Read Old Songs in a New Cafe Online
Authors: Robert James Waller
Old Songs in a New Cafe
BOOK THAT GIVES VOICE TO OUR SENSIBILITIES,
OUR EXPERIENCES, AND OUR DREAMS…
OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ
“POWERFUL IN THEIR SIMPLICITY AND POIGNANCY… these essays read as if Waller was in your living room, chatting away about his
hopes and dreams. It’s often difficult to sup press the desire to interrupt and say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve felt that way. You sure
put it nicely.’”
—Blade-Citizen
(CA)
“WALLER’S STRENGTHS ARE EVIDENT right from the first one: the beautifully wrenching ‘Excavating Rachael’s Room.’ If you’ve
ever had a child, read it as soon as you can get your hands on it.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“VINTAGE WALLER… a writer I’m glad to have found.… Perhaps the charm in OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ lies in Waller’s way of giving
us back the world and our intimate relationships, refreshed and glistening.… While he may live in Iowa, he travels the world
of the heart and soul, and through Old Songs, saves us a window seat along the way.”
—Palm Beach Post
“WALLER’S STRENGTH IS THAT HIS WRITING RINGS TRUE.”
—Orange County Register
(CA)
“THERE IS GOOD WRITING IN
OLD SONGS IN A NEW-CAF
É
.
… You might want to dip into his nonfiction and meet the man behind Francesca Johnson, Robert Kincaid, Jellie Braden, and
Michael Tillman.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“WALLER WRITES LYRICALLY”
—Rocky Mountain News
Excerpt from “Memphis, Tennessee” by Chuck Berry used with permission from Chuck Berry and Isalee Music Publishing.
Excerpt from the poem on
page 51
from
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
, edited and translated by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The essays and stories have previously appeared in JUST BEYOND THE FIRELIGHT, copyright © 1988 by Iowa State University Press;
ONE GOOD ROAD IS ENOUGH, copyright © 1990 by Iowa State University Press;
The Des Moines Register, Country America, Humane Society of the United States News, League Lines
and
Voice of Humanity.
Published by
arrangement with the author and Iowa State University Press, Ames.
Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1994 by Robert James Waller.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2480-4
F
OR:
Georgia Ann, Rachael, Ruth, Robert, Sr.
Gerald, Charlie, Sammy, Roadcat
Perry, Harriet, Stan, Allen
And
…
Orange Band.
Thanks to Jim Flansburg, Jim Gannon, and Bill Silag, for their help and friendship, and for their support when others wavered.
Thanks also to the lowans who read what I wrote early on and encouraged me to write more. And, finally, thanks to the rivers
(they know who they are) for being the source of it all.
Contents
A Rite of Passage in Three Cushions
Ridin’ Along in Safety with Kennedy and Kuralt
Drinking Wine the New York Way
In Cedar Key, Harriet Smith Loves Birds and Hates Plastic
Essays by Robert James Waller began to appear in
The Des Moines Register
in 1983, but I did not encounter Waller’s writing until 1986. That’s when I read “Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann,” a striking
tribute to a romance still strong after thirty years, expressed with exceptional grace, dignity, and unabashed sincerity.
It was rare to see such a thing in a newspaper—not only the subject matter but also the lyrical quality of the writing itself.
At the time, I was working as managing editor at Iowa State University Press, and in a letter I asked Waller about his writing
plans and suggested that he and I discuss the possibility of publishing an autobiographical work that incorporated the pieces
running in the
Register.
His response was cordial—and somewhat amused. An autobiography was probably a bit premature, he indicated, but the idea of
an essay collection appealed to him. In fact, he was already at work on several additional
Register
pieces.
The following summer the
Register
published, in eight installments, Waller’s magnificent account of an unaccompanied 100-mile journey he made by canoe on Iowa’s
Shell Rock River. The essay was at once a celebration of Iowa’s natural beauty and an indictment of public indifference about
its preservation. Waller’s river voyage became the talk of Iowa and fueled debates in taverns and cafes across the state.
Not everyone in Iowa was delighted by what Waller had written, but a flood of mail to the
Register
indicated Waller’s message had been heard.
The mail also revealed the unusual appeal of the writer’s style. It wasn’t simply that Waller expressed people’s concerns
about the natural environment; it was the captivating way he said it. “You painted with words what I experienced, but found
difficult to relate,” wrote one reader.
Subsequent essays in the
Register
also drew praise, and increasingly readers’ comments focused on Waller himself, rather than on his own subjects: “Some people
are given the gift to be able to reach another person’s heart,” declared one letter, written in praise of “A Canticle for
Roadcat.” “You are loved and appreciated by a great number of people you probably will never meet, but who feel they know
you because of a kindred spirit.”
For some of us at least, discovering a writer like this can be a startling and even troubling experience—here is someone giving
candid expression to the vague longings stirring within us that we thought were only our own. Waller dares to describe these
feelings, and does so with great skill. He draws us into his world with the elegance of his language and holds us there by
the authority with which he addresses matters of concern to us all.
These are often matters of the heart, as in
The Bridges of Madison County
and in several of the essays collected here, often involving characters and situations having counterparts in our own lives.
Especially in the earlier essays, Waller focuses on the events of a conventional midwestern life—a man and his family, his
memories of childhood, and his concerns about the future. Yet even when he writes of experiences we know firsthand, Waller
illuminates them so brilliantly that we are forced to look at things—memories and desires, families and relationships, landscapes—in
new ways.
This isn’t Waller’s main purpose in writing. For him, the creative process is a personal exercise in self-discovery. “I am
discovering, as I write, what I really think, what I really believe,” he explains in his essay “Getting the Words Rightly
Set.” This is the magic—and the power-—of creative writing as a means of self-expression. “Your deepest feelings can cause
you to shudder a bit… because you didn’t know they were there and writing has uncovered them.”
But no matter what his topic, Waller has the ability to make it his own, such is the confidence with which he writes. This
too is an expression of self. “I’m not refined and tentative as a person. I have strong emotions, I am passionate about things,
I am a little rough around the edges, I can easily become overly sentimental, and all of this comes through in my writing,”
he said in a letter to me when we were just getting to know each other. And, he suggested, for him the outcome was perhaps
less important than the process itself: “I take chances….Some times things work out, sometimes they don’t.”
Things have worked out very well in the years since then. Eventually Waller published two books of essays with Iowa State
University Press:
Just Beyond the Firelight
(1988) and
One Good Road Is Enough
(1990). Word of the two books spread gradually beyond Iowa, due in part to the reprinting of individual essays in national
magazines but also as a result of Waller’s own travels. Mail arriving at our offices and at Waller’s home indicated that pockets
of Waller fans had formed in Washington, New Mexico, and elsewhere around the country. Now of course what were once scattered
fans are part of a network of Waller readers who have kept
The Bridges of Madison County
at the top of the best-seller lists for nearly a year.
Robert Waller’s enormous popular success is a testament to his ability to draw readers into his quest for self-discovery.
Recently Oprah Winfrey described
The Bridges of Madison County
as a book “that’s touching souls all across the country.” She told her television audience that when she finished the book,
she wanted to talk to others who had read it and to share Waller’s gift. Readers of the essays collected here are likely to
react the same way, as they discover the distinctive gifts of a remarkable writer.
B
ILL
S
ILAG
Iowa State University Press
January 1994
I began writing these little pieces on a warm, green morning in the summer of 1983. “Ridin’ Along in Safety with Kennedy and
Kuralt” was the first. Until then I had written only academic journal articles plus a fair number of songs I played and sang
during my twenty-four years as a bar musician. Just why I decided to take up the writer’s trade is not clear to me now, nor
was it any clearer then, I suspect. In fact, until recently I’d never considered writing as a way to make a living. So, as
best I remember, it merely seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. I began writing for that reason and none other,
which is pretty much the way I’ve lived my entire life.
I puttered along, writing mostly on weekends, publishing a few pieces each year in
The Des Moines Register.
People wrote or called to say they enjoyed the essays. Jim Gannon and Jim Flansburg of the
Register
encouraged me to keep writing. Since I was a university dean at the time, applause from anybody, anywhere, was welcome.
After reading “Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann,” Bill Silag, who was then editor at the Iowa State University Press, suggested
a collection of the
Register
pieces. That also seemed like a good thing to do, and it delighted me to think the essays would be gathered into a single
volume, which we titled
Just Beyond the Firelight.
Taken together, they formed something of an autobiographical sketch covering my first forty years, and that sounded a whole
lot easier than someday possibly writing a history of my meandering life for possible grandchildren who possibly might not
care in any case.
A second collection,
One Good Road Is Enough,
was subsequently published, and suddenly I had two books in print when I never expected to have any. I began work on a third,
which eventually appeared as
Iowa: Perspectives on Today and Tomorrow,
a fairly long and analytical work on the curious place of my growing and living.
Then came
The Bridges of Madison County.
To date, it has sold more than 4.5 million copies, has been on the
New York Times
best-seller list for 76 weeks, and has occupied the top position for 36 weeks.
Bridges
changed my life in ways I still do not completely understand. In any case, Pm pleased that Warner Books decided to reissue
the early essays. I think you’ll find they have much the same flavor as
Bridges.
If I were to write these pieces now, I would not handle them as I originally did, but I am unapologetic about the way they
look and taste. They represent where I was at the time they were written, nothing more. We come, we do, we go, and I think
we should not take ourselves more seriously than that.
You’ll meet my wife, my daughter, and my old friend and colleague, Roadcat, who was as good and true a friend as anyone could
wish for. And I’ll take you back with me to the flatlands dust and heat of Rockford, Iowa, in the 1940s and 1950s. There,
in a quiet, unobtrusive place between two rivers, I found heroes of a size that suited me. For example, Sammy Patterson, billiards
master; Kenny Govro, cat fisherman; and Perry Burgess, who worked as a kiln stacker at the local brick-and-tile plant.