The title of the book comes from a quote by Wallace Stegner, saved by my father in a folder he called "food for thought."
I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or a rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
Wallace Stegner, THE SPECTATOR BIRD, p. 162
My father passed away in 1994. Here is the editor's note I wrote when I published a paper copy of the book in 1996:
My father, Les Scheaffer, began this
project in the late 1980's after the completion of his book Lutie and Mercy
Ann, A Story of the Lockridge-Gibson Family 1875-1918, an historical
account of the lives of his maternal grandparents. The new book was to be a collection of his
writings about his own life--poems, essays and stories--that focused on his
family, childhood, school and early social work experiences. Some of the pieces had been written as part
of a creative writing class at the College of Marin, others were occasional
pieces and some were created specifically for this project. Two of the stories are about Camp Bovey,
perhaps the greatest achievement of his life.
He once wrote, “But if there was a contest I think I would win: Camp Bovey,
seventeen summers! That was my great
luck and my great love.”
From the earliest years of his life
my father was a saver and keeper of records.
Many of his writings include excerpts from diaries, letters and
notebooks or were inspired by them. In
all the pieces in this book as well as his other creative writing he always had
the support and encouragement of my mother who was his “in house” editor and
critic. Some of the later stories are
about experiences they shared.
Born in 1914 at the beginning of
World War I, my father’s life encompassed the Great Depression, World War II,
the Vietnam War and tumult of the 1960s, moving from the Midwest, to the East
Coast, back to the Midwest and finally to California.
When my father died on May 1, 1994,
he had made the final corrections on most entries but he had not yet begun
assembling the book. That job has fallen
to me. Not knowing exactly how he
planned to organize the book, I have chosen to arrange the pieces
chronologically and by theme. Although I
have listed myself as editor, I have changed as little as possible. I have made a few spelling and punctuation
corrections and, in a few cases, I’ve changed some words for clarity. As far as I could tell he had not yet
selected a title for the book, so I borrowed Shadows on the Wall from
the Wallace Stegner quotation that he had chosen to be part of the book under a
category he called “Food for Thought.”
The “shadows” in this book are vivid and multifaceted and tell us a
great deal about the man that was my father.
We are fortunate that my father had the desire to tell the stories of
his life and that he had the gift of telling them so well. This book is a portrait of what it was like
to grow up in a small Midwestern city in the 1920's and 30's and a glimpse into
the lives of settlement workers just before and during World War II. But that is not why he wrote it. He wrote this book “for the kids” so that we
might know a little of what made him the person he was. For that I am glad.
Caroline
Scheaffer Arnold
October
1996
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