Second Page: I Am the Cheese

I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts, on my way to Rutterburg, Vermont, and I'm pedaling furiously because this is an old-fashioned bike, no speeds, no fenders, only the warped tires and the brakes that don't always work and the handlebars with cracked rubber grips to steer with. A plain bike -- the kind my father rode as a kid years ago. It's cold as I pedal along, the wind like a snake sliterhing up my sleeves and into my jacket and my pants legs, too. But I keep pedaling, I keep pedaling.

This is Mechanic Street in Monument, and to my right, high above on a hill, there's a hospital and I glance up at the place and I think of my father in Rutterburg, Vermont, and my pedaling accelerates. It's ten o'clock in the morning and it is October, not a Thomas Wolfe October of burning leaves and ghost winds but a rotten October, dreary, cold, and damp with little sun and no warmth at all. Nobody reads Thomas Wolfe anymore, I guess, except my father and me. I did a book report on The Web and the Rock and...

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Robert Cormier may be best known for his acclaimed (and often-challenged) book for teenagers The Chocolate War. This book, I Am the Cheese, was probably the third book of his that I read. Part character study, part mystery, it's the story of a boy riding a bike on a search for his father and answers about his past. After I first read it, I left it on a shelf at work. Our caretaker admitted a few days later that she'd seen it there, picked it up, and read a huge chunk of it right then and there. She'd finished it within a day or two.

In 1997, three years before Cormier's death, I Am the Cheese received the Phoenix Award. This award, presented by the Children's Literature Association, is given to a book published 20 years previously which was "overlooked" for major awards at the time of its release. (Quite an interesting concept for an award, I must say, and one I quite like.)

I'm due for a re-read.