Rocket Man

by William Elliott Hazelgrove

Dale Hammer is husband and father caught in the middle.  He’s moved his family out to the suburbs in search of a better life, but everything seems to be going downhill.  Dale is battling authority figures out to ruin him, from the cop who is convinced Dale has cut down the sign to his subdivision to a wannabe-military Boy Scout troop leader.  Matters aren’t going well within his family either, from his increasingly hostile relationship with his wife to his failed connection to his two children, especially his son.  It doesn’t help that his father – who was never a good role model for fatherhood himself – has decided to move in over Dale’s garage.  It’s all building up to Rocket Day, when Dale will have to not only launch the troop’s model rockets, but also discover a way to be the kind of father that he really wants to be.

Rocket Man is a novel that speaks poignantly to the difficulties of being a father in today’s world.  Like so many of us, Dale is caught between the often conflicting expectations of career, society, marriage and fatherhood.  Navigating the demands that these obligations impose on our time, attention and emotional energy is not a simple task. And the hard truth is often that loving your children and wanting to be a good father simply isn’t enough to resolve these challenges.  One of the greatest demands on a father is the necessity to be “normal”; to put aside – to some extent – our own desires and our own drama for the sake of your children.  This is one of the necessary jobs of a father: to provide children with a safe and stable place in which to grow and to develop their own lives and desires.  Dale’s story is that of a man struggling with himself to find the balance between being normal for his family and honoring his own identity and needs, and finding that each may be essential to the other.

Excerpt:

HAIR of the dog.

The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed.  The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one.  But I have to make a decision.

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Product Details:

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Pantone Press Inc.; 1st edition (September 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0615213073
• ISBN-13: 978-0615213071

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