"Milk" by Ron Carlson

I need to ramble a bit today.  May I?  Yes, it's your blog and it's a blog.  Ramble.

I love short stories and I love the idea of the people that write them.  Even if they are evil or otherwise unfit as humans, and they probably aren't but even if they are, I think if you write short stories you get a free pass.  When I thought Alice Munro was actually on Twitter last night I was so excited, and then felt sort of sad and shamed when it wasn't her.

One of the reasons I love short stories is because you can be in a bad mood, then you read a short story, and it makes everything just a little bit better.  It shifts your perspective just enough to make you realize that, like the story itself, your mood won't last forever.  Your mood, you realize, is a short story.  I'm generally a happy person but yesterday, well yesterday I didn't want to read a short story but I needed to, and I picked a great one: Ron Carlson's "Milk."

Do you know his work?  I didn't but I'm a fan now.  Not only did I enjoy his writing but he's got a great head of hair and I'm a sucker for any guy that can rock a jean jacket.  I think he would be fun to take to a dive bar on the Jersey Shore.  We could play pool and drink beer and talk about the writing life.  Ron, if you're reading, call me.

Back to "Milk." As you know I'm always looking for lessons in the short stories I blog about and there's a doozy in this one.  If you've been struggling with the issue of scale, read this story, the story of a father named Jim.  Here's the grand theme: being a parent is terrifying.  How does Carlson approach his theme?  By zeroing in on the story of one father.

There are the twins, and their generic adorability that cloaks their true purpose in life: to create a sense of fear in their dad that is so profound that it makes even milk cartons seem ominous.  I try not to let myself think of the unique pseudo-death that I would experience if anyone took my child, but that terror creeps in at times.  It hits me when bad things happen in the world, but yes, it also catches me unexpectedly, not in the moments of sadness but in the moments of joy.  What if I ever lost those moments?

I appreciated that Carlson told this story from a father's point of view, because in my experience worrying is often seen as the purview of women.  It made me look twice at his fears and see them more clearly.  If you are interested in stories about parenthood, if you want to study the use of scale, or if you are in a wicked mood, read "Milk."