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Synopsis:
The story is ostensibly about a meeting, and the story of this meeting is told from the vantage of a middle-aged son reflecting on how his parents met in 1948. Throughout, it is evident that he believes in the romance that a time and place and a single event bring people together to foster a proverbial, eternal bliss. Nowhere in the story is the son's faith shaken, though there is much in the story that should dispell his faith. Consequently, he is at once glorious and unreliable. He is at once funny and sad. His aptitude for an unwavering belief in and pursuit of romance in his own life belies an ineptitude for realizing a romance of his own and, accordingly, earmarks as vain his quest for the happiness he assumes his parents must have found because of the first time they met. The various incidents of this ineptitude and his misfortunes in life, both funny and sad, parallel the reader's growing realization that, in as much as the narrator's happiness is an illusion, so too his parents' bliss is an unlikely claim for the narrator.
Early in the story the son suggests a movie brought his parents together. So, in large part, his story is one of a quest for a movie, as if finding this movie is the remedy to the apparent malaise the son finds his life has become. He is a divorcee and a father in his own right vis-a-vis long-distant phone calls from his daughter; he is a poor graduate student of Latin and ancient Greek. And it is as if going home to a movie where his parents began as his parents, discovering his origins, will be the same as discovering and benefitting from a defining aspect of what he perceives as the success his mother and father enjoyed in their relationship.
In becoming a story about a quest for origins, it also becomes apparent that the son's origin or definition is not the result of a parent's romance or bliss. It becomes apparent that he is a product of a relationship between a man and woman wrought in a slow, but inexorable, deterioration. Even the mundane survival instincts have failed his parents, who are long since dead. Whatever he is has been influenced by a misconception. The son's perception of his parents and their first meeting is skewed and blurred like a comedy of errors in incidents of dissemblance, concealment, and conceit.
The son's story about his parents is contained in one long story imagined by a narrator who begins by telling of her own parents and her meeting with a man who could very well be the son in search of his beginnings. The dissemblance, concealment, and conceit are innocuous, perhaps pathetic, but nonetheless prominent for the confusion about real identities. The narrator is like the son in search of a movie, a setting, an atmosphere that would reveal the essence of his or her parents' success as a loving and lovely couple. It is, ultimately, in the telling of her story, in her own imagination about the son, that what is told by the son becomes a story that reveals the fiction of the perception she and, consequently, the son have about their realities. Gradually and ultimately, the two characters, the narrator son looking at his parents and the narrator daughter looking at him, are indistinguishable from one another in the narrative.
The story is all only make-believe. It is a film-goer's companion, rife with trivia about characters and events that never really happened -- fictions from movies and elsewhere. In the end, nostalgia for past times and pastimes, for movies, for a home life where blithe storytelling thrives, for an affair with a German woman, for late night conversations with a three-year-old daughter is tempered by a realization that the past times and pastimes, the movies, the storytelling, the affair, and the three-year-old daughter perhaps never existed, at least not in the way the story reveals them.
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Book excerpt:
Right after the war, before my father or Wilburt or John or any of the other locals had begun thinking about after the war, to wonder, that is, what was coming, everyone was speaking of what had been, mostly what had been of the war. It was a vague time. In typical John Wayne or John Garfield fashion, there were those in Roads who were pawing at the ground with one foot, intense looking furrowed brows on dark expressions, yet very reticent of their greatness. These were usually the dark ones. Others were brighter and crowed of glory. Some of them still wore their uniforms. None of them, of course, was still serving. And it was right after the war that most of these weren't doing anything at all. They had nothing coming. Still, everyone in Roads -- everyone in the Dippinn in Roads -- was thinking about war. And it was then that Wilburt and John Purinee had come to their understanding.
You see, Wilburt Stebby was bright, one of those who liked to crow. He was "a blusterous sort," my father used to say. "Always has one thing to say about t' other. He likes to bloat a story real loud like whenever he's talkie' to his buddies, 'specially after the war. It was like cards or something he weren't going to lose at. When the room was crowded when it was like in the war at some saloon full up of wall t' wall Joes who was making it real loud with their talkie' and laughin' and music was playin' out on its jukebox or radio, Wilburt used t' like to exclaim:
"'Hey, now,' he'd say real slow and loud even when I could hear him fine. I could tell he weren't really talkie' to me. Just making a story so everyone could of heard.
"'That'd be worse than I had, Chase, but it got me like a shot and I ain't never seen how. Just knowd it did when it happened. Got some buddies, too.'
"'Course it didn't matter his perdicament. The dangerouser sounding the better. This one time he was shoutin' about diggin' hisself out o' a foxhole he'd dug. It'd been rained on with some sand and gravel from a couple of explosions. Japanese grenades or mortars. It didn't matter. The bombs hit close by enough that Wilburt been sprayed with all the dirt. Them explosions could be like rain showers. Weren't gonna hurt ye, but it weren't gonna get ya glad you was there. And a foxhole weren't no protection from the rain, neither."
"With a long 'I', Honey. Neither," my mother interrupted, looking at me and speaking in a hush. I smiled and mouthed to her that "I know." I presume it was for my benefit. My mother nodded in approval. Dad must have seen where she was looking and presumed the same as I, for he kept on talking, undisturbed.
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Patrick King's Biography:
Having lived and worked, taught and schooled in Oregon, Arizona, and now California, Patrick King brings to his writing a history of logging, farming, teaching, and engineering, learning and wandering that speaks to a truly American yearning to discover. He was born in Newport, Oregon, in late 1953 and lived until he was six in a little rural place called Gunter on Smith River Road. It was there that he once started a fire. He would, of course, like to think of the experience as some kind of grand metaphor, but, alas, whatever poetic allusion one can find in starting fires, the simple truth is that he played with matches and real trees burned. Ask around Gunter today and they'll tell you.
Not because of the fire but perhaps to the satisfaction of evergreens and everyone, his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1960. Growing up in this desert oasis -- as far away, he supposed, from real trees as is humanly possible -- he has occasionally returned to the Northwest. Once to cut fire trails and set chokers; other times just to visit and discover whether anyone has forgotten. Once he returned to run movie projectors in a little theater in Corvallis, Oregon. When not musing about forests and fires and movies, he has repaired cameras, operated bulldozers, managed a recording studio and college media center, researched and written briefs for attorneys in Phoenix. He has attended to his English and Latin and Greek studies at Arizona State and UCLA, where he is sure he earned some very impressive degrees.
And with a sense of the comparative in all of his experiences -- that Johnny Rocco ideal of going for more -- and with a sense of the contrariness that he might just get it, he has found his current niche and, for the last thirteen years has settled in one place, in perhaps the most unsettling of places -- Los Angeles. Here it is that he has been teaching writing and literature to high schoolers and college students. Here it is that he has discovered there is more to teaching and writing and learning, and that, contrary to any earlier discovery of his, he may just very well never get enough. Here it is that he has written his first novel and is writing his second. Here it is also that he is raising two children while being raised himself, he says, by his wife.
His loves, of course, include his family and teaching and writing and movies and books and computers and trucks and trees and a lot more. He could have settled for less, he claims, but then he would have had to do without much.
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