Along the Frontage Road
It is often said that grief is a funny thing. Sometimes grief makes us notice things that would normally escape our attention, or it makes us view normal, everyday things with a new perspective. Sometimes this perspective is not necessarily pleasant. As in Michael Chabon’s short story, “Along the Frontage Road,” the main character assumes a morose view of the
world after the death of his seventeen week old daughter. His gloomy outlook forms a significant theme throughout his story. He now sees the world as it is, without being biased by how it was when he was a boy. Furthermore, his
childhood view of the world serves to darken his already murky impression of
life. He sees that modern day life has become more deformed than that of his childhood. The world, it seemed to him, had lost its innocence somewhere in between.
Now the
days of authentic
pumpkin patches were gone. The undesirable city had driven them out, along with beautiful farms and orchards. The country gave its life for despised stretches of ugly, dirty highway that become a home for seasonal pumpkin and Christmas tree sales for only three months out of the year. All this has the feeling of something hypocritical.
Added to traditional fall decorations were touches of a sinister world. To the bales of hay were added rubber snake-filled skulls. To the scarecrow was added a “Friday the 13th-style goalie’s mask” (276). The
speaker then goes on to say that “… in the orchards of my youth it would never have occurred to anyone to employ a serial-killer motif as a means of selling Halloween pumpkins to children” (276). Such an occurrence would have been held in contempt earlier in the man’s existence.
Perhaps the most apparent example of the depravity in our world is that of Andre and his father. Drugs were not a common problem during the days of the speaker’s childhood. They were nearly unheard of. The speaker does not even immediately recognize the otherwise abnormal actions of the father. It is later only upon visible evidence that the identity of the black man is discovered.
Also, the speaker recognizes the horrible relationship between Andre and his father. All Andre ever received was ill treatment. Andre was expected to obey and to be nearly invisible. The very act of asking for a pumpkin was met with incredulous anger. Rarely would broken relationships like these be acceptable in earlier years where family ties were much stronger.
The speaker sees the world as objectionable. He laments that the smell of cut grass “only intensified my sense of having borne my son into a base and diminished world” (276). He wished that he could take his son back to days in his childhood that were devoid of the blackness of our world. It is not that he feels that the world cannot be trusted, but “sometimes I do feel that very implication lodged like a chip of black ice in my heart” (275) and perhaps the chip finds an easy mark because every loving father trusts that his child will long outlive him. Rather, he desired that his son did not have to take on such a life full of darkness. He wanted the world to regain some of the trustworthiness and innocence that it had once bestowed upon its inhabitants. Even the speaker’s son, in his own way, wished for a certain element of innocence to be restored to the world. He fought desperately to keep his pumpkin in one piece because it reminded him of Kate. Maybe it was that he realized that many children are not given a chance to live. Kate had been one of those children. Quite possibly he thought that he was doing his part to preserve at least a part of her memory or presence.
Because of what the speaker saw with his grief imposed pessimistic outlook, we wield a sense of loss, not just for Kate, but maybe more so for the way things used to be.
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