THE FLYING DREAM (eBook)

Six Stories and a Play

David Coddon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
292 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-6868-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Whether in the face of grief, a family legacy of addiction, a pandemic or a love just out of reach, those inhabiting this collection of short fiction and drama are steeled by bravery and hope. They share a dream that will carry them above the storm.

David Coddon is a Southern California-based fiction writer, longtime journalist and theater critic. His previous novels include 'The Romancer,' 'There and Back Again,' 'In Violet' and 'The Redeemers.' He has also published under the name Barrett McCloud two anthologies of short stories: 'Raining in Paradise' and 'Blue Tomorrow.'

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This collection of six short stories and a one-act play reflects on the challenges that accompany grief, loss, love slightly out of reach and even an unprecedented global pandemic. What girds the principals in each narrative are the very human qualities of bravery, resolve and hope.

Textauszug

Not A Day Goes By

When “love” is reduced to “warm regards,” all is lost.

It is the first anniversary of the death of my marriage. “Hope you are well,” read the card she sent. “Warm regards, Jan.”

In times like these, I search for peace of mind, if not revelatory insight, by walking the beach. At around this time of day, with the tide low and the footing at the water’s edge firm. The weary sun descends toward the misty horizon. The air is redolent and evocative of the sea, the proverbial cradle of life.

I am aware, as I trudge southward with the remnants of waves washed ashore caressing my bare feet, of my oppressive fatigue. My body is heavy with the unforgiving weight of days and nights not far enough in the past to relent.

Artists, it is routinely observed, and writers in particular among artists, find prolificacy in their pain. They also, it is routinely observed, toil in solitude. Loneliness is a byproduct of making art.

Burying my feet in the cool sand up to my ankles, I settle in about 50 yards from the shore in possession of a spiral notebook frayed from false starts, a ballpoint pen visibly running low on blue ink and the title for an anthology – “Vista In The Wind” – that needs a book attached to it: characters, conflict, setting, the works. I’ve got dozens of untethered titles awaiting novels or at least stories; provocative, manfully conceived titles, too: “The Threshold.” “They Jumped So High, They Hit the Sky.” “A Parliament Of One.”

I cross out “Vista In The Wind” in my fading blue ink and scribble below it: “Warm Regards.”

It won’t be long before I will no longer be able to afford residency at Hotel Marisol. This morning I found a note shoved beneath my door informing me that I was a week’s past due on my long-term rent. Little wonder that they’d like me out of here. Tourist season will begin in earnest in a couple of weeks and they can get twice or even three times what I’m paying for this same mini-suite of rooms on the second floor.

They should be more understanding. I’m a model tenant. The most “noise” I make is typing on a laptop computer, even if at all hours of the night. Some might consider me a “celebrity” of sorts too, at least in literary circles. I’m a regular at Bay Books on Orange Avenue where you can customarily find me browsing the latest arrivals in fiction or among the attendees on author speaking nights. I’ve been recognized by repeat customers on the patio of the Tent City Café around the corner from the Marisol where I sometimes sit with pen and pad, working out ideas that may or may not come to fruition. At the local public library, books of stories of mine occupy almost a fifth of a shelf in the “Short Fiction” section. Possibly that’s nothing to brag about.

Since Jan walked out I’ve been more lonely than introspective, and that’s a fact. Whoever said that a writer must toil in solitude never awoke by themselves in a king-sized bed, rolled over and clutched at nothing. Or spent long, silent days staring at a cursor blinking from an accusatory personal-computer screen: “DON’T JUST SIT THERE. WRITE!” it seems to say.

I’ve been thinking about writing the story of Jan and me. “Mood Piece” is the tentative title. I can’t commit.

Neither could she.

It occurs to me that I have difficulty with titles.

Tell someone you’re a novelist and immediately that someone is impressed. A novel isn’t just a piece of writing, it’s an achievement. It’s a book! It’s a literary leviathan.

Tell someone you write short stories and you know what they think? That you couldn’t commit. You couldn’t write an entire novel so you took your idea, condensed it for convenience’s sake and called it a short story. Same blueprint: a beginning, middle and an end, but far fewer pages. Not a leviathan at all.

This runs contrary to the history in literature of prodigious and even immortal short story writers. Poe wrote one novel in his life. Kafka never wrote what was to be considered a full novel. With all due respect to the great “The Catcher in The Rye,” Salinger’s best writing was his short stories.

A short story after all isn’t evidence that a writer can’t commit to a novel or that he or she is lazy or insufficiently inspired to write more. It’s the writer at his or her purest self. A narrative stripped of all heft and excess, a … but then I go on. This is why writers are often regarded as ponderous or pretentious or in real life dull outside of their written pages. They teach and preach.

Not me. Not today.

A writer who lives on an island is blessed. Yes, I do live on an island, though Coronado, across the bay from downtown San Diego, isn’t always thought of as one. And yet I feel removed from urban life and instead part of a community: retirees and tourists by day, wanderers and bar-hoppers in Navy whites by dusk and in darkness.

That’s my favorite time to wander.

I may start out seated at a bench just down the street from the Marisol in Star Park.

Coronado’s most famous writer, L. Frank Baum, had resided for a time on Star Park Circle, just down Park Place from me, and due south a few hundred feet. An unassuming yellow house with blue shutters on the windows upstairs and down, a sunny porch and a fine green lawn, it’s now occupied by someone who doesn’t appreciate gawkers or curiosity seekers, and likely not other writers. I’d never gone within 10 feet of it – just eyed it from the sanctity of the park across the way and imagined a day when Baum himself did indeed summer there and permit his imagination to run wild.

He had written: “Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.”

In full breath, and after no more than 15 minutes’ worth of idly observing the people walking dogs or the women in athleisure-wear practicing tai chi on the grass or reflecting on the yellow house, I am up, on my feet, and on my way to Orange Avenue and new discoveries.

When Jan and I used to walk the island city’s main drag we did so paying little attention to the tourist-oriented shops on our right if we were walking south, or on our left if we were walking north. We were immersed rather in conversation, not always about issues or matters of consequence, but whatever crossed our minds at the time. She is a deep thinker, a person with perpetual curiosity about her world. I’m the same. Together we would ask the questions “Why?” “How?” “I wonder?”

Aloneness. Not what I counted on.

Around the corner from my hotel, the indoor/outdoor café Tent City boasts a full complement of customers sitting outside on the cool, yet humid evening. I recognize among those on the patio the goateed server who more than occasionally had waited on Jan and me when we’d visited from San Diego. He must have been aware that I was residing, temporarily, at the Hotel Marisol, because I’ve walked past the café practically every evening though I’d never sat down or gone inside for food or drink.

Kent, I believe his name is. An affable fellow who had told us once that he was an aspiring actor and had performed at a theater across the bay in several productions, including a musical. A revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” I think?

I hear somewhere in the recesses of my memory Sondheim’s “Not A Day Goes By” from that underappreciated show:

“Not a day goes by / not a single day

“But you’re somewhere a part of my life

“And it looks like you’ll stay

“As the days go by / I keep thinking when does it end

“Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting

“But I just go on thinking and sweating …”

Kent looks up from the order he is taking. His eyes, behind thin wire-rim glasses, brighten and he proffers a short wave.

I nod.

The tourists, conspicuous in their souvenir T-shirts, Bermuda shorts, flip-flops and tote bags with the names of village shops embossed on them, parade up and down the wide sidewalk on the south side of Orange where I promenade, the vestiges of Sondheim still haunting me, the smiles of my Jan still possessing me, the unstarted and therefore unfinished pages of “Mood Piece” berating me.

Though only five minutes from my pensione, I’ve abandoned on this walk as I do for diversion on a regular basis the peace, quiet and privacy of the Star Park neighborhood for the comparative bustle of business in Coronado: the cafes, the bars, the boutiques, the candy store, the trinkets shops, the historic Spreckels Building with its stately columns and dignified veneer in front of which bankers banked, theatergoers queued up for the theater and consumers of history reveled in the past as presented by the local historical society.

Hands deep in my pockets, I navigate the crowds and bask in the breeze against my face. It carries on it the briny scent of the nearby Pacific.

I will miss this when I return to the other side of the bridge, to the “big city” that long ago lost enchantment for me.

The literary agency in New York underwent a personnel upheaval and a new representative has been assigned to me. After seven years working with Ted Morey, who was affable and low-pressure and nearly as interested in golf as he was in my short stories...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.9.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-6868-2 / 9798350968682