Description

ET AL. (AND OTHERS) stories in this book are like selected short subjects in the old days of movies. After publishing four books (main features), I started writing short stories for my own amusement, and nineteen of them comprise this book. Section A is miscellaneous fiction, Section B is about growing up and growing old, and Section C concerns fishing companions. I don’t know where the ideas for the stories in Section A came from. They concern a variety of subjects, and none of them would be recognized as part of my personal life story. They were fun to write. A Night at the Westerville Lodge was written from the point of view of a stuffed animal, Message from the Cloud was told by a deceased pet dog, and Her Majesty’s Birthday Note was written in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I hope you have as much fun reading them as I had writing them. Six of the stories in Section B relate in some way to events of my life. The seventh is about the ultimate futility of preserving memories of a person through photographs, voice recordings, and more technically advanced techniques. Fishing with a person provides excellent opportunities to know them. Stories in Section C tell of fishing with my son, and then with my son and his friend. His Last Fly-In is about an unusual man who was my boss for fifteen years at Honeywell and a friend for much longer than that. Paxton concerns a Native American fishing companion living on the Lower Brule reservation in South Dakota.