Daily Excerpt: Road to Damascus (E. Imady)
The following excerpt comes from Road to Damascus by Elaine Imady. My father was always the outsider in our family, the one with the funny Missourian accent, who said “Miz”, “naught”, “bucket” and “skillet” instead of “Mrs.”, “zero”, “pail” and “frying pan,” who spoke slowly and who moved deliberately. We–Mother and we three sisters–were the fast-moving, fast-talking, mercurial Easterners who got impatient with Dad’s phlegmatic, Midwestern ways. Dad only had his mother, our Grandma Rippey, but Mother, who had been a Post, had aunts, uncles, first and second cousins galore. In Palisades, everywhere you turned, there were Posts, relatives all. Actually, Dad’s relatives probably outnumbered Mom’s, but they were far away in Missouri and we only saw them once when they came east. So, as I said, Dad was an outsider. He was also a drinker. At the end of our days with him, drink was more important to him than anything else in the world. He swallowed it down, and it swallowed him up. I’m not