46 pages • 1 hour read
For One More Day
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Morning”
Chapter 3 Summary: "Chick’s Mom"
The chapter begins with Chick’s memories of his childhood. We learn he idolized and emulated his father, and his love of baseball is rooted in his father’s own love of the game. His father, Leonard Benetto, was charismatic and handsome but distant and often demanding. He owned a liquor store, and drove a “sky blue Buick sedan” (20). Chick sees having a closer relationship with his father as “life’s assignment,” as dictated by expectations of him as a boy (20). But his life changed forever on “a hot cloudless Saturday morning in the spring of my fifth-grade year,” when he finds his mother upset and sitting at the kitchen table (21). She tells him his father is not there, but does not tell him where he is: “I was a mama’s boy from that day on,” Chick says (21).
When Chick regains consciousness on the baseball field and sees his mother standing in front of him, apparently alive, he tries to shout to her, but can’t make a sound. When he looks up again, she is gone. He gets up, despite his many injuries, and walks toward his old house, still determined to end his life. The chapter ends with a short, encouraging note that Chick’s mother wrote him on his first day of kindergarten.
Chapter 4 Summary: "How Mother Met Father"
Chick’s mother often wrote him notes, a habit that sometimes mystified him: “anything she had to say, she could have said right then and saved herself the paper and the awful taste of envelope glue” (24). His mother gave him the note from the previous chapter as a way of soothing his anxiety about starting school. For Chick, this episode is characteristic of his mother, who is beautiful, glamorous, but a little disconnected - she gives him a note at a time when he had not yet learned to read: “That was my mother. It was the thought that counted” (24).
We learn Chick’s parents met as teenagers in 1944, at a lake in the town where he grew up, shortly before his father enlisted in the Army. At the end of World War II, Chick’s father proposes to Chick’s mother by letter, and returns home shortly after. Chick remembers his mother as beautiful and well-liked, but frequently scolding him. Chick was fascinated by his father, though his father’s aloof behavior, in retrospect, seems to prefigure the fact that he would leave the family.
His father is an Italian Catholic and his mother is a French Protestant, and Chick describes their marriage as “an excess of God, guilt, and sauce” (26). His father pushes him toward a career as a baseball player, while his mother values academic success over athletic prowess, though she goes to his baseball games and cheers him on. Chick muses that he was more drawn to his father because he was compelled to work for his love: “He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there” (28).
The chapter ends with the first of many episodes from one of Chick’s notebooks, this one labeled “Times My Mother Stood Up for Me.” Here, Chick tells the story of his mother barking back at a dog that barks at a young Chick.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 contain key details about Chick’s childhood. In Chapter 2, Chick returns physically to his point of origin: his hometown. In these chapters, he begins a parallel journey into the furthest reaches of his memory. The main characters of these memories are his mother and father, though the bright, vivacious “Posey” of Chick’s childhood bears little resemblance to the gentle, somewhat mysterious figure of his mother, who he catches sight of on the baseball field. However, since nearly all of what the reader learns about both of Chick’s parents comes from Chick’s search for answers in his memory, the characteristics of Chick’s parents that Chick sees as having influenced him most directly - his mother’s constant care, and his father’s disengagement - come through most clearly.
The theme of fatherhood is also developed in these chapters. Chick adored his father, despite the man’s distance and unkindness, and he is highly conscious of how carefully he emulated him as a child. When Chick speculates that he loved his father more because children value love that they have to work for more highly, he offers the reader a telling view into his most basic assumptions about close relationships. For Chick, who has been battered by his attempts to destroy himself, unconditional love verges on being unimaginable.
For Chick, memory is more than a fixation; it organizes his thoughts and drives his actions. Though Chick is not reluctant to discuss his feelings, his memories provide context for his reactions in the present and give clues to the emotions that motivate him. These memories are sometimes more telling than the explanations he himself provides. For example, in Chapter 3, Chick tells the story of the morning after his father walks on Chick and his mother. He ends the story with the words: “I was a mama’s boy from that day on” (21). However, it becomes clear that this is not quite true: while Chick’s mother raises him and supports him, he never forgets his father, and continues to behave in a way that reflects his sense of loyalty to him. In truth, the memory emphasizes that his mother’s presence has been a source of comfort and healing at difficult moments in the past, as it is when he wakes up on the baseball field.
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