Thank you.  I will pass along your comment to the ladies.  They enjoyed the experienced and voted on our next selection -- a mystery set in the Deep South.  I wonder if I can convince them to hold the next meeting at a coffeehouse?

We had our first meeting on last week (Sunday, 5 July 09) to discuss “The Dead Boy at Your Window”.  It was just my family and me, and they convinced me to hold it at Bruster’s Ice Cream off of Garrisonville in North Stafford.  We talked over waffle cones under a beautiful night sky. 

My daughters liked it, but they were not in love with it.  They were a little disappointed since they thought that a horror story would be scary (and they wanted to see a more action).  I told them that short, short stories are like poems in that they tend to make us think about a single concept.  They instantly recognized that this story’s theme focused on love -- it is both forever and capable of doing incredible things.

My wife was not a big fan.  She thought that the woman had a psychotic break and imagined it all as a way to keep her baby alive if even in her own mind.  My wife based that from the very first sentence, so I looked at the story with her theory in mind.  I can see how she arrived at that conclusion.  In the end, my wife agreed that it was about love.  For her, however, a mother’s deep love for her dead child created her fantasy and her husbands’ love for her that kept the delusion real.

I thought the story was incredibly sweet and innocent.  Like the ladies, I thought about a mother’s love bringing her child to life and the husband and child’s love that made it work.  It was comforting to consider that love stays with us even after our memories fade in death and that love can comfort people even when they are not the target of that love.  Telling a woman that her dead husband still loved her, for example, even though it was probably not her husband brought comforted to both the living wife and the dead husband.  I also thought there was some “Frankenstein” allegories with a hideously deformed figure being taunted and beaten.  The end is much happier than the horror classic.  It made me think and that is never a bad thing.

Family, ice cream and literature.  It was a good night.