Writers Group on Tuesday in These titles mean nothing.

Favorite author?
Well I have a string of them.

James Baldwin.
Graham Greene.
John Updike.
Theodore Dreiser.
Michener, a bit.
The spy guys.
Le Carre.
Maugham.
Greene, again.
Fitzgerald.
Sinclair Lewis, another Minnesotan.
Hemingway, a bit too.
John O’Hara.
John Cheever.
Raymond Chandler.
Philip Roth.

Women?
Willa Cather.
Edith Wharton

More recent women.
Lily King.
Claire Messud.
Ann Patchett.
The Rooney girl, Sally.
Edna O’Brian, also Irish.
The Canadians, Atwood and Munro.
The Australian, Shirley Hazzard.

The poet, e e cummings.
Another poet, Donald Hall.

The husband and wife pair, Katherine and Colin Harrison.
Richard Price.
Lately I’ve been reading Paul Auster and Lawrence Block.

Non-fiction, Halberstam and Manchester.
The Lindberghs, husband and wife.

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Let me tell you a story. It was a night in early June, 1993. We met at a writer’s class in the public room of the new Waukon library. The room was long and had a vaulted ceiling with great acoustics. The class was held by Robert Wolf, a writer who’d moved from Chicago with his wife, to enjoy Northeast Iowa and to share culture with the natives. He had had other classes with everyday people and had published a number of small books with their contributions.

There weren’t very many of us to start out. That night there was me, and a retired elementary teacher and a neighbor of ours, a young man, who has worked with Wolf at a class in Lansing. We had been asked to bring a sample of writing that we admired and perhaps aspired to writing ourselves.

My choice was easy. I brought John Updike’s ‘Pigeon Feathers’. I’d read Updike since high school. He was a New Yorker writer and he was maybe 15 years older than me. His short stories were often about his own life, and I could see myself in them. I hoped to follow him through my life, and was disappointed when he died at about the age I am now, leaving me without a path to follow.

The book itself is a sixty cent Crest paperback that I rescued at a library sale. Copyright dates on the stories are from 1959 to 1962 and no doubt they were all in the magazine first. I knew the stories. And inside the cover was an address sticker from Mrs. Hull, the woman who wrote the columns in the local paper that I had read through those same years. The book itself is a special relic of a time not really long ago.

‘Pigeon Feathers’ is a short story about a teenage boy who is a treasured only child. He lives with his parents and a set of grandparents. It’s during the Depression, and his father is a high school teacher whose job is not secure. The whole family has moved from the small town in Pennsylvania to a small farm the mother has inherited. Both the boy and his father are unhappy being in the country but it’s what his mother wants.

The grandfather dies. The boy asks his mother for reassurance that there is life after death and she isn’t sure. She says the grandfather will live on in his family’s memories. The boy isn’t satisfied, he goes to the family’s minister, who pretty much tells him the same thing. The hours the grandfather read his Bible weren’t a guarantee of heaven. There was no proof of a life after this one.

I’d marked the passages of the conversation between the boy and his mother. I had access to copy machine at work and I made copies so each of us could have one. Bob Wolf was happy at my interest and industry. I was surprised he wasn’t aware of the story, and surprised that I was the only Updike fan in the room.

Wolf suggested that we read the dialog like a play. The neighbor young farmer would take the boy’s words, the teacher the mother’s, and Wolf himself read the text linking the dialog and finishing the story.

It went well. The voices were clear in the quiet room. The story was new to them, but they ‘got’ it. I listened and I could hear their appreciation and understanding. I felt good for having brought the beautiful story to them.

The boy in the story does not receive assurance of eternal life for his grandfather, and he is sad and disappointed and angry.

Later that summer, he is asked to kill the pigeons that are messing up the empty barn on the farm. He takes the 22 rifle and kills the birds. He and his mother collect the bodies to bury them. Together, they look at the complex colors and patterns of the feathers of the dead birds so beautiful and individual and deserving of attention.

How did the creator, or whoever it is who supervises life and death, devote so much care and beauty to these ratty insignificant birds? The boy realizes, he knows, that whoever made pigeons would also have a plan for his good, Bible-reading grandfather after his death. The message is there will be a plan for the boy’s own life, and for ours as well.