Book World: Eighty years of memories that will stir readers’ own

Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility By Roger Rosenblatt Turtle Point. 98 pp. $ 15.95 - - - When Roger Rosenblatt was 3 years old, he wandered away from home, and his parents had to call the police to fi nd him.

“How long I walked I cannot say,” he writes of his sojourn on a beach in Cape Cod. “But after a while I heard the police car siren behind me.” Little Roger was unrepentant. He greeted them with a smile on his face and a dead horseshoe crab dangling from his hand.

“You can’t just wander off without telling us,” his father said.

“We were scared to death,” his mother said.

I read this and paused as a longago memory started poking and prodding for my attention. This is one of the gifts of Rosenblatt’s book “Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility.” It provokes reader participation.

In his deceptively short book, the celebrated author and essayist takes us on a tour of his “weathered mind” at age 80. He eschews chapters for a series of written snapshots. Some are short essays, but many are streams of fragments - often barely a word or two, all of them deftly arranged and fl uttering about. They are more than enough to stir things up. His memories of his life summon ours, without warning or apology. Line by line, he helps us fi nd softer landings.

When I read about his wandering the beach at age 3, I thought of one of my mother’s memories, recounted to me throughout my life. One cool, sunny day before I could walk, I went missing in my greataunt’s home, where my 20- yearold parents lived for the fi rst few months after their elopement fi ve months before my birth. The three adults repeatedly shouted my name as they frantically searched the house, until my father looked out the front window. There I was, sitting in the grass, smiling upward for no reason they could discern.

Every time my mother told that story, her voice rose to the timber of parental pride. “We never fi gured out how you got out there. You didn’t look the least bit scared or surprised when we found you. You just smiled and reached up for me.” I haven’t heard that story in my mother’s voice for more than 20 years. Rosenblatt invited her back for just a moment, and this time I heard the story of how I was capable of magic.

The Cold Moon, Rosenblatt explains at the onset, is the last moon before the winter solstice, a fi tting metaphor as he embraces “the coming of my wintertime of life.” His life, like all lives, has known its share of upending experiences, but he is now certain of three things: “I believe in life. I believe in love. I believe we are responsible for each other.”

Off we go, to explore his reasons why. “Wipe the tears from your face, see the moonlight, and rise,” he writes. “No need for a stairway. Hold on to your soul. One shot of courage and we’re climbing.”

Rosenblatt’s mood pivots and leaps as his imagination “ruffl es the mind.” He writes of the beetles that save mimosa trees in Houston, his daughter’s death at age 38 and greeting “small nervous birds” in walks along the sea. He marvels at the “ingenious geniuses” of both Shakespeare and the creator of the cluster bomb, and pivots again, to an unnamed “you” sitting with him for breakfast at a diner.

“You looked at our fi ftysomething Latina waitress, with her morning smile competing with her exhausted eyes, and then at me. ‘ Do we have a hundred dollars to leave her for a tip?’ you said. And when our waitress could not believe what we did and kept looking alternately at the money and at us and you said, ‘ A New Year’s gift’ to remove the sting of charity from the gesture.”

Stay with him. He watches four homeless men at the village dump setting fi re to a pile of prosthetic legs “for warmth - and s’mores.” Eight pages later, we’re in the segregated “Coloreds” car of a longago train, where the Dixieland Five band members sleep, their instruments piled in the aisle “in a great slag hill, like possessions taken from prisoners.”