Shifting Gears: A Poetic Novelette

By Allen R. Conkle

This book deals with how one teen who was caught in a fast-paced, instant gratification age of electronic games and gadgets, dealt with having to compete in the slower paced life that was thrust upon her by circumstances she experienced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468556728

Allen R. Conkle

Allen R. Conkle is a father and grandfather whose life has spanned from before the space age into the electronic age. He watched his children with their less sophisticated electronic games and, then, his grandchildren with their more powerful game housed in smaller packages. He is an engineer, but still it is difficult for him to keep up with all the changes in this ever changing world of technology.

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Chapter

1

Shellie Harper was living in a Midwestern city with her father John and her Mother Nora. Their family was feeling the effects of the sagging economy, much like what was being felt in other cities across the country. The economic stagnation was making it rather difficult for a young girl, just out of high school, to find work. There were jobs out there, but nothing that appealed to her and many other late teeners with only a high school education. This generation of teens had engrained in their minds: fast moving scenarios ranging from instant wealth achievement for celebrities, to instant gratification of playing electronic games, to quickly obliterating huge sectors of bad guys in these electronic games. Perhaps not all of this generation’s teens, but many of them, fit into this electronic age of I want it now mentality. However, some teens were able to break away from their electronic high tech fixation long enough to pursue other endeavors, and training that would make them more employable. The slow process of learning and developing work related skills seemed to conflict with Shellie’s world of instant gratification, and therein lay the problem. Not everyone will have the opportunity to work at designing video games, so the transition to old fashioned hard work, and dedication, needs to be made in order to be prepared for employment. Essentially, that in a nutshell, was what Shellie Harper was facing now that she was a young adult. Shellie was a slender girl, and often skipped meals to stay that way. She was an only child who possessed a beautiful voice, but also possessed a reluctance to pursue the voice training work that is usually required to develop it. Money was a problem, since she had none, and there were no scholarships available to help with the cost of voice training lessons. There was, however, an instructor named Cory Bolden, from her high school days, who saw a promise of her doing something special with her musical talent, but that was as far as it went, at the time of her graduation from high school. Shellie had been out of high school for about a year when a chance meeting with Cory occurred at a concert, where they spoke briefly, and the former teacher asked Shellie if she had ever considered using her musical talent as a sideline to her regular job. Shellie had to tell him that she did not have a job yet, and wasn’t really interested in the kinds of work that were available. The conversation more or less ended there, but he told her to keep in touch and he would try to help her in any way he could. Shellie’s home life was one that ranged from boredom to spirited conflicts with her mother, Nora, and her father John. Shellie knew of other families who were going through these difficulties at home, so that wasn’t all that unusual. The family had few friends, but that was not uncommon in the city where many people hardly know their neighbors’ names, let alone make friendships; but they did have a few family members who lived in the city. Shellie’s mother, Nora, suggested therapy for the three of them, but that fell on deaf ears because John said they could work out their problems themselves, and besides, they had no insurance to cover the cost for counseling. John was a rather tall man who worked at a low tech job in a factory nearby. He was unable to help Shellie when she had questions about her electronic games, and begged off by saying the world was passing him by. More than a year had passed since Shellie’s high school graduation, and her father had just received notice that his hours at work were to be cut. Fewer hours were something he could ill afford since he was the sole breadwinner, and his wife, Nora, had worked very little outside the home, during their marriage. Nora was able to offer a well rehearsed list of reasons why she could not get work, and many of her reasons for not working just served to be the basis for many of the arguments she had had with John. The daughter-mother confrontations became more frequent and heated up to the point where John, if he walked in on them going at it, felt obliged to step in and physically restrain them. Nora wasn’t coping well, of late, and John would hear his wife crying late at night. Nora began blaming herself for the family’s problems, and every now and then would sit down and try to discuss her feelings with Shellie, when John was at work. These talks, however, were infrequent and sometimes branched out into areas of life planning for Shellie where Nora believed herself to be a self taught expert, and didn’t mind saying so. Shellie had a way of tuning out her mother when the conversation turned to planning her life. Shellie, in an attempt to ward off feelings of complete boredom, did make an attempt to write some poetry, and of course, her mother