At first glance, there is no common thread connecting these stories.
Consider the titles alone:
The View From the Pickleball Courts, Socrates of London, Jamaican Weddings, A Mafia Story, The Last Wise Man on Wall Street.
They seem less like chapters in the same book than a group of strangers who have accidentally boarded the same train and are now too embarrassed to ask where it is going.
One might reasonably wonder how these stories ever found themselves under the same cover—and, more importantly, who allowed them in.
And yet, beneath their apparent differences, there may be something that binds them.
Perhaps the connection is not something to be announced, but discovered. It may lie in the spaces between the stories—in the small absurdities, private defeats, unlikely triumphs, and strange consolations that make up the business of being human.
It may not be the stories themselves, but the view they offer.
That view changes.
The players change.
Even the rules seem to change, but the human comedy remains remarkably the same.
Genre: FICTION / Short Stories (single author)Not known yet. Just released on Amazon, B&N, Apple and two dozen other resellers..
The View From The Pickleball Courts
Every morning, the residents of "Stony Brook Creek" gathered at the community’s new pickleball courts, proudly proclaiming them the finest amenity in the neighborhood and by a consensus reached mostly through repetition, in all of Southeast Florida.
Then, and without further ado, the games would commence.
There were twenty-seven courts. Twenty-seven. The number had been arrived at the way nations arrive at the size of their nuclear arsenals. Not because twenty-seven was needed, but because twenty-six felt like weakness and twenty-eight felt like admitting something.
On the surface, pickleball was a harmless game. It involved paddles and a plastic ball.
After all, how much harm could one possibly inflict upon a neighbor with a ball like that? Quite a lot, as it turned out.
The ball itself was rather funny: bright yellow, lightweight, and covered with large holes, as though someone designed a Wiffle ball and then gave up halfway through the process.
The ball reminded one of those inspiring fathers who placed a Wiffle ball on a tee in front of his one-year-old, looked into the child’s eyes, and silently imagined the boy one day standing beneath the bright lights of a Major League stadium. The child, meanwhile, was usually more interested in eating the ball.
The game didn’t require much of athletic ability, but modest coordination, some physical exertion to justify mentioning it to a doctor, and just enough competitive spirit to make grown adults question the character of their neighbors. Sometimes the competitive spirit made matters over complicated.
Because pickleball had an unusual way of transforming perfectly civilized people into temporary constitutional scholars.
