Up in Northern California, I was signing my books in front of a local Cafe. Geronimo sat at a table sipping his coffee reading, he looked up, "What's yer book about?"

That question sparked a conversation that went far beyond my books. His smile was disarming, charming and his eyes held a wealth of experience and depth that made him both young and wise and distinctly different from the average man walking through the average life. I liked him. I looked forward to him reading my books and I looked forward to his feedback.

At that time he spoke about a book he was writing. I told him, "When you finish it, send me a copy, I'll send you my latest too."

That was over a year ago. A month ago, his "The Weight of the Sun" showed up in my po box. I tossed it in the back of my van and carried it with me on this year’s book tour. And so, again, on many more than just one book signing, I sat with Geronimo (via his book) and read of his stories. Stories carved by experience and seasoned with sincerity and an odd kind of objectiveness. A sensitive, carefully aware, objectiveness that still feels. That searches.

The book is a collection of short stories that motif a pattern of poor farming Filipino men in the States. Of the scarring memories of the war in Vietnam and how those memories weave in and out of post war reality. The book reserves judgment, studies the joy and the pain. Seems to seek the "Wonderful and the Fearful." Is content with impermanence, expects endings. These are the stories of a man between cultures, between knowledge and war. The well-read soldier. So well-acquainted with opposing faces of reality, that those who prefer to stick to their one world view, will find themselves challenged.

The first few stories are a bit expository and kept me a bit at bay. I grew a little antsy but, by the third and forth, I was hooked and moved. Choked up at times -- filled with the sense of a moment of a memory of a story that Geronimo had expressed so carefully in words.

Some quotes from the book:

"and when they got to the end of the sky and the world, they would pry apart the soft edges of the horizon and escape into whatever lay beyond."

"Across the fields, you could see the thickest part of night tangled in the groves of trees, waiting for daylight to set it free."

"...she noticed how the light sometimes cut right through Benigno, as though his preoccupation with the horizon was sapping his ability to keep himself visible."

"I could feel my pulse rise to the beat of helicopter blades skimming the city on a summer night. He saw me flinch when someone slammed a door or a car backfired. Like him, I knew what it was like to come back to the world, to look into the faces of your family, your lovers, your friends, and know you had brought back something that would break their hearts someday."

Available via: publishing.pdx.edu