Excerpts from: Dresden Avenue

As many of you know, I am constantly working on writing projects. One project, a collection of stories from my life, I have been working on for over a year. I’ve decided to call the collection – Dresden Avenue - the name of the street where I did most of my growing up. I thought I would share a small excerpt from the collection.

So, here goes:
Every Sunday, my father would read the funny page out loud using various funny voices. He had a trunk full of voices. His booming voice and infectious laughter is the wonderful soundtrack to my early life.

Dad, it seems, was more devious than I realized. One Sunday morning, he changed from reading the funny papers to reading Pilgrim’s Progress. Since he still used the funny voices, at first, I thought it was the funny pages. As time wore on, I began to understand that this was a real story.

I would race to the fake-brown-leather recliner that Mom routinely patched with duct tape and jump into Dad’s lap. He would read out of a very old leather bound edition of Pilgrim’s Progress. He used a high falsetto for Pilgrim and changed to his deep bass voice when Pilgrim became Christian. I still remember his voice scraping the depth and the horror I felt when he read that Pilgrim had fallen into the SLOUGH OF DESPOND! Oh, the horror!

Dad left every chapter as a cliffhanger…would Pilgrim ever climb out of the Slough of Despond? Would he ever make it to the Celestial City? When Dad finished the book, I remember the look of profound relief that crossed his face. I can’t imagine the patience it must have taken to read the entire early edition of Pilgrim’s Progress to a squirmy five year old who interrupted and asked too many questions. Squirmy and talkative – seems I haven’t outgrown those particular traits.

It seems interesting to me to remember those moments in the glow of the 1970’s lamp stand/coffee table that was so popular during that time-period. Nowadays, kids have special edition Bibles and special edition this and that, none of which was available when I was growing up. Yet, I seemed to understand Pilgrim’s Progress at five and remember the lessons it taught me to this day.