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Lois Shoemaker prefers a stick-shift. Being an open-minded liberal with
a history of bohemian adventure from her youth, she does not use this
aspect of her life as a conversation piece. She'll defend the standard
against the automatic in a natural conversation at a party or on the phone
with her mother, but she never uses it as an icebreaker.
She loves driving. It's been twelve years since she's smoked pot, and
three glasses of wine constitutes a full night now that she's married.
All of this is possible because she loves driving. It's the one thing
even a good mother can sinfully enjoy, and today she is particularly excited
to see her boy Jack. It’s been too long since she has spent any
time with him and she intends to treat for deep-dish pizza.
Her chariot of circumstance is a brand new 1997 Ford Escort wagon. Like
a lover, a car can take on a precious image, entirely removed from objective
reasoning, and recite ballads and sonnets as long as it's receiving its
master's compassion.
She has named her car Joni, after the folksinger.
The car doesn't really approve the name, preferring a paternal title,
Jim. Despite the gender oversight, Jim never minds the music Lois selects
for her daily domestic duties across town. For instance, today she is
picking up her son after school.
By now Jackson is fifteen years old, and still very fickle about his passions.
Once a busy highway of civil wars and flying dragons, his mind has since
become a mystery to his mother.
She believes her fifteen-year-old son is sitting on a pile of promise
on the steps of his school library thumbing through the mind of some dead
Greek waiting for her to whisk him into the car for some special time
with Mom. You see, it’s been nine years since her family felt whole,
but today she hopes to start putting things back together.
All she has to hold on to now is the breakfast they shared that morning.
She couldn’t keep her eyes off him while he gobbled down his French
toast with an excess of syrup. He looked so tall the way he was holding
his fork. As she drops him off at school she can’t believe how big
he looks.
As a fifteen-year-old boy, it is indisputable that Jack is changing. As
he walks into school that morning he begins to suspect that very same
thought. Looking around the front lobby near the principal’s office,
he can’t find a single piece of familiarity. He scratches his head
for classmates but can’t remember a single one.
Jack merely stands in the middle of the floor as ringing bells rush crowds
of students into classrooms and down both halls. Alone in the quiet he
feels unusually incomplete and as he struggles to understand this unfamiliar
sensation his feet carefully step one in front of the other.
Before he knows it he is struck by the cool conditioned air of a department
store and realizes he must have walked all the way to the mall. Truth
is he took a bus, but he won’t realize that until he checks his
change.
Unlike the school, there are many things that Jack firmly recognizes in
the mall. He finds a little comfort in that, but his defining nag within
has one more demand. For whatever reason, he must buy a long-handled umbrella.
Jack says to himself, “huh. Just the umbrella I guess.”
All day he sinks into store after store in search of the long-handled
umbrella until finally he finds a hall for kings: The Sears Spring Clearance
Sale. It takes just a second of carousing before Jackson's eyes lock on
the prize. A Brom Heindenburg 6000, with leather grip and action release.
At the push of a button, 9 feet of vertical dry.
The instrument is far out of reach but a store employee catches the gleam
in Jackson's eye and stops to offer some help.
"Can I see it?"
"Sure thing, kid."
The employee stands on his toes and takes hold of the Heindenburg. "You
sure you don't wanna take a look at something a little cheaper?"
Jackson searches for something to explain his strange compulsion. "It's
for my Grammy, she gave me the money."
The store employee rolls the umbrella from his grip into Jackson's hand.
He wraps his fingers over the leather handle and finds a button underneath
his index finger.
Just then a million sounds explode across the store as if each noise were
a pane of glass shattered on a pile of tombstones. Smoke and flames frame
flying debris, and the dust rolls through the store like a demolition
tidal wave.
In the Sears employee’s mind, religious extremists from a country
not yet pronounced have just blown up the hunting and fishing department.
In the mind of the chief executive of Ford Motors, the first of many lawsuits
over a faulty axle and a fatal wheel bearing in initial production will
eventually persuade him to suggest another company lay-off.
[B]
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Dedication
Chapter 1 - Two Bookends
On A Couch
Chapter 2 - Battery Fluid
Chapter 3 - Whose Fuse Is The Muse
Chapter 4 - Why Widows Sing The Blues
Chapter 5 - Welcome to Sears
Chapter 6 - Fortress of Solitude
Chapter 7 - Rite of Passage
Chapter 8 - Letters of Arrival
Chapter 9 - Keeping Busy
Chapter 10 - You Can’t Teach a Gorilla
to Golf
Chapter 11 - Satellite
of Love
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