First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - The Removers; Andrew Meredith

Every Tuesday I host First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where I share the first paragraph or (a few) of a book I am reading or thinking about reading soon.  I couldn't resist this one when I saw the cover at the library. (This memoir is just 177 pages)

 

The Removers (a memoir)

Andrew Meredith

Scribner - 2014

"Dad parks the hearse at the curb under a pink-petaled dogwood, in the glory of the first balmy April Saturday afternoon.  We're on Cantor Avenue in front of a tan brick apartment building, treeless courtyard, three stories high, a block long but invisible, a place that marks the edge of our Philadelphia neighborhood and the next, a structure populated by pensioner bachelor mailmen and mothers and toddlers learning English together.  At the rec center baseball diamond across the street, screams of 'GO!" followed an aluminum plink.  At the corner, tulips in yellow, red, violet, planted to partition the sidewalk from a tiny row house lawn, salute a crew-cut man in a tank top, gold crucifix swinging as he soapy sponges his four-wheeled stereo.  The fried onions from the grill at the steak shop a block away whisper that the cold and dark have passed and we've been delivered somewhere better, and yet inside our little brick houses these last six months a secret part of us wondered: is this the year winter doesn't end? A girthy old woman in her sleeveless summer house dress, sunlight warming her arms for the first time this year, hoses the dirt under the rosebush.  She looks like a Helen.  She might be a Carol.  An ambulance lines up at the red light like all the other cars, in repose, maybe coming back from an oil change."

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What do you think?

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