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Preface

The preface — this thing — is the toughest part of a book to write because it has to account for what follows: the selection of personal experiences and the experiences of acquaintances, narrated without moral or political purpose, recalling, for fun more than anything else, the humorous side of solemn or outrageous events in the legends of small towns.

I’ve used the real names of all persons involved which, I trust, will lend the stories some historical credence.

Digressions, I must admit, became a problem. While trying to focus on local events, I wound up recounting the extraction of a beer glass from a man’s rectum in the emergency ward of a Toronto hospital, and the flight of a Salvation Army bass drum through the show window of a gay bar in San Francisco. However, digressions of this sort are unavoidable when one considers what mathematicians tell us — that all people and the events they are involved in are at most only six degrees removed.

It’s the small-world effect. We are all connected, and I assume that the stories related here, if pursued further, would connect us to similar events and people in every small town and city in North America.

Bob Green

Cambridge, Ontario

April 2006