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Excerpt From
the Book:
“My
wife Frances walks through the house like a benevolent queen. She lifts and
squeezes and cuddles every living thing – except me. She steps high like a
majorette, to clear the muzzle that follows her every move like rader. Every
canine eyes is on the seat of her toreador pants.”
That’s the
sound of my storytelling voice. On a good night I can keep that up for hours. On
a bad night only the simple truth comes out, and everyone turns away.
I dropped out
of an archeology program in my third year because I’d convinced myself I was a
natural-born stand-up comic. Now I’m just another ex-college man in the
construction business – but I still tell tell my stories. A good story tops an
after-work bar stag like a foaming head tops a draft beer. A single man’s
stories has to sound like a tales of brave Ulysses, a married man’s like a leaf
from the book of job:
“Frances
proceeds slowly from the dogs in the den to the cats in the kitchen, petting
each in turn, finally spending the later part of the afternoon with the birds
that live in the bathroom among the plants. She chases them through humid
Boston ferns and wandering jews, using a flat toothpick for their games of tag.
Something Frances is so busy eith her birds that she has no time to fix my
dinner, and I’m left with their namesakes – Swans down and Birdseye – while she
goes off to comfort a loon that’s gone mad at the sight of bubble bath.”
My stories
are all rooted in fact, through I do exaggerate for the sake of the tale. I
exaggerate, too, because it helps keep the frustration at arm’s length, make it
all seems comic, even to me. I play a fool the fool in all my stories and this
too is based on fact: I personally handed Frances each and every one of the
orphaned animals she’s taken in. My business generates orphans. I’m in
excavating and grading. My roadbeds and sewers lines break up the countryside
and bisect framers’ fields, cut across the sagging fences of country living. I’m
the wrecker of a thousand happy forest homes.
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