The stories in Loaded for Bear are told through the voice of a male narrator. But he is a shape shifter, ranging in age from a boy to a retiree, and holding forth from each of the decades in between.

We encounter him, variously, as a city newspaper boy and as a country preteen; a Vietnam War draftee and a young father and groom-to-be; frightened son and a troubled veteran; a brother and bereaved lover; a divorced single father of adolescent girls, then grown daughters; a dutiful nephew and reluctant farmyard midwife; a colleague forced to interview a Palestinian immigrant for his Green Card certification. And once, apparently, as one of a circle of female cousins.

In each encounter, we find ourselves invited observers in alternative universes, as befuddled as the unwitting characters by the circumstances that enwrap them.