Leaving my office I began to think about this post. A little button in my head was pushed. It is round with tapered and slightly shaded edges and a right facing triangle. Immediately precisely arranged zeroes and ones streamed out splices of a Bob Seger song. First words were “On the road again,” but then the song jumped across a couple deep, black grooves to “There I go… Turn the page.”

Odd. I know the song popped into my head because I was thinking of a post title, and it really doesn’t take much to push that button anyway. Anyway, this post isn’t about turning the page in the sense Seger sang about, but a page turner by Cormac McCarthy, “The Road.”

The book was recommended a few months ago by (Work)Joyce, so I downloaded bits of a sample to my Kindle and read it while climbing stairs yesterday. Joyce suggested I could relate to the story of father and son survivors touring the charred corpse of earth, courtesy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Kindle samples vary. Some are long and rich. Others barely get you to chapter 1. This stretch of “The Road” stomped stairclimbing me in less than 20 pages. Here are three that kicked me hard:

“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Son: “What would you do if I died?”
Father: “If you died I would want to die too.”
Son: “So you could be with me?”
Father: “Yes. So I could be with you.”
Son “Okay.”

“You forget some things, don’t you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

It’s bleak but right now irresistible. Gotta go turn the page.