Michael Perry

Visiting Tom: a Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace Michael Perry Lrg edition

Toiling in a shop Perry describes as ?an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake,? Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and ? now and then ? batches of potentially ?extralegal? explosives. As he approaches his sixtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, Tom, famous for driving a team of oxen in local parades, has an endless reservoir of stories dating back to days of his prize Model A, and an anti-authoritarian streak refreshed daily by the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps over 8 million vehicles past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man?s equanimity and ultimately ? when he and Perry converse over the kitchen table as husbands and as the fathers of daughters ? unvarnished tenderness.