Major Ponds Traveling Chautauqua
Major Ponds Traveling Chautauqua
A Novel by Stan Goldberg
Sam Traub spent his entire life asking the question, “Why me, God? Why do you make me suffer, but leave less virtuous people unscathed?” He is given the opportunity to learn the answer on one condition: he must do the most unvirtuous act possible and take responsibility for it.
Major Ponds is a San Francisco bar where misfits gather and create worlds they’d rather live in than the one forced on them. It’s where a blues legend plays her last set, where stories don’t need to be true to matter, and where a man carrying sixty years of silence finally begins to speak.
From the streets of 1940s Berlin to the jazz clubs of 1990s San Francisco, from a young boy’s unanswered prayers in Buchenwald to an old man’s final conversations in hospice, Major Ponds is a novel about the distance between the life we were given and the one we wanted. It’s about what we carry, what we hide, and what we finally say when there’s no time left to stay silent.
What readers will find in this book:
Guilt and how it shapes the choices we make for a lifetime. Forgiveness and whether it’s possible when you can’t forgive yourself. Faith and doubt and what happens when God stops answering. Grief and how we survive losing the person who made us whole. Aging and what it means to face your own story honestly. Caregiving and the weight of watching someone you love disappear. Dying well and what two men in hospice taught each other about letting go. Love across a lifetime and how it changes but never leaves. Belonging and why we all need a place where our stories are accepted. Music, poetry, and storytelling as the things that keep us alive when nothing else works.
What others are saying:
At the intersection of the Holocaust, baseball, and jazz… a brilliant and heart-wrenching meditation on the power of forgiveness. Goldberg’s story of an unlikely friendship between two men haunted by the ghosts of their past, by suffocating guilt, is moving and touching. The novel probes the question, what does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to let go of hurt? Two dying men create a bucket list so unexpected it will leave the reader in an introspective daze.
— Alfredo Botello, screenwriter for Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift and author of 180 Days and Spin Cycle.
Major Ponds will take your heart on a journey from tragedy to transformation. Along the way, the presence of death helps us to discover what matters most.
— Frank Ostaseski, Founding Director of the Zen Hospice Project and author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.
About the author:
Dr. Stan Goldberg has spent 50 years writing, teaching, and volunteering at the bedside of people facing life’s hardest transitions. He is a Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, the author of 9 books and over 200 articles, and has received 26 national and international awards. His memoir Lessons for the Living was cited by Arianna Huffington in Thrive as one of seven books anyone desiring personal growth should read. He has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC, Psychology Today, and over 80 other media outlets.
For eight years, Stan served as a bedside hospice volunteer at four San Francisco hospices, including the celebrated Zen Hospice Project. He accompanied more than 200 people through their final days. For many years, he counseled caregivers. He lives with both cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
His website tagline says it all: Aging, Caregiving, Dying, and Recovering Joy.
Major Ponds Traveling Chautauqua is his first novel and ninth book.
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About the newsletter
“For 50 years, I have written about the emotions that keep us up at night, ranging from what I felt spending a raucous night with an aging blues legend to holding a dying patient asking me for forgiveness because he thought I was his son. From describing what I felt seeing the visions of relatives who died in Buchenwald, standing where they were killed, to the joy I experienced but couldn’t put into words when witnessing a musical event that had no words to describe it.
In my 200 blogs, 9 books, and more than 50 interviews, I’ve taken you with me from the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950s to a private meeting with Martin Luther King in 1965, and to the mind- blowing vibrancy of San Francisco in the 1980s.
So, what’s missing? A connection I have always wanted with my readers, and according to my readers, a connection they would have liked to have with me. The Chinese have a curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I’ve been truly cursed! I hope to create a personal connection with this newsletter, which will give you an opportunity to discuss anything I’ve written about for 50 years, share solutions, and learn something new from other community members.”
– Stan Goldberg
Join the conversation:
Every month, Dr. Goldberg and the community explore one theme from his work and his life. Belonging, guilt, forgiveness, aging, caregiving, and finding joy in the hardest places. The book club is open to everyone. The topics are chosen monthly by the community.
Need help?
If you’d like help buying the book, joining the community, or signing up for the newsletter, just write to majorponds@stangoldbergwriter.com and we’ll be happy to assist.