Sweet Tempo

About the Book

From the Prologue of Sweet Tempo

Call me Stephen. Please. Mom and dad call me Little Stevie, an embarrassment made worse by the fact that there is no Big Stevie in our family, unless you consider Uncle Steve who we haven’t seen since my first communion. My dad (Leopold by the way) named me after one of his army buddies who died in the Pacific campaign of WWII. I think he wanted me to be Little Stevie reincarnated or something; I often disappointed him. It’s just as well that he didn’t call me Little Leo. But it’s having the “Little” attached to me all my life that gave me twitches. I always wondered when I would grow up.

I thought it might happen when I first went to college, but my mom’s letters and phone calls spread the name through all the dorms and hallways. It took a major decision (the only one at that) for me to step out of Little Stevie’s pantaloons and into gabardine trousers of adulthood (although I really don’t know what gabardine is, for I still wear denim). When I decided that I had enough of college and wanted to travel, they surprised me by not arguing. At that point I wasn’t sure if I had made the decision or they had, but once they set me free, I was cornered into going. Decisions do not come easily to Little Stevie, so it was with great ironies and twists of fate that this decision would lead me to this.

My trip began as an adventure and this book, a travelogue. But as Providence would have it, it soon became a romance, and then some twisty sort of unromance, then (I wish it never happened) a tragedy. The reader, I hope, sees a comedy in tragic guise; the irony is there to taste. Much that is written here need not have been written; my preference is that none of it occurred. At this point much seems like a nightmare within a dream, and in fact the dreams I had while on this trip were as real as sin. You’ll see. There are times that I wonder if it happened at all. But the story here needs to be told, if only to honor the memory of love lost. Perhaps the story will entertain, but it also serves as therapy and treatment for the tragic minded and chronically romantic.

I wonder now, if this is what it means to grow up.

About the Author

James P. Kain teaches English and creative writing at Neumann University. He is the author of two books of poetry: Coming to my Senses and Curved Space and the More Delicate Times, and the novella, Sweet Tempo: An American Romance. He lives in Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania with his wife, Helen, and daughter, C¡ara.