Book Review: The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise by Robert Norris

The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise, Pentimento Memories of Mom and Me by Robert Norris is a book that makes me celebrate yet again how memoir has risen to today’s heights! The preface opens on January 11, 2021, the author’s seventieth birthday. A world away, his mother lies comatose and a few days later, the long, tender mother/son-separate life paths but unbreakable bond comes to a close. Four days short of her ninety-fifth birthday, Catherine Caroline (Murphy) Schlinkman peacefully passes from this life.

Katherine (Kay’s) son, Robert, an expatriate and permanent resident of Japan for several decades, writes her obituary. His brief but detailed overview lays good groundwork for our later search for the pentimento memories he references in his title.

In Book 1, we travel back to 1880, the birth of Kay’s grandfather on her mother’s side. Here is where Kay began gathering the priceless generational stories she loved (and we read in her own dialect) and telling them to her family. We see how the families functioned and grew. Generations moved from Union County, PA to Minnesota to North Dakota to White Salmon, WA, where Kay was born. She and Bill Norris, her husband-to-be, also attended high school there, and they eventually married. 

Their second child, Robert’s early memories are foggy until he is five and living in Jacoby Creek, Arcata, CA. The vibrant Chapter 5, “My Own Jacoby Creek,” holds his cherished memories of fishing with his dad in the creek; Dad building their house; Mom gardening avidly.

Norris is a dreamer who avidly explores the abundant, gorgeous trees that surround him. He thrives on the beautiful natural community he experiences with his friends and family. His deep curiosity and endless questions about all aspects of life are wondrous. He asks, for example, “How can God have always existed? Why do I have to say 10 Hail Mary’s instead of 5, to excuse myself to God?” We delight in his obsession with playing baseball, playing it, following it both locally and nationally. All his life, he will participate in baseball whenever, wherever, and however he can. 

By the age of 10, Robert’s pages become vibrantly filled with rich, sensory detail.

This joyful world of mine … Dad’s sawmill out in the Arcata lowlands … nearly all my friends’ fathers work in the woods and sawmills … I love this world and its alliance of community … love the November smoke that emanates from the fireplaces of Jacoby Creek … the smell of freshly mown lawns … the April bees buzzing from flower to flower to gather their pollen … the wild and terrifying winter rain that unleashes storms of unyielding power … the winter flooding of the creek … the fresh green of the countryside after a spring storm … the crackling of a winter fire … the darkness that prowls softly through the silence of the forest at night … the earthy fragrance of  trees, the grass and flowers on the April day I lay stretched out, head cupped in my hands, chewing on a blade of grass, surveying the stretch and sweep of this very special world.  

Not long afterward, though, a spring day arrived when Kay and Bill Norris told their three children they were divorcing. The world fell apart for the family. Bill would re-marry soon and Kay the following year. Their oldest child, Dick, decided he’d live with his father and new family. Robert and his sister, Terri, spent time with each parent. In time, Norris felt he didn’t belong to either home. Soon after graduation he longed to leave Arcata.

He and his best friend talked with an Air Force recruiter, who “promised them the world.” He could not have dreamed this moment would mark the beginning of his mother/son-separate life paths-unbreakable bond. Nor could Robert have imagined he would eventually be ordered to Vietnam. When he received those orders, he told the Air Force he was a man who could not kill others, was court martialed, and imprisoned. His decision forever changed the promising course of his young life. 

The remainder of this memoir, in Book 2, follows Norris’ journey until today. We walk with the intelligent, sometimes low but never broken man starting over to create a life according to his core beliefs. He works incredibly long and hard. Occasionally he stumbles, yet perseveres to find his place in our huge world. His dream is to be a writer and become the authentic man he seeks.  

Wholeheartedly, I recommend The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise, Pentimento Memories of Mom and Me. The story of a mother/son-separate life paths-unbreakable bond is exceptional and the writing is riveting, holding the reader throughout. The main characters are richly developed as is the moving impact of and wisdom gained from the memoir. And, most especially, the greatest gift of the everlasting tenacity of family bonds.