But do you remember the thrill that once accompanied the Jerry Lewis Telethon achieving, or saints preserve us, surpassing its goal?
I’ll not go so far as to say that the publication of Four Fathers rivals the curing of a disease, but help us reach this pretty achievable number of two thousand dollars and I am sure you’ll get a good feeling.
And what better tune to accompany this plea than: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSBrn6wTZSA
Back when my family and I worked over 500 and 1000 piece puzzles–laid out on our dining room table–we all had our roles: My father would separate the borders pieces out, my mother would organize the pieces according to color, my sister and I would ignore their deliberations and through trial and error snap pieces together, and my great aunt Jean would secret a piece into one hand while pretending to dispassionately examine the goings on. She did this in order to always, I mean, always, be the person who, voila, held the last piece and triumphantly secured the puzzle’s completion. For a time, we didn’t all know this, but we must have been suspicious, for I remember (or maybe this is the fiction writer in me fashioning my own puzzle pieces together) my father seizing his aunt by the hand and showing us all that indeed inside her palm lay that ultimate piece of blue sky or white cloud or green grass. I think the result of this event was not that Aunt Jean stopped secreting pieces: instead, we all started secreting pieces: the fingers on one hand scrambled across the pieces on the table, while the fingers on the other hand clutched the puzzle’s potential closer.
What does the above have to do with Kickstarter and Cobalt and Four Fathers, the book I’m so grateful to have contribued to, along with Dave Housley, Ben Tanzer and BL Pawelek? Simply that I like to think of that individual in the indy lit world who presently clutches that last one or ten or twenty-five or one hundred fifty or three hundred dollar pledge that will help Andrew Keating and the good people at Cobalt reach the two thousand dollar goal to help bring this book about fathers–their foibles and fears, fates and fames–out in the world. But meantime, the rest of us have fewer than two weeks to keep snapping together the border pieces and filling in the rest of the picture so that Aunt Jean can deliver the unifying piece.
And when I say “us,” I mean that. For just like Sy Sperling and Hair Club For Men, I’m not just a Four Fathers author, I’m also a backer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQFFziVCZaw
Thanks for reading, and here’s the Cobalt link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cobaltpress/cobalt-press-start-up-where-you-should-be
Ian Dury and I probably had about as different a father as humanly possible, but this song has taken on such a great importance to me since my son was born, which in turn made me think more about my own father and the man he was and is. But check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE7b-REv72c
And once it has you feeling sentimental, hop on over here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cobaltpress/cobalt-press-start-up-where-you-should-be
tomswilliams 