The Most Pitiful Saga

There was once a man named Jack. A Cadillac on life’s thoroughfare, he was a man of letters, whose eccentric flare for storytelling and offbeat sagacity were the stuff of legend on the campus of a small independent university tucked away in the Conejo Valley of Southern California. Now a professor emeritus residing comfortably in that same region, he has on occasion, or so I have heard, been tempted back into the classroom for a time, a great boon to those enrolled in these classes, as what they encounter is far more than a somewhat enlightening or rather piquant scholastic cruise through the wiles of Flaubert or Milton. Indeed, much more. Jack Ledbetter is a Father Time, a spinner of tales from the great Midwestern firmament of stanchion and of cow, whose Rockwellian flare for gritty characterization and ludicrous juxtaposition is a drug you scarcely know you’ve taken. I was fortunate enough to have passed through the university during Jack’s tenure there, and I managed to land before his oracular tutelage four times in the course of my undergraduate career. In those tempestuous years of self-searching, attempting to