Trucks

Book Review (of sorts)

I just finished one of the greatest books I've ever read. So great (and it take's a very old reviewer to make the following statement) I'd be happy to call it the very last book I ever read. The finial on a life of great reading.

I say that without bypassing the King James Revised; that, I read ongoing.

Entitled TRUCK: a love story, by Michael Perry from "up north" Wisconsin. It tells the story of his restoration of a 1951 International Harvester pick-up, with down shifts into his bachelorhood, raised-box gardening, volunteer fire department fire-manning , and his various philosphic sorties covering a wide range of thoughts. I will not tell you all. The lowest gear is reserved for his ruminations over taking a wife. And not just any wife.

Perry weaves many story lines together masterfully. It's the kind of book you can read episodically, a short riff at a time before you drift off to sleep, a sleep not caused by reading the book, mind. There are things about the book that I do not resonate to, most notably Perry's love of deer-hunting. But as a boy who spent his youth in the northwoods religiously bagging and eating deer in season, he is not to be faulted by me. He tells about it forthrightly and sensitively, combining the hunting narratives with his consumption of the salad greens he grows in a free-style yard, the driveway of which contains his pick-up, long-term mouldering into the ground, waiting for it's day of epiphany. That day that comes. Machinists will love this part!

This editor used to own an old Ford 150 pick-up (see illus.), and before that his own vintage International, pre-owned by the late artist, John Tyson. John's hood ornament for that truck was an upright pitchfork with circular motorcycle parts for eyes and a welded-on grin. I thought about those trucks as I read the book.

Those of you who know me know I wouldn't steer you wrong on a good book. But since this so-called "blog" evidently reaches as far as Ohio, West Virginia, Alaska, Oregon, Washington and New Delhi, it is read by people who don't know me. I can only say trust me. Perry, an established author, doesn't need me to push his book because it already is a best seller. I picked it up at the public library on a Wisconsin Authors table, sat down to peruse it, and wisely checked it out and took it home. I later heard that Chapter-A-Day read it in instalments on NPR.

I'm not ready to die, but if I do, it was a good book on which to end my reading career. What more can a man say?

s/ Zep Dix

This is it: