The Imagination of the Heart

In this novella, Barry Gifford's "The Imagination of the Heart," Lula Pace Fortune and her lifelong friend Beany Thorn -- both in their eighties -- hit the road one last time, heading down to a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans in the effort to embrace life one last time, for, as Beany points out, "You quit life, it don't quit you." The account of their trip ultimately is a beautiful denouement to the lifelong relationship between Lula and her lover Sailor Ripley -- chronicled in Gifford's "Wild at Heart," "Sailor's Holiday," "Sultan's of Africa," "Consuelo's Kiss," "Bad Day for the Leopard Man," a brief appearance in "Baby Cat Face," and finally "The Imagination of the Heart." The adventures of Lula and Sailor are ones I've cherished. Their voices as real and vivid to me as any I've encountered in fiction. Their tribulations and their pain, their love and experiences of the world, their friends and crazy enemies -- it's been a wonderful ride, but, eventually, even a lost highway comes to an end... This novel mainly focuses on Lula, and we are privily allowed insight into her mind and soul like never before, mostly through snatches of her diary. In her gentle way she tries to understand the pain of the world; and, at eighty, Lula has become something of a modern day saint, using scripture to try and understand but never condemn. Lula's wisdom is simple and direct. Learned from a lifetime of hardtimes met with an open heart and an almost sweetly innocent mind: "Now we got a situation where all these different countries think they got the right answer on religion including our own of course and I don't believe nobody does some are more greedy than others and more righteous but a person in a montain hut in Asia got just as much right to their version of the way thoughs ought to be as one in LA thinks about her tan line than one who might be starving in a desert covered in flies in Africa." Lula's life has been one of near constant confrontation with chaotic happenstance -- her old home New Orleans destroyed by a hurricane, her love taken away by a twist of fate, more trouble with her son than one can shake a stick at -- but in her love with Sailor she managed to find some stability and meaning, creating a world wild "at heart," and more than surely weird as hell on top.