18+ General Discussion Forum

I just finished "Swimming at Suppertime" by Carol Wasserman. It's a sweet but unromanticized story of an impoverished, small town in New England, not far from where I live. It's worth it just for her modern-day retelling of the Gospel of St. Luke.

Mary and Joseph are a teenage couple who take refuge in an abandoned factory because Mary is pregnant with her step father's baby and is too young to receive welfare. She gives birth to a baby boy whom they wrap in a sweat shirt and place in a cardboard box. They are visited by some scallopers and 3 professors from U Mass Dartmouth doing a study on the homeless, all of whom were attracted to the spot by the circling, squawking seagulls overhead. A few heroin addicts and ex mental hospital patients are there too.

"They kneeled around the cardboard box, and hoped that this kid would beat the odds. That he'd survive and grow. And be the one to tell us things which we once knew but have long since forgotten."

Marcia