Offering a vivid portrayal of time and place, Breakfast at Mema's shares a collection of author Van Carroll Temple's boyhood adventures. The humorous, poignant stories hail from the '60s in Ruston, a small college town nestled in the tree-covered hills of north Louisiana.
In Southern storytelling style, the interconnected vignettes portray a unique time and place when Temple's world was the outdoors and the landline telephone was the only personal communication device. His parents taught him and his siblings to treat others as they'd like to be treated and then set them free to figure out the rest. He shares how his days were packed with play and work--climbing trees, riding bikes, working in the garden, poking around in the woods, hunting, fishing, mowing yards, Boy Scout outings, reading books, and girls.
This collection narrates how assassinations, abortions, and Vietnam interrupted the idyllic life, revealing a bigger, more complicated world and signaling the beginning of childhood's end.
Praise for Breakfast at Mema's
"... Van Temple's gentle memoir, Breakfast at Mema's, serves up a bit of indulgent nostalgia. But, there's so much more. At first blush, the stories are a potpourri of childhood vignettes--more Andy of Mayberry than the edgier tell-all stories of dysfunction we have more or less come to expect. They progress, not unexpectedly, up to and over the precipice of a few of those moments that signaled for each of us the 'end' of childhood. ..."
--Nancy McBride, Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Alexandria, Virginia