Artist Provides Inspiration For Authors

Because it's like walking into an Edward Hopper painting.

- Historic Saint Paul's preservation consultant Aaron Rubinstein, describing why people should patronize the Original Coney Island Restaurant & Bar on St. Peter Street (Feb. 2017).

 

 

Does it make sense for someone like me, who reads maybe six to eight novels a year, to post about books?  If Momma Cuandito, a prodigious reader of many genres, had a blog, she would probably write more about books than I do about films.

 

After I posted my February 17 story about trudging through Moby-Dick, I should have considered my quota of book posts fulfilled for 2017.  But, I read a review recently about a short story anthology which was curated with such an original theme that I had to checkadoo for myself.  While in Arizona last month for two weeks without the print edition of a newspaper to read, I filled the gap with In Sunlight Or In Shadow.  It is a compilation of seventeen stories, ranging from eight to thirty-five pages, commissioned by Lawrence Block.  What makes the anthology remarkable isn't necessarily the quality of the stories themselves or the bona fides of the authors he selected, but the procedure Block used to arrive at the finished product.

 

We begin with the famous American artist, Edward Hopper.  Smithsonian Magazine, in a 2007 article by Avis Berman, called Hopper "the supreme American realist of the twentieth century."  Although internationally famous, the enigmatic Hopper spent almost all of his life in New York.  The period of his greatest accomplishments was roughly from the end of World War I to the early 1950's.  He was skilled in many different disciplines, with oil painting being his forte.  His focus was on color and light.  Many of Hopper's works showed landscapes, urban architecture and seascapes, but what attracted Block for purposes of the anthology he curated was the collection of Hopper's pictures conveying people in seemingly unremarkable circumstances, e.g., a woman sitting on a bed in a drab hotel room, a few city dwellers gathered around the counter of a late night diner, or a young couple conversing on the front porch of an old house.  In his foreward, Block states that Hopper's paintings don't tell a story as much as they suggest a story to the imaginations of the viewers.

 

With that in mind, Block invited eighteen of his favorite writers --"A-listers," he calls them -- to contribute to the anthology project.  Each writer selected a Hopper painting, then created a story inspired by that writer's contemplation of the picture.  In some cases, the connection between the painting and the story is obvious, such as Rooms By The Sea by Nicholas Christopher, a mysterious story about the happenings inside a house which overlooks the ocean, based on Hopper's 1951 painting of the same title.  But the more fascinating stories are those for which the author was inspired, but not directed, by what she saw on the canvas.

 

Each of the seventeen stories is immediately preceded by a full page color plate of the related Hopper work, and by an introduction, most of which are presumably written by Block, describing the credentials of the author.  Every author has had her works published numerous times in various media, and is the recipient of many awards, such as the Edgar Award (for mystery writers), the Bram Stoker Award (dark fantasy and horror), the O. Henry Award (short stories), and the Spur Award (westerns).  I must admit that the only three with whom I am very familiar are Stephen King, whose story, The Music Room, has the kind of edginess and creepiness one might expect from a writer with his reputation, Lee Child, mostly famous for creating the Jack Reacher series --two of the twenty-one Reacher novels have been made into movies -- and Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific popular author who, it is often said, is impossible to pigeon hole into a particular style.  Block, himself, contributes a story, as does Gail Levin, who authored the seminal biography of Hopper titled Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.  Ironically, it is Levin's contribution, The Preacher Collects, which I found to be the only clunker in the seventeen story collection.

 

As Block describes in his short but entertaining foreward, "the stories are in various genres, or in no genre at all."  Many stories center on women, sometimes in peril, sometimes with revenge as a motive for their decisions.  A couple of stories have surprise endings, a few leave us dangling without closure.  At least two border on the supernatural, such as the narration coming from a dead person, or a house which geometrically expands annually without construction work.  It would be hard to come up with three favorites, or even one, but if you are the kind of book browser who spends time reading a passage or a chapter before laying down your purchase money, I would suggest The Projectionist by Joe E. Lansdale, and Autumn At The Automat by the curator himself, Mr. Block.   The inspiration for The Projectionist was a 1939 painting by Hopper titled New York Movie, which also functions as the dust jacket's cover picture.  The title character is the narrator, an uneducated male film buff in his twenties.  He's learned his trade from the former retired projectionist, Bert.  The theater is owned by an elderly couple who are approached and threatened for protection money by gangsters.  The narrator witnesses the shakedown and goes to Bert for help.  Secrets are revealed and surprises ensue.

 

In Autumn At The Automat, the story concocted by Block having admired Hopper's 1927 Autumn, the lesson to be learned is that things are not always as they seem.  To reveal too much here would be a disservice to the author and you.  This is the kind of story you might have seen in the old television series The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

 

A side benefit of reading In Sunlight Or In Shadow is that I added at least one new word to my vocabulary: frontispiece.  Perhaps I am telling you something you already know, but a frontispiece is a picture that is inserted between the front cover of a book and the first chapter (or in this case, the first story).  The frontispiece to Block's collection is the 1950 Hopper painting Cape Cod Morning.  According to my North Dakota high school math, I calculated that as a result of that picture's inclusion, we have eighteen Hopper paintings but only seventeen stories.  Block explains the discrepancy in his foreward.  His original plan was to have eighteen writers (including himself) write stories based on a Hopper work which they chose.  Block and his publisher, Pegasus Books, secured all the required permissions to reprint those paintings.  But the best laid plans go asunder, or so we are told, and the writer who chose Cape Cod Morning could not deliver -- for undisclosed reasons.  Block, tongue in cheek, invites us to create our own story to go with that painting.  "But," he cautions, "don't tell it to me.  I'm outta here."

 

Two footnotes, if you will...  The introductory quote from Aaron Rubinstein was pulled from an article written by Star Tribune food critic Rick Nelson on February 4, 2017.  Nelson was covering the re-opening of the Original Coney Island Restaurant in conjunction with the St. Paul Winter Carnival.  Located at 444 St. Peter Street, the Coney Island had not been open to the public since 1994.  Nelson describes the place as "meticulously preserved in a dipped-in-amber-like state."  It is housed in two adjacent buildings, one of which was built in 1858.  Besides functioning as a restaurant, over the decades the space has served as a saloon, a hotel, an arsenal and an armory.  Here is the kicker: Although the Coney Island has been rented occasionally since 2011 for private parties, the restaurant's opening was for one day only, February 4.

 

Second, scholars have identified over eight hundred paintings as being the work of Edward Hopper.  A retrospective of his art, including, inter alia, one hundred of those paintings, can be viewed next year at the Art Institute Of Chicago from February 16 to May 11, following stops in Boston and Washington, D.C. 

Held In Suspense For Fifty Years

I like big, fat books in the winter, books that will swallow me up for hours, books that I can read... on the couch by the fireplace, a polar fleece blanket over my knees and my dog sleeping on my feet.
 
- Laurie Hertzel

I'd like to see a show of hands.  How many of you remember what Confession Fridays are?  Hmm, I do not see anyone with her hand up.  Surely you recall my post from June 27, 2014, Personal Prophecies And Yellow Caps, in which I wrote that on the website I frequent, Notre Dame Nation, public confessions are posted as a means of "coming clean."  I then proceeded to make a confession, of which I was not proud, in that Friday blog post regarding the Personal Prophesy Game.  Alas, I have not made a Friday Confession here since, but you are about to read one.

I was reminded of Confession Fridays a few weeks ago when I read Laurie Hertzel's column in the Star Tribune.  Laurie is the Senior Books Editor for that paper, and I make a point of checking out her thoughts which appear most Sundays on the Books pages of the Variety section.  An excerpt from her January 22 column appears above.  She described how certain types of books lend themselves to particular seasons of the year.  For the cold Minnesota winters, she prefers "big, fat books," not the type that you'd bring to the beach in the summer or read while reclining on a hammock in the fall.  She proceeded to suggest five fat book titles: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; Vanity Fair by William Thackeray; Rising Up And Rising Down by William T. Vollmann; and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.  She admitted she hadn't read the Melville book in its entirety, but intended to do so.  It was her modest admission which triggered this post.

 

Before I continue I should point out that all three of my kids think I'm anywhere from slightly to more-than-moderately eccentric.  Momma Cuan's perception of my traits probably falls more toward the latter end of that spectrum.  I'm okay with all of that; if I weren't I would not be making this Friday Confession.  My guess is that nothing I write here will come as a surprise to any of them.

 

My story begins in the winter of 1962-63.  I was in Father Art Perry's sophomore English class at Assumption High School in Davenport.  As I've noted before in my August 25, 2012 post (Chrome Dome & The Cub Reporter), almost every priest at Assumption had a nickname, some more cleverly bestowed than others, some more derisive than others.  Father Perry's nickname was neither clever nor derisive; it was simply what many redheads are called, "Red."  Red Perry, among the most beloved faculty members at a school sorely lacking in that category, was one of my two favorites at Assumption. (The other was my junior religion teacher, Father Carlos Leveling, who was a "late vocation.")  Father Perry was the kind of teacher who inspired his students to do their best, sometimes for no other reason than the feeling that, like playing for an inspirational coach, you did't want to let him down.  Red was also my homeroom teacher, and our intramural basketball team -- the last organized hoops team of my illustrious career -- was, of course, Red's Raiders.  He was a Notre Dame grad, another plus.  Some guys said he played football for the Irish.  I don't know if that was true, but it didn't take much imagination to picture that squarely built priest with the thick neck as a fullback.

 

The English class was a mixture of grammar, vocabulary, composition and literature.  Sometime during the last week of school before Christmas vacation, Father Perry assigned Moby-Dick, much to the chagrin of my classmates and me.  The unabridged novel was mammoth, coming in at six hundred seventy-five pages.  With visions of our two week break being ruined, we tried our best to convince the priest to assign a more manageable tome, if indeed he felt compelled to assign anything at all.  No such luck.  As if he were doing us a favor, he pointed out to us that even though there would certainly be a test on Moby, it would not be given until the Thursday of our first week back in class in January.  If we all didn't love the guy so much, we would have hated him!

 

Moby-Dick is comprised of several dozen relatively short chapters, and I knew I needed to read a bunch of them every day while on vacation.  Once school restarted after New Years there would be loads of homework from my other teachers which would make last minute binge reading of Moby impossible.  Nevertheless, I let things slide at home, always coming up with a flimsy excuse for ignoring the book.  I told myself I needed a short mental health break before plunging into the assignment.  I was only kidding myself, because the thought of having to plow through the gargantuan classic was always hanging over my head -- not what you'd call a mental health break.  One unproductive day slipped into another, plus there were those pesky inconveniences called Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  I didn't fare any better during the week between Christmas and the resumption of class.  During the two week break I managed to read only a hundred pages or so.

 

I started reading like a maniac once school resumed and I was back in "student mode," but as I predicted, there was so much homework from my other classes that there was no way I could finish Moby before the Thursday morning test.  Our in-class discussions covered roughly only the first half of the book.  When I sat down to take the dreaded test, I still had a little over a hundred pages to go.  I decided not to ask my classmates how the story ended because, crazy as this sounds, I wanted to reward myself for hours and hours of reading by arriving at the conclusion organically.

 

Somehow I was able to schlep my way through the exam with enough familiarity, based on what I did read, that I received a B+.  By now you are wondering where the eccentric behavior manifests itself.  Here is what happened on the next school day (Friday), when the graded papers were returned and Father Perry went over the exam.  I covered my ears whenever I realized that the class discussion was about to delve into those last hundred pages!  I discovered that if I lightly rubbed my fingers over my ear canals, I could block out sound at least to the point where the voices were unintelligible.  (Maybe the conversation would have proven to be unintelligible anyway, without my having to resort to those extraordinary measures.)  Naturally I was hoping I wouldn't be called on for those discourses, but I wisely lessened the odds of that happening by volunteering some sage comments about the first part of the book.  My ruse worked!

 

A dutiful student would have, at least, finished the book over that next weekend, but no.  I never picked up Moby again.  Maybe I wanted to get a jump on the next classic, The Last Of The Mohicans, assigned by Red.  It was another pretty fat book.

 

****

 

In the tradition of famed radio host Paul Harvey, here is The Rest Of The Story.

 

Four years ago I was rummaging around the closet in the den at the Quentin Estates, looking for an old book.  Instead of finding what I wanted, I discovered a copy of Moby-Dick.  I was immediately enveloped in shame, remembering that English assignment from dear old Red and how I received an undeserved B+ for bluffing my way through his test.  Not that it would make any difference now, fifty years later, but I felt the urge (the obligation?) to complete the mission.  I still did not know how the story ended, having managed to avoid all conversations, articles, references and movies about the great white whale.  At this point retired with time on my hands, I started from page 1 and did not pick up any other book or magazine until I had reached the surprising conclusion about three weeks later.

 

Thanks to Laurie Hertzel's column, I have now come clean with this post.  If I ever meet Father Red in that Big Library In The Sky, I'll have something to talk about with him besides Notre Dame football.

 

****

 

Since it is unlikely I will have another post about Father Perry or Father Leveling, I would like to add this postscript.  In the fall of 1965 when I was a freshman at Notre Dame, the two of them looked me up in Cavanaugh Hall on a Saturday morning.  They had traveled to ND from Davenport to attend a football game that afternoon.  I thought that was pretty cool of them, especially since I had left Assumption in 1964 for North Dakota.    

Daniel Martin Thwarts A Score Of Lawyers

The first third of the calendar year ended on April 30, and in that period I managed to read four books. Yep, four whole books!  Man, I was so proud of myself, I was struttin' around here like a peacock.  As Hubert Horatio Humphrey used to say, "pleased as punch."  Then recently I overheard Momma Cuandito tell someone that while we were in Mexico for a week, she read three books.  Three books in one week?  That seems physically impossible to me, until I stop and think about it.  Momma Cuan can read anything at any time, even with music, the TV or the radio on in the same room.  She has the ability to tune things out and focus.  I, on the other hand, need almost total quiet.  I can't concentrate on what I'm attempting to read if I'm in close proximity to any noise-emitting device whatsoever.  The one exception is random white noise, which I have used on occasion off my phone app in our living room to block out the television audio coming from the family room.

In light of the foregoing, I am wondering if I should start a Slow Readers Book Club.  It would be for people like me who, you know, take a whole month to read a 350 page book.  Other potential members would have to promise to be tolerant of the slow pokes. I do, however, have reservations about my initiating such an undertaking, because my extremely limited experience with book clubs has been hit and miss.

Throughout the sixty-one years of my reading life, I have only been in two book clubs.  One of them didn't end well; the other never quite got off the ground.  The first was the Norwest Law Department Book Club. I know that's kind of a long and clumsy name, but we were a group of attorneys.  What did you expect?  In retrospect, maybe a name like The Barristers' Book Club would have been flashier or cooler, but we weren't big on style points.

The NLDBC actually got off to a fairly promising start.  There were a number of voracious readers who had favorite authors and great recommendations.  We met in Conference Room E on the seventeenth floor of the Norwest Center (nka, the Wells Fargo Tower).  Twenty-four people could sit around the mammoth marble table, plus there were a dozen or so extra chairs ("bleacher seats") along two of the walls.  We hardly ever had to make use of the bleachers, but at least they were there if we needed them.  The picture windows looked out on the northeast section of downtown Minneapolis, with the  Mississippi River beyond.  That view came in handy if you got tired of someone prattling about all that was wrong with the book selection. The view out the window was a ready-made distraction.

Most of the books we read were worthy selections.  Some of them were Independence Day by Richard Ford, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and Death Comes For The Archbishop by Willa Cather.  The honor of selecting each book was passed around, mostly randomly, among the ten sections of the Law Department (Litigation, Trusts, Commercial, Depository, etc.), and the individual selector would send around an e-mail to promote her pick.  Some of those missives were more intriguing than others.  For example, one that I thought sounded particularly interesting was from Bob Lee, a lawyer in the Corporate Section who picked The History Of The Siege Of Lisbon by Jose Saramago.  Bob wrote, "It is the story of a lowly proof-reader for a large publishing house who, in a fit of whimsey, deletes the word 'not' in a new text book on the history of Portugal, and, as a result, causes political upheaval in Europe."

The NLDBC had a nice run -- albeit off and on -- for about two and a half years.  You might think nothing could be worse than a group of attorneys discussing the finer points of an obscure novel, but by and large the meetings were fun.  (Maybe because we carried on these sessions over lunch.)  Of course, not everything was ideal.   One of the regular attendees was my colleague "Leslie," who surely must have set a record for disliking every single selected book.  (Note: I am using quotation marks around some of the first names to protect the identity of the culprits.)  She even found fault with her own selection.  Then there was "Vicky," who regularly asked the selector/moderator for a meeting date postponement so she could finish, but then skipped the rescheduled confab anyway.  And finally we had the "Cynthia and Sherri Show," in which two litigation attorneys, who happened to be best friends, would enter into long dialogues with each other while the rest of us ingested our box lunches and contemplated the Mississippi.  Sometimes it was like eavesdropping on My Dinner With Andre.

Admittedly, those were minor quibbles.  We had a dandy time while it lasted, but you know the old adage about "all good things."  Toward the end of our run, attendance at each gathering started to drop.  People "forgot" to put it on their calendars.  Maybe some of the book offerings didn't sound all that appealing.  One could say that work got in the way; folks simply too busy with their jobs and off-the-clock family responsibilities to make room for leisure reading.  But what really killed the NLDBC was Daniel Martin, or more precisely, Daniel Martin.

After the NLDBC had been in existence past its second year anniversary, Daniel Martin, a novel I'd never heard of, was selected for the club's "enjoyment" by the General Counsel of Norwest (and subsequently Wells Fargo), Stan Stroup.  Upon hearing of Stan's selection, there were two main reasons I had high hopes for his choice, thinking maybe the club's rejuvenation was at hand.  First, I learned that the author of Daniel Martin was John Fowles, who also wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, a novel I had enjoyed reading in the early seventies.  (The story was turned into a fairly successful film in 1981.)  Secondly, Stan was the most brilliant lawyer I have ever known, and I figured this would translate into making a smart book selection for our group.  We needed a good pick because, as alluded to in the immediately preceding paragraph, attendance was down and some members felt we were on life support.  Was Daniel Martin the novel that would turn things around?

I was also confident the Daniel Martin gathering, several weeks hence, would be well attended and the discussion robust, for the simple reason that "The Boss," Stan, was in charge -- "large and in charge," to coin a phrase.  People would not dare to blow off this meeting, even if they hadn't bothered to read the last several club selections.  Plus, this would be a chance for the worker bees to impress the General Counsel with their astute observations and literary acumen!

Despite my initial optimism, my hopes plunged immediately when I picked up the novel off the B. Dalton shelf.  Seven hundred and four pages.  Bummer.  I was now faced with a dilemma.  Do I break my own longstanding 400 Page Rule, or do I stick to my principles?

[Note: In case you are not familiar with my 400 Page Rule, that means you are probably not familiar with my 100 Page Rule either.  Here is how I described them on May 12, 2009 in a post on ND Nation under my nom de plume, East of Midnight:

100 Page Rule: I never give up on a book before page 100. Once I get to that page, I decide whether to finish it. If I decide yes, then I read it to the end, no matter what. By the way, I regretted having to follow this rule when I decided to finish "Underworld" by Don DeLillo (the first chapter was the best part of the book), but most of the time I feel I have made the correct choice.

 

400 Page Rule: Perhaps this sounds nuts, but I never start a book which is over 400 pages unless (i) it has been strongly recommended to me by people I trust, or (ii) the author is one of my faves. There are just too many books less than 400 pages which I want to read but haven't started, so those get my attention first.] 

I reluctantly decided to plunge into Daniel Martin.  If anyone other than Stan had chosen that particular novel, I would have gladly sat out.  In hindsight, that would have been a wise choice.

Daniel Martin was a tedious, dreary and sleep-inducing story, replete with flashbacks, about a man who married the sister of his true love, and then finds himself in awkward situations partly as a result of that decision.  Maybe Fowles only had three good novels in him, The Collector and The Magus being the other two alongside The French Lieutenant's Woman.  (Even some great authors stop short of four; Harper Lee, whose To Kill A Mockingbird was her solo effort, readily comes to mind.)  There's a reason why Fowles' three earlier books were deemed worthy of a film interpretation, whereas Daniel Martin was not.

The book club members who, like me, were brave enough to read Stan's selection could not fire up during our meeting.  We felt like we'd just submitted a term paper, and dreaded the oral defense of our thesis.  The short gathering ended with a whimper.  For the first time I actually looked forward to getting back to my desk.  Stan might have been an outstanding attorney, but his salesmanship fell short.  Few, if any, of us left the room convinced by Stan that trudging through Daniel Martin was worth the effort.  The demise of the NLDBC followed shortly thereafter.  I have rarely strayed from my 400 Page Rule since.

I'm sure you are wondering about my adventures with the second book club to which I referred above, and those four books I read earlier this year.  Those exciting recollections will have to wait for another day.   

The Book I've Read Five Times

I noticed that The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, a new movie directed by and starring Ben Stiller, opened for general release on Christmas Day.  I am very interested in seeing this film because Mitty is my favorite short story of all time.  Most studios hold their most promising films in abeyance until the last week of the calendar year, so I have my hopes up.

I've written before that I taught eighth grade for eight years (1972-80), following three as a sixth grade teacher.  Although the eighth grade subjects I taught varied a little bit over the eight year span, one of several constants was that I taught literature throughout the entire duration.  For the first five of those eight years, our main literature text was Explorations In Literature, an anthology of thirty-three short stories, plus assorted poems, published by Houghton Mifflin -- not to be confused with Dunder Mifflin -- in 1972.  Even when our curriculum switched to a different lit book in 1977, I still had my students read many of the short stories found in Explorations, including, of course, Mitty.  I have described Explorations as "the best book I've ever read," because of the wealth and variety of the short stories included therein.

The Explorations list of authors is quite impressive.  Any one of a number of Edgar Allan Poe stories would certainly have been acceptable.  Explorations begins with The Tellale Heart, a Poe offering which contains one of the greatest opening paragraphs ever written.  Ray Bradbury, a famous science fiction writer who passed away a year ago, is the only author with the distinction of having two stories (Dark They Were And Golden Eyed and The Pedestrian) included in the anthology.  Roald Dahl, the British author of the popular children's story, James And The Giant Peach, has his readers on the edge of their seats with Poison. Bernard Malamud, known to baseball fans as the author of The Natural, writes a thought-provoking story, A Summer's Reading, about a high school dropout. And Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer and biochemistry professor, contributes Someday, a futuristic story about the role computers might play in the social world of youth.  It seems only O. Henry, maybe the most famous short story writer of all, and humorous Mark Twain are missing from the Who's Who List of short story scribes put together by the Explorations publisher.

At the end of each school year I would ask my students to rank their five favorite Explorations stories, and their bottom three.  After they voted I would give them the aggregate results, along with the ratings from their predecessors.  This will come as a shock to Momma Cuandito, who believes I've saved every scrap of paper pertaining to my teaching career, but I'll be dag nabbed if I can find those ballots!  Therefore, for purposes of drafting this post, I am left with little choice but to divulge my own personal ranking of my top five Explorations short stories, with the exhortation that you place most, if not all, of them on your 2014 reading lists.

5. The Answer by Philip Wylie. At twenty-two double-columned pages, this is by far the longest of Explorations' thirty-three short stories.  A two-star US general aboard an aircraft carrier is in charge of conducting the testing of an H-bomb which explodes over a volcanic island in the western Pacific Ocean. On nearby Tempest Island a nine year old boy, the son of an erratically behaving missionary, discovers a mysterious "casualty" which has fallen from the sky moments after the detonation.  Months later, an eerily similar incident occurs on the frozen tundra of Siberia during a Soviet weapons test.  Secrets are kept, evidence vanishes, and the leaders of the two cold war superpowers have decisions to make.

4. Different Cultural Levels Eat Here by Peter DeVries.  The scene is an urban bar where the regulars constitute almost all of the clientele.  Two couples, obviously non-regulars, sit at the bar and order hamburgers.  The cook/counterman, as is his custom, asks each of the foursome, "Mit or mitout?"  The reference is obvious: onions.  One of the women comments under her breath about the peculiarity of such phrasing, but the counterman is not deaf.  This sets in motion an uneasy dialogue, and a fascinating study of human behavior.

3. The Survivors by Elsie Singer.  Fosterville is a border town which sent all of its young men, except one, to fight for the Union in the Civil War.  That one exception is the recalcitrant Adam, who chose to join the Confederacy.  Now the war is over, and the town annually celebrates its thirty-five returning war veterans with a Memorial Day parade.   The Union leader is Adam's cousin, Henry.  As the years go by, the former soldiers pass away. Adam remains a loner, a self-imposed outcast, while Henry is the most admired man in Fosterville.

2. The Lie by Kurt Vonnegut.  Fourteen year old Eli Remenzel is riding with his parents in their chauffeur-driven limousine to the posh Massachusetts boys' prep school, Whitehill.  Three former US presidents were alums, and Eli's physician father was the fifth generation of Remenzels to attend.  Dr. Remenzel has to remind his wife constantly that neither she nor Eli should expect any favors from the school, even though half the buildings on campus were funded by the Remenzels. So, what's the problem?  Life is good, right?  Not exactly.  Eli has never told his parents that, two weeks ago, he tore up the letter of rejection from the school's admissions office before his parents could read it.

1.The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty by James Thurber.  Walter Mitty is a hen-pecked husband who does not need physical separation from his wife (or for that matter, anyone else) to escape from reality.  His vehicle for these pleasurable respites is daydreaming, but not just your run-of-the-mill daydreams.  For instance, he is the surgeon to whom world famous specialists defer when the patient is at death's door.  He is the expert marksman who can hit his target with any of an assortment of different firearms.  He is the pilot who can get his plane through storm clouds which would keep other mortals grounded.  Sometimes his private thoughts are betrayed by a tendency to speak aloud unconsciously while in a state of mind far removed from his actual whereabouts.  "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself!" exclaimed a nearby woman to her companion.