Publisher's Synopsis
This love story begins in 1994, before the Oklahoma City bombing, and ends several years after it. It explores the feelings of a widower physician-poet raising three boys and a divorcee mother raising two daughters. Trauma, medicine, poetry, romance, fear, faith, sensuality, tragedy, comedy, and circumstance maneuver the characters through life's labyrinth until the denouement. All creatures are fashioned after their one great teacher, Mother Nature. She is primal, beautiful, ruthless, cruel, unforgiving-with one permeating spiritual force-life. For the sake of life, everything is sacrificed-including life itself-as the strong, the weak, the fast, the slow, the fit, and the unfit all feed upon each other. Death is as essential to life as life is to death, and the two form the endless circle of spirit and form. Human kindness, on the other hand, is preposterous to Mother Nature because it nurtures in the reverse, from the strong to the weak. Through kindness, this magnanimous force that inspires its spirit from love, the human soul finds God. Whereas historically, Homo sapiens have ruthlessly competed in wielding cruelty upon their fellow humans under the rubrics of law, religion, patriotism, heroism, self-defense, etc., the ranks of kindness have remained thinly represented. There has always been a shortage of kindness in this world, and the takers have always outnumbered givers. That is why this novel came about. This work was inspired by Oklahoma, where I have lived and practiced medicine since 1971. It celebrates the Oklahoma kindness that is the primal voice of the land. As a novel, it violates all the vernacular rules of storytelling and rests, in its entirety, in the lush spiritual bosom of feelings. I wrote it without a plan or plot in mind, and as I wrote, I was as eager to find out what was to happen next, as you will be when you read it. The story slowly "descended" upon me and took an entire year to un-scroll. It was a fervent poem that echoed out of my subconscious, a poem I was unable to hear until I penned. Consequently, poetry strums throughout the entire work, animating it with blithe spiritual tunes. Unlike most novels, all explanations and citations are referenced in footnotes, which rather than distract, should satisfy curiosity and enhance the reading pleasure. When a citation comes from one of my books of verse, I use the first letter of the book-title to denote the source: L: for Loves And Lamentations Of A Life Watcher, V: for Vast Awakenings, F: for Familiar Faces, and B: for Four And A Half Billion Years. When one of my fellow writers complained that it had too much poetry, I demurred with, "I wish it had more." I did not write this entirely fictional work with the general public in mind. I wrote it primarily as a gift to my patients, to my friends, to my fellow Oklahomans, to poetry and literature lovers, and to myself. I wrote it to celebrate the kind Oklahoma spirit that permeates this land. This is not just a fictional, love story. Rather, it is a story about the mighty arms of love that gather all of humanity into one enormous embrace. Perhaps that is why, when I finally penned The End, my tired eyes were requited with thankful tears.
