The Boy and the Big White Rock

The story I'm about to tell isn't just about a boy who grew up from the second grade through the eleventh grade in the lap of comfort in a large home on an inspiring 84-acre estate in upstate New York being forced in his senior year of school to move with his parents and two siblings 788 miles away sleeping on five canvas cots in a small one room apartment in the poorer lower east side of Milwaukee Wisconsin. It happened in 1957 but while my candle still burns, there are two persons of character, my mother and my father and what I've grown up thinking was a dark circumstance I found myself in my senior year in high school. A situation I've felt had deeply affected my life. I only recently discovered I've had the facts of what had happened and the circumstances that surrounded them wrong all these many years. I've learned what really happened to my parents at the time-not to me or my brothers but to my parents-and what my parents chose to do about it-how they kept it to themselves. I'd be remiss if I didn't put pen to the story while my candle glows. I ask your patience in my early year preface and buildup-the story I want to tell began unraveling when I was fifteen years old-sixty-eight years before I started to write the sentence you're reading now. It has taken a large wedge of my lifetime to discover the truth, its meaning to my parent's legacies and how it will forever change what I've grown old wrongfully remembering as a traumatic, unhappy ending for my parents oh so many years ago. I'm a writer because of my parent's examples and guidance and I'm blessed that I can take newly discovered truths and weave them into a heartwarming nonfiction, a final tapestry my parents deserve-I promise every word of my story is true. I'll take that risk.

KIRKUS REVIEW SAYS:

The seventh of eight children, Antil enjoyed an idyllic upbringing surrounded by the hills and waterfalls of Central New York. Jutting from a nearby cliff that overlooked the property was the eponymous big white rock, where the young Antil would sit and think about the world and his life, reflecting on events from the eruption of a new war in Korea to a satisfying and profitable day of selling hot dogs with a friend. His childhood was characterized in part by the schemes of his father, a commercial bakery owner, which included building a bomb shelter to protect the family during the height of the Cold War. ("My father's plan was that the flat roof of the bomb shelter would serve as a sun deck off the living room, as if it would mask the structure's hidden agenda, its fictional purpose of withstanding a hydrogen bomb blast.") His senior year saw him switching schools and sleeping on a cot above a partially constructed ice cream parlor in Syracuse-one of his father's failed business ventures. With humor and a great sense of time and place, Antil spins stories of his coming of age in this unlikely setting.

The author has a novelistic sense of detail, writing of his family members in a way that makes them seem slightly larger than life: "My father's entrance coming in the house and into the light of the dining room was as matter-of-fact as a ship's captain... The narrative is episodic, offering short vignettes that range from the incidental to the comic to the unexpectedly poignant. Together, these anecdotes perhaps don't amount to quite enough to engage an audience with no connection to the author's previous books or to the Central New York region. Even so, there are many wonderful moments here that capture not only America at mid-century but also an off-beat family whose way of life, for better or for worse, feels quite remote from the present day.