The Dog Days of September is the story of two generations of an American family at the beginning of the new millennium. Out of work attorney Harold Abner has become the typical 21st century alienated American employee trapped in a greed driven, hi-tech business world where hard work, education, and experience no longer merit company loyalty or continued employment. Abner has endured months of depression, desperation, and resentment toward his plight as a result of the restructuring of his Boca Raton Internet startup. His severance pay has just run out and he has no prospects for employment. The tropical Florida summer has become a constant irritating factor in his life, capturing him in a personal hell of disappointment and failure. Abner reaches his peak of frustration one scorching Sunday morning in early September. That particular Dog Day summer morning, Abner reflects on various incidents in his life and his thoughts and actions lead to a life changing solution to his desperate plight. Eventually, that resolution sadly leads to his son David becoming entrapped in his own personal hell as a sharp shooter in Iraq. A soldier driven by the lust of battle and revenge, David is on a sniper mission and his subsequent tragic actions on another scorching September morning lead to his own introspective examination of his life and human existence. Both father and son learn in this story that middle class life in 21st Century America is now one of new struggles and disappointments not suffered by other generations of Americans. Steven H. Kurlander was born and raised in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of Buffalo Law School. Kurlander is a political and small business blogging consultant and publishes a blog called Kurly's Kommentary, which can be found at www.stevenkurlander.com. He lives with his wife Jodi and their two children in Lake Worth, FL. The Dog Days of September By Steven H. Kurlander AuthorHouse Copyright © 2010 Steven H. Kurlander All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4490-7151-6 Chapter One DENNING, NEW YORK-SEPTEMBER 1, 2009 "Only the dead have seen the end of the war." -Plato On the first morning of September, 2009, the eternal dawn returned to the threshold of a beautiful, serene expanse of New York known as the Catskill Mountain Park. Lackluster dull daylight began to penetrate the sky, illuminating the remnants of low, lingering, dark rain clouds left behind from severe heavy showers of the prior night. While it had stopped raining farther north in the higher elevations of the Catskills, black, ominous clouds still dominated the horizon, engulfing the distant peaks with heavy rainfall. Angry lightening in the far sky flashed against those ridges, the reverberation of its subsequent thunder fading as the light grew stronger. The dawn's air of the Catskill Mountains on September 1, 2009, was finally seasonally cool. At the first sign of daybreak, the birds of the upper Neversink River Valley began to sing a collective opus to commemorate the dawn. The songbirds were everywhere, perched in trees, on telephone wires strung along isolated country roads, and on rusted roofs of trailers and homes, all drenched from the night's unrelenting downpour. Every bird in the valley sang out its own rhythmic hymn, performing an instinctual rite in tribute to another new day and one more morning of life. No single bird's song solely captured the auditory environment of the hollow. They all became one-thousands sang celebrating the dawn in glorious musical anarchy. The birds' song woke a tired young veteran in an old, rustic hunting cabin near the river. He lived there in self-imposed isolation since returning home last fall from his second tour of duty with the Army Rangers in Iraq. Purposely keeping his eyes closed, David Abner embraced the sound of the birds' soothing songs. Their melodies were as immaculate as any prayer, poem, essay, symphony, or song ever composed by man. This morning, the Neversink River, a world-renowned trout stream and a tributary of the upper Delaware River had swelled to flood stage levels from the prior night's downpour. The river's fast-moving current carried drapes of dead vegetation that had been swept into its waters by the night's thunderstorm. A blanket of fog encompassed the river valley, delaying the light from reaching the cabin and steady breezes now moved down from the mountains blowing stunted corn stalks and hay planted in the fields of the hollows. In this summer of no rain, the levels in the Delaware River Valley reservoirs, which contributed to the water needs of New York City, were at the lowest levels since they were built in the early 1950s. The old Sullivan County hamlets that had once prospered before being condemned and buried under the reservoirs' waters had reappeared, some for the first time ever. The foundations of buildings that once supported large tanneries, barns, h