Old Songs in a New Cafe (18 page)

Matters of ethics and honor are difficult, can become confused and abstruse. You learn about such things not from books, but
from example. You learn about them standing on your feet, in the sun outside of o1’ Lady Smith’s chicken house, watching your
father’s face harden, his eyes turning to liquid hydrogen, his voice saying, “I want you boys to take every goddamn chicken
out of those coops, one at a time, very carefully, and put them all back in the chicken house.”

For honor is hard to come by. And pride that flows from honor is not false. Slowly, implicitly, you begin to understand that.
You pick it up riding beside a thin and bony man in striped bib overalls, watching the Iowa roads run backward in time through
the cracked floorboards of an aging truck, watching the dust blow in loose spirals behind you before coming to rest, once
and finally, upon the summer grass, long after your passing.

—
Washington Post

Robert James Waller began the pieces in this book on a warm, green morning in the summer of 1983. He hadn’t set out to be
a writer. He just needed to record his feelings about people and animals and things he cared about. His first story, “Ridin’
Along in Safety with Kennedy and Kuralt,” told about being young and a musician, and how playing “The Wabash Cannonball” one
day in a roadside bar changed the rest of his life. The
Des Moines Register
printed the essay, and people began asking for more.

The result is
Old Songs in a New Café
. A work of nonfiction, it takes you inside Robert James Waller’s mind and world…revealing insightful experiences from his
own life and, with his special magic, illuminating those poignant moments most of us share. Few writers possess the power
to move us. Even fewer become legends in their own time. Robert James Waller has done both. Just as you have loved his best
selling novels, you will love…

OLD SONGS

IN A

NEW CAFÉ

“Before Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid, before Jellie Braden and Michael Tilman, Robert James Waller wrote about his
wife, his daughter, his cat, and the last dusky seaside sparrow on Earth.… There is good writing in
OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ
…dip into his nonfiction and meet the man.”

—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Essays in this volume were selected from
Just Beyond the Firelight
and
One Good Road Is Enough
, originally published by Iowa State University Press.