Just when the Leary siblings believe that they can hunker down in their home of origin and mentally time travel back to a simpler time, Macon's dog Edward decides to bite someone. if people didn't adjust, how could they bear to go on? The four Leary siblings quickly settle into a comfortable daily pattern and no one discusses Macon's dead son or his wife's recent abandonment anymore. He thinks it can't get any worse (never think that), but then he falls in the basement and breaks his leg, which sends him back to his family of origin: a household of two quirky divorced brothers and an “old maid” sister who never married. fled from me, I don't know, I've lost them, I'm left standing here saying, 'Where'd they go? Where is everybody? Oh, God, what did I do that was so bad?'”

I'm all alone it's just me it seems everybody's just. In a scene that nearly broke me, he calls the store to have the groceries delivered and ends up breaking down and telling a stranger on the phone: 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:

Author of the accidental tourist