"The Truth"

by Sam Pickering

Overview

This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a pro-fessional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row.  They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956440287
Publisher:	Madville Publishing
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Sam Pickering isn’t bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and naïve. His world, and pages, however, are green with life. In this collection of essays, he celebrates friendships and the memories of friendships. He rummages through closets of books, some so worm-eaten they are wondrously nourishing. He cures aches and pains by turning them into words. He meanders days and places and looking closely at life finds it intriguing. Under his pen, the imagination soars and the familiar becomes richly appealing, at once both familiar and unfamiliar. He is not a self-help writer, but his essays lighten one’s steps and make a person, even a vegan, want to eat a Montreal Sausage and cheer villains, and heroes, at a country wrestling match. Although Sam Pickering lives in Connecticut, he has long been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

    1 And So It Goes

  18 On Again, On Again

  42 End of the Roads

  71 Reading at Eighty

108 Reading at One Hundred and 

Twenty

145 Who Am I Now?

153 Bail

170 California Christmas

196 Suicide by Pen

212 Afterword

223 About the Author

Editorial Reviews

I've been reading Sam Pickering's essays for nearly fifty years, and they have always been for me a touchstone, a place to go home. Now, in his 34^th book, he seems even more comfortable in the genre-the personal essay-that he has so beautifully embraced and made utterly his own. These essays are uplifting, poetical, sometimes melancholy, always hugely entertaining. Pickering is an American original, and he's writing here at the top of his form.

-Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me

From the Publisher