My Mostly Happy Life (eBook)

Autobiography of a Climbing Tree

Shelly Reuben (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
292 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-0-9884181-6-5 (ISBN)

Infos

After serving in World War II, Samuel Swerling, a family man and inventor, created a wonderful park filled with large, leafy trees that were trained to grow in such a way that they would be easy to climb. People fell in love in the Samuel Swerling Park. Painters painted pictures, dogs chased Frisbees, and pretty girls basked in the sun. It was an idyllic place where time stood still. Most of all, though, children did what Sam had created the park for them to do. They climbed trees. The narrator of this book is one of those trees. He and his fellow trees thrive on human contact, and in their long and happy lives, they have had few disappointments. Time passes. Sam's grandchildren, particularly Esther Swerling, are now in charge of the park. Esther is young, beautiful, and like Sam, an inventor. When a hurricane floods the area, she and her family provide food, warmth, and shelter to those in the park seeking refuge from the storm. At the same time, Jarvis Larchmont, a power-hungry politician who was thrown off the grounds years ago for bullying, is put in charge of the city's recreational facilities. Still bitterly resentful about his treatment as a child, he joins forces with ecco-terrorists to destroy Samuel Swerling's dream. Suddenly, our narrator and his fellow climbing trees are separated from the very life-force that they were created to serve. They are separated from children. The trees cry, and they begin to die. Then Esther, her friends, and her family organize. And they fight back.

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Once upon a time, Samuel Swerling, a World War II veteran and inventor, decided to build a park. It would be filled with trees trained to grow in such a way that children could easily climb them. To this end, he bought bought two acres of land, hired Alonso Hannah, a one-armed arborist, and began to turn his dream into the reality. After five years, Alonso and Sam had created a small, privately-owned park in a big publicly-run city. Sam married Ghita, bought an apartment across the street from his park, and had five children. People fell in love at the Samuel Swerling Park. Painters painted pictures; dogs chased Frisbees; pretty girls basked in the sun; and time stood still. Most of all, though, children did what the park had been built for them to do: They climbed trees. The narrator of this book is one of Sam's climbing trees. He thrives on human contact, and in his long and happy life, he has had few disappointments. Lately, however, he is being subjected to life-threatening injuries by Jarvis Larchmont, a power-hungry politician who was thrown out of the park for bullying when he was twelve-years old. Time passes. Sam's grandchildren, particularly Esther Swerling, are now in charge of the park. Esther is young, beautiful, and like her grandfather, an inventor. She is also ferociously protective of her heritage. When a hurricane floods the area, she and her family provide food, warmth, and shelter in the park to those seeking refuge. At the same time, the City's beloved mayor is hospitalized, and Jarvis Larchmont is put in charge of the Department of Parks. Still bitterly resentful at having been thrown out of the park as a child, he joins forces with ecco-terrorists to destroy Sam's creation. Suddenly, our narrator and his fellow climbing trees are separated from people. Separated from all that they know and love. Separated from children. They cryand they begin to die. Then Esther, her friends, and her family organize. And they fight back.

Textauszug

Chapter 6

Ethan’s Best Friend

Now I have to tell you a story about a fictional bird named Pal and a mother and daughter who look very much alike.

Both have bright red hair.

Both have freckles.

Both have big hazel eyes.

And both are very pretty.

The mother’s name is Pegeen Fitzgerald, and her ten-year-old daughter is named Meg.

They used to sit on one of my lower branches and read aloud (they took turns) from Meg’s favorite book, Ethan’s Best Friend.

It was an old book, one that Meg’s mother had read during her own childhood. It was not very long, but it was jam-packed with illustrations, and parts of it were written in verse.

Since others, too, had loved that book, including Esther’s mother Donna, who is a successful sculptress, the last two-lines of the story are engraved on a brass plaque and embedded in a brick wall that surrounds the Children’s Garden in the Samuel Swerling Park. Sam had commissioned his daughter Donna to design and create the plaque herself.

I’ll tell you more about the plaque and the Children’s Garden later.

The book’s main character was a twenty-one-year-old poet named Ethan. Ethan’s purpose in life was to re-popularize the kind of rhyming poetry that was written by his English and American heroes: Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Alan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling.

He intended to accomplish this goal by writing the poems
himself.

Ethan was a nice looking man. Not particularly handsome, because his mouth was a little too small, his teeth were a little too large, and his face was a little lopsided, but he was tall and well-made. He had light brown hair, compassionate brown eyes, and a sweetly romantic disposition. Ethan was the kind of a fellow who would walk across the street to give a donut to a vagrant; he always surrendered his seats to women on buses; and he opened doors for just about everybody, because it seemed to him to be the right thing to do.

His parents lived on a farm halfway across the country, and they did not earn enough money to help pay his rent; but they did have a beloved cockatiel named Pal who had been in the family since before Ethan was born. So they gave Pal to Ethan to keep him company in the big city where he had moved to achieve his dreams.

Pal was a beautiful bird with a plump grey chest, white wings, an elegant long tail, and a bright yellow head, from which sprung a crown of grey feathers as graceful and festive as a salute. Pal’s cheeks were emblazoned with vivid orange patches. These patches made him look like he was blushing from acute embarrassment and added a comical aspect to his otherwise forbidding beauty.

Ethan rented a small apartment on the sixth floor of a tired old tenement in a tired old neighborhood of an ever-changing city. He worked eight hours a day, five days a week in the stock room of an advertising agency, so that at night and on weekends, he could compose his verses. But every evening before he picked up his pen, he spent an hour playing with his pet cockatiel, Pal, and telling him what had happened during the day.

Ethan taught Pal new melodies (the cockatiel could whistle fifteen songs and sing the lyrics of five), and he confided his hopes about the poems that he wanted to write, and the life that he wanted to live.

In return, Pal would nestle up against Ethan’s fingers, dance on his shoulder, and sing while Ethan diced vegetables, grilled chicken (his mother had taught him to be a very good cook), and dined. When Ethan was busy writing, Pal would fly around the room, collect unasked for items—a penny, a paperclip, a packet of sugar—and lay them on Ethan’s desk as if offering bits and pieces of inspiration. Sometimes a poem about a penny or a paperclip or a packet of sugar would emerge.

Such was their life together.

Until two things occurred.

The first was that Ethan fell in love, which meant that most of his conversations with Pal now concerned Nancy Sue, an illustrator with whom he worked at his advertising agency, and who also seemed to like him very much.

The second was that a magazine editor expressed interest in paying for and publishing a lighthearted poem he had written called “Ode to a Hiccup.” Nancy Sue thought the poem was funny, and when Ethan read it aloud to Pal, the cockatiel emitted a staccato whistle that sounded very much like a laugh.

Then, as so often happens in books about poets, everything went wrong.

Nancy Sue disappeared from their office, did not return Ethan’s telephone calls, and did not answer his letters.

That very same day, Ethan received a letter from his new editor stating that her magazine had been acquired by a major media conglomerate, and would cease publication. Therefore, her offer to publish “Ode to a Hiccup” had to be withdrawn.

Ethan was depressed.

Ethan was in despair.

If he had been just twenty-years-old, youth would have invigorated him to meet the challenge.

If he had been forty-years-old, maturity would have fortified him against disappointment.

But he was twenty-one years old.

The body armor of childish oblivion has disappeared, but wisdom and stamina had not yet moved in to take its place.

Ethan had started to write poetry when he was six-years-old. He began to submit poems to magazines when he was eleven. Five of his poems had been printed in his grammar school newsletter, and during his high school years, four were printed in the local newspaper.

After that, nothing.

When Ethan once complained to an editor about the difficulty of getting published, she snapped back that he shouldn’t feel sorry for himself until he had received one hundred rejections.

He had long since surpassed that benchmark.

He sat at his small desk in his small apartment, staring out his small window at the blank brick wall of the building across the alley.

For over half an hour, he did not move.

Pal was perched atop a Thesaurus on a bookshelf beside Ethan’s desk.

He watched his best friend not move and not say anything, and he waited patiently for an explanation. None was forthcoming. After fifteen minutes, Pal began to sing a lullaby that Ethan’s father had taught him when he was a baby bird (and when Ethan was a baby boy). The words were meaningless, but soothing.

Pal sang, “My baby bye boom boom.”

He sang it over and over again, waiting for Ethan to turn his head, to smile, to reach out a hand, and to gently rub the cockatiel’s head.

But that did not happen.

So Pal stopped singing and continued to observe.

After many minutes, Ethan finally moved.

He began to rifle through his desk drawers and to pull out publisher rejection letters. It took him about an hour, but eventually, he found three hundred and sixteen rejections. He gathered them into a pile, stuffed them in a plastic bag, and tossed the bag into the trash. Then Ethan dived back into his drawers. This time, though, to retrieve his poems.

He pulled them out, one at a time.

Pal hopped from the Thesaurus to Ethan’s shoulder. He dug his toes into the fabric of Ethan’s shirt and rode the rollercoaster of arm movements back and forth as Ethan reached for a sonnet, a couplet, a ballad, or an ode, musing sadly over each before he gently placed it atop the others on his desk.

When all of his poems had been thus gathered, Ethan cleaned the debris out of his metal wastebasket and ran a damp paper towel over its bottom to make sure that it was clean.

Then he began to place the verses inside the wastebasket, each loosely positioned at an odd angle on top of the one beneath it, so that there would be ample oxygen between the sheets to feed the fire.

Pal hopped off Ethan’s shoulder and perched on the edge of the wastebasket.

Ethan did not notice.

He was focused exclusively on the funeral pyre of poetry he was creating, his self-absorption and self-pity all...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.4.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• ISBN-10: 0-9884181-6-9 / 0988418169
• ISBN-13: 978-0-9884181-6-5 / 9780988418165