Collected Short Stories volume I

 Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for.
 A straight-laced ex-nun must decide what to do with a stolen Sony Trinitron TV. The arrival of a Russian Jew in the apartment complex where she lives resolves the matter of the ’hot’ TV while opening another can of existential worms.
 When Ronda Wickford, the assistant manager of Brandenburg’s ShopRite Supermarket, inadvertently hires a middle-age man with a PhD in philosophy to run the fresh produce department, weird things begin to happen. As events unfold, she learns a thing or two about Wittgenstein’s linguistic theories, common decency and how to fix a leaky faucet.
 Marie Augustin, an Haitian nurses aide, is blindsided when one of her elderly clients asks her to accompany him on a trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform in Tanglewood. Does the green-card immigrant, who witnessed first hand the endemic violence in her native country, follow agency protocol or bend rules to accommodate the absurd whim of a dying man?
These are just a few of the stories you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters are trying to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe.