"In "Duet for Past and Future," inspired by Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," Reubenfine, a lawyer in Indianapolis, having lost his musical career (along with his wife and child), thinks he recognizes the very cello he had sold to finance his legal education and new life. He and the young woman who plays that cello become involved in a relationship that threatens to tie them together for a moment or forever."--BOOK JACKET.

"In "A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief," inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Passion According to St. John," Kraft, an exiled New Yorker and a Jew, is the conductor of a high school orchestra in a small Texas town. He talks his way out of a traffic ticket by telling the born-again state trooper of his own special relationship with Jesus; Kraft tells the credulous lawman that the reason he exceeded the speed limit was that he'd been carried away by Bach's "Passion" on the car radio.

The resulting comic - and serious - imbroglio turns Kraft's life upside down."--BOOK JACKET. "In the title story, inspired by another poem by Robert Frost, a dying stage director and his new Russian-born wife, who has acute but temporary arthritis, are confined to a sickroom from which only one of them will ultimately emerge (alive). Determined to escape their fate, if only for one perfect spring day, they make a comic and touching game of weighing their mutual and personal woes."--BOOK JACKET.