Summer Snow

Summer Snow

by Dan McCall

Dusty, a retired English professor, is getting up there in age—he’s losing his memory and his eyesight, but he relishes being a disagreeable old curmudgeon. He adores his son Jimmy, but a year ago father and son had an argument and a falling out; now Dusty’s been drinking again, their estrangement is unbearable. Dusty then learns his son is ready to heal the rift-- Jimmy and his wife and two young children are coming to visit “Pop” for Christmas. Dusty, by turns caustic and outrageous yet always entertaining, realizes how desperate he is to make things right again.

Synopsis

Excerpt

I’m gettin’ old. Out of touch. No longer do my students and I speak the same language, and I have to ask around to find the new meaning of old words, e.g. “crowbarring” (when a loved one pries open your rib cage and removes your heart) or—and this one really bothers me—“Vietnam” (a destructive relationship you can’t leave: ‘I can’t forget that bitch. She’s my Vietnam.”) And the people who you would think know better are, if anything, worse. Jesus, I wrote a whole book on Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener after I read hundreds of books and articles on it that were absolutely wrong—the virtually unanimous critical and scholarly commentary was backwards and upside down and dishonest and smug and preposterous….

But why should anybody—especially young’uns—trust me? For six months I thought “to go postal” was to go as slow as the U.S. mail. I thought “Poppa Chubby” was a noun, not a verb.

………

I need Jimmy’s approval so desperately, now that I’m a useless old man, going blind….I start to tell him a true fuck-up, I read in the Syracuse Post Dispatch “Scarlet Letter” for “Secular Left,” I’m a helpless, pointless, out of work duffer… “I misread a headline a day in the newspaper,” I tell him. “Today, ‘Falling Tits’ for ‘Fainting Fits.’ Yesterday, “Immigration Feces” for Immigration Fences.” And the day before that I—of all people—‘Artistic’ for ‘Autistic.’

………

And, oh shit, now that I’m retired my learning is a weapon, wielded in smug superiority, to punish, not to teach, I have no control over it—I’m a knowledge-bully, just last week I discovered I was out of mint jelly, I had lovely loin lamb chops but nothing to put on them, so I whipped up to the P + C only to discover my eyes couldn’t locate the Mint in the shelves of jams and jelly, so I sauntered over to an adjacent aisle where a familiar monster employee was unwrapping cartons and putting their contents on the shelves, a big guy about 280 pounds with a ridiculous pig-tail rubber-banded down his neck, and when I asked him for help he gestured to the watch on his brawny wrist, he was busy, too busy to help a blind man, and I blew my stack, I fairly shouted at him, “You, sir, are one of nature’s anomalies—an Ass-Hole with a Pig-Tail!” and he sprang to attention, I was sure he was going to kill me, and then he burst out laughing and took me to the Mint jelly—

So sometimes you get away with it, but where do my spasms come from and why can’t I let them ride off into the sunset? I don’t like the man who is taking me over, the bastard is stealing me from myself, and now I am dizzy with my deterioration…..