This is a true short story about a meeting off the road during a long road trip. The setting is the desert west of Winemucca, Nevada, on an excrutiatingly hot and dry day. A lot of expensive trouble is well repaid by a conversation of about two hours that is not easily forgotten.

Shortly before his fifth birthday, David Vogel announced he wanted violin lessons. When his father insisted violins were too expensive, David went knocking on doors and came home with the loan of a half-size violin. Growing up, it was assumed he would become an artist of some sort while his older brother would be a scientist. David was not the better student of the two. When he graduated from high school, the principal called his parents in for a conference and informed them that it would be a waste of David's time and their money to send him to college. But in college, he and his brother switched places. His brother became an actor while David earned a PhD in biophysics (but with a subspecialty in eccentricity).

Most of Dr Vogel's writing has been educational, and almost all of it (including an introductory physics textbook) has been humorous. (His research papers on neural network models of higher cognitive processes are not at all amusing, but at least he almost failed his thesis defense when the conservative academic from a country with a certain national stereotype took issue with his amusing style - not appropriate in scientific writing).

Facing retirement, Dr Vogel has taken the opportunity to begin writing fiction. (Well, the physics problems about his Chrysler powered Smart Car were already fiction.) Day of the Dragonfly is the first novel he has let out of his hands, and it is the first that is not humorous. "It was an unexpected book that came chasing after me while I was sitting with my wife on a long, hot, tropical day in Brazil. It didn't have a single joke in it, but it insisted on being written. It seemed to write itself. Unfortunately, it wouldn't stop writing itself, and when it went past three hundred thousand words, it had to be hacked back like an acre of kudzu."

David Vogel presently resides in Hull, Georgia. He's easy to find. Hull is just one vowel from Hell. The serous tone and formal style of the new book have not stopped him from doing stand-up comedy.