It was the first meaningful thing I ever wrote.
Directed at an audience of one.
In the bedroom of our place in the Red Barn Trailer Park with my new born son sleeping in the bed as I studied at the tiny Formica desk, I didn't understand what I was reading.
My mind refused to recognize the dots ... much less connect them.
I looked at Jeremy sleeping, realizing I hadn't accomplished anything in life other than learning to play some guitar and failing to understand birth control, and I burst into tears.
Then I grabbed my pencil and wrote "I AM NOT STUPID" over and over and over, repeatedly breaking the pencil, sobbing but determined to change ... something.
Later in Dr. Mosley's history class, the assignment was a paper on a Civil War skirmish, "The Battle of Bull Run."
"Wearing wool coats, the Rebels slogged through the mud listening to the Yankee's victory yells, sweating like bullets while wondering if bullets turn to blood."
It came back circled in red.
In the margin, also in red, Dr. Mosley scribbled, "Excellent!"
I brought it to the tiny trailer and showed it my son who gleefully stuffed it in his mouth.
And at that moment ... everything about me changed.
I began to read ... everything!
Book after book after book.
And I wrote ... and I wrote ... and I wrote.
Later still, in Louisville, Kentucky attending Seminary and inexplicably in charge of an inner city Church ... I kept a daily journal on ... life as I saw it.
After four filled notebooks, through Divine accident, Holy intervention or damn good luck ... those journals became my first three books.
Writing became my way of processing everything.
"You know Dad," a newly abandoned and adult Jeremy tells his old abandoned Dad on the beloved back deck, "you have this way of writing everything out of you ... so you don't have to hold on to it."
It reminds me of a Jimmy Buffett lyric, "You put the book, by itself, on the shelf with your heart in it."
All the hurts, joys, things gone right and massive failures ... I write em out.
In the pool, Sarah floats doing her pregnant laps as I sip wine bobbling in the warm water under the Palm Tree with the oyster eyes, coconut bra and grass skirt.
Goddess pokes her head between the picks of the Beloved Back Deck to check on us and Winston, the Little Gay Dog, whines behind her because he wants to be with Sarah at all times.
Our talk isn't pleasant.
Sarah's protecting me ... LOUDLY ... from things at work that aren't quite right and other people who want me to do things for them that they won't do for themselves.
I'm quietly intense.
"What do you think?" she asks, wet face and intense blue eyes staring an inch away from mine.
I remain quiet.
"Well, I'll read about it with everybody else," she laughs swimming away.
Everybody's got to find their way to, "Let it out and let it in", as the major prophets the Beatles admonished the struggling.
Well ... this is mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment