The Geranium

The summer of Flannery is underway, and I'm one story in. Not a bad beginning, not bad at all.

The first story read was The Geranium, which is the lead story in her thesis. That's got to be a damn fine thesis. Maybe a little better than Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It was pubished in Accent magazine in 1946.

It involves an old man forced to live in New York with his daughter, and the man has to deal with his changing life, aging, and black people who aren't stepin-fetchits like he grew up with in the South. On the whole, the story was okay. Nothing terribly remarkable about it besides her ability to really get inside the old man's head and use repetition nicely to get that rhythm of old-man thought into the text. But, I'm not sure I understand the ending.

The story builds up to a point where you expect the old man to have a life changing kind of ah-ha moment...well, you'd expect it with lesser writers. So I was under the impression that the old man would die, but nope. He gets into an argument with a neighbor across the alley because the neighhor accidentally knocked his geranium off his windowledge, and the old man had been timing his day by the appearance of the geranium on the windowledge. The last line even belongs to the neighbor, who was barely in the story, and he says, "I only tell people once" or something like that. I don't know if that's supposed to be some kind of God like thing or supposed to lead us to think about us only living once. I don't know.

Anyways, one story down, 500 some-odd pages worth of stories to go.

VIVA EL MUSTACHE