Life, Mrs. Gump to the contrary, is not actually like a box of chocolates. You may not know exactly what you’re going to get, but you can be pretty darn sure that chocolate will be involved somehow.

The stories in this book are not quite so trustworthy or predictable. Each one is its own little bonbon, to be sure, but sometimes there’s a little Saki-esque kick waiting at the end, sometimes a warm Thurberish chuckle, and sometimes a gutwrench suplex that comes out of nowhere and slams you to the mat.

Ray and I go back a ways. We met in junior high—we lived in the same apartment complex in Raleigh NC, he a son of Flushing NY and me a son of Pennsylvania, two befuddled Northerners trying to make sense out of the South.

He introduced me to the music of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and I think I may have introduced him to theater. We wrote and performed plays and skits together, along with a circle of similarly offbeat friends, and had a fine time before we all got scattered by the winds of college and marriage and work.

Ray for his part grabbed the world by the cojones, scoring an MBA, marrying a wonderful and creative woman, and successfully keeping his own Internet design firm alive through the dot-com bust. But as these stories will show you, he’s kept his youthful idealism and love for humanity alive, albeit under a crust of quirky humor that any reader of Twain or Vonnegut will recognize.

So dig in. Keep a glass of water and a toothpick handy for cleansing of the palate, so you can enjoy each and every one of these tasty little morsels.

Skip Mendler
Honesdale, Pennsylvania
February 2015