Tonight’s short story broadcast on WPCA-FM was The Duo, which probably is the most autobiographical of my 27 stories in print. You’ll find it in The First Gathering of The Break Time Stories and as an ebook in Yet More Break Time Stories. It’s also one of the shortest stories I’ve written. The protagonist is a retired Navy officer, Frank Dodd, who is linked at the hip with Mary, his wife. They join the narrator in Graduate School. After graduating, Dodd goes into business and then gets elected to the U.S. Congress representing West Anglia in southern California. Dodd is an idealist, but several terms in office erode his idealism enough so that it is obvious. Those terms in office also lead to many questions.
When I’ve been writing I’ve tried to avoid reading other pieces of fiction, but now, after some years of not writing, I’ve been reading some fiction. The latest: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My sense of it: it’s astonishingly dull and even boring, with weighty conversations few people ever would have held in highly unlikely situations. Fitzgerald wrote it when he was 23 years old, which might explain things, but the feeling back then was that he managed to capture the essence of the emerging jazz age. I’d rather be living now, if that’s the case.
Our weather of late has been warm and the snow is receding rapidly from all areas of our property. The ground still is frozen and logs at the bottom of the piles in the rear of our property still are frozen to the ground. I’ll need to dry them out, as we still have many weeks of cooler temperatures and probably more snow before Spring and before the lake begins to thaw in April. I still see vehicles on the lake and I expect that, per usual, someone will lose what was a nice truck when it goes through the ice close to shore.