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Tucker’s 2023 Novel Available Here!

— Posted inIndie Novel, Literature — 3 min read

Wanderer Come Home by Dale Tucker

 

A fascinating odyssey into the natural homeland of the soul!

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Wanderer Come Home follows the turning points in the lives of two men whose paths, it would seem, should never cross though eventually and fatefully they do. One of these men is Axel Browne—a veteran of the Vietnam War—whose path has been that of hardship and disappointment because ever since returning from the war he has spent his life as a wanderer and homeless individual. The path of the other man, Hunter Carr, has been quite the opposite of Axel Browne’s where he has lived the “American dream” and more, where every success he had ever hoped to achieve has been his.  But all of this changes for Hunter when, on a moonless night, he crosses paths with a ghostly fisherman at the end of a bridge painted silver.

Wanderer Come Home explores what happens when a human on Earth discovers his own immortality before death and how it changes the world he knows and the life he leads, thereafter.

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To read sample chapters of Wanderer Come Home click HERE!

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The 2023 print version, First Edition (autographed), of Wanderer Come Home retails for $24.95 USD plus $6.05 shipping within the United States.  Express shipping and international rates are more.  The print version of Wanderer Come Home is sold exclusively through this blog so is not available at the usual book retailers.  To request your signed, First Edition, print copy of Wanderer Come Home, please email Dale directly at: [email protected].  By selling Wanderer Come Home directly to you, I am able to offer it at a much more affordable price than it would otherwise be if sold through one of the large book retailers.

A newly designed ebook edition of Wanderer Come Home has been released and is available now at your favorite ebook retailer listed below.  Wanderer is available in epub mobi pdf lrf pdb txt files so it can be enjoyed on whichever device you use most.  The ebook version of Wanderer Come Home sells for $5.99 USD.  (The ebook price is subject to change.)

Buy Your eBook Copy of Wanderer Come Home at one of the retailers listed below!  Just follow the link given.

Smashwords eBook Store,  Apple iBook Store,  Barnes & Noble,  Everand,  Gardners,  Rakuten Kobo,  Odilo 

*After you’ve read Wanderer Come Home, please, if you will, return to your retail outlet and write a review and provide a book rating for this novel.  Thank you very much! — Dale

 

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Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

Herman Melville – Moby Dick

 

I’ve Done It – I’ve Gone And Joined Substack

— Posted inAnnouncement — 1 min read

Click HERE to visit my Substack page.

The link above will take you to my subscription page where you can subscribe to my Substack for free.  Or, if you click on the “Maybe Later” link instead, my page will open up for you to peruse at your leisure without signing up.

 

Writer’s Log No. 5 — A Decent Man

— Posted inArt of Living, Family, Memory — 3 min read

 

person sitting on beige street bench near trees

I knew a man once, many years ago, who was a decent man.  He was married to my grandmother.  He was not my biological grandfather, however, because my grandfather had died at the dawn of the 1940s, before I was born.  But this man was my grandmother’s second husband and, as I said, he was a decent man.

But to my uncles on that side of the family (my grandmother’s sons) he was at best an outsider and at worst an interloper.  My uncles made fun of him—not usually to his face but among themselves.  Their jeers drew attention to this decent man’s flaws.  He was elderly, and like other men his age, he had lived through the so called Great Depression of the 1930s which made him thrifty—my uncles called him stingy.  He was an independent-minded man who refused to be bullied; my uncles said he was stubborn and hard-headed and attributed this personality trait to his German heritage.

So maybe he was stubborn; what of it?  I’m a man now of his years and I’ve never liked or responded well to being bullied.  Is this a blemish carried down from my English or Swedish ancestry?  Perhaps this decent man could have been more open to other people’s suggestions and ideas—especially my grandmother’s requests to mind the speed limits when driving—but again, he was an elderly gentleman when I knew him and perhaps he felt uncomfortable driving because of certain physical limitations related to age.

I grew up, like all or most of my cousins, thinking of this decent man as an outsider who was difficult to live with.  I carried these impressions of this decent man into my adulthood without thinking very much about it.  The decent man had become a cutout, a two-dimensional photo of a man, representative of characteristics worthy of ridicule.  But I had not really given much thought about the decent man who I knew as a child.

Later in life, I thought about this decent man and what I personally knew about him from my own experience.  I remembered his whiskery hugs and kisses on the cheek he gave whenever we arrived at his and my grandmother’s home.  I remember the tears that welled in his eyes when we were leaving.  Obviously, he felt some deep sadness when our visits ended.  I remember he was quiet and let my grandmother absorb the spotlight during family gatherings or when her children paid a visit.  He did chores, especially those no one else cared to do.  I remember that his dentures slipped at mealtime, creating a soft clicking sound that no one else I had ever known made.  I remember that he was proud to have been born and raised in Ohio.  I remember that he loved my grandmother and would have done anything in his power for her.  I didn’t remember him being stingy or stubborn, but generous with his time and love.  I remember him being a decent man.

What I also discovered, far too late in life to express to him personally, was that I loved him.  And I still do.  I love you Grandpa Vern and I hope somehow you know this now.

Writer’s Log #4 — December 13, 2023 4:05 PM

— Posted inUncategorized — 3 min read

bonfire on forestIt’s been many years since I moved from Idaho to the East and eventually ending up here in North Carolina.  And I had lived, since childhood, in Idaho primarily in one town.  Calculated roughly, I believe I spent about 235 thousand waking hours in my hometown, so the vast bulk of my memories naturally would be rooted there.

But since leaving Idaho, my memories have presented me with an odd phenomenon, and here is what I mean:  Now first of all, let me say that I don’t think about my hometown in Idaho very often.  I live life in the present most of the time.  But there are moments when my thoughts do return to the town where I grew up, just sort of out of the blue.  I’m sure this is quite common for most folks.  But the phenomenon part of this experience, in my case, is where these random thoughts of mine return when they do, in a sense, go home.

Strangely, they don’t return to the homes where my family lived when I was a child or later when I had my own children, nor to the churches where I spent so many hours, nor to the schools or to friends’ homes or to the rivers that played such an important role in my life during all of those years.  No, my thoughts don’t return to any of these important places when they casually pop into my head.  Instead, they land me on sidewalks, next to streets where nothing ever happened except that I walked past these places on my way somewhere else.  In all, there are only three, perhaps four, of these places.

One of them is a place I walked past almost every day during the school year when my family first moved to Idaho because it was on my way home from school.  Walking to school, I took a different route so did not pass this particular spot, but on my way home I did.  I attended that school for three years.

This place was located about a block west of the school, against a tall chain link fence which enclosed the high school’s football or baseball field (depending on the time of year).  My brothers and I had watched many football and baseball games through that fence because we didn’t usually have the money for a ticket.  But where we watched the games was at a different corner of the yard altogether than the place I always remember.  Literally, the only thing that ever happened at that particular spot, near the street corner, toward the end of the fence, is that I walked past it many times during the first three years I lived in that town.  No fights, no first kisses, no car accidents, no money found on the sidewalk; nothing of importance that would register a memory ever happened on that spot.  I always walked past it alone and in a hurry to get home, yet my mind finds it memorable for some unknown reason.

There are a couple of other such places in the same town which my mind remembers at random times, also, and none has any more significance than I once passed it while walking.  I wonder sometimes if these memories have something to do with a past life in which some element of it keeps seeping through my unconscious mind, into my memory.  I don’t really know.