What's That Pig Outdoors? by Henry Kisor

Author:Henry Kisor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252090196
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Debby’s parents spend their summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Depending on the lake level, their cabin is twenty to fifty feet from the edge of the cold, clear, clean water. Every morning loons paddle by, and in season Canada geese tarry on their way south. This is wild, remote, lonely, and beautiful country, timbered out by the 1950s and now well into second-stage regrowth. Deer, raccoons, porcupines, and foxes abound, and black bears are returning to the lowlands from exile in the nearby Porcupine Mountains.

That was where I met Betty and Clark Abbott. At first they seemed bemused by the deaf young man their daughter had brought to their summer home. I knew it was up to me to cross the bridge, to meet them halfway, to show them that I was as normal and ordinary a young man as any Debby had dated. Fortunately the task was made easier because we had a good deal to talk about. I have no talent for comfortable small talk, the kind that helps create relationships. For me, communication with strangers is too difficult to waste on social noise.

Betty and Clark are well-informed, politically conscious, and socially concerned people who form reasoned opinions about national and world events. A young newspaperman’s kind of people. At first our conversations were halting, but during the long, slow, cool weekend in that quiet cabin on the lake shore, we started to become accustomed to one another’s speech.

Betty and I both were voracious readers, and we talked about books. Clark and I exchanged opinions about the growing civil rights movement in the South. To my surprise the Abbotts, who lived smack in the middle of lily-white Republican country in central Wisconsin, were thumpingly in favor of the goals of A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King. I also learned that in the early 1950s the Abbotts had been all but ostracized in Marshfield for their vocal opposition to the depredations of Senator Joe McCarthy, the anti-Communist witch-hunter from Wisconsin.

This, I thought, was where Debby got her intelligent, open-minded character, her conscience, her compassion, her selflessness—the things I loved her for. After that Labor Day weekend in the north woods, I began to think that this was a family I might marry into. Shortly before her twenty-second birthday that October, to my surprise as much as hers I popped the question. She quietly put her hand on mine and said yes.

Now began the complicated social maneuvers all young couples must endure to secure the approval of both sets of parents to the union. Mine seemed to think it a good match. They had never expected their son to marry any but a hearing woman, and they liked Debby. The only one in my family who disapproved was my little sister, Debbie, who displayed the normal thirteen-year-old girl’s outrage that another woman—let alone one with the same name—would come between her and her beloved big brother. (Yes, the similarity in names did cause a few amusing problems later on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.