Tag Archives: robert mccammon

rocket, my screen-printed bike

bike

“Seems to me,” the Lady said, “a boy’s bicycle needs to see where it’s goin’. Needs to see whether there’s a clear road or trouble ahead. Seems to me a boy’s bicycle needs some horse in it, and some deer, and maybe even a touch of reptile. For cleverness, don’t you know?”

In Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, our hero Cory gets a brand new bike.

This isn’t just any bike. This bike is from The Lady. It’s brand new and made just for him. It’s red and had a headlight, and in the headlight it has an eye that looks out for Cory. It steers him away from danger and helps him get to adventure–fast.

“At this instant I felt at one with Rocket, as if we were of the same skin and grease, and when I grinned, a bug flew into my teeth. I didn’t care; I swallowed it because I was invincible.”

So in tribute to a book I loved, and in tribute to Rocket, a bike I wish I had, I made my own. Sort of. Mine’s a bit more two dimensional.

screen printing stencil

I started with a stencil. I traced and drew and doodled until I had a bike I liked. Then I traced it onto a transparency and used a craft knife/box cutter thing to cut out my stencil.

Continue reading “rocket, my screen-printed bike”

miss blue glass and miss green glass

In Boy’s Life, which I totally loved, two sisters named Sonia and Katherina Glass were almost perfect mirror images of each other–except one always wore blue and the other green.

Now that is style. They adopted a uniform, dressed as themselves, and went with it. Plus monochrome can really be a great look. I don’t own enough of one color (except black) to pull off monochrome looks very often–and I have a pretty strong aversion to matching. But in honor of Miss Blue Glass and Miss Green Glass, let’s take a look at some killer blue and green clothes and accessories we could wear in our own lives.

blue

blueaccessories

I’m really into blue. It’s one of my favorite colors and I just think it’s beautiful–like the ocean and sky. Plus blue jeans are blue, so you’ve got that going for you. But I was surprised at how much I liked these greens.

green

green accessories

Gorgeous, right? Emerald and mint are really growing on me. Maybe soon I’ll give up mismatching for one day and pick a color and stick with it.

boy’s life by robert mccammon

boy's life by robert mccammon

Last week, when I was walking to work, I saw people putting leaves on trees. There was someone on a ladder, someone in a raised platform, and someone on the ground, and they were all using wire to put fake leaves on a tree that had none.

When Cory, the narrator in Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon (Kindle here), is riding on a train with a man who looks suspiciously like Frankenstein’s monster, Cory thinks, “Were these three insane, or was I?”

That’s how I felt.

Cory lives in the small town of Zephyr, Alabama, in the 1960s, and he tells the story of the year he turns 13. His town is full of wonderful absurdities, his adventures are plentiful, and his love for his family and friends is strong and true.

I love a lot of things about this book. But the thing I love most is Cory’s voice. A lot of books use children narrators–children can ignore danger and logic in a way that adults can’t–but adult attitudes, vocabularies, and thoughts tend to sneak through. Cory’s voice is consistently strong and interesting, and he tells stories the way kids see them: big and real and exaggerated and in your face. “Writer? Author? Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be,” Cory says. And a storyteller he is.Continue reading “boy’s life by robert mccammon”