RichEisbrouch

Yep.

That's an interesting way to put it. Thanks for pointing that out.

Yep, definitely.

Yeah, Chris was thinking with something other than his brain, and Mark had politely let himself be cornered in a car with his partner and her parents, and he just needed to break free. And Phil, Chris, Anne, and Mark are still in their mid-twenties, with their brains just finishing up developing.

Yep, and Phil hasn't had enough distraction recently. That's why he temporarily took himself out of Iowa and into Mexico.

Thanks for liking this. It's certainly a hard book to love because of Scoot's adventure, but he ended up taking his parents, especially his father, on one, too. You'll notice Scoot's sister shrugged it off, perhaps knowing her brother better than their parents do, and maybe knowing her parents better than they do their children. And you gotta remember that Sharon set this off, and Don reminded her at least a couple of times that she's susceptible to the wrong-headed Pendleton omens. As for open endings: how else could this book end? Don and Sharon are only in their early forties, and their kids are in their early twenties. With good fortune, they all have many years ahead. But I don't really want to chronicle Sharon, Don, Noah, Owen, and Lisa as great-grandparents. We learn a bit more about Don and Owen in some related Waldron Police stories, but those stories are focused on work, and Don and Owen are still in their forties. Again, thanks for reading. Rich

Don's a different man than Scoot, raised in a different time, if the same place. But Don's still in that place, and Scoot's discovered other worlds with different rules, and there's nothing that says that at twenty-four, he can't go off on a job, or a sexual holiday, for a couple of weeks without reporting into his parents.

There's also the possibility that there are no lumps, and Scoot is a hard-working, well-balanced guy as a result of his parents' caring while he and his sister grew up. But presently, on a drunken impulse, and a bit because he's in love and showing off, he's having fun, and it's a kind of fun his parents can't understand because they're no longer twenty-four and didn't ever live in the California sun and work in the film industry.

Thanks, but it really comes from observations of places my mother, mother-in-law, cousin, and a business friend have lived and hearing about places my sister-in-law and niece still work. And these places are far more understanding and supportive than the places my grandmothers and father lived, fifty and forty years ago.

Unfortunately, there's a reason the chapters in this book are short: they match my attention span. They're also like writing haiku: trying to fit a lot of exposition into a little space. I'd considered starting the book with this chapter, but I needed the readers to know who these people were and in what kind of world they were living.

Good thought, but I think I have one more easy book in me, the one I'm presently serializing here, and then I want to go back through all my writing, proofread again, and do it bit of editing. Then I'll see.

We were all busy – Papa with Herbert at work, Mama giving a piano lesson, Howard at NYU, Lewis at Columbia, and I was in my room reading law homework – when Ella quietly let herself into our apartment. It was late afternoon in late October, and she had a key, just as she still had one to my grandparents’ apartment right down the street. We all had keys to that, though we didn’t have one to Ella and Joe’s duplex on Central Park West. But Rosa was almost always there, and if it was her night off,

Thanks. Glad it held your interest.

I'm not sure it haunted anyone else as much as, for some reason, it did Cory. To everyone else, it was just a neat story.

Yep, at base, he's a good guy.

Partial tanks and maybe not thinking with all their brains, either.

Yeah, ain't guilt grand?

You seem to be wondering in the right direction.

Yep, Terry and Cory are comfortable all right. Though Terry's been kind of isolated, and Cory's presently focused elsewhere. So maybe they don't realize or appreciate the ease between them.

Well, Terry's perception of Cory is he acts like a frat boy. But compared to an actual frat man, Cory may pale. And how much is Terry stereotyping frat guys anyway?

Yep to all those things. Nice observations.

Cory has lots of experience, but you're right, little of it seems to be with camping, and he's definitely unfamiliar with this area. And thanks for reading this. It seems you've gone through the whole book in one sitting. Wow.

The other thing my father was concerned about was Howard, the man I intended to marry though not immediately. Howard and I were the same age, but like Lewis, he’d gone to school on the normal schedule so would only start his junior year in September. But he had a one-year Master’s degree planned, so we’d finish at the same time. No matter what my father thought, I wasn’t planning to let Howard get away. I’d simply never met anyone like him in terms of his attitudes toward women. He

Yep, we seem to have forgotten so many of the details. It's like we invented modernity.

My other model for law school, if my parents really didn’t approve, was Lewis’ father, now Chief Assistant District Attorney for the City of New York. Mr. Pecora started college, but then his father died, and he had to start working in an office. He’d finished college at night and had studied law the same way, and when he’d finally completed that degree, he was twenty-nine. At twenty, I was already ahead of him, so if I had to work as a stenographer to go to Columbia, that was fine with me.