THE OLD HOBO AND OTHER SHORT STORIES BY JOHN EDWIN PARKES

The Old Hobo and Other Short Stories THE OLD HOBO: It is mid-1900 when a battered old hobo trudges up along a California Highway and stops to rest at a roadside rest stop. He sees, liking to himself, a weathered old oak tree barely surviving within the rocks on the mountainside opposite the roadside rest stop. He is taken back when a young boy at the roadside rest wants to carve his initials in the tree with his pocketknife. It is stopped when his parents intercede. The old hobo bids a farewell to the tree and trudges on. THE SUN WILL SHINE: In the mid-1900s in a state mental hospital, a patient looks to a liking to himself by playing a solitaire marble game. THE GOLD MINE: A city slicker stops in for a beer in the bar of a derelict old gold mining town. While there, he encounters an old- timer viewing his gold samples and his dreams of developing a lost, secret gold mine. The city slicker facetiously plays the old timer along. So, is the gold mine real or in the old-timer's imagination? THE TENEMENT FLAT: In the mid-1900s a factory worker at the end of his workday comes home to his tenement flat only to meet and confront his wife over the fact that the last of their eight children, a daughter, has ran away with a sailor. An intense argument arises, family dynamics are unleased, the raising of their children, she being a boring, cold wife, his infidelity and his no-nothing job. With his pistol that she has taken, she confronts him, to finish him, to end it all. However, so, the tables are turned when, she being distracted, he gets the pistol, shoots her, and walks out. HE WAS NOT ONE OF US: The flimsy shack with its earthed floor shakes and sways incessantly from the raging, howling snowstorm outside, as the men, but for one, huddle around a heated potbellied stove under a swaying lantern telling their tales and yarns. They laugh, they joke, and they chuckle to keep their minds off the freezing cold. The one lies on the floor, his bac