"Spud"

My first posting for my previous blog, "Glen Alan's San Antonio", carried a title that included "Spud". It refers to the state of my raising, Idaho. Actually, when I first moved to Fort Worth, Texas, I had a job on the TCU campus where I quickly earned the nickname "Spud".

Two Sundays ago I was in the Green Hills area for Sunday dinner following a tremendous worship at Eastwood CC, and I went in to browse a Davis-Kidd Bookstore in the mall. As my eyes scanned the shelves and display tables, my attention got caught by a book of the same title. "Spud". I picked up the book and read that it was a novel by John van der Ruit. Also, I saw at once from the cover illustration that the title is the name of the protagonist. I turned over the book to read the summary on the back. At once I burst into prolonged laughing. Think "LOL"!

The reason for my hilarity is that after a couple of very short sentences describing the state of the world at the time of the novel's story line, it describes the protagonist as a "prepubescent choirboy." The ONLY time I've EVER encountered such a description for a person is when I first was getting acquainted with my wife-to-be, Ellen, at TCU. She called me her "prepubescent choirboy!"

Now please, dear reader, do NOT think the novel is an autobiography of yours truly! It's set in circa 1990 South Africa, taking the form of a diary (or journal) by a teenage resident of a boarding school in that country. I've never even been in South Africa, or in a boarding school there or anywhere!

But that "prepubescent choirboy" description of the protagonist certainly caught my attention. I've already checked out the novel from the Nashville Public Library for reading. I anticipate LOL in full!