The Beauty of Being: A Collection of Fables, Short stories & Essays
Abstract
This paperback book seems to include eighteen short stories that dig into the mystery of life. I read and enjoyed the first two, which are surely more complex than a fable. In the first, "The Tree of Life," a couple come to violate a grandmother's admonition that plucking a flower from the beautiful tree of prosperity will destroy the tree. They do, and soon the neighborhood has stripped the tree of flowers. The offending young woman realizes what she has done, runs to the tree and hugs it, and pleads "Please grow flowers again." The second story is an account of a wild escapade in Costa Rica, including help from locals and some silly gambling by the narrator. His rental car is deeply damaged, and he "tries to sell" the unlikely story to Nissan. They accept the story, and soon enough the advertising department at Nissan publishes it as a commercial. Thus the narrator has just given Nissan a great story for free, and he views the commercial built on it a few months later. The stories or "chapters" are in prose except for Chapter 3, which seems to be in verse. I ran across several proofreading errors along the way.