Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
When the Dogwood Blooms: Seasons in a Boy's Life

When the Dogwood Blooms: Seasons in a Boy's Life

Howard, Stanley B.

Paperback

General Fiction

ISBN13: 9798374267907
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 6 2023
Pages: 782
Weight: 2.26
Height: 1.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When the Dogwood Blooms: Seasons in a Boys Life is a seven-chapter memoir. This memoir is based on many experiences in the author's life, though much of this is fictionalized. This life odyssey began with a road trip from San Antonio, Texas, to Brazil in a 1957 New Yorker station wagon large enough for two adults and four young children to sleep in to a class reunion on the North Shore of Chicago more than half a century later.

The seven chapters in this novel are available on Amazon Books as these seven shorter novels:

  • Three Stories of The Plague: This chapter has three sections, each with a different related story. The first story is the story of wizened beggar, bent by leprosy, who approached the station wagon in which six Texans, including the protagonist Ray, passed through her mining town in the Peruvian Andes.
  • A Year in the Valley: This book begins with Ray working in a large home improvement store in North Dallas when he is offered a job in a small city named Donna in the citrus-dominated southern tip of Texas, known as The Valley. After an all-night drive, Ray arrives in Donna and choses to accept one of two available jobs, that of a high school science teacher.
  • The Big Time Newspaper Man: This chapter follows Ray to Waco, where he had spent many childhood and teenaged years at his paternal grandparents' house, often attending the morning service and Sunday School and Training Union and the evening service on Sunday night, as well as a summer camp and on other outings with teenagers from his grandfather's Southern Baptist church.
  • Shanties Never Sung: This story tells of Ray's time as a submarine Sonar tech in the US Navy. Though these experiences were formative for him, he soon realized that the Navy was not for him. This revelation came early in his naval career after serving under a division officer more intent on serving himself, it seemed to Ray, than lifting up those whose lives he controlled, though the Sonar tech in his division who had an English degree other than a BS in engineering, stayed in this safe port of employment for a decade before venturing back into the uncertainty and more cold heartedness of the civilian world.
  • Five Stories on a Summer Night: This chapter contains five related short stories that some critics might describe as venturing into the supernatural. The first of these stories, Kiss in a Yellow Taxi, is a ghost story of sorts told within two other stories..
  • AKA Jake Spelled Jaak: This chapter is the story of an eternally young man, whose real name was Martin, who tried to find his place in the world as a photojournalist, philosopher, and social engineer, and for a few years as a Marine, while dealing with his own demons. These burdens were fueled by an inability to conform to the norms of society.
  • Homecoming for Tex: This last chapter brings the memoir of Ray full circle, when he returns to the prep school his father sent him and his older brother to when their parents split up and their father moved from his San Antonio practice as a pediatrician after their father accepted a position as a medical researcher on the North Shore of Chicago. This chapter contains five vignettes of Ray's life after the odyssey he never asked for began. The first of these stories is about a trip Ray and his two younger brothers made from Delaware, to where they had moved with their father after he left the active Navy to again practice medicine, back to Texas.
Chapters in this book include short stories such as:

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