I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 10, 2021] “The Bees, Part 1”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

I’ve enjoyed Aleksandar Hemon’s stories.  And this one was a huge mix of humor and sadness.

This story begins simply enough.  The narrator and his family are watching a film.  But his father is so annoyed that the film isn’t real that he (and the family) walk out before it’s over.

His father only wants to see things that are real so he sets out to make his own film.

His script:

1. I am born
2. I walk
3. I watch over cows
4. I leave home to go to school.

He tries to film his son doing these things, but on the sixth try, the son was stung by a bee which resulted in a hilarious slapstick tumble down a hill–which the father filmed.

But that’s not what “The Bees” references, exactly.  His father was a beekeeper.  The family fled Sarajevo when the siege started and eventually settled in Canada.

They started to take root but soon, the narrator’s father grew frustrated.  He stopped taking English lessons and began writing his life’s story. It was called The Bees, Part 1 and was mostly dedicated to beekeeping.

This includes an amusing tale of a wicked neighbor trying to steal from the beehive and having the hive fall directly on his head.  But it also includes a horrible memory when the hives all died out.  And the even more horrible story of what he neighbors did to the hives after his family fled to Canada.

Eventually his father started beekeeping in Canada.  He now has twenty-three hives, but “Canadians don’t appreciate honey.”  He also wants to write a new book called The Well.