Cracked Window

On the radio, Garrison Keillor says writer Charles Webb turns sixty-nine today. Webb wrote The Graduate, the book on which the 1967 movie was based. News to me is Webb’s sequel, published in January.

A little research shows Home School is a sequel in name only. Not worth reading, not worth risking the original story losing its special status. Good stories end; finality keeps them very much alive.

My first encounter with The Graduate was the movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Katherine Ross as Elaine Robinson. I didn’t read the book until I had seen the movie five times — the first with guy friends, the last four alone — before graduating from high school in 1968.

I imagined myself as Benjamin after his affair with Elaine’s mother, Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs. Robinson. I loved his Alfa Romeo sports car, the way he drove it balls-to-the-wall, how good he looked unshaven and disheveled, how he questioned his advantaged life, how he did whatever it took against impossible odds to win Elaine’s heart from the superficial, pretty-boy college guy.

I wanted to be Benjamin the intellectually gifted outsider, the rebel whose persona exuded a secret charm that attracted girls like Elaine. At Winter Park High in Florida, such girls were my friends but beyond my romantic reach.

How strange to stumble upon photos of my childhood house of the 1960s on a movie web site. I was searching Google images for a picture of Lake Sybelia in Maitland, Florida. Once a quaint hamlet of citrus trees and lakes, Maitland was long ago consumed by the tourist monster that ate Orlando. During my search, up popped the house — white columns, veranda, and canopy of live oaks — under siege by a phalanx of movie cameras and crew.

Interlopers! was my first thought, irrational given that my family rented the house and moved out thirty-eight years ago. Then the movie title tugged at me: The Way Back Home.