The closer we are to dying

the long version

"In the 1950s in Fort William, Ontario, everyone knew Dusty Fiorito. He was handsome and hard and hot-tempered. A letter carrier, a small-town trombonist and occasional crooner, a heavy drinker, Dusty was both the keeper and maker of his Italian family's many stories. At the end of his life, as Dusty lay dying in a hospital, Joe sat with him at night, listening one last time to the family legends.". "As the days pass, Dusty retells his son the history of their family's roots in Italy and about his own upbringing in Canada: his uncle's flight from a small Italian town after the shooting death of an enemy, his travels as a band musician, and various tales of his close-knit family of six brothers and five sisters. From this life, Dusty weaves the most marvelous, colorful, funny, memorable stories about himself and others - stories of the everyday that over the course of a lifetime accumulate the power of myth."--BOOK JACKET.