The author's grandmother questioned her son when he told her of his intention to study for the ministry: "... Do you think you are good enough?" Her words echoed in the author's revisiting of his father's memoir. He had seen the Lord at work in his father's ministry and wondered if he too might be "good enough," to enter study for the ministry. The author thanks God for his own two years' trial at divinity school, and thanks Him for providing instead, direction down the less traveled secular road he took as a teacher and writer. Miles have gone by and there are miles to go.
His father's memoir offered the author a portal to the past to travel his own journey and to discover source material for stories. The seven stories above in Prairie Pastorale barely etch a portrait of his father's career. There is more to be told. As much as seven times seven more stories? If there be world enough and time.
In 2016, the author edited a collection of emails, essays and stories, Been There Done WHAT! (http://www.beenthere-donewhat.com/), written by John Cameron Smith, an Australian traveler of Southeast Asia, sailor of the South Atlantic, and adopter of dogs and, most recently, the offer of his hostel for a peace dove. In late 2019, before the imposing of travel restrictions, the author and his wife themselves traveled to Australia to meet the author, John Smith, and found him every bit the full-of-life raconteur of his book.
The author's novel Shepherds Awake, (Westbow Press, 2014), is story of a year-long sheep drive in the 1860's through upstate New York following the towpath of the Erie Canal, the shores of the Great Lakes, and across Wisconsin almost to the Mississippi River to end at Boscobel, Wisconsin. The story is reminiscent of family lore. Turns out that such a sheep drive might actually have taken place. Since he wrote the story, genealogy studies indicate that the author's great great grandfather, Squire Elijah Sarles, might well have undertaken such an expedition to Boscobel.
After forty years of journeying, the author, with his wife, Evie, have returned to New York, to Long Island, to teach and write and take long hikes along Oyster Bay.
