Summary

The first chapter of Anything Is Possible, "The Sign," could be read as a short story. It is told in third person, past tense, and presents the story of Tommy Guptill driving into town to buy his wife a birthday present. Through the use of long, accumulative sentences, past and present often merge in a single moment, where the action of the present brings to the surface memories of the past.

The chapter begins with a long explanation that Tommy Guptill, a now-elderly man, once owned his family's dairy farm, which had burned to the ground when he was 35, many years before the present-time action of the story. The third person narrator explains that though the fire had been many years before, Tommy still woke with the fear he had felt the night of the fire. His family had lost everything and had...