Patricia Vaccarino

This past Thanksgiving marked the two-year anniversary of when I was shot. The weapon was a Smith & Wesson high performance revolver, loaded with eight .357 Magnum bullets. The perpetrator fired all eight rounds. I was struck three times. Miraculously, my injuries were nominal: three cracked ribs and a collapsed lung. I lost a lot of blood. It could have been worse. One bullet, “a thru and thru,” passed close to my spine. 

Novels enrich our lives because we touch the fragile threads of the diverse fabrics that weave us together. We begin to see the connections in things and become spellbound by the certainty that no one person is on this earth alone. All of us are slogging through the muck and the mire, navigating the joy, the sorrow, the grief, and the pratfalls that throw us haphazardly off course only to be consumed by a reckless wind. A good novel teaches us that it is noble to be a human being.