THE PASSAGE OF PALMER DAY Palmer Day, a seventy-three year old child-like man, runs away from home because he has to - and because, after all, he wants to. Widowed for ten years with no children, he slaps his meager affairs in order, throws together a few things, jumps into his blue Chevy pickup truck, and heads west from north Jersey. His odyssey of just a week - it begins on the vernal equinox, on Good Friday - takes him a wide circle through eight states where he encounters, among others, a pathetic burnt-out prostitute, a coven of Satanists, a sage Black preacher, some blinkered old backwater boys, a wretched homeless family, a self-absorbed pair of facile professors, a genteel Southern widow, a couple of truant college kids, a dying old mobster, an autistic child savant, and a runaway fatherless boy, like himself. Palmer’s life on the road is feral. He sleeps in his truck or wherever he finds lodging, and he eats randomly. His apparently aimless meander, however, proves galvanically consequential for the unassuming pilgrim; for Palmer’s passage is, after all, a coming of age story. It started when Palmer’s nephew Rob hit on hard times, and Palmer invited him with his wife Sissy and their two girls to stay with him until he got back on his feet. Rob and his family soon prove to be impudent freeloaders, to which Palmer responds by avoiding any interaction with them even as they occupy his home. Rob and Sissy contrive Palmer’s passive withdrawal to mean that he is demented, and they begin to treat him as such, shamefully so, and scheme to have him institutionalized - to take his home and get control over his assets. Palmer does not confront their guile. He bolts - leaving them to their own feckless devices, and in possession of the house in which he had lived for almost fifty years. Palmer is a provincial fellow. He left school in ninth grade and worked as a maintenance man for the ＂City＂ all his life. He seldom ventured, and never far, out of his blue collar town in the shadow of Manhattan. But simple and innocent as he is, Palmer is none-the-less canny and smart - increasingly so as his journey draws him into lives and things that hone his sense of what is real, and of what is right. Palmer is edified by much of what he meets along the way, such as the sagacious Pastor Joshua Jones; but the cruelty and anguish, the dark ambivalence he encounters in such characters as the dying Mafioso Johnny Vivenzo harrow him in a way he has not known - while signs of his failing health and mortality chasten him as well. Palmer is not without his flaws, of course, particularly a passivity out of which the persons and events he faces eventually shake him. As the action unfolds and intensifies, Palmer responds more deliberately and grows in witting and will. Dreams and ruminations, memories and mystical moments converge to leaven his mind and heart and to lead him full circle - to the inevitable and unimagined end of his wanderings.The story is told entirely by Palmer Day in his own voice, the shorn dialect of an urban Jersey boy, but with precise perception, deft idiom, and droll humor - a narrative persona which well complements the story’s action and defines his evolving character. And Palmer has a sure ear for the parlance of the different characters with whom he interacts, whose speech he credibly renders in the story’s ample dialogue.
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