Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

Genres: Short Stories

Synopsis

From Robert James Waller comes a wonderful collection of 19 essays--all of them as romantic, reflective, and timeless as readers have come to expect from the author of The Bridges of Madison County--a celebration of life and loss, of what things still can be.

Release date: September 26, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 192

Sample

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.


BILL SILAG

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.


We’ll ride along through Asian nights with Captain Charlie Uban, an Iowa boy who took C-47 cargo planes into territory where
they were never meant to go, into the snow and wind of the southern Himalayas when the world had lost control. We’ll fly yet
another time, with a flock of Canada geese beating their way south through a midwestern blizzard, and well think about what
it means to fly no more when we look through cage wire at a fellow named Orange Band, who was the last member of his species,
resting there on his perch and perhaps contemplating what zero truly means.


There’s more—things run amuck when river otters are turned loose in Iowa, and we’ll look at the art and technique of the long-range
jump shot. I coast by my fiftieth birthday and wonder about it, my father confronts an assault on his honesty, and I run into
an extraordinary woman in the back country of Florida.


In short, this is a book about people and animals and things I care about. It’s about growing up and showing your stuff, finding
love, winning and losing, and getting older. It’s about where I began and where I came to at a particular time in my life,
as a person and as a writer. And I suppose it’s also about where Pm headed, though I never seem to realize such things at
the time. We come, we do, we go, and the doing can be a rather grand voyage if you don’t panic and if you believe, as I believe,
in magic and imagination and wizards who live along quiet country rivers.


ROBERT JAMES WALLER

Cedar Falls, Iowa

January 1994

______________________________________

Like some rumpled alien army awaiting marching orders, the brown trash bags hunker down on the patio in a column of twos. A
hard little caravan are they, resting in sunlight and shadow and caring not for their cargos, the sweepings of childhood and
beyond.


With her eighteenth birthday near, Rachael has moved to Boston, leaving her room and the cleaning of it to us.

After conducting a one-family attempt at turning United Parcel Service into something resembling North American Van Lines,
we gather by the front door early on a Sunday morning.


Beside the suitcases are stacked six boxes, taped and tied. In my innocence, I tap the topmost box and ask, “What are these?”

“That’s the stuff I couldn’t get in my suitcases last night; you guys can send it to me,” she replies, rummaging through her
purse. Out of habit, I begin a droning lecture on planning ahead, realize the futility of it, and am quiet.


She has a deep caring for the animals and purposely, we know, avoids saying good-bye to them, particularly the small female
cat acquired during her stay at camp one summer, years ago.


The cat has shared her bed, has been her confidant and has greeted her in the afternoons when she returned from school. Good-bye
would be too much, would bring overpowering tears, would destroy the blithe air of getting on with it she is trying hard to
preserve.


We watch her walk across the apron of the Waterloo airport, clu. . .