When the Dogwood Blooms: Seasons in a Boy's Life

One might consider When the Dogwood Blooms to be seven novellas. The three related stories in the first chapter, "Three Stories of the Plague", introduce the novel's protagonist, Raymond Burns Herbert. Ray is the second son of the four sons of a San Antonio pediatrician and the daughter of a multigenerational family of Baptist missionaries to Brazil, who originated in Waco. For Kindle or phone, each chapter will be available separately; and sectional short stories will also be available separately. The first story, "Three Black Bananas", is centered around a wizened, seventyish peddler who approached the Herbert's 1957 New Yorker station wagon in a mining town in the Peruvian Andes, on a road trip to Brazil. Just after a llama shepherd boy spit on his window, Ray asked about this witchy woman. The second story, "Helen of Troy, Texas", is a prelude to the second chapter, "A Year in the Valley" about an ill-fated year during which Ray taught science at a small-town high school in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The third story, "They Called Her China Doll", is a ghostly tale of a mining town close to a ranch on which the Herberts spent summer vacations.

The third chapter, "The Big-Time Newspaper Man", is about Ray's job as a cub reporter in Waco, Texas. Though he had greatly hoped for such job for two years after graduating with an English degree from Delaware, perhaps because the city editor didn't think English majors were competent journalists, despite experience in college and part time in the Valley, this coveted job was a great disappointment, as described in its first story "Me Dead-Weight Young Stallion".

This led into the stories in chapter IV, "Shanties Never Sung", which begins with Ray's experiences a submarine sonar tech on a trip to the North Pole in the story "Coffee Run". This story answers the age-old question of why some sailors are dubbed with a name such as dog feces.

The fifth chapter, "Five Stories on a Summer Night", is five related stories with a main character named Edgar Pugh, though all were written by Ray after he left the Navy and was temporarily happily married, working as a technical writer in San Diego. The first and longest of these five short stories, "Kiss in a Yellow Taxi", is so named for another short story written by a young woman in the creative writing course in which Raymond enrolled in community college. The scary story in this long story is named "Pink Scraps in the Wind"; and the enclosing short story also contains a wedding story Ray wrote, titled "After Figaro Got Married".

The sixth chapter, "AKA Jake Spelled Jaak" is about with a photojournalist. named Martin Savnik, an ex-Marine infantryman from Staten Island, who was happy for a short while as a chaplain's assistant. Martin, who called himself Jaak, came home after a few years with a girlfriend in Germany when Ray and his second wife picked him up at Dulles. Though he came home in time to get his share of an inheritance from his mother, who like his father had died from lung cancer, already he had an ominous cough probably from a great affinity for cigarettes and pot, if not high alcohol content cheap beer. The last part of in this chapter, "My Father's Great Invention", is about Martin's relationship with his Slovenian father, an electrical engineer, and his younger brother, an engineering student at Cornell.

The last chapter, "Homecoming for Tex", goes back to where much of Ray's story began, at Lake Forest Preparatory, in Lake Forest, Illinois, where Ray went with his older brother after their parents' acrimonious separation. This chapter contains these five chronologically related short stories: "A Woman of the Highway", "How Day Light Savings Really Works", "Two Jew Boys and a Monkey", "The Second Most Self-Serving Statement", and "When the Dogwood Blooms in Texas".