by Mark Dunn
1975 PHYSICALLY CANDID IN LOUSIANA
Two patio paviors must contend with a provocatively ecdysiastic lady of the house.
1976 THROTTLED IN ARKANSAS AND OKLAHOMA
Feuding sisters drive from Tennessee to Oklahoma to celebrate their mother’s birthday in separate cars, though fate refuses to keep them apart.
1977 RECTALLY REMUNERATIVE IN ILLINOIS
Big changes are discussed in the boardroom of a company that has made its reputation manufacturing products best not discussed in mixed company.
1978 TRI-TOASTED IN MISSOURI
Three thirty-something lawyers come together to raise a glass of Johnnie Walker to someone they all have in common and each dearly loved, though the feeling wasn’t reciprocal.
1979 GOING THROUGH THE MILL IN TEXAS
The story of a hapless, antisocial Dallas family told through documents filed in a Dallas County Justice Court.
1980 RENOVATIVE IN TEXAS
A boy remembers the summer he spent helping his step-grandfather renovate a house and learns that family isn’t always defined by blood.
1981 SELF-ANOINTED ABOVE, LET’S SAY, OKLAHOMA
A woman confronts a famous female televangelist on a plane, accusing her and her husband of keeping the woman’s mentally unstable daughter from getting proper medical treatment.
1982 REUNITED IN MISSOURI
Those gathered at a thirty-year high school reunion wonder if the one among them who has just recently been released from prison will make an appearance, and if he does, what will be the consequences?
1983 ETCHED IN STONE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
A man visits the Vietnam Memorial on his late friend’s birthday and finds his friend’s kid brother there, ready to topple the man’s heart-object from his pedestal.
1984 PATRIARCHAL IN CALIFORNIA
A father of three girls wants to try once more for a boy, and his “son obsession” puts a crimp in the family’s enjoyment of the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games.
1985 SMITTEN IN WISCONSIN AND MINNESOTA
A young man sees a youthful picture of his wife’s grandmother and falls in love, inviting consequences that jeopardize his marriage.
1986 LOCKED OUT IN TEXAS
An old man is confronted by the reality of his Alzheimer’s as he stands naked before a YMCA locker, having forgotten his lock’s combination.
1987 MOTHERLY IN GEORGIA
A middle-aged preschool teacher has a very personal reason for wanting to teach only three-year-olds—a reason that finally comes out after thirty years.
1988 STOUTHEARTED IN FLORIDA
A teenage girl schemes to make it possible for her grandmother’s lesbian partner to see her grandmother when visitation by “non-family” members of ICU patients is disallowed.
1989 MELODIOUS IN OHIO
The four grown members of a teenage singing sister act accidentally learn about a fifth sister they never knew they had.
1990 GERONTOCONCUPISCENT IN VERMONT
An old man—the “guardian angel” of the love between a teenaged boy and girl he befriends—is tempted to exploit the fact that the couple has been sneaking into his house to have sex while he is out.
1991 FILICIDAL IN MISSISSIPPI
A father decides to do the unthinkable: end his own life and the lives of his two children by taking them automotively to the bottom of a lake. His eleven-year-old son is determined not to let him have his way.
1992 GRIEVING IN MINNESOTA
A widow cannot bring herself to remove her husband’s voice from the announcement on her home answering machine.
1993 SHELVED IN NEW MEXICO
A young woman must put her life on hold to care for her mother. She isn’t alone.
1994 CROONING AND SWOONING IN SOUTH DAKOTA
During a purported estate sale of Will Rogers and Dale Evans memorabilia, the sales coordinator learns the truth behind the sale…from a young man tied up in the basement.
1995 VARIOUSLY BEREFT IN MINNESOTA, CALIFORNIA, OKLAHOMA, AND MONTANA
The death of their brother necessitates various conversations among the four surviving siblings, during which they assess their tentative relationships with one another and the lunatic state of the country.
1996 COPROPHOBIC IN MISSISSIPPI
A couple looking for a new house find one that could be a good fit if only it weren’t for an insurmountable glitch in its presentation.
1997 COMBUSTIBLE IN OHIO
A woman insists to police detectives that she didn’t set her husband on fire, even though there is sufficient motive to implicate her.
1998 DENTIGEROUSLY FORTUITOUS IN FLORIDA
A dental hygienist discovers that the man who two weeks earlier tried to rape her in a dark parking lot is sitting in her chair.
1999 CONSTRUCTIVE IN BOTSWANA
A sexual tryst with a fellow Habitat for Humanity crewmember and a life-and-death encounter with a pack of wild hyenas bring a woman to certain enlightening truths about herself.
2000 CONVERGENT IN CONNECTICUT
All of the stories of the century come together in this denouement set in a Wilton nursing home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a lot of people I should thank for help—both direct and indirect—with this book. Inspiration for these stories came from many people and from many different places. I got the idea for “1994: Crooning and Swooning in South Dakota,” for example, when my friend Rod Replogle gave me a program from a Roy Rogers traveling variety show he attended as a kid. Likewise, a facsimile of a 1940 Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad schedule I received from my friend Steve Marquis was the inspiration for “1940: Au Fait in Colorado, New Mexico, and California.” People from all around the country picked up their phones and courteously answered all of my oddball questions about their cities, their churches, their streets, their grocery stores, their Stuckey’s roadside gift shops. I rarely got their names, but their assistance is no less appreciated for being undocumented.
Some folks do require a personal thank you:
Thanks to Jack Thayer, admissions director of the Menaul School in Albuquerque, and to the directors and volunteers at the Menaul Historical Library of the Southwest for research assistance pertaining to “1957: Loyal in Utah.” Jack was also especially helpful in providing information about his grandfather, a Titanic survivor, for a story which, regrettably, I was unable to use (due to a surplus of nautical tales in the book and another story’s strong claim to the year 1912).
Thanks to Wayne Taylor for sharing details of the summer he spent with his step-grandfather, many of which ended up in “1980: Renovative in Texas.”
Thanks to Laurie Kalet for sharing the particulars of her job as preschool teacher, which I incorporated into “1987: Motherly in Georgia.”
Thanks to Jennifer Rodgers for doing the same for her job as dental hygienist, which I used in “1998: Dentigerously Fortuitous in Florida.”
Thanks to Scott White for the idea behind “1976: Throttled in Arkansas and Oklahoma,” and to Mary Dunn for the idea behind “1961: Unliterate in New Hampshire.”
Thanks, as well, to Mets scholar Phil Calbi for making sure that I got the facts right in “1962: Thrown a Curve Ball in New York,” and to Los Alamos resident Robert Benjamin for doing the same with “1944: Sequestered in New Mexico.”
Thanks to Yazoo City native daughter Cindy Foose for all the help she gave me with “1949: Ball Changing in Mississippi.” I appreciate Cindy’s willingness to relate so many rich details of her Mississippi youth to me.
Thanks to Jeremy Pena for help with the legal aspects of “1997: Combustible in Ohio.”
Thanks, as well, to all the people who put together the Internet Archive digital library and the Wikipedia and Gutenberg websites. As a writer who has spent most of his former research hours sitting in dark, musty libraries for long afternoons, the opportunity to access primary and secondary sources for my historical research with the click of a mouse has made a
book about the twentieth century, which previously would have taken me a decade to complete, something I was successful in finishing in less than two years. Each of these websites (along with all the other sites I consulted) was a Godsend for this author of the mother of all cultural research projects. I am also grateful to OTR.net, which offered among its thousands of hours of archived radio programs WJSV’s full day of broadcasting from September 21, 1939, which became the inspiration for “1939: Galactophorous in Virginia.” How did I know how many songs from The Wizard of Oz were sung on CBS radio that day? Because I listened to its entire broadcast day, courtesy of this site—a veritable audio time capsule.
Four very personal thank-yous are in order:
To my literary agent, Amy Rennert, who has stuck by me through thin and thin (her patience in waiting for the “thick” being greatly appreciated).
To my editor, Guy Intoci, not only for his editorial gifts, but for his championing of this very unusual book. It’s editors like Guy who, in this era of stultifying caution and conservative retrenchment in the publishing industry, view “different” as actually a positive thing. Without editors like Guy or publishers like Mark Pearce, adventurous writers like me would be woefully under-employed.
To my copy editor, Michelle Dotter, who was Captain Cook-ian in her navigation through a quarter million words of prose, and who went above and beyond her responsibilities—at one point informing me with a heavy heart that I would have to jettison my use of the Alka-Seltzer catchphrase, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” because it came out a year later than the story I’d sought to use it in. Michelle’s investment in the success of this book, in spite of presumptions tied to her surname, went far beyond dotting “I’s” (and crossing “T’s”).
And thanks, finally, to my wife Mary for all of her editorial input, and for putting up with me and this wildly ambitious fiction project that hijacked nearly three years of our marriage. It’s over now, honey. Let’s get our lives back.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Title
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
1901 Arboreal in Texas
1902 Vehicular in New York
1903 Deductive in Michigan
1904 In Memoriam in Pennsylvania
1905 Genealogical in Rhode Island
1906 Punch(ing) Drunk in Pennsylvania
1907 Problematically Betrothed in Massachusetts
1908 Volant in North Corolina
1909 Morbific in New York
1910 Porcine in North Carolina
1911 Efflorescent in Maine
1912 Triskaphobic in Wisconsin
1913 Clairvoyant in New York
1914 Devotional in Illinois
1915 Having a Sinking Feeling in the North Atlantic
1916 Incarcerated in Oklahoma
1917 Principled in Massachusetts
1918 Trepid in France
1919 Vestal in North Dakota
1920 Filial in Tennessee
1921 Composed (?) in Oregon
1922 Cineastic in Arkansas
1923 Conspiratorial in North Carolina
1924 Double Faulted in Illinois and D.C.
1925 Acrophilic and Agoraphobic in Pennsylvania
1926 Between the Hammer and the Anvil in Kentucky
1927 Assisian in Massachusetts
1928 Misdeemed in Indiana
1929 Taking a Dim View in Michigan
1930 Without Apron Strings in Delaware
1931 Awed and Wondering in Connecticut
1932 Fascistic in D.C.
1933 Letting Go in Missouri
1934 Adulterous in Illinois
1935 Perseveringly Terpsichorean in Washington State
1936 Shabby-Genteel in California
1937 Depilated in Ohio
1938 Jiving in Nebraska
1939 Galactophorous in Virginia
1940 Au Fait in Colorado, New Mexico, and California
1941 Under attack in Hawaii
1942 Cerulean in Wisconsin
1943 Telegraphic in Iowa
1944 Sequestered in New Mexico
1945 Hypernatremic in the Pacific Ocean
1946 Enneadic in Iowa
1947 Racist in Tennessee
1948 Haunted in Connecticut
1949 Ball Changing in Mississippi
1950 Poikilothermal in West Virginia
1951 Psitticine in Pennsylvania
1952 Doubly Uxoricidal in Colorado
1953 Pharisaical in Wyoming
1954 Famished in Texas
1955 Agitated in Alabama
1956 Discreetly Silent in Montana
1957 Loyal in Utah
1958 Explosive in South Carolina
1959 Tight in New York
1960 Smiling in California
1961 Unliterate in New Hampshire
1962 Thrown a Curve Ball in New York
1963 Estivating in New Jersey
1964 Nearly Interred in Alaska
1965 Mistrysted in New York
1966 Outraged in Idaho
1967 Going the Vole in Nevada
1968 Hieratic in Kansas
1969 Parental in Arizona
1970 Skirting the Issue in West Virginia
1971 Bibliophilic in Alabama
1972 Precipitate in Illinois
1973 Vengeful in Maryland
1974 Vicinal in Tennessee
1975 Physically Candid in Louisiana
1976 Throttled in Arkansas and Oklahoma
1977 Rectally Remunerative in Illinois
1978 Tri-Toasted in Missouri
1979 Going Through the Mill in Texas
1980 Renovative in Texas
1981 Self-Anointed Above, Let’s Say, Oklahoma
1982 Reunited in Missouri
1983 Etched in Stone in Washington, D.C.
1984 Patriarchal in California
1985 Smitten in Wisconsin and Minnesota
1986 Locked Out in Texas
1987 Motherly in Georgia
1988 Stouthearted in Florida
1989 Melodious in Ohio
1990 Gerontoconcupiscent in Vermont
1991 Filicidal in Mississippi
1992 Grieving in Minnesota
1993 Shelved in New Mexico
1994 Crooning and Swooning in South Dakota
1995 Variously Bereft in Minnesota, California, Oklahoma and Montana
1996 Coprophobic in Mississippi
1997 Combustible in Ohio
1998 Dentigerously Fortuitous in Florida
1999 Constructive in Botswana
2000 Convergent in Connecticut
Synopses
Acknowledgment
