Publisher's Synopsis
The author wrote this collection of short stories and poetry while doing graduate studies at the University of Kansas at the Writer's Workshop. The essays are adaptations of sermons given at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation in Naples, Florida. The title story in this collection, "The Apotheosis of Walter Smith" concerns the suicide of a middle aged married man with two children, working as a manager of the branch office of a loan company ($800.00 dollars on your signature only). It takes place in a small town in western Illinois near Chicago, where, one cold evening in February he experiences a sudden moment of desperation and despair at the way his life has evolved, with no hope for promotion in his work and multiple family problems. He leaves on the train for Chicago and finds himself on this windy night standing on a bridge overlooking the Chicago River, where he is accosted by a burly policeman who warns him to leave the bridge. And for the first time in his life he refuses to obey this lawful authority. As he stands there pin the bridge he reviews the whole dismal story of his life from the time he married his wife to the present, like the scenes from a video. He climbs up on the railing and contemplates the cold swirling water and the accumulated debris from the streets of Chicago. He remembers the days when he was a child. At a picnic with his family his father shows him how to skip a flat stone over the water of the lake. But when Walter tries, his stone immediately sinks into the water. His father encourages him to try again, but instead he runs crying to his mother. Walter recalls this event as he stands on the rail of the bridge, and while the policeman's back is turned, he is ambiguously either pushed by the wind or deliberately jumps into the debris of the river and sinks like a stone instead of skipping across the water on forever to the center of the lake. Walter Smith inhabited no special hell...just our good old day-to-day hell...a man's existential agony conditioned by his circumstances but not determined by them; the universal nausea that makes one's last gagging effort the retching up of one's self. As observed by Albert Camus: "Man has reasons, myths, ideals, miracles...all manner of means of accomplishing that fatal evasion of reality and betraying life. But nature has consequences. She always has the last word. If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterwards. During every day of an un-illustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live in the future: tomorrow, later on. 'When you have made your way'. 'You will understand when you are old enough.'
