The Secret Lion

The story’s structure allows the narrator to string together three key moments in his Loss of Innocence. In the frame timeline, the narrator is experiencing changes related to the academic and social differences between elementary and junior high school. Next, the narrator describes how he and his friend found and lost a grinder ball that symbolizes a vanished, idyllic youth. Finally, a story from earlier in the narrator’s childhood reiterates how learning about the world destroys childhood innocence. All three stories come together through the symbol of the lion. The lion must be heeded when it roars, just like the changes that come with time. Ultimately, the narrator recognizes the inevitability of change but seeks to preserve a memory of untainted perfection.

The story’s frame establishes the narrator’s resistance to the changes that come with growing up. He does not like how his academic life has changed, or how his relationships with girls and teachers have changed. In entering junior high, he has left behind the simplicity of childhood and gained more responsibilities. Social relationships change as well, with girls no longer being “the same girls that [he] used to know because [he] couldn’t talk to them anymore, not the same way [he] used to” (98). As girls become objects of affection, childhood friendships disappear, or at least evolve. Lack of guidance from adults makes this transition more stressful than necessary. The narrator remarks that “there were words, oh there were words in junior high school, and [he] wanted to know what they were, and how a person did them” (98). Presumably, these words involve sex, but rather than taking their adolescent students’ natural curiosity in stride, the teachers punish the narrator and his friends when they approach them with questions. This struggle to communicate across generational lines recurs throughout the text and may contribute to the narrator’s anxieties about growing up. An instinctive understanding marks the narrator’s friendship with Sergio—the result of The Bond of Shared Experience—but now the narrator risks becoming someone like the teachers or his mother, adults who seem to speak a different language.

Going to the arroyo is a way for the narrator and Sergio to “solve” junior high. They are not supposed to go there—a recurrent motif in the story—but the area is very nostalgic to them. It was where they played games as young children. He describes the arroyo as “our own personal Mississippi” (98). This is ironic since it no longer flows with water. As adolescents, though, they use the arroyo to shout their frustrations and innermost thoughts, taking some control over their lives when they feel like they are losing control in all other aspects.

The second disappointment the story depicts is the loss of the grinding ball that the boys find in the arroyo. They do not know what it is at the time, but they hold onto it, wanting to keep it for themselves. Ironically, they lose it in the process of trying to preserve it: “It was iron-heavy, it had no name, it felt good or not, we couldn’t take it home to show our mothers, and once we buried it, it was gone forever” (100). At the end of the story, the narrator calls this buried ball “perfect” and associates either it or its loss with “the lion.” This develops its significance as a symbol of vanished childhood and innocence.

The final moment of disappointment unfolds in another flashback, this one even earlier in the narrator’s childhood. The loss of the grinder ball reminds the narrator of when he and Sergio were driven out of the arroyo by the dumping of sewage waste—an indication of the boys’ lower-class status that will contrast with the world they are about to enter. They become determined to see what is on the other side of the hills, the elevation of which also symbolizes class status: “We looked across the highway in one direction and there was the arroyo; hills stood up in the other direction. Mountains, for a small man” (100).

To young boys, however, the height of the hills makes them all the more alluring, seeming to promise adventure rather than a hopeless (literal and figurative) climb. The details of the boys’ journey consistently highlight their naivety. They pack terribly, not understanding what they need. They soon tire of walking and bend the truth about the time of day to suit their wishes: “We just agreed the sun was overhead and that it was time to eat, and by tilting our heads a little we could make that the truth” (101). When they first stumble on the golf course, it seems otherworldly in its greenness, and they believe wholeheartedly that this heaven on Earth belongs to them.

The Reality of Class Differences, however, is embedded in the experience from the start. The reason the boys don’t recognize the golf course is because it is so removed from their world: “No one had ever told us about golf. They had told us about heaven” (102). What’s more, the course’s existence is only possible thanks to the wealth of its owners and members: The water resources to maintain a green golf course are expensive, and the people who have access to it must be well-off. When the boys first emerge over the top, they put on airs and affectations pretending to be rich. Even in their ignorance, they understand that this luxury requires money. Before long, they are cast out of this Edenic environment because of their class—a loss of childhood wonder and innocence that devastates the narrator.

The title ties all three aspects of the story together. The lion is first mentioned as the “roar” that comes with the changes of junior high. It appears again at the end, as the narrator is discussing the grinding ball: “We buried it because it was perfect. We didn’t tell my mother, but together it was all we talked about, til we forgot. It was the lion” (102). The antecedent to “it” is not clear. The narrator could be referring to the grinding ball, but the statement also seems to encompass the heaven they found on the hill, as well as the broader innocence of childhood, or perhaps the consignment of such things to memory. Even here, however, that innocence is not perfectly preserved; the boys eventually “forget” about the incident, again underscoring the inevitability of change.