The Secret Lion

“When a person had all these teachers now, he didn’t get taken care of in the same way, even though six was more than one.”

Transitioning to having a different teacher for each topic is difficult for the narrator. The irony is that one would expect more teachers to mean more oversight, but since each teacher sees him for less time, the narrator feels neglected. He does not feel ready to be left to his own devices in this way, and he resists the change.

“We would yell this stuff over and over because it felt good, we couldn’t explain why, it just felt good and for the first time in our lives there was nobody to tell us we couldn’t.”

One of the narrator’s key complaints in junior high is that he can’t ask questions like he used to, even as things around him constantly change. Going to the arroyo is the boys’ “solution” to these frustrations, as it is strongly tied to both their boyhood and their friendship. It is an escape from an adolescence and a place in which the boys do not need to “explain” themselves to be understood, relying instead on The Bond of Shared Experience.

“We had this perception about nature then, that nature was imperfect and that round things are perfect.”

When the boys find the grinder ball, its roundness fascinates them. It starkly contrasts with their anxieties about growing up and changing, which seem “imperfect” natural processes. This episode ultimately juxtaposes the natural course of time with the “perfection” of memory. The boys work to preserve the grinder ball but find they can only do so in memory, and then only until that fades.

“We knew because of a lot of things, that if we were going to take this and show it to anybody, this discovery, this best thing, was going to be taken away from us. That’s the way it works with little kids, like all the polished quartz, the tons of it we had collected piece by piece over the years.”

The narrator and Sergio are desperate to keep the grinder ball a secret because they fear they will lose it, much like their youthful innocence. Unable to express this directly, the narrator compares the imagined loss to his experiences of rock collecting. Someone or something (probably the narrator’s mother, given his fears about the ball) took away all of those beautiful rocks, and the narrator wants to avoid a repetition of this with the ball.

“The ball was gone, like the first reasons we had come to the arroyo years earlier, like the first time we had seen the arroyo, it was gone like everything else that had been taken away.”

The narrator leads the reader into the framed story, connecting the disappearance of the grinder ball to learning about the golf course. The thematic connection lies in the narrator’s disillusionment: In both instances, he mourns an innocence that vanishes as one grows up and experiences the world.

“Nature seemed to keep pushing around one way or another, teaching us the same thing every place we ended up. Nature’s gang was tough that way, teaching us stuff.”

In this instance of personification, the narrator compares nature to the leader of a gang. This figurative gang teaches the narrator that the passage of time will continue to take away his youthful innocence. This comparison also works to communicate the narrator’s class status, as gangs mostly exist in lower- or working-class areas.

“We looked across the highway in one direction and there was an arroyo; hills stood up in the other direction. Mountains, for a small man.”

In the framed story, the narrator reflects on his first impressions of his new home’s landscape. He saw the terrain split in half, one side ascending and the other descending. This setting proves symbolically significant following the discovery of the golf course, as the hills visually indicate The Reality of Class Differences.

“So we went swimming that summer and some days we had a lot of fun. Some days we didn’t. We found a thousand ways to explain what happened on those other days, constructing elaborate stories about neighborhood dogs and hadn’t she, my mother, miscalculated her step before too?”

The reader does not get a lot of information about the narrator’s mother but must make inferences based on the narrator’s perceptions of and interactions with her. The mother forbade the boys from going to the arroyo, and they had to sneak back to shower off the sewage waste in order to avoid punishment. This is one of several instances of fraught communication between adults and children.

“That was the first time we stopped going to the arroyo. It taught us to look the other way. We decided, as the second side of summer came, we wanted to go into the mountains. They were still mountains then.”

This first time the boys stop going to the arroyo, it’s because of the sewage waste; though they don’t recognize it, they’re looking for an escape from their class status. The last line highlights how the narrator’s perception changes over time: To a small boy, hills look like mountains. This makes the terrain that much more intriguing and daunting. He feels brave tackling the mountains, but as childhood slips away from him, he learns that the mountains are just hills, paralleling his broader disillusionment.

“Perfect. Heaven was green, like nothing else in Arizona. And it wasn’t a cemetery or like that because we had seen cemeteries and they had gravestones and stuff and this didn’t.”

The boys’ reaction to the golf course highlights their innocence. They know little about the world beyond Arizona, so a well-kept green area seems like either a cemetery or heaven. This moment develops the allusion to the Garden of Eden, which the boys will figuratively be cast out of.

“We got down there, we were laughing, we kept hitting each other, we unpacked our stuff and we were acting ‘rich.’ We knew all about how to do that. Like blowing on our nails, then rubbing them on our chests for a shine.”

The narrator’s ideas about rich people’s behavior illustrate his naivety. He has probably only encountered wealthy people through TV shows and movies, so he adopts the affectations he has seen there, pretending to polish his nails. Though the boys think they know “all about” class, they’re about to learn otherwise.

“Something got taken away from us that moment. Heaven. We grew up a little bit, and couldn’t go backward. We learned.”

This moment encapsulates the boys’ loss of innocence, or symbolic expulsion from Eden. Like Adam and Eve, the narrator learns something he cannot forget. The boys are afterward resigned to the reality of Earth and a little sadder for it.

“The truth is, we didn’t look so hard for it. We were two boys and twelve summers then, and not stupid. Things get taken away.”

Sergio and the narrator’s willingness to let the grinder ball vanish is an acknowledgment that its perfection must remain a memory. The passage also contains a use of synecdoche, defining the narrator’s age in terms of summers—a time of year that suggests youthful freedom.