ŷ������

This novel reveals The Source of the fractious and long-standing Mideast Conflict.

Sounds like a great book to mull over, doesn't it?

It is.

But I, when I read most of it -

In 1967, after my Dad dropped me off at the Canadian civil service swimming pool, the brainchild of the Ottawa RA Centre -

Was so "distracted to distraction by distraction" by the self-conscious faces of my fellow teens that I didn’t see I’d shifted into third gear.

My mind raced while reading. For I had suddenly TRANCENDED my self-consciousness through my BOOKS. That day, though Dad had tried to extrovert me, he had failed.

I was now a “loner.�� Heaven help me!

For it so happened that I had to soon after be admitted to a Funny Farm, so asocial had I grown!

Yet, these books I read, I loved. And Michener's was no exception.
***

The sun was glaring hot, and baked my teenaged hide, sitting at the RA pool and staring absently at other teens looking up to see if they were being looked at.

Remember T.S. Eliot? “They had the look of things that are looked at�� - teen angst in poetry. Coming of age.

Ah youth, as Marlowe chortled!

Yes, Joseph Conrad - you were right. Our youth is wasted on the too-young.

And even I -

With a vastly entertaining book like The Source, one of James Michener's masterworks -

Was as totally bored as only the other absent, blase and nincompoopish too-young can be. Turning into a Mr. Hyde a little too fast!
***

For as the nurses in my friendly neighbourhood psych ward were to abjure me two years later -

"I was NOT living in the Real World -

I had one whole Hockeysock fulla growing up left to do!��

And man oh man were they RIGHT on both counts!

I had yet to learn how to LIVE.

But now, sixty years later -

I have finally got pills that help me downshift my teeming brain -

So all’s well that ends well...

On my good days.