Summer Field

About the Book

While living in town in a small apartment, Joan Granger encounters a man watching her from across the street. Joan´s sister tries to get her to contact the police, but Joan feels he is entertaining. Why drive him away when she is actually enjoying his attention?

And she and her daughter Sylvia continue to encounter that attention in various situations throughout the story, some helpful, some disturbing.

It is after Joan moves that she realizes the stranger really fits into the category of "stalker." In the following scene she says:

"He really has been stalking me." Moving to stand before the front porch window, she parted the sheers between crimped, red drapes and peered out toward the road. "He followed me all the way from my apartment out here." She let the curtains fall back together and turned to face Sylvia.

"This scares me after the fact."

Joan´s daughter also has her moment of doubt about this "all too available" gentleman who has come into their lives.

"No," Sylvia snapped, pushing herself out of her chair, "there´s something the matter with him." She rushed into the kitchen and unlocked the main door. Holding it open for a second, she checked the screen to make sure that it was hooked. Then, after examining the front door, she started up the stairs, pausing midway to scold her mother whose eyes had been following her. "And keep my window locked."

Not only is this man´s behavior strange, his mode of living, however appealing it may be to some, does not fit exactly into the norm. Who is he? That´s the quesion readers will be asking themselves.

The setting for this story is Southwest Arkansas where the author was raised.

Among the short stories included in the book, the author gives an account of his brief experience with Bill Clinton. He also writes about his friends who were or are HIV and an alternative treatment for the disease.

About the Author

Robert Olden Stewart was born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 27, 1943. When he was about seven, his parents divorced, and he elected to remain with his paternal grandmother who raised him. As early as the eighth grade, he put together a little book which he still has in his possession. Unfortunately, many of the poems he constructed when he was in his twenties have been destroyed, a fact he regrets. Bob, as he is called by close friends and family, received a degree from Southern Arkansas University in 1966, teaching English for a few years and then obtaining a graduate degree in 1976. Not only education but numerous other occupations have consumed his years; he has worked at everything from security to radio announcing and telephone customer service. Currently, he is a supervisor in the call quality department of a large telemarketing company in Oklahoma City. Asked if he plans to write another book, he answered, "No, I don't think so. It is such a monumental task. I will probably stick to shorter pieces such as poems and short stories."