Population 485

I just finished reading another Michael Perry book: Population 485. If you liked Truck: A Love Story, this one is more of the same.

I have found both these small-town memoirs to be very relaxing. Sort the same way I feel about the movie "On Golden Pond". I know it's not the world's greatest movie - it just helps me to take a deep breath - in with the good air, out with the bad.

I hope to share a few of my favorite passages with you over the coming days in an effort to get you to pick it up.

First one:

The farm was a rock patch. And where the rocks stopped, the swamps began. It was a tough place to subsist, let alone thrive. During one nine-year stretch, when five of the ten Jabowski kids were in braces, Stanislaw worked night and swing shifts at the munitions plant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, arranging his farm work around the full-time job. He'd feed the sheep and cows, do the milking, drive forty miles to the munitions plant, pull a full shift, drive home, and do all the chores again before sleeping. Night shift or swing shift, the cows swung with him. Somewhere in there - I can't imagine - he planted crops and put up hay and sleepwalked through the month-long-twenty-four-hour-a-day-grind of lambing season. I regret to report that there was a shamefully mirror-intensive period in my life in which I engaged briefly and quite ineffectively in the sport of bodybuilding, one of the reasons I just couldn't keep at it was because I'd watch my bulging, lubricated compadres admiring the cut of their triceps, or the belly of their biceps, and I'd think of Stanislaw Jabowski, with his bowed shoulders and little strap-iron muscles, and how, within four days of head-to-head choring and bomb-building, he would leave those baked-fish-nibbling showpieces whimpering in the damp corner of the milkhouse. Somehow, pectorals the size of beef roasts seemed pointless.

- Michael Perry in Population 485

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