Teaser Tuesday

Grandfather had bronchitis and sipped whiskey from a flask, talking about how in the fine, early years of his marriage he and his wife (this was in the late thirties) would jump in their car and drive all the way to Chicago in less than three days just to eat in a bona-fide French restaurant.  At a crossroads he permitted the frantic dogs to jump out and chase a coyote–in a lifetime of chasing coyotes they had never caught one except pups in the den.

________

I used to keep up with Jim Harrison (especially remember A Good Day to Die), but hadn’t thought of him in years until I recently read The Woman Lit by Fireflies (which reminded me of how I admire and like his writing).  Dalva was on my Reading List in the 1980s but somehow I never got around to reading it; making up for lost time now.

Below is another couple of Teaser sentences from Dalva (I know . . . I know . . . that is two too many according to the “Teaser Tuesday” rules . . .)

It was today–rather yesterday I think–that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation.  I said people don’t talk like that in this neighborhood.

Two ‘don’ts’

NEVER NEVER NEVER lay a book facedown when open!

DO NOT drop food or drink on the book you are reading!

Excerpt from Jim Harrison’s novel The Woman Lit by Fireflies:

Gwen told Stuart everything important except why she was on the train.  She was voluble in a way she couldn’t remember, and in a manner she couldn’t have been with someone her own age.  She told him about the small family ranch between Mule Junction and Guthrie to which she had retreated after a brief, unhappy marriage to a university mathematician who now owned a computer business in Albuquerque; about the Cambodian girl they had adopted and she had raised to the current age of sixteen; about her love of flying and the old Cessna 172 she owned that was temporarily grounded in need of a valve job; of the Simmental-Charolais stud bull that was the ranch’s bread and butter, of her arthritic father who lived seventy miles away in Silver City because he needed dialysis twice a week, but always came to dinner on Sundays.  She told him that her daughter, Sun by name, was precocious and had been recruited by colleges for early admission but had chosen to spend another year at home and graduate with her own class.  Sun’s hobbies were botany, livestock and Indian history.

“Maybe that’s because she’s Oriental and the Navajo and Apache are Athabascans who supposedly crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, then came on down here a thousand or so years ago,” Stuart suggested.

“She’s too perverse for that.  She prefers the Anasazi, Hopi, the Isletas and Pueblo people who came up from Mexico.”

[from the section of the novel entitled SUNSET LIMITED]

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite writers.