O The Clear Moment (Paperback)

If "memoirabilia" were a word, it would perfectly describe O the Clear Moment. In this enormously appealing "implied autobiography," Ed McClanahan has assembled a gathering of what he calls "coming-of-age to coming-of-old-age" stories that are both quirky and cutting, hilarious and lyrical, all told in the inimitable voice of one of his generation's best southern chroniclers of American life. McClanahan launches his tale in 1950, the year he turned seventeen and had his "Personal Best Great Moment"--one that involved Lucky Strikes, a Tony Curtis forelock, a pretty girl named Bernice, a pair of Kentucky high school basketball hotshots named Bobby One and Bobby Two, and several raw eggs. From there, McClanahan is off and running, describing characters from his eventful life with affectionate and precise detail. There's the summer he spends on a road crew in Yosemite National Park, striving (with ever-decreasing degrees of success) to be faithful to his college sweetheart back home. There's the 1969 "peace" demonstration at Stanford University that was less a revolution than a traffic jam. There's the McClanavan--the '68 VW Microbus that took McClanahan and his new bride on a 14,000-mile trek in search of honky-tonks--and the "old white whale" of a '65 Chevy van named Moldy Dick that helped to bring them home again. Like "escapees from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post," McClanahan and his stories come alive as American souvenirs, enchanting readers with his signature prose the Cleveland Plain Dealer says has a "bittersweet, almost wistful current trickling just beneath the surface . . . adding texture, continuity, and poignancy to his reminiscences without diminishing their gentlyhumorous gifts."