An American Childhood: Epilogue Summary & Analysis

Dillard notes that a dream is not much more than its setting: someone is climbing into a ship carrying a baby, or lying on tree branches in an alley, or dancing in a darkened ballroom. The setting of our lives, she says, is a maze: one by one we learn its corridors, without remembering how they connect.

Dillard describes one setting, of a car trip into the mountains in September. The mountain curves away and you walk toward the ridge, she writes: you might then pause to notice that you’re living, and imagine a map and locate this mountain ridge on it, in which a dot would represent you. You might wonder what happened to the other “dots” that made up your life, swimming in the river, swinging a bat, being kissed, stepping into a warm field.

Dillard moves from the impersonal “you” back to the first person to admit that she does wonder. But she doesn’t want to focus on her personal trajectory. Instead she says that what’s important is for any person to awaken and discover a place, to find the globe already spinning before his or her eyes. She returns to describing the imagined mountain slope, and broaches another problem: “you” might have different, disparate memories, but no proof that all those memories belong to the same person. “You” have to just trust that all these memories are set in the same, wider world. All of your cells have been replaced in the meantime, she says, as well as most of your feelings, except for two: one of lowering your foot into a hot bath, and the other of the subsequent sensation: noticing that you’re here.

Dillard compares the many different places the reader might be reading this book with the setting where she’s writing it, at a wide desk in a pine shed with young oaks growing outside. Lost in the past, she imagines her own mother, still young and energetic, approaching Annie to bring her back to when she was young. Then she reminds herself that she is here, now, with her own family: she goes back and forth from this awareness many times a day.

Dillard briefly characterizes her childhood: Pittsburgh in the 1950s, in a household of comedians, a childhood filled with books. Perhaps it was because her father left to go down the Ohio River one day that Annie always equated living with leaving, she thinks. She recalls Mother persuading Father to perform or “do” Goofus, an old pantomime routine about a farm boy, grinning stupidly in his character.

Father instructed the children that true American culture was Dixieland, and then jazz. It was a culture of the stock market crash and the Depression and Dust Bowl, all because businessmen realized all at once that paper money was only paper. Of course, Annie thought, as her father explained it to her. She describes other things that “meant” America, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Chrysler Building, the Chicago World’s Fair to the Erie Canal, and especially the wanderers like Daniel Boone and Johnny Appleseed.

They danced a lot in Annie’s house, and Father always reminded the children of a line in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, when the narrator was dancing in a Mexican bar and said this was the only time he ever got to hear the music loud enough. Annie was speeding up, getting ready to leave. She drove up and down the highways and over the Pittsburgh bridges. She wrote poems and played piano fast, listened to jazz and wondered if, in New Orleans, the music would be loud enough.