I passed a minor milestone about a month ago. I noted it silently at the time, but, as I said, it was a minor event, so I didn’t even celebrate the occasion with a Manhattan, my favorite drink. What was that minor achievement? Drum roll, please. I completed my first year of blogging with a post about the joys of a Finnish smoke sauna (see here).
Perhaps surprisingly, as my earliest readers can testify, I’ve never once mentioned here the two books I’ve written. That’s about to change. Why? Because over the past months, I’ve been revising my childhood memoir (originally published as Bending the Twig – see here–), and I’d like to see what you folks think of my new version.
So I’m going to reveal my new opening here, splitting it into two brief posts. Those of you who have read the original book will notice little change in the paragraphs below. But the ones to follow in a day or two are entirely new.
Do I have ulterior motives? Of course! First motive? I have neither literary agent nor publisher lined up to put my revised edition between covers, so if you happen to know either of these species, I’d be delighted if you would pass the word along.
Second motive? I’ll keep that secret until I post the rest of the opening. Ready? Here’s the beginning of my revised Chapter One.
“You’re a lucky boy.”
Right. Real lucky. And rich. And ten-and-a-half feet tall. I glanced at my grandfather. His eyes, inscrutable behind wire-framed bifocals, focused on the wing joint where his knife worked.
I ripped open the tender skin of my pheasant and stripped off its iridescent plumage, mulling his odd comment. With the point of my hunting knife I dislodged a few pellets from the breast. We sat on low stools in the backyard, cleaning birds after our Saturday afternoon hunt.
“Yep, you’re lucky,” Grandpa repeated brightly. He was seventy-one, rheumatic but reasonably spry, still working for a living, still accurate with a shotgun. Until that moment I had considered him to be level-headed.
I was sixteen. My younger brother and I lived with our maternal grandparents. Our two sisters were seventy miles away, living with an aunt and uncle. Admittedly, things were going fairly well for me just then, but calling me lucky was like calling the two dollars in my pocket a fortune.
“This one’s hardly shot up at all,” I said, slitting open its belly and catching a whiff of guts and blood. I slipped my fingers under the ribs and ripped out the heart and fragments of lung, then the windpipe and gullet. Had someone at that moment predicted I would one day carve the corresponding organs from a cadaver’s chest and call the vital tubes by their more scientific-sounding names, trachea and esophagus, I would have fallen down laughing.
But I would eventually make my way to medical school and troop along with my new classmates into the anatomy laboratory for that first time, our nostrils alert to the unfamiliar air laced with formaldehyde, alcohol, and preserved human flesh, our anxieties concealed beneath shells of exaggerated confidence. I would find my cadaver, an elderly male gray as slate, encased in his metal box, and I would take up my scalpel — and balk. Though I was adept with my well-honed hunting knife, quick to cut and quick to finish, I froze before that preserved gray body, for I had been bruised by Death’s power, and that lifeless form recalled loved ones I had lost. My mother, and later my father, had been placed inside more ornate boxes, and I had watched them being slowly lowered beyond scalpel’s reach. I stood before my cadaver, waiting for my heart to slow, and finally pressed my keen blade into that cold throat — breaking the spell. In the months that followed I calmly sliced through my cadaver’s remains with scalpel and scissors, sawed through his bones, cut out his silent heart and gritty liver, probed his rubbery brain, my knowledge expanding as he diminished. But even though I had learned much since that distant afternoon when my grandfather called me lucky, I had not yet grasped his meaning.
