Why Wanderers Are

In short, this is the story of points of view. Daily problems, sometime problems, family problems, calamities, upheavals, and world wars have their participants: viewers, actors, reactors; each have a point of view. Each point of view is a puzzle piece. Just as a jigsaw puzzle dumped out on a card table seems meaningless until the pieces are considered, sorted and pieced together, an understanding of real life may seem meaningless without the consideration, sorting and piecing of the many points of view available.

It’s Waco; naked feet are still dancing on summertime sidewalks, skipping across molten, macadam streets. A rusty Radio Flyer is rattling it’s valuable soda water bottles—bouncing across sidewalk cracks, threatening to abandon ship. Crim’s Corner Grocery is the final destination. Rainbo is Good Bread—stretching metallically and diagonally across the screening—is a part of the door screen; it bounces and vibrates, jars and shudders; brother and sister enter. In that dark and cool store—Big Chief tablets live in harmony with Campbell Soups—all neighborhood gossip is relished, then shared. 

An imagination can go anywhere. But can it answer a little girl’ s questions? 

When you’re a child like Sissy, life is as simple as an old jelly jar and a lightening bug glowing through the glass. It is a state of foreverness—for the time being. Why Wanderers Are is a wending road map of that journey through time and understanding. The backdrops are those years before, during and after World War II. The book addresses events and their interstices—the life of ordinary people seeking to prevail, adjust and endeavoring to move on. 

It is a nomad life Sissy is living and she wonders why. Why do some people stay and some people go? What are the rules? Are there rules? Her mother is attempting to parent, protect and provide a living for her and her brother. She seems to always be leaving. But it wasn’t always so. Sissy just knows if she finds the puzzle pieces, lays out all the straight edges, matches the colors, and puts it together, she’ll know why. The pieces are a mosaic of love, deceit, war, loyalty and atonement. Each piece reflects a memory, real and imagined, an event caught in the limiting nether-place memory of the picket fence. 

Sissy takes on the role of kid, adult, narrator, guide, imaginer of another time and dilettante; but she is not the main character; she is director. The roadmap, time, is the main character. Each character represents a different perspective, a puzzle piece, she is sorting—finding straight edges, curves, colors and shadows—fitting it together to see a father she never really knew and a time barely experienced except through gauzy memories and those remembered by others. 

And it all hangs on words—symbols of experience, some communal, some personal—our road signs, pointing out directions, all looking for meaning and that treasure under the spot marked with an X.