Giraffe and Other Short Stories

By Jonathan M. Purver

A collection of short stories set in Hollywood and New York City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467054027

Jonathan M. Purver

Jonathan M. Purver has written more than a dozen books, and he has written many feature stories for Gannett Newspapers. His works also appear in numerous journals and reviews. He adapted the Broadway play Dark of the Moon (by Berney and Richardson) for Public Radio, and his play Night Train has been produced for Los Angeles regional television. Jonathan, his wife Jeannie, and their cat Sunset, live in South Lake Tahoe and Novato California. This is his first book of short stories.

Book preview

© 2009 Jonathan M. Purver. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/18/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4389-4321-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4389-4322-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-5402-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

For Jeannie who makes everything possible

and to the memory of my mother Edith and my father Eugene.

In the heart of a winter snowfall I snowshoe across the meadow and feel the snow swirl around me. The snowflakes are moments of time which will settle into drifts. In spring the drifts will be gone. The landscape of the meadow will appear to be different yet it will be the same meadow.

This is how I view time, swirling snowflakes settling into drifts, disappearing only to come again in a cycle without end.

My snowshoes have left tracks upon the snowfall of time.

In the spring I may no longer walk this meadow, but come winter you will find my tracks upon the snow and we will meet again.

And together we will greet the spring.

Contents

Preface

Giraffe

A Cop and His Horse

Almost Catholic

Every September

Bridges

Central Park

Firebird

Letter Home

Alligator Shoes

Space

Five Minutes

Why Do I Sing

I Will Listen

Ishmael

Poet

Electric Cowboy

Carnegie Hall

Always Near

Smoke

The Blue Raven Bistro

Southern Comfort

Maggie

Eleven O’clock Is Still Morning

Winter’s Song

Beginnings

Epilogue

Preface

When I was young I had a small darkroom where I’d print my own black and white photographs. After developing the negatives, I would place them in the overhead enlarger, project an image onto the photo paper, bring it into sharp focus, set the timer, and print. Under the glow of the soft red light, I’d place the paper in the hypo tray and very gently with wooden tongs make sure the paper was completely under the solution. I smell its tart scent. Then the exciting part. Slowly an image begins to form, indistinct at first, then clearer and clearer until the photograph emerges. Look! I took that. That’s what I saw. That’s what I felt. That’s a part of me.

The stories in this book are my word photographs. They’re what I saw, what I felt, they’re part of me. Some of my word photographs are fragments, frayed, hazy, or light struck, because memory, like an old photograph, may fade a bit over time.

The snapshots in this book are my memories, dreams, and snowflakes. They are not tidily arranged or chronological, and this is deliberate. If we try too hard to place neatly into a container, a memory, a dream, or a snowflake, it evaporates.

Are these stories true? For the most part, they’re factual as to the people I’ve met as well as the places I’ve been and what I’ve experienced and felt. In two of the stories, a number of months after I’d written them as they actually occurred, I could not shake the feeling they were unfinished and felt compelled to complete them as I have. Winter’s Song is one such story, true except for the last line; and the end sequences of Beginnings which of course I could not have known. Another story, The Blue Raven Bistro, is one that should have been. Every so often, life presents us with a canvas, then hands us nice big colorful crayons so we can color it.

Most stories in this book are based on my own memories, though you’ll notice a few written as poems. These are based on people I’ve known. It may have been my fingers which touched the keys, but it is their voices, not mine, which fill these pages.

Lives are perceived as being in a straight line, from dinner table to cookie jar. However, perhaps what we like to call reality is simply part of a journey, and from time to time we allow ourselves to be released from its confines and exist outside boundaries.

It is my belief that on rare and unexpected moments, what we experience is not restricted by time or space nor measured by any clock—that our journey contains no endings, only beginnings.

Giraffe

We lost the giraffe in New Mexico. It wasn’t really much of a giraffe, when you come to think about it. Gray corduroy, maybe a foot high, one ear quite well chewed.

We were traveling eastward to visit my paternal grandmother Sonia. My grandfather had just died, and my parents and I were driving back east to be with my grandmother for awhile. The 1939 Buick, burlap water bag attached to the front bumper, only took us a couple of hundred miles a day. We drove mostly at night; in summer you didn’t cross deserts midday.

Like a plump beetle, our dusty-brown automobile found its way from the open fields, the walnut groves, the ranches that were Los Angeles, to the blistering deserts of the Southwest where we’d look through the windshield to the horizon and watch billowing cloud castles and shimmering lakes far in the distance down the narrow black highway. When we got to the lakes, they had vanished, and new lakes were in the distance. Lake after lake, cloud after cloud, lake after lake, for hours and hours until the child of seven was lulled to sleep by the swaying of the car as he dreamed of lizards and cacti and ships sailing upon lakes at the end of long black highways never reached.

My grandfather suffered a stroke five years earlier, while still a young man. He was a prominent civil engineer, a professor of engineering and mathematics at Brown University, one of the engineers who helped design the bridge over Sydney Harbor. He could get around well enough, but had difficulty finding the words he looked for to communicate his thoughts.

His words, which I know would have been beautiful, had become butterflies for which he no longer had a net. But he spoke with his kind and intelligent eyes, and when he couldn’t find words he wanted to use to speak to his grandson, he’d turn the sounds into little songs or rhymes, and we’d laugh.

Although I was very young, I remember visiting my grandparents the year before and feeling sad knowing my grandfather was trying so hard to search for words to communicate with me. I hope he knew that he did speak to me in a language more meaningful than that of words: a language composed of feelings, of love.

When I see the bridge that spans Sydney Harbor from northern to southern shore, I think of my grandfather. Surely the world’s largest steel arch bridge, this lovely work of art, is his memorial.

SKU-000259631_Text.pdf

Nighttime was best for crossing the deserts. Quit driving during midday, find a small adobe-walled motel and a nearby diner, go to sleep early in the room with the squeaking bed and the screen door covered with insects. Awaken while constellations glow in the southwestern sky, pull onto the highway, gaze out the rear window as the flickering white and red neon sign of the motel speeds away into the black distance. As we drive into the night, from time to time a truck thunders past from the opposite direction, shaking our car. Under the stars, hours go by.

From darkness, across the desert the sun rises, and for a few moments the horizon is lighted in brilliant color just before desert heat begins again. And we drive until we find a small adobe-walled motel and a diner, go to sleep early in the room with the squeaking bed and the screen door covered with insects, until it is time again to awaken while constellations glow in the southwestern sky.

It was near the end of a day, somewhere in New Mexico, that we realized the giraffe was missing. It was with utter horror my parents noticed its absence. It must have been left at last night’s lodging, most likely dropped under the bed. This night, my father phoned last night’s motel, but the giraffe was nowhere to be found. The room hadn’t yet been rented, so the manager himself checked the room, looked in dresser drawers, closets, even crawled under the beds, then went out and looked around the grounds. He and his wife had a daughter around my age; they