46 pages • 1 hour read
Mitch AlbomFor One More Day
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Noon”
Chapter 15 Summary: "Chick and College"
Chick remembers his first day of college, when his mother drove him to campus. She is happy and proud he has received a scholarship, though she is less enthusiastic about the fact that it is for baseball. She feeds him a huge breakfast, and Chick feels awkward because she has dressed up and insisted that he do the same. His mother is extremely excited about the opportunities that await him at college, opportunities that were not available to her, but he is uncomfortable and increasingly embarrassed as she explores the campus. After he refuses to let her see his new room, she gives him a long hug, despite his standoffishness. He goes upstairs: “I pulled away, lifted the trunk, and began my climb, leaving my mother in the stairwell of a dormitory, as close as she would ever get to a college education” (78).
Chapter 16 Summary: "The Middle of the Day"
Chick’s mother makes him a roast beef sandwich for lunch and asks about Catherine, his ex-wife. She wants to know what Catherine thinks about Chick’s relationship with his daughter, Maria, after he implied earlier that all was not well. With difficulty, he admits to her that he and Catherine are divorced. He begins to explain the downward turn his life has taken, but his mother does not respond, and instead tells him that all his problems can be fixed.
The chapter ends with an upbeat note that Chick’s mother sends him after dropping him off at college, with well-meaning but somewhat naive advice: “Charley, be nice to the people there. Be nice to your teachers. Always call them Mr. and Mrs., even though I hear now that college students call their teachers by their first names” (80). Chick’s mother expresses her pride that he is the first person in the family to go to a university.
Chapter 17 Summary: "When Ghosts Return"
Chick clings to baseball as he grows up because he believes his father will eventually return if he becomes good enough at the game. He often visits his father’s old liquor store, and he hears that his father now works full-time in the other branch of the store, an hour away. Chick gradually accepts that his father is not coming back. His longing becomes less intense, though he feels his father’s presence whenever he plays baseball: “I could picture my father at the plate, tipping my elbow, correcting my batting stance” (81).
Finally, at the first game of his college career, he sees his father sitting in the stands, “in the front row of seats just left of home plate, from which he could best study my form” (82). His father nods silently at him, and is overcome with emotion. Biting back tears, Chick hits a home run.
Chapters 15-17 Analysis
These chapters move Chick’s past forward, to his time in college. He is on his own for the first time, and in theory he is more independent, though both of his parents continue to exert a profound effect on the development of his personality during this crucial period. When his mother drops him off at college, they are both intensely aware that Chick’s life will be very different from hers. His mother greets this fact with enthusiasm, happy she can provide her son with the education she never had but always wanted, while an uncomfortable Chick is focused instead on distancing himself from his mother, and only in retrospect can he understand both her motivations and the roots of the shame that drove him to behave the way he did.
Chick’s memories of college are almost exclusively devoted to baseball or thoughts of his family, a testament to the degree to which he identifies himself in relation to them. Despite his years of absence, the memory of Chick’s father stays with him, and he models himself off his idea of what his father would want him to be. As Chick describes the role of his father’s memory in his life as a teenager and young adult, the theme of ghosts is expanded from earlier chapters. In describing his father as a ghost (as in the title of Chapter 17, “When Ghosts Return,”) it becomes clear that a “ghost” can also be an embodied memory.
Chick’s father’s appearance in the final chapter parallels his mother’s appearance at the beginning of the book. Both take place on a baseball field; in both, Chick sees a parent he previously thought he had lost a short distance away from him. In both situations, he wants to communicate with them, but something prevents him from doing so. These are two of the most powerful instances of memory becoming actualized in the book, and represent memory’s transformative effects.
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By Mitch Albom
