This is an excerpt from Soft Hearted Stories, a Colorado Book Award Finalist, 2020.
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
softhearted stories, friends and boxes and wine and politics. A man I met while making soup for the house Lis of Portland, when it was so very cold and icy, became my friend Kalani. Cow took food to hungry cold people in parks and at sides of roads, underpasses everywhere. The massive upsurge in the number of people without homes in the Portland metro area. He and Lisa, his wife, help me pack up and organize, or days and days and days. We drank wine. They kept my secrets. I hope I made decisions about what not ticket, what to keep. Every decision felt rash rushed wrong. Sometimes they disagreed with my decisions. Jesus said. You need to keep this certificate your grandmother earned for piano. Lisa is a piano teacher. I examined it, imagined it in a box, another box of pieces of paper. I made Lisa throw it out. So someday my daughter won't have to face throwing it out. Goldman and his sons took 30 years of my life to the thrift stores and the dump softhearted stories, and then everything was gone. Bowman and I sat on the steps one day someday before that last one another hot summer day when there was nothing else to take away. And we talk small talk like how much he loved living in Portland in huge top confessions, that sort of thing, he said. You could come to my church and I read your book. I said, I want to write you into the next book if it's okay with you And when he said, Of course I said, What do you want your name to be? It should be something meaningful and multi leered something that stands for something else after a god, her saint or something, he said, Well, what does my name? Meat? We looked it up. A variant of the whip blonde white. He left Well, they got that wrong, though He said many things to me. Then he confessed things, and we talked about things, things we need to talk about. Conversations between black men like him and white women like me in the flat. In the world of unreality, not sexual things, but heartful things, hard things, those many, many things. I told him about the reading Siri's I had created and curated as part of my literary life. The writing I did and want to dio. We talked about writing. He said So many black women have told me they've been raped or they were molested as girls or both. I'm telling you because you are a writer and people will listen to you. I'm a writer. People will listen to me. But these stories he told me you're not mine to tell. We watched the sunset. I told him about the big oak tree the neighbor cut down and how the squirrel had come looking and ran around and around the stump. He said, You're gonna be OK. Going to check in on you from time to time to make sure.