An Answered Prayer
Highly Recommended
So, usually I start with a recap so
you get a taste of what the book feels like. Then I tell you what worked and
didn’t work, and what touched me. Forgive me if I break a little from my usual
style. This book has me all over the place, in a good way.
David is a regular kind of guy, and
Ryan is a jock. They are both in high school in the sixties, when being gay was
just not okay. They meet, the become friends, then more. Then life and hate and
the times tear them apart. Life goes on. People move on. And yet…
Now here’s the beautiful sadness
that grabbed me in the darkest and most hopeful and cynical places in my soul—life
never takes you quite where you think it will. Yes, we are caught in the
hurricane, but sometimes, just sometimes, it drops you in the most unexpected
places. Sometimes, even after forty years, you look up and holy hell, there’s your
second chance.
I don’t want to spoil anything for
you as you read this incredible book. Dan Skinner, God bless him, has created
characters that I know, that I lived with, played with, grew up with, loved,
lost, cried over and still love. These are the people of my past. This story is
mine, and probably in a lot of ways, Dan’s. Gay men of a certain age (and doesn’t
that sound haughty, and is a simple way of saying, fifty-ish) have a very
different experience of coming to terms with their homosexuality. It might be
difficult now, but for those of us who discovered that part of ourselves in the
sixties and seventies (and early eighties) lived a different life.
Here’s the thing, and I’m sorry I’m
all over the place here. This book is a must read. It’s love, life, loss and
joy, pain, sadness and…I am almost lost for words.
The lessons here? Life
is bittersweet, take your happiness a day at a time, and hope is a fickle bitch
that surprises you when you least expect it. It might take forty years, but
sometimes, God gives you back that which you never thought you would see or
feel or hold again.
What a gift.
Read this book. It’s
a prayer answered.
Tom
