Short Stories, Tall Tales, and Surprise Endings

Herein lie thirty stand alone stories. They offer a wide variety as to tone, theme, mood, and  setting, but each has a build up to an ending with a surprise, chuckle or thought provocation. They cross the globe but find commonality in people who are much the same whether native Peruvian or English noble. Indeed, the subjects include encounters with unusual animals, trees with messages, enigmatic women, and folks of limited education who are rich in wisdom. 

Put wings on your armchair, carry your sense of humor and appreciation of irony with you, and enjoy some vicarious adventure.  Join an idealistic politician in his crusade to improve health care – while reducing cost, see how teaching math competes with athletics, share the responsibilities of a Peruvian shaman, or go fishing in world class waters; there's a bit of diversion for every palate.

Penned over decades and put together for you now, enjoy these excursions where you will meet some fascinating friends and memorable depictions.

For those who enjoy a good yarn, a large dose of humor, a wide selection of offerings, and telling illustrations, this gathering of tales is written for your pleasure, diversion, and entertainment. The illustrations, themselves, will invite you into each story and leave you with an image for recollection. Common threads of humor, telling psyches, poignant moments, and crescendo endings tie these tales together. This is a collection of widely varied stories written over decades.

One,written over sixty years ago, resulted in the author pursuing creative writing; lost, but re-written and re-named, it presents itself as "Apparition." Another was published in "The Atlantic Salmon Journal," and now is offered for your armchair visit to Labrador, considered by many to be the last frontier in North America. There are a few stories based on the author's encounters with a most unusual and unforgettable individual in Maine whose father was a Maine woodsman raconteur and mother was a one time New York City Rockette. He, himself, was an accomplished story teller. You will find him as Lionel. Some of the players in the stories spoke little but made major impressions, such as seen with a bear in Yellowstone, a llama from Patagonia, and the Ay Ay Ma Ma bird in the Amazon. There is a good deal of whimsy thrown into many of the stories; nonetheless there are offerings that will leave you sharing heartbeats and tears with characters. For the reader interested in health care, there is a tale called, "Concussion," so named and copyrighted before the later, more well-known version. In it, you will find a protagonist driven by personal issues, blocked by political ploys, and befuddled by the play of the participants; it is a story offering another direction for health care. So, travel from the Nile to the Amazon, join the English gentry at the southern tip of South America, see yourself on the sea with pirates of yesteryear, pick up a fly rod, or put on some snow shoes – all easily done while sitting in an armchair imagining yourself on a literary safari.

Born at the end of the great depression, and having a Bostonian psychiatrist father and a Utahan mother who put Blake in cowboy boots at age two, it was only natural that he usurp the genes for sense of humor, the love of the great outdoors, and a profound appreciation for the importance of the psyche.

Both parents were artistic and passed this ability on to Blake, who, realizing that he charged less than anyone else, hired himself to illustrate this book. After the usual adolescent diversions and misadventures, Blake settled down in college where he majored in psychology while satisfing a variety of other interests including creative writing and fulfilling pre-med requirements. He was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, an honor society in college. He then went on to the Faculty of Medicine, at McGill University where he was president of Alpha Omega Alpha, the honor society there. Fortuitously twice honored, he went on to post graduate training in general medicine and neuro-psychiatry – later melding these disciplines as a family doctor. He taught for a half dozen medical schools, each awarding him with titles rather than money. He held board certifications and re-certifications which gave him a series of unpronounceable initials after his name.

  While he has previously published in scientific and clinical medicine journals, this left little room to express his sense of humor and love of literature. He has exercised that for your pleasure previously in a novel as well as in short stories over many decades. His novel, "The Saturnian Snake," guides you through the devolution of medicine in the latter part of the twentieth century. His short stories range as widely in subject and character as they do in geographical location.

Here, you will have a sampling of his various ways of using the short story format. Just as he invites you to find the many hidden figures in the Story Tree, he invites you to join him finding the irony, humor, pathos, and commonality that extends across the globe.