Waiting for Nothing: Tom Kromer, American Century Series

18 the minnesota review Lex Runciman Waiting For Nothing Tom Kromer, American Century Series No name inside. $4.65 penciled in a corner, crossed out. Three dollars and forty cents buys me this book. Memory confusion between us, my father, class of 1932, posted stock quotations. Minimum wage, chamois and chalk on slate walls, numbers and numbers and numbers. The dedication, not as I thought I remembered, not Sally, but Jolene. "For Jolene, who turned off the gas." Yellow houses, he says, yellow but not too yellow: food, and never turned away. A thousand such houses. The spectacle of a man living on one color. In my childhood, on the fritz meant not working: anything, animate or not, broken, needing repair. The silver-side chrome toaster, heavy, swollen as a bubble and cold as stone. Out of hunger and the urge to forget it, Norman Rockwells are born. Haydn's 56th Sonata circles under a needle. This is the luxury of reading, of not reading. ...