THE INCIDENT IN THE NIGHT

I see by the Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, a site I check every morning, that today is the birthday of John Steinbeck.  That struck a chord in my writing self.  Steinbeck, usually named when I’m asked as my favorite author, was the first author whose full set of novels I read.  I was lucky in that my parents had most of them on their shelves.

 

Strange as it may seem, the scene I remember most from all I read was one from either Cannery Row or Sweet Thursday.  They are one narrative in my mind, and they are my favorite works of his, perhaps because of the following anecdote.

There on Cannery Row, in a Depression era contest to bring some amusement to an otherwise unamusing time, a man is trying to set a record for flag-pole sitting.  Something about the whole thing was bothering this guy, so in the middle of the night he got up and went out and shouted up to the sitter. The answer was shouted down: “I’ve got a tin can up here.”  You know what the question was, of course.  And for some quirky reason this has stuck in my brain for over fifty years.

As I’ve read other novels since then I’ve often come upon an instance where a character was in, shall we say, a marathon situation.  Often I’ve thought about the incident in the night on Cannery Row. Only rarely has the author satisfied my curiosity, and rarely as well as Steinbeck. I just thought you’d like to know that.