"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."
C.S. Lewis
"Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art."
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Polish Poet and Aphorist, Maori Proverb
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
Pablo Picasso
The six short stories in the latest collection of stories from Nettie Firman are about the uncomfortable but necessary lessons of learning, aging, and growing spiritually. They feature normal people in normal lives to whom abnormal things happen, which are in nonetheless perfectly normal events.
They include things going wrong at a teenager's secret party while his parents are away. The unexpected love that blossoms between two people as they tend a dying man. The deal with the unsettling experience of the two adult children of parents who had affairs with each other.
They are insightful about the human condition, occasionally hilarious, always full of humanity.