Candles: Some Burn Bright... Mine and Others Don't...? Humorous Short Stories by Mark Owen Cope Sr.

"This is a compilation of stories that cumulatively have become an explanation of how lucky and unlucky a person like me can be," Mark Owen Cope Sr. writes in the introduction to this book. In his seventy years of life, he has witnessed over and over again the manic whims of Fortune-often with hilarious consequences. Whether it's the baseball bat he'd always wanted leading to the near-drowning of an old lady ("A Lovely Little Baseball Bat") or a former circus performer's mobile home falling literally under the Arkansas Guarantee ("The Dog Poop Lady and the Arkansas Guarantee"), each story turns on those real-life twists of irony that are always stranger than fiction. Some of these anecdotes are jokes, others probe at darker points in Mr. Cope's life, but throughout this collection of stories, as in life, the author never loses his sense of humor.

Mark Owen Cope Sr., originally from Idaho, has lived across the United States, in California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. Since his teenage years, he's worked a number of jobs, from electrician's helper to air-conditioning repairman to mobile-home salesman to plumber (and everything in between)-jobs which have brought him into contact with the comical cast of characters that populates this book. In his youth, Mr. Cope spent two terms enlisted in the Air Force, working primarily in radio repair, photo interpretation, and intelligence. Mr. Cope has four children and survives his late wife, Betty, to whom he was married for more than forty-five years and to whom this book is dedicated.