Dream Word – CONNECT

Luke 3:7,8 Then he said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him, "Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? NKJV

Like it, or not, intended, or not, released in 1967, the Paul Newman film classic, ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ is a veritable mine of Christian Metaphor.

In 2007, Donn Pearce, the writer of both the novel and the majestic screenplay for this film, was still living and writing near where I lived at that time, which was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Leaving home aged only fifteen, meant that the author’s personal life is a rich source of story for the film. For example, Pearce lied about his age when joining the army in 1944, and he went absent without leave because he was a rebel against unnecessary rules, and spent time in the stockade before the intervention of his mother, who finally informed the army of his true age. Thrown out of the army, Pearce then joined the merchant navy, traveling the world, only to be imprisoned in France for the black-market counterfeiting of money! Escaping then from the outside prison detail, he fraudulently made his way back to America where he took up a new career in burglary. Later, aged just twenty, he was caught and incarcerated for safe-cracking, from which he had to serve two full years in the Florida State Department of correction chain gangs. At the very least, this young man experienced more of the bad life in those eight years than many men would dare to or expect to experience in their full and strong, hopefully, eighty years. Pearce, having previously given up writing, as a much older man, circumstances of need had now made him take up his pen once more. In those intervening years, however, before returning to writing,  he had an office where I used to live in Dania Beach, from which he arrested run anyone from runaway killers from the Carolinas to StoreFront Preachers who moonlighted in the drug trade. (I am sure that some of the latter are still operating in that same trade, in Broward County today, yes,  even as I write this Night Whisper.)

I tell you all this because Don Pearce is not a financially successful author. At the time of my writing, he was struggling to take care of his ailing wife and to find extra money for medical bills. I suspect he most certainly felt like Sysiphus of old, bound to an eternity of frustration in forever rolling a rock uphill and never reaching the top. Indeed, Ben Alsup, writing in Esquire magazine from an interview with Pearce in 2005, records Don Pearce telling him one very par

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