On The Road -Years Later

                           

      If I were to choose my all time favorite book I might say On The Road by Jack Kerouac.  I was seventeen when I first read it and it was suggested by Marty Cohen, a young man who I had recently met when he took over the Jack and Jill Ice Cream truck route in my neighborhood. The first day he showed up, I was probably sitting on the front steps reading a book, since reading was my favorite past time for a large part of my life.
     I had grown up reading from a young age. My Dad taught me letter sounds and how to put them together to make words before I started first grade, and I think I had my first library card by the age of six or seven. I read most all of the Nancy Drew books and graduated to more grown-up detective stories as I got older. So as I said, I was probably reading a book when Marty and I first met. He was an English major at Temple University in Philadelphia and I was about to enter my senior year of high school in my home town outside of Philadelphia. We got to talking over the summer and he recommended a few of his favorite reads such as The Blackboard Jungle and Johnny Got His Gun which I read and which introduced me to literature outside of the detective genre.
     On The Road however, was exciting to me on so many levels. Kerouac's free-flowing style of writing was something new to me, his characters and adventures carried me way beyond the world I had lived in to that point.  The flow of conversation, music, road trips, love-making, and poetry went on and on. I had been born in and lived in a mostly Italian working class neighborhood and had no inkling of going beyond my small town. The idea of just heading out on the road with no plan, itinerary or schedule was beyond my way of thinking. And I loved it!  The following year I graduated from high school just in time for Woodstock and the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Fortunately I survived with some happy memories of good times and not too many negative effects.
     It has probably been decades since I last reread it,  but I came across a copy at a used book sale a while back. I was going to give it to my son to read, but didn't because he has some trouble getting into actually reading books because of an eye problem, though he can skim over internet stories for hours at times. The other reason though was I don't think that I wanted him to realize that Mom had her wild side that grew out of reading this homage to the Beat Generation.
     Nowadays, many years and hundreds if not thousands of books later, I still have to smile when I think about On The Road. It was like opening the door to a new world. Maybe that's why the other story I think of as a favorite is Stephen King"s Dark Tower series. But that's a story for another day.