Synopsis "The Fifty-First State (in English)"
Random external events, like the election in 2020 of Philo Satrap as President, in as much of a shocker as was Donald Trump's victory in 2016, influence the course of David Timmons' career. On the same day that David is told to shut down the New Jersey division of the Carr Corporation he runs, his wife, Didi, suffers a fatal heart attack. Weeks later, on the day of actual plant closure, a group of employees gathers for a farewell drink. A subset of these goes on to dinner, and then, in adventurous whim, sets distant Montreal as its destination. By Albany, though, only Casey Connors, a girl hardly known to David, agrees to stay the course. David and she spend agreeable, chaste hours in the capital of French Canada, marking the beginning of a romance. Through the agency of Jules Kafka, the Carr CEO who fired him, David takes a position with President Satrap to help facilitate Satrap's grand plan for carving out of three states a megalopolis to be known as Greater Metropolitan and become the fifty-first state. When, though, Kafka offers David the top position at a substantial acquisition in Tupelo, he realizes the principal purpose in his life is to make happy his new wife, Casey, and his trepidation about the Deep South dissipates. Author Charles Cherry says of himself: "I'm Brooklyn born, Brooklyn bred, and when I die, I'll be Brooklyn dead... but still curious!
