Weeds in Bloom: Autobiography of an Ordinary Man (review)

In one vignette of the twenty-eight that make up this autobiography, Peck tells how he bought all seven quilts an elderly woman had for sale, so as not to break up what she saw as a family of warm, lovingly constructed blankets that belonged together. Such is the connected feeling of this picturesque collection of character sketches, an homage to the plain folk who have shaped Peck's life journey. "You shall know me by the people I have known," Peck says in his prologue, by way of explaining the shape of this seemingly shapeless assembly of stories, each one telling in its own right. The stories are divided into three sections: Vermont Boyhood, Early Manhood, and Florida Years. They tell of Peck's experiences as a boy who loved baseball, who gathered up coal that a fireman threw from his train while the engineer wasn't looking, who wrote poems about simple things and horrible things, who worked in a sawmill and a paper mill, who was a friend to a homeless boy. They tell of the people Peck met in the army and in his research in the Florida swamps; there are stories of good dogs, and of encounters made possible by virtue of Peck's unprejudiced approach to all kinds of folk. This is not an action-packed thriller, nor a traditional author's account of how he came to be a writer and how each experience found its way into a book; it definitely has a nostalgic and sentimental air, and adults may warm to it more quickly than young readers. Rather, it is a book written by a man whose best friend was Fred Rogers and who clearly shares his gentle sense of wonder at the world and the people in it, a book that savors the flavor of hard-working Americana.