What Makes a Child Lucky

Years ago, Alane Mason introduced me to Gioia Timpanelli, through her exquisite Sometimes the Soul. A few days after Christmas this year, a package, wrapped in pink, showed up at my door. Another gift from Alane—Gioia's newest, signed. What Makes a Child Lucky.

This is the slim volume I read early yesterday morning while the sun rose over the kicked-up ocean and the wind blew the gulls from from green-slicked rock to rock. A perfect book in that it is an ageless book, timeless, too (the two not being the same thing at all, I realized, as I read on and through). Lucky is the story of a boy whose best friend is murdered by the very gang of thugs who soon absorb the boy into their strange circle. The setting is rural Sicily. The hills are ripe but also lonely. There is a shepherdess who tends her flock and then there's Immaculata, the old woman who keeps the boy alive amidst the murderers and kidnappers. She teaches him to cook and to hunt for wild asparagus. She whispers a saving grace into her ear and teaches him the meaning of compassion.

Lucky feels like fable, except that it's so immaculately told. It is saturated with the patient knowing Gioia has marked out as her own. "A great poet said that we make all art from memory and hope," her narrator says toward the end. "Memory is a funny companion. I myself love and trust it. And hope? It is stranger still. Both qualities are essential in my everyday life, as essential as seeing that thin red bird that stitches the high branches of a fir tree with its flight."

Joseph, who tells his story after he's grown up, reminded me of the children I met in the squatter's village of Juarez a few years ago. Of this boy, pictured here, who had nothing but his own great happiness and a borrowed baseball cap, and who would not be defeated.