I've been reading - again - one of my very favorite authors, sampling stories from Fred Busch's 1990 collection, ABSENT FRIENDS. Busch wrote about thirty books over a career that spanned more than thirty years, and he was a master of he short story form. All fourteen stories here are small gems. "Ralph the Duck" is considered a classic. And the opening of "Dog Song" can break your heart. But I think I will confine my comments to just a few lines from the story, "Naked." Here they are -

"It is a law of brain development that you will, when grown, remember every departure by every person to whom you should have called good-bye, and whom you ought to have embraced, and on whose cheeks you could have dispensed a couple of the dammed-up tears you persist in hoarding."

Reading these lines, I remembered the last time I saw my dad alive, in a hospital bed, full of pain from an as-yet undiagnosed cancer, and the too-casual "take it easy" good-bye I gave him. I thought too of Fred Busch, gone now for more than a dozen years, felled by a heart attack, and how much I wished Icould have known him. But that can never happen, so I will keep on reading his stories, novels, and essays. Thank you, Fred, for all of it. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/absent-friends/ ( )