The French Kiss-Off & Other Short Stories: Plus Bonus Volume: the Book of Love

By Xlibris US

When I left the small hotel in the Montparnase section of Paris to enter the taxi Id booked with the desk clerk the night before to take me to the Charles DeGaulle airport north of the city, I paused on the sidewalk and considered:

Do I have all of my luggage? Yes.

And my ticket and passport? Yes.

Am I doing the right thing? Will this man be the right one . . . or perhaps Im making another wrong turn on my road through life?

But my last question went unanswered in my mind as I watched the driver put my bags in the trunk, then I began my journey to America. And to Jim

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499006650

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Dennis Glaser.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/19/2014

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Contents

Preface

The French Kiss-Off

How It All Happened

I Did Right by Her

It Never Happened

Gift Shopping

Bedtime Stories

A Strange Situation

The Writer’s Dilemma

Amour Unrequited

Amtrak Sunset

Another Lonely Girl

It Never Happened

Mysterious Ways

The Argument

The Barbecue

The Dilemma

The Great Snowstorm

The Hunger

The Last Time

The Mystic

The Quickie

Unrealized Expectations

The Old Man and His Fiddle

The Writer’s Dilemma

Six Went Down to Mardi Gras

The Fun Begins

Meanwhile

The Apartment

Incident on Rampart Street

The Writer’s Dilemma

Order in the Court

On Creating Your Soul Mate From the Mate You Have on Hand

OTHER BOOKS BY DENNIS GLASER

Music City’s Defining Decade

A Geezer’s Guide to the Universe

Seeing Europe as a Traveler, Not a Tourist

For Better or Verse

Preface

I know not what the truth may be,

So I tell the story as it ought to be"

Meet the Author

I’m not sure how, when, where, or why I decided to make my living as a writer. As a child in Nebraska, I read everything I could lay my eyes upon. Maybe that was part of it.

While still in grade school, I used my older brother’s toy typewriter—the kind you turned a dial to a letter, then hit a lever that pressed the letter on the paper. It was slow, tedious labor, typing words one letter at a time, but I produced an 8½ x 11 page of the Pibel Lake News, named for the rural community where I grew up. I made multiple copies using carbon paper, and put a copy in each of the 5 or 6 mail boxes (we were the last stop on the rural mail route). Next day, the mailman was waiting for me when I went to get our letters, and he told me in all seriousness that I couldn’t put anything in a mailbox unless it had an address and a stamp on it.

Well, I used to leave an apple in our mailbox for him, so I figured I had to quit doing that too, since I had no money to buy stamps. And how could you put a stamp and address on an apple?

My brother, Wilfred, who was about 18 months older than me, contracted polio when he was 3 or 4 years old. Naturally, his need for care and treatment occupied most of my parents’ time, so I didn’t get much attention during those early years. On the other hand, later Willie and I attended school in the same grade and I benefited from learning first hand how to deal with another person’s affliction. But the things we could do together during childhood playtime were of course limited—and my three other older brothers didn’t offer me much childhood companionship.

And so I had a lot of alone time. Wilfred was gone a lot—undergoing care and treatment in the state orthopedic hospital. So I became an omnivorous reader—everything from the daily livestock journal to a couple of monthly magazines and frequent visits to the town library.

I attended a Catholic high school, taught by nuns, my sophomore, junior and senior years. English composition was my favorite subject, and the better papers were selected for the honor of being read aloud to the class. I delighted in using double-meaning slang in my stories, much to the students’ amusement and some red faces on the nuns who were our teachers. Maybe that was why I was elected president of the senior class! The nuns were not pleased, nor did they like it when I dropped pool hall tokens in the collection plate when passed around for one cause or another, World War II was raging, and my two oldest brothers were in the Army. The third in line, Harold, was helping my father and thus was eligible for deferment until I became draft-eligible at age 18. Only one son per family could be spared. I had no interest in learning how to raise cattle, so I began lobbying my parents for consent to enlist. I turned 17 in January, which also was the end of the first semester of my senior year. I told the nuns of my plan, and they determined that I was just one unit short of graduation.

Wait a minute, said the Mother Superior. If we changed the name of our religion class to ethics, you’d have enough units to graduate. And so it was arranged. I have always taken delight in the fact that the good sister compromised her ethics to help me graduate early. They were never happy that I’d been elected senior class president, given the other problems I created for them—which included the need for sending a classmate to wake me up when I failed to show up in the morning.

So I went to Omaha to enlist in the Navy. But this was in 1945 and its ranks were closed. The recruiting office sent me to the Coast Guard, pointing out that it functioned as part of the Navy during wartime. I was accepted, and was called up a few weeks later for boot camp. You could not enlist after your 18th birthday when you became eligible for the army draft, and on the train with the other recruits I was celebrating my 17th birthday while everyone else was approaching 18.

After boot camp where I was a squad leader, and a leave which coincided with graduation, I was sent to radio operator school, probably because I was one of few recruits who could type. But I’ve read some of the letters I sent home (and which my mother saved). Certainly the letters showed little likelihood of me becoming a professional writer!

After six months of training, during which I learned to type in English what I was hearing in Morse code without stopping to think what it was, I graduated while still 17 as a Radioman 3/c, which is equivalent to an army sergeant. I came home on leave over Christmas, and in January was shipped out from Boston to my new duty at a Loran station at Cape Bonavista, on the very northeast tip of Newfoundland. LORAN means long range aid to navigation, a system that sent out radio signals from two different locations which by triangulation told the plane or ship where it was. The other station was at Battle Harbor, Labrador, with which I talked daily in Morse code via shortwave radio. I worked for a Chief Petty Officer, who only required that I go on the air twice a day. I soon had a girl friend in Bonavista, and that helped me pass the time. Usually I went to town in a dog sled.

After my discharge in June, I gave my parents’ house a coat of pain and helped my brother B.J. on his ranch over the summer. I’d planned to attend the University of Colorado in the fall because a guy from Colorado told me they had a great journalism school. But my plans were changed when I needed surgery—an appendectomy—and there were no VA hospitals then. So, my savings gone, I used the GI bill to enroll at Omaha Tech, which had a journalism sequence and even produced and printed its own newspaper. I soon became managing editor. Found a girl friend, and worked part time at a fancy restaurant and then in a clothing store. An instructor at Omaha Tech knew the owner of the Manhattan (Kansas) Tribune-News, who called and offered me a job. I took it.

After a few weeks of general reporting, I became farm editor, and when we added a weekly farm paper to our other two papers, I moved up to managing editor of all three. From there, I went to the Phillips County Review in Phillipsburg, Kansas, because the owner had a practice of financing newspaper purchases for his editors. But not for me, because he took a job as secretary to the governor and needed me to run his newspaper. So when the Manhattan publisher called and offered me his top editorial management position, which by then had included a national soil conservation business magazine, I accepted. I had a wife and daughter to support, so I needed to get on with my life.

His promise to help me buy my own paper became less likely as my responsibilities increased, so I started looking for one to buy on my own. A small (failing) daily in Lewistown, Illinois, was in my grasp financially, so that’s where I went. In the 15 years I was there, I grew it into 8 community papers and a big high-speed printing center where we also printed other people’s papers, plus millions—make that billions—of tire circulars for Goodyear and later, also for Goodrich. And did it without outside financial help—not to mention with a banker who thought I was nuts.

That—and my marriage—palled after a couple of decades, so I voluntarily signed everything over to my ex-wife and moved on to Nashville, working as a professional manager for my cousin, Tompall; then as a magazine editor and writer for a national country music fan magazine; did graphic arts product sales; was public relations executive for a small record label; operator of a beer bar on Music Row once frequented by Kris Kristofferson; owner of a record-pressing factory; and finally, advertising writer and manager for a large religious publishing house. There, I was steadily promoted, finally reaching middle management. During my years in Nashville, I was doing a lot of writing, some of which is in this book and my three previous books.

After 13 years on my last job, I took early retirement with a small pension, Social Security, and a few bucks in the bank. I moved to a 55-acre farm I’d purchased in Cannon County, Tennessee, renting out and eventually selling the condo I’d purchased after my second divorce. I really enjoyed living on my farm. I kept busy mowing the weeds, harvesting a hayfield for use as mulch or had baled and sold, and cutting wood which I used to heat the house during winter. Rock fences said to date back to slavery days criss-crossed the land. The place also featured a spring as its water supply, which was fed into a regular pressure system. TV was lousy, but life was good. And I had a huge garden and some fruit trees and a grape vine. And had two ponds built, stocking the one closest to the house with fish.

I married a third time, but it turned out she was lying when she said she wanted to live in the country. What she really wanted was for me to buy a Saab car, which I did—and in which she drove away to Texas a few months later.

But I can’t complain. For most of my unmarried years, I enjoyed more compatible feminine companionship. However, I did henceforth refrain from inviting anyone to marry me after No. 3. And managed to date single women who also wanted to preserve their amateur status.

In the 1990s, I gained a feminine pen pal in France, and went to visit her for a week. As a result, when I met another French lady in Tunisia who invited me to come live with her, I accepted the invitation and sold my farm for exactly twice what I’d paid for it. The relationship with the French lady in a small village about an hour outside of Paris was never that wonderful, but her home was a great base of operation for a guy like me who wanted to see more of Europe. And somehow, I never seemed to lack for feminine companionship as I traveled about the continent.

I was back in the ‘states and in a comfortable relationship with Linda Deems in Northwest Georgia when 9/11 helped me decide to move back to the U.S. permanently. Here I was again able to engage in my gardening hobby, and I have branched into fruit trees and decorative flowers as well. And I introduced Linda to the joys of annual ocean cruises plus fun trips to show her Hawaii, England and France.

Yet, something pulls at my memories when I hear the song: There’s nothing left for me, of days that used to be. I live in memories, among my souvenirs.

And writing books like this one is the best way I’ve found to meld the past with the present. I hope you enjoy my efforts.

These are titles to my previous books, all still available at Xlibris.com, Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com, in print and also as e-books:

A Geezer’s Guide to the Universe

Seeing Europe as a Traveler; Not a Tourist

For Better or Verse

Music City’s Defining Decade

*     *     *

Epitaph

I originally wrote the following be mixed with soil at the farm house in Nebraska where I was born, and which still is in family hands. But I think now that I’d prefer the garden in Georgia where I found much peace and enjoyment.

Here, mixed with the soil of his declining years, are the memories of the fifth, and the last son, of Tena and Carl Glaser. Dennis Glaser was born January 22, 1928, on the bed on which he was conceived, and died on ______, 20_____ in Rossville, Georgia.

Prior to the home he shared here with Linda Sue Deems, Dennis lived in perhaps a half-hundred different houses, apartments, and furnished rooms in Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Tennessee, France, and Georgia.

His creative life following service during World War II, was as newspaper reporter and editor, newspaper and commercial printing company owner and publisher, music business involvement as personal manager, magazine writer, public relations official, and owner of one of the last record-pressing plants in Nashville, followed by middle-management positions in the advertising field. After early retirement, he sold his 55-acre farm in Cannon County, Tennessee, and moved to France where he lived for several years while traveling about Europe and North Africa. After which, he wrote and published five books.

The father of one daughter, Mrs. Denise Heffren, Dennis was married three times, and found true spiritual connection in late life with Linda Sue Deems, who also survives, along with his daughter, two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

It was his final wish that this epitaph and his ashes be mixed with the soil of the garden he so enjoyed tending in life. And he hoped that his books brought joy and new insights to those who read them.

The French Kiss-Off

When I left the small hotel in the Montparnase section of Paris to enter the taxi I’d booked with the desk clerk the night before to take me to the Charles DeGaulle airport north of the city, I paused on the sidewalk and considered:

Do I have all of my luggage? Yes.

And my ticket and passport? Yes.

Am I doing the right thing? Will this man be the right one… or perhaps I’m making another wrong turn on my road through life?

But my last question went unanswered in my mind as I watched the driver put my bags in the trunk, then I began my journey to America. And to Jim.

After checking in and depositing my luggage, then going through passport control where the officer barely glanced at my papers, I passed through the gate to Satellite 2 and stepped on the moving sidewalk which took me to the TWA boarding area.