Schmidt's Shorts: Stories to Make You Smile

Need a smile to break today’s depressing reality? Here’s an eclectic mix of short stories and essays from an eventful and well-lived life, certain to bring smiles and a few chuckles. Included are adventures – rafting the Grand Canyon; hiking Oregon’s wilderness; chasing big salmon, rare birds, and lost friends; debating “the shape of the universe, death, God or not, Big Foot, the condition of your prostate, and that bird you keep hearing across the desert night.”

You can groan through disastrous, youthful misadventures – descending old mines, climbing smokestacks, hitchhiking through the Sixties, and biking into calamities.

Learn why sometimes God sends kitties from heaven; other times, maggots. Why swamping the Grand Canyon and reading Ayn Rand should be done while young. What Flat Earthers, Mormons, and Evangelicals have in common. Why it can take 34 years to get over a lost fish. How you get labeled by Uncle Sam as a “nonaggressive, sociopathic, sex deviant (with a hernia).” Why you can’t fix stupid. How to “savor the beauty all around us while it lasts, even as the sky in the East grows steadily darker.” And proof of Wayne’s Rule #1, “a failsafe, four-word way to explain most any inexplicable human behavior” (hint, acronym: PAFM).