Day out of Days

Kitchen

I ve always done my best work in the kitchen. I don t know why. Cooking stuff up. Maybe that s it. Now I ve got my own kitchen deep in the country with a big round table smack in the middle. But I am surrounded. I m not sure who put all this stuff in here. Who jumbled all this up on my white brick walls as though it told some story, made some sense; some whole world out of floating fractured bits and pieces. Pencil drawing of Seattle Slew, long after retirement bloated pasture-belly, glazed far-off stare in his eye as though looking back to the glory days of the Triple Crown. And, wedged between the glass and flat black frame, snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles. Postcards of nineteenth-century Lakota warriors like Gaul, adopted son of Sitting Bull, price on his head; left for dead only to come back and seek his perfect vengeance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Henry Miller with a walking stick, black beret, sitting on a rock wall gesticulating to the camera, some quote about morality and why don t we just give ourselves over completely and unabashedly to the present, since we re all up against the same grim prospect anyway; same sinking ship. Slaves in sepia tone, harvesting bluegrass seed and whistling Dixie. Wedged between the tile and brick, more pix of hawks and galloping horses out near where we used to chase skinny coyotes back into the tangled mesquite and ocotillo. Then Beckett s sorrowful bespectacled hawk-face, gazing into oblivion with no trace of self-pity, resigned, hands clasped between his knees. Underneath in neat black scrawl: There is no return game between a man and his stars.

Who scrambled all this stuff in here with no seeming regard for associative order, shape, or color? Without the slightest care for where it might all wind up. Just randomly pinned to cupboards and door frames, slipping

SAM SHEPARD was the Pulitzer Prize winning author of more than fifty-five plays, three story collections, and two works of prose fiction. As an actor, he appeared in more than sixty films, and received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for The Right Stuff. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy, and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He died in 2017.

[Shepard] drills down through the strata of our history into the bedrock of American myth. Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review

Expansive and rich. . . . With scenarios that are at once unbearable and irresistible, Shepard casts a predictably haunting spell. USA Today
 
Gorgeous. . . . Searing. . . . Shepard beautifully records the overlooked, strange places men find themselves, both physically and emotionally. San Francisco Chronicle
 
Sharp enough to move a reader to tears. . . . Funny and smart. . . . Profoundly satisfying. . . . The narrator talks out his conflicts . . . with great precision and beauty. The Boston Globe

Expansive, panoramic. Like Bob Dylan, Shepard is a geographer of the rawboned surrealism of America s shadow interior, story after story bearing the name of a town or highway, our national portrait dabbed with a thousand points of darkness. James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
 
These stories [have a] deep, abiding appeal. The Los Angeles Times
 
This is Shepard s brilliance the ability to continually surprise us. He plays with our heads, pushes boundaries, and in the end makes the journey worthwhile. The Denver Post
 
Shepard [is] one of the most lavishly gifted, prolific artists of his generation. The Plain Dealer
 
These deceptively modest works, reflective and witty, explode with fresh energy. Their touches of absurdity give way to a depth of emotional loss that will sneak up and wring your heart dry. [Sam Shepard] is still a star, still a treasure .It takes an eternally young genius like Shepard to make us laugh and wonder. The Daily Beast
 
Shepard s talent and bent for language is what drives the book. The rhythms. The precision of the words. His instincts on when to give and when to hold back. All together, these pieces take us on a road trip of America, before dropping us off inside ourselves. The Providence Journal
 
His literary voice .[is] strong, unpretentious, and