and Mom trusted Dr. Yff to do what was best for me, they agreed that I should
have this surgery. But no one asked my
opinion. I felt like a lamb led to the
slaughter. Being in an unconscious state
while a doctor took a knife to my throat sounded terrifying. Could I really trust Dr. Yff? Did he know what he was doing? What if he slipped and cut my vocal chords or
my tongue instead of my tonsils? What if
the bleeding wouldn’t stop? What if…I
died? Who knew what awful things could
happen to me once I had lost consciousness?
Mom gave me a hug and kiss, and a
nurse led me by the hand into the operating room. After lying down on a table in the middle of
the room, they strapped me down like an animal being prepared for sacrifice. But instead of plunging in a knife to achieve
a quick kill, they devised a slow and torturous method of subduing me. They put an apparatus over my mouth and nose
that held cotton batting soaked with ether.
Every time I breathed, I inhaled a little more of the ether’s noxious
fumes. As I kept inhaling that awful
smell, the fumes gradually sent me reeling into a nether world of darkness and
panic.
My head began to pound with an
incessant noise that grew louder and louder.
I could feel myself drifting off into a dark world I dreaded to
enter. I was sure I was dying, and there
was nothing I could do to stop it. Never
before had I so much wanted to escape and fly away. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t
free myself from my restraints and the stifling ether smell.
The next thing I knew, I woke up in
a hospital bed with the worst sore throat I had ever experienced. But I was alive! Wonders of wonders, I had survived the
ordeal! I went home that same night to
recover in more familiar surroundings.
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If you'd like to see more from Dan please visit him at www.flyingfarmboy.com and www.danielboerman.authorweblog.com.
The Flying Farm Boy can be purchased at www.winepresspublishing.com and Amazon.
