Loaded for Bear

<p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The stories in </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Loaded for Bear</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> are told through the voice of a male narrator. But he is a shape shifter ranging in age from a boy to a retiree and holding forth from each of the decades in between. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>We encounter him variously as a city newspaper boy and as a country preteen; a Vietnam War draftee and a young father and groom-to-be; frightened son and a troubled veteran; a brother and bereaved lover; a divorced single father of adolescent girls then grown daughters; a dutiful nephew and reluctant farmyard midwife; a colleague forced to interview a Palestinian immigrant for his Green Card certification. And once apparently as one of a circle of female cousins. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In each encounter we find ourselves invited observers in alternative universes as befuddled as the unwitting characters by the circumstances that enwrap them. </span></p>