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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466893658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 232 KB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Randy Powell
I've lived in Seattle all my life -- since 1956. I live here now with my wife, Judy, and our two sons, Eli and Drew. I like the outdoors, books, fresh crab and raw oysters, and rain.
As a kid, I was crazy about sports. All sports. When I wasn't playing the real thing, I was playing some imaginary form of it. I wasn't a great athlete, just obsessed. I peaked when I was eleven. Our little league football team won the city championship, and the coach gave me the game ball. I lost that ball a few years later. I'm still looking for it.
I had fun reading and writing. When I found a book I liked, I threw myself into it, into the main character's skin. I'd try to write in the author's style. Writing was hard work, but what a rush it gave me, coming up with the right phrase, finishing a piece and feeling it click, reading it to the class and getting some laughs.
In high school, in the early 1970s, my hero was Arthur Ashe, the tennis pro. I concentrated on tennis and worked hard at it, but not hard enough. Today it's still my game of choice, and I still don't work hard enough.
High school is also where I became serious about writing. I became even more so in college, at the University of Washington. I made two trips to Europe, worked summers in Alaska as a deckhand on a fishing boat, and wrote short stories, novels, and even formula romances.
After college, I got a job teaching at an alternative school for junior high and high school dropouts. I taught for four years and loved it, but finally left because it ate up my writing time.
My breakthrough in writing came when I learned to look inside myself and write about the things I cared and felt deeply about. I guess it was only natural that my first published novel, My Underrated Year, should be about a high school football and tennis player. Yes, there's a lot of myself in that book, although hardly any of the incidents actually happened. That's true of my other books as well.
I enjoy visiting schools and talking to students about writing. I also love hearing from readers. You can write to me in care of my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I promise I'll write back!
Read an Excerpt
Swiss Mist
By Randy Powell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008 Randy PowellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9365-8
CHAPTER 1
house–roof–cover–shelter–protection–defense– bastion–wall–division–separation
We lived in Seattle in a small house that had a big backyard. Right smack in the middle of the backyard was a brick barbecue. In all the years we'd lived there we'd never used the barbecue, but it still had the charcoal smell of all the cookouts from past owners.
"You can roast an entire boar on that barbecue," my dad said. "Those bricks, Milo, see those bricks? They're from the same lot of bricks that were used to build the fire station and the Episcopalian church — the oldest buildings in this neighborhood."
My dad, Luke Bastion, was a philosophy teacher at a small private college. My mom, Cori, volunteered at my school and worked part-time in a candy shop. My parents loved living in Seattle and doing city things like going to plays and concerts, eating out, and looking at old buildings in different neighborhoods.
Dad had a short, well-groomed beard and zinc-colored hair that he combed straight back and tied in a ponytail. Actually, it was more like the tail of a small wet rodent than that of a pony. He had a round bald spot on top of his cranium. He took psychedelic drugs.
"For research," he told me.
Dad was always frank and open with me about his drug use.
"Mind experimentation is part of my job as an educator and seeker of enlightenment," he said. "Unlocking doors of the mind and consciousness; journeying through unknown corridors that connect our human mind with the great cosmic intelligence that controls all of life, from the orderly orbiting of the planets to the hooked beak of the jayhawk."
He shook a big stack of pages at me.
"Look at all these notes I've taken, Milo. My philosophy. Look how tiny my handwriting is! Have you ever seen such tiny handwriting?"
One of my dad's favorite things to do was step out into our backyard at sundown, when the shadows crept between the houses, lean against the brick barbecue puffing his pipe, and gaze musingly at the sky. Or gaze musingly at a blade of grass. Or a bug. Or a brick. Let's face it, he was usually so high in the evenings he would gaze musingly at most things.
Sometimes he'd invite me to step outside with him. I'd inhale the smells of charcoal barbecue, mown grass, burning pipe tobacco, and neighborhood chimney smoke.
You could argue that Dad and I didn't have a whole lot in common. He had a bald spot and I didn't. He smoked a pipe and I didn't. He used hallucinogenic drugs and I didn't. He was deep. I was shallow: all I wanted was a BMX bike for my birthday.
But as my dad told me many times, we had one very important thing in common.
"We're both on a quest for truth," he said. "You may not realize it yet, Milo, but you will. Right now your brain is still operating on the concrete-literal level. But the time will come when you're ready for the higher concepts, and I'll be able to share my complete philosophy with you — I should have it pretty well worked out by then. I guess that's about all I have to offer you — I can't teach you how to catch a ball or hammer a nail, but I can teach you how to seek the truth."
It gave me a good feeling to know that someday I would know what he was talking about.
"In the meantime," he said, "it would probably be best if you didn't emulate some of my more questionable practices."
"Huh?" I said.
"Don't do what I do," he said. "And work on building your vocabulary. If you're going to be ready to receive the concepts I share with you, you'll need a firm grasp of your mother tongue."
Mom was the one who taught me how to catch a ball and hammer a nail. She also helped me with my homework and took me to dentist appointments, Scout meetings, and baseball practice. When I was a little kid, she pitched me imaginary baseballs in the backyard. I'd hit them over the fence and the fire station and the Episcopalian church. When I got older, we played catch with a real ball and she threw me grounders and fly balls. We threw the football around. She taught me how to block and tackle and come charging out of a three-point stance. She was a coach's daughter. Her dad, my grandpa, had been the great Romney Nordquist, one of the Four Norsemen of Ballard High School football legend, who went on to coach the North Pilchuck High School Coots for thirty years. He died of a heart attack when I was eight. A coot is a type of duck.
Mom would try to drag Dad out in the backyard with us. "Come on, old man, we need a catcher" (or outfielder, or ball shagger). "Come on, Luke, shake your booty."
Dad was afraid of low-flying insects. He was also afraid of colliding with the brick barbecue. Mom, who had collided with it many times, said that our yard would be much safer and roomier if it didn't have that brick thing smack in the middle of the nice green lawn and this year, dammit, before Milo finishes fifth grade, we are going to take it apart brick by brick and haul the bricks to the dump. Nonsense, you'll do no such thing, that's a perfectly functional barbecue and I intend to use it for grilling steaks this summer. Sorry, old man, it's coming down. Oh no it isn't. Oh yes it is — and what are you talking about grilling steaks, you don't even eat meat. Yes I do. Bull, you're a vegetarian! I am not!
My fifth-grade year, they didn't just fight about the barbecue, they fought about money, household chores, Dad's drugs. They were sinking deeper and deeper into debt. House payments, car payments, drug payments — bills, bills, bills. Dad had invested their savings into a get-richquick scheme, and lost it all.
I can't think of too many things worse than lying in my bed at night and hearing my parents screaming at each other.
On April 5, the morning of my eleventh birthday, Mom and Dad blindfolded me, then led me out to the backyard and took off the blindfold and pointed to my birthday present, which was leaning against the brick barbecue: a brand-new, fully assembled BMX bike. The kind with high handlebars, an elongated seat, and fat bouncy tires specially designed for doing jumps and stunts on trails. Never had I felt such pure joy and jubilation. I ran around the yard cheering. Then I got on the bike and rode it all day and made it part of me.
A couple weeks after that, on a Sunday morning, my parents were nose-to-nose in the living room having a great big fight. I happened to pass by in search of my batting gloves just as my dad was giving my mom a shove, causing her to fall backward onto the coffee table and break it. My mom just sat there for a moment. I had no word in my vocabulary for the look on her face. I found my batting gloves and went to practice. All during practice I kept seeing the look on her face. By the time practice ended and I got home, Dad had packed a couple bags and moved out.
CHAPTER 2nervousness–stress–anxiety–strain–effort– labor–work–job–profession–teacher
I went to school every day with a nervous, bunched-up stomach. I felt sorry for both of my parents, but especially for my dad, because he was the one who had moved away. He was crashing in his friend Wally Katola's basement. I didn't see much of him during that time, because he was trying to get his life straightened out. I'd overheard my mom's older sister, Shan, say that she'd heard he was in some sort of trouble in his job at the college. Every time I thought of something ordinary such as my dad's bald spot or the smell of his shirt, it felt like my heart was breaking. And then I would take those feelings and stuff them back into me, like I was loading gunpowder down a musket barrel.
I don't think I would have made it through that spring if it hadn't been for my fifth-grade teacher. Ms. Swinford was strict and she made us work hard, but she was always up and bubbly. She had short curly hair, plump apple-red cheeks, red lipstick, and light blue cat's-eye glasses with sparkly jewels embedded in the frames. She told us stories about her childhood growing up on a farm in Wenatchee in eastern Washington. I loved hearing about her big happy family — her parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, dogs, cats. All that happiness! We learned more about Wenatchee than we'd ever need to know. She did that with all sorts of subjects, made us go deep into them and care about them as if we owned them.
Her favorite subject in the world was Switzerland.
When she was twenty she'd spent a year living in Switzerland with Aunt Liesl and Uncle Cedric, who owned a genuine Swiss chalet. Ms. Swinford had a whole Power-Point slide show she'd made about her trip. And a shelf full of books about Switzerland, all with big glossy color photos of the Matterhorn and the villages and cities and farmers and children. It made me so happy to look at those pictures of Switzerland; it felt like I belonged in the meadows of wildflowers and the Swiss villages. Just the word Alpine gave me tingles. As a mountain, the Matterhorn ruled.
Matterhorn!
Aunt Liesl and Uncle Cedric weren't her real aunt and uncle, but you could tell she really loved them. They had a view of the Matterhorn from their back porch. They had climbed many surrounding mountains. She showed us pictures of them. Uncle Cedric had a pencil-thin mustache and a felt hat like the Swiss men wear. Aunt Liesl had thick blond braids coiled around her head, like ram horns.
Ms. Swinford also used to tell us she had a little friend named Virginia who lived inside the cuckoo clock with the cuckoo. It was a genuine made-in-Switzerland cuckoo clock and the cuckoo would come out at the stroke of every hour, but Virginia was too shy to come out, even when we were "good citizens."
I didn't really believe there was somebody named Virginia living inside the cuckoo clock, but part of my mind did, because back then, back in fifth grade, I was able to believe in just about anything.
A handful of us fifth graders would sometimes stay in the classroom during lunch or recess and listen to Ms. Swinford's Swiss music. We'd talk about Switzerland and movies and ghosts and Bigfoot and UFOs and a hundred other things.
"You all have a purpose in life," Ms. Swinford would say. "A grand purpose and destiny just waiting to be discovered. Just remember, something good is always waiting for you at the next turn; everything is a part of the perfect plan of the universe. Spread sunshine wherever you go."
The biggest teacher's pet was a girl named Penny Part-now. She was the tallest, smartest, most mature, most talented person in the fifth grade, and she never let any of us forget it. I hated her, partly because she was so good at everything, but mostly because she had a big mouth.
"I know exactly what my purpose and destiny are," Penny said. "I'm going to travel the world, then be an actress, and then retire from acting and get elected President."
"Of what?" I said. "The Know-It-Alls of America?"
I was the only one of my friends brave enough to insult Penny to her face. She took karate and could have easily torn any of us apart both verbally and physically, but she always left me alone because it was kind of common knowledge that Penny liked me. I had no idea why she liked me, but I took advantage of it.
"I wonder where we'll all be five years from now," Ms. Swinford said. "Just think, five years from now you boys and girls will be in tenth grade! High school sophomores!"
"Unless I decide to skip a couple of grades," Penny said. "Which I may do."
"Who else knows what his or her purpose and destiny are going to be?" Ms. Swinford asked. "How about you, Milo?"
"How should I know?" I said. "I'm only a fifth grader."
"What about you, Ms. Swinford?" somebody asked.
"My destiny? Oh, I'm living mine, right here and now. This is where I'm meant to be."
* * *
One sunny morning in May about a month after my dad had moved out, Ms. Swinford had the class singing "The Happy Wanderer." I was feeling especially sentimental and heavy-hearted that morning, and for some reason that song really got to me. All sorts of memories and feelings just flooded in. The smell of my dad's shirt, the sight of Dad leaning against the brick barbecue in the quiet evening, Mom tossing him a ball underhand so he could catch it.
When we got to the part that goes "I wave my hat to all I meet, and they wave back to me," I felt myself losing it. I thought of a little boy, just like myself, a knapsack on his back, walking along the trail, waving his hat to all the other happy hikers and getting waved back to by them. All the pain and stress I'd been stuffing down for the past month or so started fizzing up, right there in class. I could feel it coming and I knew I was going to start crying. I had to get out of the room. I got up and made for the door just as the first big sob hit me. Penny Partnow was sitting in the front row and as I rushed past, our eyes locked for a second, and I noticed something in her expression, something gentle. Then I continued out of the room.
When I got to the hallway, I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and started crying.
Ms. Swinford came out. "Milo? Are you okay?"
"My ... my stomach. I guess it's something I ate."
"Do you need to go to the nurse's office?"
I shook my head.
Ms. Swinford knelt down and put her hand on my forehead. That day she was wearing some kind of sleeveless button-down blouse. Her bare arms were fleshy and feminine. She smelled fresh and outdoorsy, like the sky. Like Wenatchee or the Swiss Alps.
"Here, come with me," she said.
She led me to a door at the end of the hall. She unlocked the door and flipped on the light. It was a narrow room with a black couch and a bookcase against the wall. She said it was a "quiet room" for teachers who needed to get away for a moment of peace.
She handed me some tissues. "Here you go, wipe your face. Why don't you sit down."
I sat and breathed in the tissues. They smelled outdoorsy, too.
"I guess you feel pretty awful, huh?" she said. She looked around the room and bit her lower lip, the way she often did when she was about to tell us one of her stories about Switzerland. "You know what I do sometimes when I feel really bad?"
"What?"
"I sit very still and listen for a minute. As hard as I can. You know what I listen to? Well, sometimes the bad feeling is trying to tell me something ..."
She bit her lip again and looked around the room some more.
"And, um, sometimes I open a book." She reached down to the bookcase where there were maybe five or six dusty books on the shelf. "Ah, here's a book of synonyms. You remember what synonyms are, right? Words that mean the same thing. So what I do is I play a little game. The synonym game. I ask myself, 'Okay, what do I feel right now?' What do you feel? Awful? Bad?"
"My stomach feels sick," I said.
"All right, sick. Let's look up sick in our synonym book. Here we go, see? Deranged, disabled, not up to snuff. Sickness: complaint, disease, disorder, illness, nausea, vomiting ... Hm, well, this game sucks." She snapped the book shut.
I laughed. I didn't feel any better — but I kind of liked the game.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Swiss Mist by Randy Powell. Copyright © 2008 Randy Powell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Fifth Grade,
1. house–roof–cover–shelter–protection–defense–bastion–wall–division–separation,
2. nervousness–stress–anxiety–strain–effort–labor–work–job–profession–teacher,
3. baseball team–gang–company–friend–ally–link–chain–leash,
4. bills–debt–in the hole–depression–pit–mine shaft–lode–gold mine–resource–lexicon,
Sixth Grade,
5. city–complex–collection–hodgepodge–maze–tangle–woods–jungle–wild–dog-eat-dog,
6. balcony–platform–stage–arena–theater–battlefield–no-man's-land,
7. vacation–interrupt–discontinue–suspend–delay–wait,
Seventh Grade,
8. hoping–desiring–yearning–nostalgia–craving–aspiration–fantasy–wishful thinking–unreality,
9. get–receive–experience–suffer–ache–irritate–enrage–incite–propel–launch,
10. summer–growing season–heyday–prime–mature–fit–strong–muscle,
Eighth Grade,
11. skin–flesh–sensuality–carnality–lust–grab–pillage–destroy–annihilate–lay to waste,
12. exam–test–ordeal–endurance–surrender–withdraw–pull out,
Ninth Grade,
13. start–begin–create–formulate–evolve–blossom–flower–edelweiss,
14. happy–cheerful–radiant–bright–alert–vigilant–wary–suspicious–distrustful–faithless–unfaithful–betrayer,
15. football–game–amusement–diversion–recreation–romp–spree–frolic–giggle–clown,
16. meet–assemble–participate–join–combine–mix–scramble–confuse–screw up–perplex–mystify,
17. conversation–chatter–babble–gibberish–nonsense–unintelligible–unknowable–supernatural–transcendental–visionary–seer,
18. airport–runway–path–inquiry–exploration–observation–detection–discovery–recognition–cognize–the Cog,
19. desert–wasteland–void–empty–blank–vacant–available–handy–skillful–craftsman,
20. wait–anticipation–expectancy–certainty–confidence–inevitability–fate–fortune–wealth–abundance–leftovers,
21. step–advance–progress–climb–scale–hike–plod–stagger–trip–misstep,
22. horizon–prospect–scenery–panorama–picture–image–apparition–ghost,
Tenth Grade,
23. move–relocate–evacuate–pass–discharge–send forth–set in motion–drive–chauffeur,
24. wake–rouse–ignite–illuminate–reveal–expose–uncover–find,
25. auditorium–theater–performance–entertainment–act–ham–butt–buttocks–buttinsky,
26. exit–opening–mouth–talk–hot air–thermal–firestorm–bombshell–thunderbolt–bolt from the blue,
27. refill–restore–correct–divulge–confess–disclose–unmask–bare–strip–cast off,
28. summer–sunny–pleasant–enchanted–bewitched–cursed–damned–doomed–fate–destiny,
29. ad–message–communication–conversation–exchange–transfer–bequeath–hand down–deliver–let go–liberate,
Also by Randy Powell,
Copyright,