Mark Dunn - American Decameron

1984 PATRIARCHAL IN CALIFORNIA

A father of three girls wants to try once more for a boy, and his “son obsession” puts a crimp in the family’s enjoyment of the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games.

1985 SMITTEN IN WISCONSIN AND MINNESOTA

A young man sees a youthful picture of his wife’s grandmother and falls in love, inviting consequences that jeopardize his marriage.

1986 LOCKED OUT IN TEXAS

An old man is confronted by the reality of his Alzheimer’s as he stands naked before a YMCA locker, having forgotten his lock’s combination.

1987 MOTHERLY IN GEORGIA

A middle-aged preschool teacher has a very personal reason for wanting to teach only three-year-olds — a reason that finally comes out after thirty years.

1988 STOUTHEARTED IN FLORIDA

A teenage girl schemes to make it possible for her grandmother’s lesbian partner to see her grandmother when visitation by “non-family” members of ICU patients is disallowed.

1989 MELODIOUS IN OHIO

The four grown members of a teenage singing sister act accidentally learn about a fifth sister they never knew they had.

1990 GERONTOCONCUPISCENT IN VERMONT

An old man — the “guardian angel” of the love between a teenaged boy and girl he befriends — is tempted to exploit the fact that the couple has been sneaking into his house to have sex while he is out.

1991 FILICIDAL IN MISSISSIPPI

A father decides to do the unthinkable: end his own life and the lives of his two children by taking them automotively to the bottom of a lake. His eleven-year-old son is determined not to let him have his way.

1992 GRIEVING IN MINNESOTA

A widow cannot bring herself to remove her husband’s voice from the announcement on her home answering machine.

1993 SHELVED IN NEW MEXICO

A young woman must put her life on hold to care for her mother. She isn’t alone.

1994 CROONING AND SWOONING IN SOUTH DAKOTA

During a purported estate sale of Will Rogers and Dale Evans memorabilia, the sales coordinator learns the truth behind the sale…from a young man tied up in the basement.

1995 VARIOUSLY BEREFT IN MINNESOTA, CALIFORNIA, OKLAHOMA, AND MONTANA

The death of their brother necessitates various conversations among the four surviving siblings, during which they assess their tentative relationships with one another and the lunatic state of the country.

1996 COPROPHOBIC IN MISSISSIPPI

A couple looking for a new house find one that could be a good fit if only it weren’t for an insurmountable glitch in its presentation.

1997 COMBUSTIBLE IN OHIO

A woman insists to police detectives that she didn’t set her husband on fire, even though there is sufficient motive to implicate her.

1998 DENTIGEROUSLY FORTUITOUS IN FLORIDA

A dental hygienist discovers that the man who two weeks earlier tried to rape her in a dark parking lot is sitting in her chair.

1999 CONSTRUCTIVE IN BOTSWANA

A sexual tryst with a fellow Habitat for Humanity crewmember and a life-and-death encounter with a pack of wild hyenas bring a woman to certain enlightening truths about herself.

200 °CONVERGENT IN CONNECTICUT

All of the stories of the century come together in this denouement set in a Wilton nursing home.

There are a lot of people I should thank for help — both direct and indirect — with this book. Inspiration for these stories came from many people and from many different places. I got the idea for “1994: Crooning and Swooning in South Dakota,” for example, when my friend Rod Replogle gave me a program from a Roy Rogers traveling variety show he attended as a kid. Likewise, a facsimile of a 1940 Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad schedule I received from my friend Steve Marquis was the inspiration for “1940: Au Fait in Colorado, New Mexico, and California.” People from all around the country picked up their phones and courteously answered all of my oddball questions about their cities, their churches, their streets, their grocery stores, their Stuckey’s roadside gift shops. I rarely got their names, but their assistance is no less appreciated for being undocumented.

Some folks do require a personal thank you:

Thanks to Jack Thayer, admissions director of the Menaul School in Albuquerque, and to the directors and volunteers at the Menaul Historical Library of the Southwest for research assistance pertaining to “1957: Loyal in Utah.” Jack was also especially helpful in providing information about his grandfather, a Titanic survivor, for a story which, regrettably, I was unable to use (due to a surplus of nautical tales in the book and another story’s strong claim to the year 1912).

Thanks to Wayne Taylor for sharing details of the summer he spent with his step-grandfather, many of which ended up in “1980: Renovative in Texas.”

Thanks to Laurie Kalet for sharing the particulars of her job as preschool teacher, which I incorporated into “1987: Motherly in Georgia.”

Thanks to Jennifer Rodgers for doing the same for her job as dental hygienist, which I used in “1998: Dentigerously Fortuitous in Florida.”

Thanks to Scott White for the idea behind “1976: Throttled in Arkansas and Oklahoma,” and to Mary Dunn for the idea behind “1961: Unliterate in New Hampshire.”

Thanks, as well, to Mets scholar Phil Calbi for making sure that I got the facts right in “1962: Thrown a Curve Ball in New York,” and to Los Alamos resident Robert Benjamin for doing the same with “1944: Sequestered in New Mexico.”

Thanks to Yazoo City native daughter Cindy Foose for all the help she gave me with “1949: Ball Changing in Mississippi.” I appreciate Cindy’s willingness to relate so many rich details of her Mississippi youth to me.

Thanks to Jeremy Pena for help with the legal aspects of “1997: Combustible in Ohio.”

Thanks, as well, to all the people who put together the Internet Archive digital library and the Wikipedia and Gutenberg websites. As a writer who has spent most of his former research hours sitting in dark, musty libraries for long afternoons, the opportunity to access primary and secondary sources for my historical research with the click of a mouse has made a book about the twentieth century, which previously would have taken me a decade to complete, something I was successful in finishing in less than two years. Each of these websites (along with all the other sites I consulted) was a Godsend for this author of the mother of all cultural research projects. I am also grateful to OTR.net, which offered among its thousands of hours of archived radio programs WJSV’s full day of broadcasting from September 21, 1939, which became the inspiration for “1939: Galactophorous in Virginia.” How did I know how many songs from The Wizard of Oz were sung on CBS radio that day? Because I listened to its entire broadcast day, courtesy of this site — a veritable audio time capsule.

Four very personal thank-yous are in order:

To my literary agent, Amy Rennert, who has stuck by me through thin and thin (her patience in waiting for the “thick” being greatly appreciated).

To my editor, Guy Intoci, not only for his editorial gifts, but for his championing of this very unusual book. It’s editors like Guy who, in this era of stultifying caution and conservative retrenchment in the publishing industry, view “different” as actually a positive thing. Without editors like Guy or publishers like Mark Pearce, adventurous writers like me would be woefully under-employed.