Next thing Macon knows, he's living alone, and he can't summon the courage to grocery shop one more time, by himself. Macon and Sarah have been together for twenty years, and they've had their issues, as all couples do, but the pressure cooker of having their only child murdered blasts both of them out of their daily orbit.įrom this time on I can never be completely happy. Macon, the “picker of buttercups,” is abandoned by his wife, Sarah, when the depression of losing her only child sends her packing. This time I saw Macon Leary as one of the quirkiest, most sympathetic characters in all of American literature, and I was fascinated by him. Ten years later, I am no less concerned about something bad happening to one of my children, but I had a totally different response to this story, and I thought of this poem throughout this read. As a mother of an adolescent son and a toddler daughter at the time, I could only think of the nightmarish loss that Macon Leary and his wife, Sarah, suffer when a lone gunman kills their 12-year-old son, Ethan, in a restaurant. The first time I read this novel, about 10 years ago, I didn't think of this poem. There's an EE Cummings poem that goes like this:
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