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| Take Me Where the Good Times Are
| | Robert Cormier
| Seventy isn't old. Not if you are Thomas ("Everybody Calls Me Tommy") Bartin, a first-rate combmaker for forty-five years. Not if you're always cheerful, with a nice compliment for everybody, can look after yourself proper, and have lots of friends to share an evening's beer with. And the poorhouse is no place for you—even if you call it The Monument City Infirmary or The Place.
Seventy isn't old—and to be as young as you feel, all you need is to be Tommy Bartin, to get away from The Place, and to head downtown where the good times are.
Tommy gets a bit of money—sixty-three dollars—as a gift and legacy from a fellow inmate, and he gets his chance to go downtown on the eve of Memorial Day. Around his downtown adventures, as told in Tommy's own lively and authentic voice, Robert Cormier spins a touching, funny, and honest tale of an old man who has a lot of growing up to do. And through this loving story, Cormier questions our euphemistic times—when you are never old but a Senior Citizen in your Golden Years; when a monthly check and a TV-recreation room are considered satisfactory substitutes for love, self-respect and a rocking chair in the sun on your own front porch.
Stephen Spender has written that the ability to portray a good man convincingly, interestingly, is almost a mark of greatness in fiction. Tommy Bartin is a good man, and a real one, in the pages of Take Me Where the Good Times Are.
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