From Chapter 7, when Robby and Rosa meet Simon in Louie's Diner:
Robby looked carefully at this gentleman he’d met, randomly, less than two hours before. Life on a college campus did not often present opportunities to conduct business with persons so nattily attired, especially during the midnight hour. What a wild night: a two-headed dog, then a belligerent banker, an executed tiger, and now a business proposition. He shrugged his soldiers. “Okay.”
Simon began his explanation slowly: “I represent a biomedical firm, Parthenonics, LTD, founded in 1988, by myself and several investors.”
“In Britain?”
“Established in Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island.” He paused. “Our firm has invested generously in technology for acquiring, preserving, and distributing unique biological specimens to biomedical laboratories.”
“What kind of specimens?”
“Excess embryos, oocyte and sperm samples of all kinds, genetically engineered cells, recombinant cell lines, stem-cell lines.”
“Animal, or human?”
“Both.”
“Human embryos?”
“We have assisted in those types of services, yes.”
“Cloned zygotes?”
“We’ve had experience with those too.”
“Cloned human embryos?”
Simon laughed. “We haven’t encountered one of those yet. As far as I know, there has not been one produced yet.”
From Chapter 16, when William and Ophelia are discussing the state of the world, over dinner:
“You see, William, the Cherokee people, and really all native Americans, for that matter, were blindsided by the onslaught of European culture.”
Tell me something I don't already know.
“The thing is, they had absolutely no idea of the immensity of it—the sheer, prolonged relentless profusion of whites, from the time of those first gentle encounters back in the seventeenth century, all the way through the Dawes Commission effects of the 1890s. Their accommodating attempts at reconciliation with the Anglo-Saxon hordes became more and more—“
"Futile," said he.
“That’s right,” as she climbed on the soap box. “They had no concept of private property, no sense of deeds and property lines and plats at the courthouse, no comprehension of legal procedures, which had taken millennia to evolve in Europe. In fact, one of the principal conclusions of the Dawes Commission was that native peoples could never be assimilated to American life until they learned to accept and make use of property development according to the laws of ‘civilized’ society. Their existence from time immemorial had evolved according to the awareness that all Nature was an inheritance of the tribe, collectively.”
Jeeves brought the wine, and poured it for them. William was thankful for Ophelia's opportunity to catch her breath.
"It's natural selection, as applied to whole cultures," observed William curtly.
“I suppose it is,” she agreed, somewhat reluctantly. She remembered him this way, always cutting to the chase with his darty little, oversimplified comments. “That doesn’t excuse it, though.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it’s the history of the human race. When you get right down to it, it’s the history of life on this planet. And yes, Ophelia, it is sad—all that sensitivity and awareness of the natural world—it is muted by the roar of mechanized, legalized—“
"Traumatized," she inserted.
"Well, yes, I am sure the Cherokee were traumatized by it all."
“We ourselves are traumatized by it, William. As a civilization, we are one big, walking schizophrenic basket case.”
William chuckled. “Ah, it’s not that bad. Some of us are not incapacitated with Kafkaesque alienation.”
“We have lost touch with the Earth itself,” she insisted. “There is no way we can appreciate its magnificence, and its exquisite, delicate fragility, with the roar of bulldozers and diesel engines filling our ears, drowning out our awareness of the Gaia.”
"Ophelia?"
"What?"
"You flew here on a jet today, didn't you?"
She sat back in the chair, sighing, having talked herself into a tizzy. Resignedly, she said, “Yes, I did William. And that’s the dilemma I’m telling you about. That’s the alienation—“
“The angst, yes,” he added, sweetly, “but it’s not a problem for me. I have no issue with the way things have turned out.”
"You're part of the problem, William."
He chuckled. "And you're not?..."
From Chapter 13, an adventure of Henry Globin, and how he begins his journey to the Ribosomes:
When Henry arrived, five minutes later, Vena Cava gate, he had a few minutes to chill out. He sat on the floor, gazing out the membrane, beyond the crowded concourses of Mitey Kindria, at an ocean of cytoplasm stretching as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, barely visible in the distance were the Golgi Islands. And far beyond that, Henry knew, was the great Continent of Nucleus, the deep interior of which drew the brightest chromatins and the most talented sugars, movers and shakers who climbed that great double-spiraled ladder of success, making decisions, wonking policies that extended far beyond the nucleopolis itself, to every reticulum in the great hinterland and every centriole between here and the next universe. He aspired to go there himself one day.
But not today, just another day in the life of a specialized protein. He did like his job though. Henry considered himself fortunate to be a guide, and he usually enjoyed the commutes between all his assignments and CircCentral.
But as he watched the great open cytoplasm, his heart was pierced with a pang of desire, for looming up from the horizon was a magnificent sailing ship, with brilliant sails rippling in the breeze, and azure-white sprays jettisoning from both sides of its bow. Henry couldn’t keep his eyes off it. He stood and watched it for a long time, until it came quite close, and he forgot where he was, and he missed the next Vena Cava push. When at last the golden galleon passed straightway in front of him, he saw the RiboNucleic flag flapping atop the mast, royal blue background with a red orb in the center, and white border. And he saw written upon the bow in gold letters the name of the ship:
HMS RuNAbout.
Oh, that he were on that great ship! Oh, that he might climb to its apex, and survey from its crow’s nest cytoplasmic grandeur and the boisterous cellular wind in his wings! Such adventure! Such freedom! Where is it going?
The ship is so close. But for this window, I could throw a stone and hit it. I can see the whites of their eyes. The boat must be docking nearby. I shall meet it at the dock!
Henry started to run down the concourse in the direction that the RuNAbout was moving. But he checked himself. No need to risk running into someone. The ship would obviously be docking somewhere nearby. So he restrained himself, continued in the direction, east it was, for a good half kilometer. Then he saw it—the sign, in large, archaic wooden letters: HMS RuNAbout, On Time, bound for the Ribosome Islands, and returning to DeeNay, Nucleus.
From Chapter 19, a letter from Plato Zupoff, a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution, to:
Dr. Karl Hallfrich
79 Horsestrasse
Berlin, Germany
September 15, 1929
Dear Karl
I recently obtained your address from our old friend, Hans Zoller. As you can see by the above address, I am now a citizen of the United States. I am so very grateful now for the opportunity to thank you, after all these years, for your help in that perilous summer of 1918 when my sister and I fled the senseless desecration of our Mother Russia. Your wise intervention made it possible for us to escape the Bolshevik rabble that had turned all order and productivity into madness.
We remember, as I am sure you do, the unholy anarchy, the treachery and sacrilage, of those days of war and revolution—when no man knew from one day to the next who could be counted as trustworthy. And so many good Russians were executed without explanation or trial. Had it not been for your securing our place on the train to Berlin, Katerina and I would have certainly perished with the others whose allegiance to the Czar and to Mother Russia had cost them their lives. Thank you.
You may remember this, perhaps not as well as I do. I had, by Providence and no small bribery, managed to obtain three boxcars of wheat that had been harvested on the land formerly owned by my parents, Anatoly and Artemis Zupoff. Your superiors in Berlin had commanded that the shipment be made immediately, to relieve the hardship of your people after so many years of sacrifice in time of war. You obtained a place for Katerina and me and our cargo of wheat, so precious during that time, in that train. We were to leave that same day, September 7, 1918. What you may not have known was this: the Bolshevik goons stopped us in Vyazma and demanded that Katerina and I be removed from the train. Our papers had been satisfactory enough for the zealots in Moscow, but everywhere in Russia someone else was in charge. Once again, Providence and a careful use of our resources preserved our place on that west-bound train that transported us back to the civilized world. Although we later found troubles and shortages in Berlin, these did not compare to the vindictive cruelty and indiscriminate violence we had seen the Bolshevikii inflicting upon their own people in the name of their god Socialism.
Just before our escape, two women had tried to assassinate Lenin. In the aftermath of their failed attempt, all hell broke loose on earth. Under commands from the Commissioner Against the Counter-Revolution, a bloodthirsty man named Peters who signed death warrants en masse as if they were orders for farm animals to be slaughtered, the paranoid secret police expanded their unjustified massacres of the guiltless peasants, and then they hunted down hundreds of intelligencia and executed them without trials or even inquisitions. In the midst of this bloody business, we managed to find an escape from Russia, thanks to you and to our Great God!
Now I can, perhaps, return the favor. Our friend Hans informs me that your son, Helmut, will be coming to the United States soon, or maybe he is already here. And I want you to know that I am here to help him in any way I can. So please provide my name and this address to him if you would like to do that. The place where I live here, in mountains that are very much like our beloved Urals, is a wonderful town named Asheville. And God has blessed me with great prosperity here. No need for socialism here in the United States of America! No need for a Kaiser! Every man who chooses to be a king can be the czar of his own realm here.
Should Helmut choose to visit me here in North Carolina, U.S.A., he can find a sizable stock of gold which I deposited in a discreet location near New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. About 55 miles northeast of that city. If he is willing to seek out the gold and bring it to me, I will give him half! It consists of 200 gold florins, original Florentine issue 1492, so it would be well worth his effort. I myself have not recovered the gold, because I have had no need of it, such has been my success in the United States of America.
These precious goods can be found on the property of a Negro named Washington Jones. His tract adjoins the plantation of Thaddeus Theseus, a prominent cotton planter who is known by everyone in that vicinity. If Helmut is able to locate this property, here is how he will find the gold that I buried in the ground after a riverboat wreck that left us stranded. Zuerst soll er den alten Eichenbaum finden, der die Kleinbauern „Mama Eichenbaum “ nennen. Der Baum ist nicht schwierig zu finden. Er ist der gröβte, älteste Baum auf dem Land von Washington Jones, sowie der Baum, darüber Lev Tolstoy in Krieg und Frieden geschrieben hat. Dann soll Helmut diese Anleitungen folgen:
Von dem Mama Eichenbaum lauf mal 64 Schritte nördlich. Du wirst da einen Kaninchenbau finden, in der Nähe eines kleinen Bach, der hier ein „Bayou“ heiβt. Das Gold ist in diesem Kaninchenbau beerdigteat.
Do not worry about the Negro, Washington Jones. He will remember me. I spent a night at his house, and he showed kindness to me. I left him a rich reward, also in gold.
This deposit was made because I was being pursued by a man who, I know, would have killed me for the gold if given half a chance. It was necessary in that precarious situation that I flee quickly, and that is how I came here to these mountains. I did manage to bring 100 florins with me. It was all I could carry without being encumbered by the weight and the bulk of it. I have used a small number of this hundred to found my mercantile venture here in Asheville. Business to date has been so very lucrative that my first small appropriation of the florins has been sufficient to carry me into prosperity that Russian peasants can only dream of. So I am, as they say here in America, fat and happy. What is even greater is that next month I am to be married to a most beautiful and perfect woman, Eliza Renland!
So please, my dear Karl, send your Helmut to me if he comes to America, and I will assure that he has great opportunity.
Sincerely
Plato Zupoff
Or check out this sample from Glass Chimera from chapter 20:
It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit
the earth somewhere near Cancun. And it might have been that the big
space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and
disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably altered the pecking
order of biological kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years
thereafter.
Earth shaking events. They happen.
It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes
had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs. Maybe they became like DOS
after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new
program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy,
their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied
like the assets of international corpuses and cartels that would later profit
from their demise. It might have been that the superbad, supermad totallyrad
reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the
smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who were in the ascendancy and
currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection. It might have
happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile
kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few
eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more
baffled at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until
finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished
reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would later distill all
that serpentine angst and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—
inflictible on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the
neighborhood. Equipped with the ugliest, hissingest triangulated head that
God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains could
nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the
dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……
“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon. He grabbed Robby
by the collar as he was about to approach Mick’s front door. The animal
promptly stuck out his tongue and slithered back beneath the azaleas.
Simon stepped up to the door and knocked. He looked sideways at
Robby with a strange grin. “Be careful, young man.”
“Thanks,” said Robby. “I’ll try to do that." He looked around again...
...and so Moses was lifted for the first time beyond the precipice.
From Chapter 24 of Glass half-Full:
"Aleph was a native of Africa, Sudan. He was a man whose youth had been spent escaping the foul entrapments of evil men. Yes, there is evil in the world, and this occasion is evidence of that fact."
“As a young man, Aleph chose the sanctuary of America because he knew our country to be a place where human dignity and freedom is valued. For his sake, and for the sake of our children, we declare here today: human dignity and freedom will not perish from the face of the earth."
From Chapter 9 of Glass half-Full:
Mt. Ebal stood warm, dry, and high in the morning sun. The red, gold hues of its boulderous ridges projected starkly into whisper-blue sky. On a soil-laden saddle nestled within the lower, rocky welts a man was digging.
Yesterday, the man had tilled the sandy soil and thrown in manure, which he had gathered from the sheep field. Today, he was hoeing trenches in the dirt.
Setting the hoe aside against a nearby shrub, Yahya Najah lifted his arm, moved the forearm across his sweaty brow, thanking God for another beautiful day. In order to give a moment’s respite to his aching back, Yahya stood up straight, looked southward across the valley to Mt. Gerizim. He drew a deep breath, and drank water from a plastic bottle.
He had lived here since he was a child. Today, he was extending the stewardship of this land that his father had acquired and developed for olive-growing over thirty years ago. Yahya’s father, Hassan, moved to this valley in the late ‘60s after the old Mughrabi quarter, just below the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been demolished. His family had been planting, cultivating, and harvesting olive trees since his father’s arrival here.
He reached into a burlap bag, pulled out several short lengths of olive branch that had been cut the day before, tossed them into the trench he had just dug. Then he grabbed the hoe and covered them with dirt. He moved to the next section of trench and repeated the procedure. Several times he performed the task, until his burlap bag was empty. Having placed this collection of propagation-stock in the dry ground of Mt. Ebal, Yahya watered the new rows with a water sprayer. When the tank was empty, he picked up and strapped the tank on his back, picked up the empty bag, grabbed the hoe, and walked down a rocky path to the garden patch. He would be going into Nablus today to sell vegetables at the market.
After harvesting a truck-full of vegetables, Yahya and his brother, Kader, drove the fifteen miles into Nablus, backed the truck into the usual stall and unloaded their produce for sale.
They spent the rest of that day selling vegetables. In the evening, after most of the produce had been sold, Yahya left Kader to finish their day’s enterprise while he took a stroll up the street to get some supper for them. Satisfied to have gathered the increase of their labors, Yahya enjoyed the evening sun as it bathed the busy West Bank cityscape with golden light. As he ambled along, he noticed an American news reporter speaking into a microphone. While passing the scene, and curiously surveying the camera as it turned silently upon a cameraman’s shoulder, the farmer’s face was projected to television sets around the world. But he wasn’t thinking of that; he was looking for a good falafel.
The American spoke into his microphone.
Half a world away, Rachel Vinnier saw, for a couple of seconds, the face of a handsome middle eastern man on the TV in the corner of the restaurant.. She had glanced up at the TV while inspecting a case of French wine that had just been delivered to the Jesse James Gang Grille. As she watched, the cameraman in Nablus panned the busy streetscape, and ended his movement with a focus on John Demos’ serious face.
But all quotes from Glass half-Full aside, I'd like to tell you why I wrote the book. I write because I have something to say about life. It may not yet fit into the boxes that assure commercial success. Nevertheless, there is something that must be said in this life.
This is not a cute story. The lessons of history are many, but among them is this important principle:
Life is not about what happens to us; it’s about our responses to what happens.
So, what’s truly important for each one of us is:
- the choices we make, and
- our responses to the unexpected results of those choices.
Take Daniel, for instance—the first person you meet in this novel. He’s an architect/builder who lives in a suburb of Washington, DC. Having some well-laid plans (blueprints) to present to a client, he sets out on a rainy Friday afternoon to do business. But an unexpected event rearranges his day. How does he respond? Read the novel and find out. Here’s a passage from Chapter 1:
Daniel, you're going to have to climb out through the passenger door. And so he did. As he stood and began to survey the bumperly mess that his inattention had inflicted, Daniel's portly, nattily-dressed, pink-shirted opponent was speaking into the phone: "Hey...yeah, but it'll be awhile. Somebody just rear-ended me. Can you call Rialto and tell them that I'll get there as soon as I can. Then call Dewey and tell them that I need those signatures before the end of today business. But it looks like we'll have to postpone the closing...right...no, tomorrow, I'm thinking...I hope so. Okay." He snapped the phone shut with perturbed impatience constraining his ruddy face.
He looked at Daniel with an expression of arrogant impatience. "Well, are you gonna call the cops?"
Then there's Daniel's brother, Marcus, a carpenter. He's seeking answers to the big life questions, but mainly he's seeking a good woman. And he does find one in this story.
“I’m working with a crew of guys refurbishing the mall. We’ve been working on the east entrance, erecting wooden beams in the entryway. It adds a little pizzazz to the place. Updates it, so it doesn’t look so…70’s. We’ve also been upfitting a coffee shop in there, adding wainscoting and some other decorative wood. Same deal. Making the place look old, so it doesn’t look so old, or…making the place look new so it doesn’t look so old, or making it look old, so it doesn’t look so new…” He busted out laughing.
Bridget found herself unexpectedly joining in his laughter. What’s he so happy about?
“I’m really happy to meet you, Bridget.”
There’s a gathering place in this novel; it’s a restaurant—the Jesse James Gang Grille, a family-run business. The people in this story frequently gravitate to the place to satisfy their longings for good food and friends. Take Morris, for instance, a candidate for Masters in physics at Lincoln University. He enjoys exploring any topic that pops up during dinner conversation.
He continued: “One of these ‘crumples’ had lifted some half-billion-year-old Cambrian shale deposits into an accessible position, called the Burgess shale, in British Columbia. Fossils discovered there by Walcott contain crustaceans with biological features (eyes and gills, jointed limbs and intestines) that are too complex to have evolved by random mutation before or during the Cambrian period. Random mutations could not have produced organisms of such complexity by the Cambrian era. What’s indicated then, by the fossil record, is a burst of genetic design that occurred about half a billion years ago, across a multiplicity of animal types.”
“Why couldn’t those highly developed crustaceans have been present during the Cambrian period?” asked Shapur.
“They were present. That’s what the fossil record attests. But according to the mathematical principles of probability, their existence could not have been randomly generated so soon in earth’s history.”
One unique perspective in this tale of multiple lives intersecting is shown through the character Lili Kapua, a Hawaiian woman who is President of the Family Education Foundation. During the course of our story she leaves her Pacific home to attend a convention in the Washington area. She is a very resourceful, energetic woman—a teacher, who is much appreciated by her colleagues, and also by her husband, David. During their flight from Honululu toward Washington, he has these thoughts:
Lili’s hips, about which he had been obsessively curious at the age of 27, had widened a little, having delivered three new humans into the world, but they still held the attraction and mystery they had demanded when he first laid eyes on her. As a young man, he had known little about the wifely aspects of womanhood, and even less about the wide spectrum of feminine sensitivities and aptitudes—attributes within a woman that would later, as he slowly discovered over 27 years, blossom and bear fruit like papayas, bursting with blood-red fertility on the inside, thereby adding decidedly feminine fascinations to his insufferably dull male existence.
Contrast David's appreciation for his woman with the attitude of Moa, whose view of women is perverse:
He opened the door of an apartment in—it must have been a Serb neighborhood—hell, he couldn’t tell the difference between one group and another. He entered the place and there she was—a lone, unprotected woman with her child. Daddy was gone, probably killed off by the Albanians, or maybe still fighting, out in the woods somewhere. The first thing Moa did was assert the intimidating power of the gun. It was like a magic wand in his hands. It hadn’t taken much wielding and waving before she got the message. He had laid the gun down and just had his way. The kid didn’t even make trouble, just whined while he did what he had to do. It had been so easy…piece of cake.
Moe's way of approaching life is fundamentally flawed. He has problems.
But then...don't we all have problems. We all have our share of faults, and the woes that result from them. Some people make bad choices in life, and then never overcome the consequences of those decisions. Others, having made poor choices, are able to resurrect efforts that have gone astray and redirect them toward more productive ends. Bridget is one such character in this novel.
“My father and I had had a big fight when I didn’t go back to school after three semesters. After that, I wanted to make a go of it on my own…to see where it would take me. When I was sleeping on that filthy couch at Wanda’s trailer, I realized that that’s where it had taken me.”
“Can’t hardly blame your dad for being concerned about that.”
“He never knew about any of it. He was always just a silent presence in the background. I think he was just waiting patiently for something to happen, something he knew would happen, to bring me back to my senses.”
Always in the background of our 21st century life, a constant flow of information and persuasion is enveloping us in a concoction of electronic influences.
Hilda Hightower, setting sauce bottles and flower vases on tables in the restaurant, paused to hear Sandy’s report. She listened as the blonde reporter described the conflagration, and its effect upon persons nearby.
“…Stillman’s act of martyrdom intensifies the awareness of many Americans who now actively protest U.S. presence in Iraq. At Haight and Ashbury, I’m Sandy Ballew, XYZ in San Francisco.”
Hilda resumed her routine, getting ready for the day’s lunch crowd.
We pay heed to these multiplicities of signals in various ways. Some of us process info as news, or as resources for further developing the goals and interests of our lives. Some folks build networks, perhaps for the betterment of mankind. Others have motives and objectives that are tainted, or downright nefarious.
Rachel, alarmed at the prospect of such a person walking around undetected for so long, said: “I don’t think it’s very likely he was living in his own little world. If he had bookmarked websites on his computer with that stuff, he was probably communicating with others. I’ll bet you he’s in a network. He might have even bragged about some of his crimes to his buddies.”
Helen agreed. “It’s been shown in the histories of some psychopaths that they have a deep need to share their torrid little triumphs with others…bragging.”
“We’ve got his computer, and we have specialists looking at his records now. There may, indeed, be some kind of network around here. We’ve had several hate crimes around here in the last few months,” said Nguyen.
“…duh!” Helen exclaimed, incredulously. "…last night."
Ultimately, though, each one of us absorbs and processes those messages and events that have impact upon our collective consciousness, and then uses them to make decisions about the next move. And we each must come to terms with our own destiny, or lack thereof, in this life. Here’s a conversation between two of our main characters that illustrates this predicament:
In their ponderous silence, the bus began to move.
“It just all seems so random to me, Maudy…people with their lives seem like puffy lottery balls bouncing ‘round, bumpin’ into each other. Every now and then one pops out lucky, but most of them are just bouncing ‘round without any rhyme or reason.”
“Kaneesha.” …Silence.
“Kaneesha.”
“What, Maudy?”
“There is an order in the universe.”
"And how do you know that?"
“I know it because…I believe it.”
“You believe it, and that makes it so? You believe it, and that makes for order in the universe?”
“Well, Kaneesha, there is a random quality to it. It’s all in how you look at it. It’s all about your perspective…your perspective. Is the glass half full? Or is it half-empty? If you say the glass is half empty, what advantage is there in that?”
“It’s more realistic.”
“Pessimistic, it’s more pessimistic,” said Maudy...
Some special individuals are able to cut right through the distractions and obstructions in life, establishing pursuits and accomplishments that enrich the lives of themselves and others in the process. Some who fall into this category may be worthy of the appellation “hero.” In our story, Isaac is one such person.
As soon as they cleared out, Marcus saw in front of him a face that he recognized. Who is that guy? I’ve seen him somewhere. A young man was sitting, speaking to an old couple. Marcus watched him, sure that he would know before long who the man is. As Marcus was observing, the man looked down, as if he were contemplating the next words that he might utter. As the young face turned downward, Marcus’ brain immediately supplied a thought that the man was looking down at a basketball, that he was about to pass a basketball. Isaac Jones.
As Marcus’ brain registered the fact that there was someone in the room that he knows, or at least, knows of, his sense of well-being began to return to him. He could do this now. He could get through this. Don’t need to go anywhere just yet. There’s Isaac Jones. I’m on a winning team here. Marcus’ attention narrowed onto Isaac. He watched him closely; after a few seconds, he could hear what Isaac was saying to the older couple:
“No, no, I wasn’t moving at all. In fact, I ran right into him. He stopped suddenly. I ran right into his back. Next thing I know, he’s pushing me aside. It was déjà vu for me, just like being knocked around on the court.”
But Isaac is speaking here about the true hero of our story, whose experience goes something like this:
In the course of this small sojourn, Aleph crossed over a small concrete bridge. He stopped in the middle and looked down. The structure was spanning a creek, a quite insignificant creek, by the looks of it. The water appeared stagnant, slime proliferating on the edges of it. Nestled against the muddy edge of what must have been at one time a life-giving stream was: a rusted child-sized tricycle, several beer cans, paper litter of all shapes and sizes, a strewn plastic grocery bag here, another one there, two tires, an irridized oil slick across the surface of the water.
Aleph lamented the passing of this place. This place, that had once been a home to trees and shrubs, squirrels and duck, foxes and deer…and fish. This place was now a mere oversight. A mere overlooking. Everyone overlooked it. No one looked at it. A mere overpassing. Everyone overpassed it. It was just an overlooked, overpassed sewer hole in the middle of a great, seething civilization. Once teeming with life, now it was collecting death. The African lamented. His eye settled on a cardboard enclosure that had once been the home, for three minutes or so, of a cheeseburger. Super Size was splayed across its broken styrofoam back.
He continued on his journey. What else could he do? Stop and clean the place? A man is not….
High above the fray, beyond our daily and lifelong struggles to retain dignity and make the best use our freedoms, there is help, and hope. Or perhaps there is only failure, and despair. Which is it?
We may encounter, in the natural world, beasts that pose danger to our peace and security, even threaten our very lives. We may also observe, in the natural world, some life forms that inspire us, that move and propel us toward our noble enterprise as keepers of planet earth. One character in our tale, Tim, playing a relatively small role in the big picture of Glass hall full, but having a large personality nonetheless, has this meditation:
Between the void of space and the crumpled berm of blue-green, red-ribbed, rumbling earth, a wind blows, gentle and mighty. This firmament of birth, broad enclosure of our earth, whirls beyond our comprehension, yet within our hearing and our knowing, but beyond our grasp or grip. Rip, flip, trip it slips through our invisible atmospheric tide, bellowing, caressing, stirring mist within our breathing and our gentle, writhing ride.
There is a creature whose native country is that domain of air. Endowed with wings of quill, it compels every wisp and waft of atmospheric nuance to its own advantage. Thus the agile eagle soars nimbly between yon mountainous clouds and above our nimbus trees.
Her rising thermals o’erflown, her swooping secrets to us unknown, she at last settles upon her aerie rock, to tend her young…stupid eaglets still not grown. It is said among the wise, and yet it is a tale to tell, that she…with her younglets’ comfort unimpressed, does up and kick them from the nest. Could such a tale be true?
You'll have to read the book to find out.
Now about the author:
Carey is a baby boomer who got together with his wife, Pat, in 1980. Working together and enjoying life they brought three new babies into the world: Micah (1981), Kim (1982)who took the cover photo, and Katie (1984). They raised the kids in Boone, North Carolina, which is on the Blue Ridge. After Micah, Kim, and Katie went off to school and graduated from Duke and UNC, Carey decided to become a teacher.
So he studied education at Appalachian State University (thrice National Champion of FCS football),to obtain licensure to teach high school English, middle school language arts, social studies, and science. Having obtained licensure in January, 2007, he is substitute teaching and hoping to break into the profession . In between completion of education courses and actually teaching, he had some extra time while Pat was busy as a nurse in ICU so he started writing Glass half-Full
In the two novels you'll occasionally find a run-on sentence or sentence fragment so that he can claim to be among the ranks of modern writers who flaunt their rejection of conventional grammar and such for the sake of dramatic effect, thus employing the stream-of-consciousness technique, but only in limited amounts, because that is only one literary device in any writer's bag of tricks. Carey's bag also includes a circular saw and a hammer, because he spent the last 25 years or so working as a carpenter and subliminally planning the book in his head, although he certainly didn't know it at the time.
Glass half-Full takes place in suburban Washington, DC, a fascinating city, and not only because its the Capitol of the USA. Carey, Pat and the three young'uns wandered about the place quite a bit while Micah lived there for a few years after graduating from Duke and taking a job in Arlington,Virginia,which may be near the mythical town of Urdor in the book. The Washington Metro area is home to over a million people, some of whom you've heard about, but many more are, like you and me, just regular folks... Marcus, Bridget, Aleph, Isaac, Nguyen, Kaneesha, Maudy, Wanda, Jonda, James, Hilda, Jesse, Rachel, Morris, Shapur, Derrick, and several others...good ones and bad ones. You know the drill.
The scenery skips around quite a bit, mainly because Carey and Pat like to travel, and some of the places they've been turn up in the story...Jerusalem, San Fransisco, London, Paris, Munich, Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico. There are other places too: Philadelphia, Baltimore, Kosovo, Sudan, that we've learned about through the old-fashioned activity called research, or study.
The second novel, Glass Chimera is a work in progress. See the links above for previews of the first chapters, and make suggestions if you like.
And (did we mention?) that Carey's alma mater, LSU (1973) was also a three-time national champion in BCS football, 1958, 2005 and 2008. And (did we mention?)there are two other national championships in the family attributable to archrivals Duke and UNC, whose respective basketball teams earned the NCAA titles, 2001 and 2005 while the Rowland kids were studying at those two reservoirs of higher learning. And we'll even mention the fact that the Tar Heels brought another NCAA trophy to Chapel Hill last spring.
Can we interest you in a championship novel?