Afterword:
Any author is likely to have stories about rejections from editors. Form letters politely say nothing of substance; sometimes rejections come with a personal observation about the reason a story was rejected. Many have a good point to make; other times, the stated reasons may annoy the authors no end. Then some rejections can leave us mystified.
One of the first magazine editors to whom I submitted this story rejected it with a one-line personal note, as follows: “It is well written enough, but I have many similar stories in stock.”
Many years have passed, but I remain speechless in response.
As I was growing up in suburban Kansas City, my family spent many summer vacations at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, and many more spring vacations on float trlps, canoeing down th
