#677 Keeping Watch Over the Sheep- Jon McGregor

#677 Keeping Watch Over the Sheep- Jon McGregor

A man is being denied entrance to the annual school Christmas nativity production, apparently there is no room at the inn. He has been banned from he school and has a restraining order put against him by his wife. All he wants to do is watch his daughter on stage for the first time. But his violent behavior has caught up with him.

“That’s what he was now, a situation.”

He leaves and tries to watch through the windows from outside, but he is arrested, he doesn’t understand why his daughter is crying. It is a very sad story.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

Tim’s father has died and it’s his job to take care of the ashes. His father was intently unsentimental, but Tim finds himself taking stock of his own life and his strained relationship with his dad. He remembers his father coming to visit and taking him to the trails he helped build as a Forest Ranger—and he remembers his father being supremely unimpressed.

“A water bar was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away whether or not it would hold…they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of the mountain staying up…he wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain.”

So the thing Tim is most proud of, the most tangible thing he has done, hadn’t met to his father’s approval. The thing his father was impressed with, briefly, was an old growth tree six feet wide, so that’s where they spread his ashes. I liked the symbolism of the bottle of whiskey saved until Tim got married—wasn’t so hot on the symbolism of the kneeling at the end.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

#492 The Ant of the Self- ZZ Packer

Spurgeon has to bail out his father again from jail. Ray Bivens Junior fancies himself a revolutionary, but he’s nothing more than a dead-beat dad and a hustler. Spurgeon is a great student, never missed a day of school, is the star of the debate team. His father, with no money and a revoked driver’s license convinces him to skip school and the debate match to take his mothers car and drive them to the Million Man March 700 miles away.

At the march he’s pissed-off and argumentative with the older men trying to get him to see the power of the day. All he sees if that his dad forced him to come, not to feel the power of the day, but to sell some rare birds his father stole. All he wants to do is go home, but his dad gets drunk, beats him up, and steals the car—and doesn’t even pay him the money he owes after selling a bird.

This was the point of the day for Spurgeon. His dad can talk about his revolutionary past all he wants, but if you can’t eve be a good father, what’s the point.

“Atoning for one’s wrongs is different from apologizing…one involves words, the other, actions.”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#458 The Rifleman- Craig Davidson

#458 The Rifleman- Craig Davidson

There’s a certain type of father that gets banned from attending his son’s little league athletics. Usually it’s one of two things: an over-bearing loud attitude that puts too much pressure on the kid, or public intoxication. Hank Mikan was guilty of both. He wanted his son Jason to be the next great basketball shooter, a rifleman. He would drill him until late at night when the neighbors began complaining about the noise.

Now as Jason is about to get college offers, Hank is barely a part of his life, and not by choice. He is one step away from being a homeless drunk. He is an embarrassment for Jason who wants nothing to do with him. He has made him hate the thing he is best at. The only thing his son has in common with him is basketball. When you get rid of that, what happens?

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#455 Zaabalawi- Naguib Mahfouz

#455 Zaabalawi- Naguib Mahfouz

A man is afflicted and in need of help. He remembers his recently deceased father speaking glowingly about the great Sheikh, Zaabalawi. He saved his father and now he strikes out to find him, so he too can be saved. But where to look?

“He was once upon a time. A real man of mystery: he’d visit you so often that people would imagine he was your nearest and dearest, then would disappear as though he’d never existed. Yet saints are not to be blamed.”

He visits any place he has heard rumors of Zaabalawi’s presence, but he is greeted with the same answers each place he goes. They say that Zaabalawi was here, but he has left, and they don’t know where. Zaabalawi has touched the lives of so many people, talked of in mostly hallowed terms, and even when he was thought a charlatan, they still remembered him. But he still cannot find him

Zaabalawi is a metaphor for faith. He is elusive and hard to describe. Those that have experienced it talk glowingly about it, but they cannot show you where to find it, it must be found by each person in their own way. In searching, one might find many other valuable things.

Rating: 8-8-9-9 Total= 34

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

It’s the late 1950’s and on Myrtle ave. in Washington D.C. the neighborhood is falling apart. In a few years, it will be razed and taken over by the city. Besty Ann is a little girl being raised by her father. Her mother died of cancer late in her pregnancy and they were able to save her.

She is a survivor, but she is lonely. She is frightened by a neighboring barber who raises pigeons. The pigeons scare her the first time, but intrigue her enough that she wants to raise some herself. She is insistent, so her father builds a coup and for three years, Betsy raised her pigeons. Every morning before dawn, her father visits the pigeons and makes sure they alive. He wants to protect her from seeing one of her pigeons dead.

Of course there is only so long he can protect her; there is only so long they can stay there before the neighborhood is lost; and there is only so long she can keep the pigeons.

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

Like father like son. A man lies awake, unable to sleep. It’s his son’s twelfth birthday.

“I am dozing trapped between midnight and dawn, and in my half sleep, I listen as rain sleets against our bedroom window; oak branches, stripped by autumn, scrape at the back of the house,”

He hears his son talking in his room, muffled, but when he looks in, his sin has closed his eyes pretending to sleep. He remembers when he was twelve, riding with his own father in his big rig. He too didn’t want to talk with his father, waiting for him to leave the rig, so he could talk to a stranger on the CB.

There is not enough time to miss good opportunities to talk to those most important to us. There are only so many miles an engine has before it dies.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#372 Better Latitude- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#372 Better Latitude- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

A single mother is raising her child and trying to make sense of his father’s disappearance. The whole story is written like a letter that will never be sent. Laureano, used to his father’s sparse company, only believes his father has taken a long trip and will soon come back. His mother knows better, although she herself is in some denial:

“I realized you had a capacity for disposing of people like they were ziplock bags, but I considered this trait of yours the same way I did tragedy or bad luck, only affecting other people, never myself.”

There is something both noble and tragic about this delusional mother, hanging on to any thread of hope, her son in a state of suspended emotional development. The end will not be good, no matter how hard she works as a mother, something is missing. Maybe it’s not just his father, maybe the missing truth is more damaging.

Rating: 7-7-8-8 Total= 30

#343 The Guesthouse- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#343 The Guesthouse- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Jeff has traveled 2,000 miles to take care of his grandmother’s funeral. “Jeff is awash in enervating, aching nostalgia, his limbs thick with it.”

His mother is traveling and doesn’t want to ruin her trip coming back for a funeral, so as usual the family duties fall to him. That’s as it has always been in this family:

“Jeff and his Grandmother were the doers, the fix, and now Jeff is alone. The fact is, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive the loss of her.”

His drug-reformed sister, the one living closest to the grandmother seems untouched by the death, but wants Jeff not keep the house. As it turns out their dead-beat father has been living in the guesthouse for a while secretly from Jeff, his sister, and their mother. He has convinced the grandmother that he is worthy of a second chance, and now he’s on his way to convincing the rest of the family, all except for Jeff. Eventually all snakes get vulnerable after feeding too much.

You know the writing is good when you start feeling the anger of the narrator, and feel some satisfaction when Jeff finally lashes out.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#316 Space- Kevin Brockmeier

#316 Space- Kevin Brockmeier

Something amazing happens when the lights go out in a big city—you can suddenly see the stars. It takes a sudden a dramatic event sometimes to see what’s right there just outside your vision. However, as poetic as that may be, you still have to lose something important.

A man has lost his wife, and is left alone with his fifteen year old son. Their light has gone out and they suddenly have to look around to see what’s there. As he laments her passing, he prays to her and worries that her memory will fade like the lights around them:

“I’m afraid…that as I climb from the well of this time into days of habit and quiet persistence, into weekends and birthdays and sudden new seasons, the things that I know of you will slip quietly away from me. I am afraid that as the glass of my life falls away, I will forget you, and what I believed of you, and what I loved of you.”

Notable Passage: “My memory of you…will be like the last, quiet pulse of an echo: were I to follow it, I could not say what towards.”

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

A widower raises his two teenage daughters by himself. As he struggles with parenthood he remembers the risks he took halfway across the world, and the path that lead him here.

The writing here is absolutely stunning. Lake captures the empty, frustrating feelings of a lonely father exceptionally well. A man who’s life is draining away fast, and all he has left are his memories and his children, who at this moment it time, won't give him the time of day.

“But when I sit next to them…and no one says a word, I have a feeling I can’t easily describe. It’s as if my heart has puffed up inside mu chest like a balloon, and every beat presses against my ribs, like the thump of a muffled drum. It’s nothing, my doctor says, but he’s wrong. That beat is the sound of time passing.”

Time is a big theme in this story.

“In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughter’s names to the air and say, Listen. Listen to me.”

Notable Passage: “A pardon is a little space, an opening, where the world stands back and leaves you alone. It is a door I walk through every day when I open my eyes.”

10-8-9-8 Total= 35