Delilah - 1

Here's part one of a new story--Delilah. After the positive responses from my last story, Beneath The Surface, come visit Jake's world ... for a while... 

The sky was such an inviting blue he almost believed he could reach up and put his hand in it. As he watched the clouds float by they seemed to tempt him to come away with them. Their gentle curves reminded him of Delilah who was never far from his thoughts. He could all but feel her  smooth roundness. He wondered now whether he would get a chance to touch her tonight or even just look at her.

“Jake! Dinner!”

The heavy voice of his step-dad calling from the house through the screen of the open back door vanquished all thought of Delilah. Like a loud thunderclap it brought him back to the field he was lying in behind the house.

Jake figured it was pretty close to dinner but he didn’t feel ready to come in and leave the quiet of his thoughts and imagination. He wasn’t hungry. But dinner wasn’t about to wait for him. Nor was Ray.

The letter had come. They didn’t like Rabbits. It wasn’t quite what the magazine was looking for. Jake thought Rabbits was good—really good. But now it didn’t matter. It was almost funny. When things didn’t go as he thought they should his thoughts turned to Delilah. It seemed things didn’t go as planned most of the time anymore. But when he touched Delilah, she had a way of making what was wrong not feel so bad. Just gazing at her would make him feel better.

“Get your skinny ass in here now!” Ray yelled. “Your mother has a nice dinner all prepared.”

Jake knew that dinner would be mac and cheese and a cheeseburger because that’s what ma always made, on the rare occasion, when she made dinner.

Jake looked back up at the sky as the clouds morphed into the heart-shaped nose of a dragon. Its piercing eyes seemed to look inside him. A tongue stretched out toward the ground like a walkway—a walkway to the sky; a stairway to heaven. Then the eyes changed. Like Frosty’s dark eyes of coal they transformed into the Grinch’s narrowing stare, eyebrows squeezed V-shaped, the green irises pushed to the top of their sockets as the Grinch’s wide lips spread in a not-so-generous grin.

“Jake, get your butt in here!”

Jake didn’t move; he squinted and watched as the dragon’s head became the main mast and sail of a tall ship. His non-response to Ray’s command would set the tone for dinner like the sail would set the ship’s course into the coming tempest.

Delilah would have to wait until later.

“What were you doing back there?” his ma asked as he came to his place at the kitchen table between his ma and Ray, perpendicular to the invisible line that joined them.

“Nothin.”

Jake sat down, picked up his fork and stabbed a couple of cheesy noodles from beside the cheeseburger on his plate. His ma knew how to make mac and cheese like nobody’s business.

Looking at the noodles on the end of his fork made him think of his dragon-in-the-sky’s inevitable slayer. Jake was no dragon slayer, more awed by the dragon’s presence. The dragon slayer was near enough though sitting at the dinner table right beside him.

“So, what was going on today?” Ray asked.

“Not much.”

“Did you go to work?”

“For a few hours. Mr. Whiteside sent us home early.”

“Early?”

“He didn’t have any more work after we finished mowing the lawn in the morning. Told us to go home and enjoy our afternoon.”

“Wow,” Ray said, “that never happens to me. You ever think about gettin' another job?”

“No, why?”

“To help yer mother pay for tuition for one.”

“Tuition?”

“College?”

Jake hesitated. He had no intention of going to college. He’d said it a million times. But every time he said it, detonated another argument. Why would he go to college and waste his and his ma’s money when all he wanted to do was in his head and hands.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. It was an acknowledgement, not a signoff.

He looked down at his plate. The noodles were in disarray yet every noodle looked the same. The melted cheese stuck them together. Ketchup made the noodles look like guts splayed out on his plate. But it really wasn’t what Jake thought guts looked like. Still not hungry, he picked up his burger and took a bite. He didn’t feel like dressing it.

“Don’t you want anything on your burger?” his ma asked scrunching up her face in feigned pain.

“Nah, I’m not feelin’ it.”

“What are you doing tonight?” his ma asked.

“I dunno.”

“What time do you start tomorrow?” Ray asked.

“Eight.”

“Supposed to rain tomorrow,” his ma added.

It hadn’t rained in days.

“You know yer mother is gonna to have a hard time payin’ yer tuition for college,” Ray went on. “You know that don’t you?”

“She doesn’t have to,” Jake said. The topic was coming up like vomit. He had no interest in even talking about it.

“What do you mean by that?” Ray asked holding a fork full of mac noodles in front of his mouth. “You gonna suddenly strike it rich?”

“No, I’m taking a year off.”

“We’ve been through this Jake,” his ma said. “You take a year off and you’ll never go back.”

“Go back! I don’t wanna go!” he shouted suddenly enraged. It was like they thrived in making him angry. He set his fork down beside his plate and stood up.

“Good night.”

***

Thus ends Part One. Parts two and three will follow in the coming weeks. If you haven't yet read The Actor or The Drive In you can get them from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo or pretty much wherever you find books.

The Actor

The Drive In

Books and Reading - Part Five

I’m back with another installment of Books and Reading. From Part Four, music remained front and center in my teenage years playing in a band with a couple of high school buddies. The plan was to write music, and lyrics to that music, and see where music would take us.

But then came another piece to my life’s puzzle, not that I knew it at the time. I was perusing a rack of magazines at a local convenience store distracting myself from Grade 12 exams when the navy-blue cover of a paperback caught my attention. Menacing eyes stared back at me from the cover with the threat, ‘take me or else’.

The book was thick; an epic tale by most standards that I had to have. Like Rush and their album A Farewell To Kings, from my last installment, I knew nothing of the author or the book. The novel—The Stand—was penned by then little known writer Stephen King. Much more interesting than studying for physics or algebra; I couldn’t put the book down. As a side note, in Mr. King’s favor, not long thereafter, I found out that a girl I had eyes for had read and loved that same book. I married that girl.

Stephen King rocked my world and was my initiation into what reading would become. I followed The Stand with several of his other novels including The Shining, Salem’s Lot and The Dead Zone; I couldn’t get enough from the King of Horror.

In a way that was the beginning of my writing life. I wasn’t exactly writing but it was part of what I have come to understand as my 10,000-hour writing apprenticeship (thank you Malcolm Gladwell); I was reading with unintentional intent. (since then I’ve read much of Mr. King’s 74-book catalogue including The Dark Tower and his more recent 11/22/63.)

Discovering Stephen King, led to renewed interest in the literature introduced at high school including classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Combine these with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom The Bell Tolls and a foundation was forming I was unaware of.

Along with my renewed interest in reading, I did have encouragement from some special teachers. Mr. Lewis in grade school, “read Hemingway, my boy, for those short sentences”, or Miss Schmidt in high school, “find that café in Paris and write” and Miss Surerus later in high school, “let talent take you where your heart wants to go”.

I kept writing lyrics, even poetry, to the songs I wrote and the band performed. But like with most plans life has a way of turning out differently and the band broke up. I was devastated but continued to write music and lyrics branching into poetry and prose.

The time came to decide what I was to do next; life was moving me on. Still confounded by writing and its format of subject, predicate and sentence structure that were so much harder to understand than the easier formulas of math and science, I chose to pursue engineering.

I’m reminded here of a quote I read from Daniel Pinkwater (author of Lizard Music), “I went to college, but I learned to write by reading and writing.”

This marks a good place to end Part Five of Reading and Writing and bid you farewell until our next meeting.

If you haven’t yet read my books The Actor or The Drive In, you can get them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo or pretty much wherever you find books.

The Actor: A Novel

The Drive In

Books and Music - Part Four

Hello again. You might think I’d forgotten to come back. But that’s not the case. Like an elephant, I usually don't forget, it just takes a little longer sometimes. You'll notice too that I've changed the title of this series from "Books and Reading" to "Books and Music". As you'll read in Part Four, I realized that Books and Reading are somewhat the same thing but Music, a very different art form, was and still is, no less influential or inspiring to me.

When we last spoke, I talked about Thor Heyerdahl’s great sea adventure and how his book, Kontiki, inspired one of my first short stories for school.

Another reading for pleasure hiatus followed as most of my reading was for school—reading was work, homework and questions; what fun was that? But that period didn’t last long and seemed to build into two avalanches that mowed down pretty much anything that was in their path. Not together in timeframe but in retrospect seemingly very close were the discoveries of Rush and the books of a certain author whose name I shall save for a future article.

I discovered the band Rush in tenth grade. I had started a band and after one of our jams, found their album A Farewell to Kings in the basement we were practicing in. I didn’t know much about them. For instance, I didn’t link the album title to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The album art was fascinating; a marionette or puppet king lying across an apparent throne in the remains of a demolished castle, a gold crown on the ground beside him—the king had lost his kingdom—a symbol of the album title.

The liner notes—lost in today’s music streaming and downloads (I sound like an old person)—had the album lyrics and a picture of the trio, guys much older than me with long hair; one with a long, handle-bar mustache, one with his leg hanging over the arm of a chair wearing white-leather high-cuts and a third standing majestically to the right of the other two in a dark blazer.

From the time I heard the first song—the title track “A Farewell To Kings”—I would never hear music the same way again. I remember playing the album (yes, it was vinyl) on my friend’s turntable and, believe it or not, decided to trade my less-prized Bruce Springsteen album Darkness on the Edge of Town (I’d bought from the Columbia House Record Club) to get it.

Albums were scarce at that time, as was money to buy them, so trades were commonplace and often the only means of getting what you wanted. I played that album like no other on my father's turntable. I couldn’t get enough and have awaited each subsequent album with great anticipation. I've only felt that way about a few albums, Korn most recently. Interestingly, the same person who co-produced the last two Rush albums Snakes and Arrows and Clockwork Angels, Nick Raskulinecz, produced Korn’s last album The Serenity of Suffering.

Rush has continued to be a favourite through their extensive catalogue of nineteen studio albums, experimenting and growing their craft with each new release—for over forty years.

But as important as the music was on A Farewell To Kings, I was captivated by the lyrics and the stories they told in songs like the title track, “Closer To The Heart” and “Cinderella Man”.

I was further intrigued by the art of writing itself. I loved to read but writing puzzled me with its sentence structure and rules of subject and predicate without a discernable formula or pattern so common to mathematics and science that I already had a propensity for. It was through the lyrics of Rush’s songs that I found a new voice and route to writing; a form that I could follow and work to without the regimented sentence structure I so struggled with. In writing a lyric, I didn’t have to worry about forming the subject and predicate, words became like strokes of a paintbrush. I picked up rhyming conventions like Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and Dr. Seuss’s anapestic tetrameter, putting words to the music I wrote, that at the time, fascinated me more than writing. I had written off writing (no pun intended) and my ability to write, in elementary school, but I loved putting music to words that others had written.

As music remained at the forefront of my teenage world, and thinking I could never write anything outside of lyrics and poetry, I will leave you to wait and wonder until next time on how my transition to short story and novel writing transpired. So until my next installment of Books and Music …

If you haven’t yet read my books The Actor or The Drive In, you can get them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo or pretty much wherever you find books.

The Actor: A Novel

The Drive In