Who’s kiddng who. I’m no writer. Look at me in the reflection of my Mother’s sun room window; posed at the patio table with laptop in my lap, bushy beard and sunglasses. I look more like a red neck hunter, or like some conceited fool pretending to be a writer. But that guy in the reflection spends more of his time looking thoughtfully into space, or so he’d like it to seem, rather than tapping away at the keys. He’s really just checking out his reflection with interest. Write something, already:
She got off the train in Fredericksburg, dragging her travel chest behind her on the platform. She let it drop after only a few yards and dabbed her lips with a handkerchief. A young man addressed her with a slight bow. She smiled behind her handkerchief and nodded. He picked up the travel chest and followed her through the depot to a waiting carriage.
Not bad, but what is she doing here? I can’t see her:
She wore an emerald green dress with lace cuffs and a tightened bodice. An exotic black hat perched on her head with peacock feathers and more lace. Deep wrinkles near her eyes, and a mouth with a sharp upturn at the corners that formed a perpetual smirk. None of us knew the color of her eyes; we found that most strange when discussing her later, but then, how often do we note the color of a person’s eyes besides those of our loved ones? Muriel was anything but loved; gossiped about, maybe. Certainly envied and begrudged and estranged, but certainly not loved. A few men had the ill-advised notion of courting her, but they were so peremptorily denied, like she was merely returning a bowl of cold soup to the kitchen with a wave of her hand, that the rest of us learned from their mistakes and kept our distance.
Okay, but why’s she hated? Where’s the atrocity, where’s the fatal flaw of character, the sullied underbelly of what’s really going on here?
She’d been married to a house builder in the neighboring town of Lux’Bourge. Her husband had gained modest wealth building homes for the land prospector, Mr. Griffin. She’d tasted just enough of the good life to covet more. She accompanied her husband to many of Mr. Griffin’s dinners, and through cunning and artifice she asserted her self to private invitations on his yacht or one of his many country homes. Mr. Griffin’s net worth was legendary amongst the townspeople’s talk at the local pub. Muriel soon disappeared into the lavish wealth provided for by Mr. Griffin.
She’d been shunned by the proper townsfolk ever since she’d left her husband. Did Muriel even notice, or care? Mr. Griffins expansive estates were like living on an island, sheltered from the chill of the outside world. Luxury was closer than love to Muriel’s heart. Trainloads of crates arrived from Turkey and France and England, antiques, clothing, jewelry for a queen.
What a bunch of bullshit. Listen to yourself, trying to sound like a writer. Tell it again, this time the plain and simple truth:
Muriel got of the train and stood by her travel chest, waiting for a gentleman to take it up for her. She wore a dress much too expensive for our town; it immediately embittered the townswomen against her, and intimidated the men to a degree where none were willing to approach her. Thompson’s boy finally helped her, but we all knew what kind of a fool he was. Though the women often talked of running her out of town, I think a part them enjoyed—in fact needed—someone to despise so thoroughly. You see, Muriel had been married to a proper man in a modest house; he was a builder. They’d had two boys. Then she gave up everything, even her two boys, to become the mistress of the wealthiest man in the county: Mr. Griffin. Now, for a man like Mr. Griffin, hardly anything was said about his character. His money held him on a level from which he could not be judged. But Muriel, she was of us, so she became fair game. And game she was. What kind of woman would give up her own children, just so she could wear new dresses from Paris and have furniture shipped all the way from Turkey?
If we were still in the habit of burning witches at the stake, Muriel would have been well-done by this time. But in this day and age we only crucified the guilty with gossip and a slow burning hatred. But as in all hatreds, there was a trace of envy, and it was that envy that brought ourselves down a notch. We put up with her. We bided our time. We acquired the habit of walking around town with stones in our pockets waiting for right moment, that hidden signal that ran like a murderous instinct through the town, for the moment that called for blood.
Monday, December 26, 2005
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Haunted Farmstead
He wasn’t sure what to make of himself, given that he passed up invitations to hang out with friends so that he could rummage around in abandoned farm fields, exploring the burnt out husks of barns, silos, tool sheds. He loved to roam haunted farmsteads on moonlit nights, with a six pack of beer or a bag of weed, maybe a friend or two, but mostly alone. He enjoyed the company of ghosts best.
The farmhouse stood within a ring of fir trees, to protect it from the strong winter winds, he suspected. All that remained was a stone foundation and a fireplace. The hole of a cellar was filled with charred timbers and a refrigerator and an old moldy doll with a missing head. At the side of the house stood two rusted clothesline poles, still rigidly posed in T formation. The cord stretching between them was missing. Why did this empty space between the poles cause such a pang of loneliness? He could almost smell clothes drying in the sun, hear the snap of sheets flapping in the wind. He wanted to curl up in the grass and watch the woman hanging clothes out to dry, one hand reaching up to pinch the clothes to the line, the other fishing blindly in a dress pocket for a wooden clothespin. In the dark he walked between the poles and closed his eyes as though, if he concentrated hard enough, he could feel the brush of bed sheets against his cheek. This was how he spent his Friday nights, while his friends were out getting drunk in the parking lots of fast food restaurants, or getting laid, or at least trying to. What would he tell them when they asked what he did that night? The truth. Always the truth.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Sunrise over Florida, Japan, South America
I’m sitting out on my Mom’s patio, in shorts, flip flops, and a black t-shirt. Warm sun reflects off my white arms and legs. My face feels hot. The breeze is nice. I listen to the metallic ping of drivers launching golf balls down the fairway of the second tee. I listen to the thud of golf balls landing on the green. Not many birds around, but sometimes the drone of a plane in the distance.
I can hardly see the laptop screen due to the sun, but does that matter? I used to write as though words formed a painting; the appearance and the order of the letters ranked high in my valuation of good writing. I think it was the purposefulness and laboriousness of typing on a typewriter that slowed me down and forced more thought into my choice of words, and subsequently, the direction of my thoughts. Now writing is a race to keep up with the internal narrator, and I pay less attention to the ascetics of the words on the screen. So it doesn't matter now if I can see the words on my laptop screen because of the sun. My fingers race across the keys like a blind person reading brail. When my fingers grow tired, I pick up one of the many books I've brought with me.
I’m really enjoying Haruki Murakami. His style of writing keeps my interest, or is it the voice of his characters? They are like the brooding eccentrics from college that you wished you knew, but you are limited to watching from a distance. Or the eccentrics we all thought we were, in that intoxicating conceit of college writers and musicians and artists. Part of his story turns to narrative with a unique perspective on the world, but I wouldn’t put him on par with Marquez, whose writing takes on the tone and magic of a South American mythology. Maybe I’m aggrandizing somebody who I haven’t read in ten years.
Murakami writes of a character that picks a few classics and reads them over and over again. Dickens, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare; each time he reads them he discovers something new. Remember as a child reading the same favorite books repeatedly? That pleasure of repetition and returning to the same familiar place? What would my books be? The Great Gatsby, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Tin Drum, Shipping News, Peter Pan? Who knows. My list of favorite books changes from day to day. Some books lend themselves more readily to re-reading; I think it’s their complexity, or just the sheer beauty of the way they are written, like poetry. Will Murakami become one of those for me? Maybe. I dog-ear pages I particularly enjoy as I go along, and Norwegian Wood is starting to look like origami.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Christmas 2005 in retro
I've been away for a while; both mentally and physically. Most of December, really. During Christmas week I was in Florida with my Mom and Ken, enjoying the warmth and good company, but no internet. So I'll post a couple entries in retrospect:
December 23, 2005 —
This is my first morning at my Mom’s house. I came down to Florida for the Holidays again, but am feeling homesick. That’s a good sign. I think last year I was still feeling like I didn’t really have a home, that my apartment was more like a hotel, and that home was where my mother was. But now I’ve made my apartment quite comfortable for myself, my own little space in the city.
My Mom’s place is cold in the morning. But once I get up and move to the sun room, I’m warmed up by the sun coming off the golfcourse. I’m trying different spots in the house to find a comfortable place to write. I think it will be here, on the down filled sofa, with the sun behind my back and turning my screen into a collage. Or maybe on the patio.
I want to be in my big leather chair by the window, listening to classical music. I want to spend the afternoon in my favorite tea shop or at Dunn Bros, with my wireless internet access. I have no internet access here from my laptop, but I can always go on my Mom’s computer. I wanted to work on my blog and my homepage, make donations to charitable organizations before the end of the year, research financial advisors, and maybe even start my match.com profile, or sign up on ancestors.com. But being banned from the internet on this laptop during the next week will be good for my writing. It eliminates distraction. I’m left here to my own devices.
So what would I write while I’m here? Do I really think I can delve into Tea House? I’m confident I can get to Stuttersville at least, and I should probably tackle The Third Hour, as it was here that the first ideas came to me, one year ago. I have a knack for waking up here at three am, and stumble down an unfamiliar darkened hallway towards the bathroom. So write something already.
……..
We slipped well past the fence, scaled the hill, and dropped down to the weedy ground with our case of beer. Drinking in an empty field with nothing but the stars and your closest friends opens up the universe, spans time even in the moment. I looked across at Rocky and Andrew with the eyes of a thirty-six year old knowing he would remember what this moment felt like. Chad was taking a piss somewhere twenty yards away and talking to us over his shoulder, something about a girl that liked him or what we should be doing. He had the most confident grin that I had ever seen. A slight gap between his two front teath. Always grinning.
I went through phases where I distanced myself from these friends and from the late night drinking. It made me strung out, depressed, like I was throwing my life away at sixteen and that I should sitting down to writing if I ever had plans to make it. Sometimes I just wanted to recover what little innocence remained inside me. I remember walking home, strung out and hung over at 9:00 AM one morning and almost crying because I wanted to be a little boy excited about going fishing with my Dad again. I just wanted to be fishing, and that I’d never touched that Jim Beam of the night before, or taken a smoke off that pot pipe, or knew everything that I had known now. But there’s no going back.
It’s too hard to pretend that you’ve never seen what you have seen. You can’t forget what it’s like to be high in the back of a Trans-am, or what it’s like putting your hand up the shirt of a girl you just met at a fast food joint. And you’d be a fool to want to go back to being that little kid on his tenspeed, right? You’d be a geek, a nerd, a dork, a loser. You just want more, friends with faster cars, girl with bigger tits and that’ll go farther.
And I met those girls and I got in those cars. The funniest thing was that the guys with the fastest cars drove the slowest. The girls with the biggest tits didn’t let you see them. But there’s always the girls that’ll go all the way on the first night, no matter if it’s in a car or a school playground or their parents basement. Shit we grew up fast. Was my crowd unusual in this?
Okay, I’m going to read for a while, then go to bed. I’ll have most of the morning to myself tomorrow. I will start writing Stuttersville. Then maybe by Monday I’ll be writing The Third Hour. I’d like that. I had dreams not unlike those I imagine for the story, though last night the dreams were more urban, the flying terror being myself, the hands that clutched the throats and choked the hotel guests my own hand.
Merry Christmas. Merry Merry Christmas. On the third night of Christmas my true love said to me: burry me in the manger. Let me smell the bales of hay, the lulling of cattle, the scurry of field mice under the door.
December 23, 2005 —
This is my first morning at my Mom’s house. I came down to Florida for the Holidays again, but am feeling homesick. That’s a good sign. I think last year I was still feeling like I didn’t really have a home, that my apartment was more like a hotel, and that home was where my mother was. But now I’ve made my apartment quite comfortable for myself, my own little space in the city.
My Mom’s place is cold in the morning. But once I get up and move to the sun room, I’m warmed up by the sun coming off the golfcourse. I’m trying different spots in the house to find a comfortable place to write. I think it will be here, on the down filled sofa, with the sun behind my back and turning my screen into a collage. Or maybe on the patio.I want to be in my big leather chair by the window, listening to classical music. I want to spend the afternoon in my favorite tea shop or at Dunn Bros, with my wireless internet access. I have no internet access here from my laptop, but I can always go on my Mom’s computer. I wanted to work on my blog and my homepage, make donations to charitable organizations before the end of the year, research financial advisors, and maybe even start my match.com profile, or sign up on ancestors.com. But being banned from the internet on this laptop during the next week will be good for my writing. It eliminates distraction. I’m left here to my own devices.
So what would I write while I’m here? Do I really think I can delve into Tea House? I’m confident I can get to Stuttersville at least, and I should probably tackle The Third Hour, as it was here that the first ideas came to me, one year ago. I have a knack for waking up here at three am, and stumble down an unfamiliar darkened hallway towards the bathroom. So write something already.
……..
We slipped well past the fence, scaled the hill, and dropped down to the weedy ground with our case of beer. Drinking in an empty field with nothing but the stars and your closest friends opens up the universe, spans time even in the moment. I looked across at Rocky and Andrew with the eyes of a thirty-six year old knowing he would remember what this moment felt like. Chad was taking a piss somewhere twenty yards away and talking to us over his shoulder, something about a girl that liked him or what we should be doing. He had the most confident grin that I had ever seen. A slight gap between his two front teath. Always grinning.
I went through phases where I distanced myself from these friends and from the late night drinking. It made me strung out, depressed, like I was throwing my life away at sixteen and that I should sitting down to writing if I ever had plans to make it. Sometimes I just wanted to recover what little innocence remained inside me. I remember walking home, strung out and hung over at 9:00 AM one morning and almost crying because I wanted to be a little boy excited about going fishing with my Dad again. I just wanted to be fishing, and that I’d never touched that Jim Beam of the night before, or taken a smoke off that pot pipe, or knew everything that I had known now. But there’s no going back.
It’s too hard to pretend that you’ve never seen what you have seen. You can’t forget what it’s like to be high in the back of a Trans-am, or what it’s like putting your hand up the shirt of a girl you just met at a fast food joint. And you’d be a fool to want to go back to being that little kid on his tenspeed, right? You’d be a geek, a nerd, a dork, a loser. You just want more, friends with faster cars, girl with bigger tits and that’ll go farther.
And I met those girls and I got in those cars. The funniest thing was that the guys with the fastest cars drove the slowest. The girls with the biggest tits didn’t let you see them. But there’s always the girls that’ll go all the way on the first night, no matter if it’s in a car or a school playground or their parents basement. Shit we grew up fast. Was my crowd unusual in this?
Okay, I’m going to read for a while, then go to bed. I’ll have most of the morning to myself tomorrow. I will start writing Stuttersville. Then maybe by Monday I’ll be writing The Third Hour. I’d like that. I had dreams not unlike those I imagine for the story, though last night the dreams were more urban, the flying terror being myself, the hands that clutched the throats and choked the hotel guests my own hand.
Merry Christmas. Merry Merry Christmas. On the third night of Christmas my true love said to me: burry me in the manger. Let me smell the bales of hay, the lulling of cattle, the scurry of field mice under the door.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Riot Against Boredom
I grow tired in this place. The world has lost its mystery and luster. Can I fabricate it here? I dream of websites with black backgrounds and electric green outlines where iguanas crawl. Of fairies glowing in the brisk night, their light illuminating the undersides of fir trees. I see the haunted wood beneath moonlight, sounds creaking from deep behind its wall of trees. But I can’t concentrate at the moment because a loud group of demonstrators cheer from outside the news station on the next block. I don’t know what they protest; trade in Spain, maybe. Maybe they protest the lack of magic in our world. That’s what we discontents need to do: organize and march. Make banners and carry megaphones to magnify our voices above the noise of traffic and demand an end to smalltalk, daytime television, mail ad-campaigns, and 24 hour news. But instead we retreat to our own little isolation chambers; the den to scribble in a notebook, the home theatre to bask in the light of a fifty-inch plazma screen and surround sound, or a book pried open and nestled in the lap like a child. These are our small condolences for making it through yet another day of dissatisfaction.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Fortune Cookies
Yesterday ideas came to mind out of nowhere, and left just as suddenly.
- Write a story titled “Crop Circles in Vermont”.
- Why do the pictures we like most of ourselves look least like ourselves?
- The day the clouds crashed to the ground.
- Since nothing brings back memories like a certain smell, create a device that records smells.
- A hearse slid into the ditch. Might as well bury them both with the same shovel.
- How would I handle the job if I was Tom Cruise’s PR person. That’s a tough job. I don’t want that job.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Having the FCC Over for Dinner
I know what if feels like to not write what you want to write. Internal censors batten down what you can say on your blog once family and friends have started reading it. It is like they are all gathered in one room and everything said has become the precarious navigation of a dinner gathering from hell.
I started out feeling so liberated with the anonymity of the net, but then I shared my blog and homepage with co-workers and old college friends. My mom figured out how to go from a picture blog I'd created, then to my Blogger profile, then to my Brettanicus blog, and soon I was editing past entries about reading pornstar blogs and logging the nocturnal activities of various windows in the high rise across from me. It morphed into the more conservative ideas of logging cell phone conversations and photographing odd scraps of garbage found on the sidewalks of Minneapolis. I'm amazed that my ex hasn't googled me yet; it's only a matter of time.
I guess this is why I have stuck with fiction, for the most part, but I think people have caught on that fiction is more honest than the truth.
I could start a new blog, disconnected from my current identity on the net, to regain that anonymity and kill the censor. But something stops me. Part of it is that this little space has become an extension of my home and life, and I don't want to abandon it. Sometimes a little censorship (I keep mistyping this word as "censorshit") and restraint can be a good thing. The other part is that I wish everyone could just be an open book. The more open we become, the more we discover we're not so different from everyone else. But the danger is that honesty can so easily hurt the people we care about, either directly or indirectly. Handling a pen is like handling a gun. You have to be careful who you point it at, or someone is going to get hurt.
But what am I worried about? My family and friends have gotten bored and moved on to other things. My only regular reader is Kelsye, and how easily I've fallen for her and the Lady Kio (aka The Divine Miss Dauphine). Something is very alluring about someone you only speak to across the digital divide, half a world away.
私はあなたの想像の作りごとである。
I started out feeling so liberated with the anonymity of the net, but then I shared my blog and homepage with co-workers and old college friends. My mom figured out how to go from a picture blog I'd created, then to my Blogger profile, then to my Brettanicus blog, and soon I was editing past entries about reading pornstar blogs and logging the nocturnal activities of various windows in the high rise across from me. It morphed into the more conservative ideas of logging cell phone conversations and photographing odd scraps of garbage found on the sidewalks of Minneapolis. I'm amazed that my ex hasn't googled me yet; it's only a matter of time.
I guess this is why I have stuck with fiction, for the most part, but I think people have caught on that fiction is more honest than the truth.
I could start a new blog, disconnected from my current identity on the net, to regain that anonymity and kill the censor. But something stops me. Part of it is that this little space has become an extension of my home and life, and I don't want to abandon it. Sometimes a little censorship (I keep mistyping this word as "censorshit") and restraint can be a good thing. The other part is that I wish everyone could just be an open book. The more open we become, the more we discover we're not so different from everyone else. But the danger is that honesty can so easily hurt the people we care about, either directly or indirectly. Handling a pen is like handling a gun. You have to be careful who you point it at, or someone is going to get hurt.
But what am I worried about? My family and friends have gotten bored and moved on to other things. My only regular reader is Kelsye, and how easily I've fallen for her and the Lady Kio (aka The Divine Miss Dauphine). Something is very alluring about someone you only speak to across the digital divide, half a world away.
私はあなたの想像の作りごとである。
Saturday, December 03, 2005
Tea Story
The tea merchant opens his back door in the morning, tosses out empty crates of earl grey and oolong and imperial jade beside the dumpster, then lets the door slam shut and locked behind him. Not even a handle on which to pull, just flat steel, one way entrance, and I’m on the wrong side. I limp over to the crates, ease myself down on a sheet of cardboard and pull the crates closer. I smell inside them and inhale the rich, nostalgic scent of oil of bergamot, the earthy smell of oolong, shipped all the way to the states straight from the hillsides of a Chinese tea garden.
I hold two dollars and seventeen cents of change inside my pants pocket, spoils from an afternoon of panhandling along the mall; why don’t I go inside for a cup of tea? I’ve been banned, that’s why, by that red faced, heartless tea merchant recently exeunt from the alley, stage left.
Okay, so I exposed myself from under the table to a couple of elderly ladies sitting at the table next to me. But that was months ago. Since then the voices have subsided, the roiling waves of my subconscious calmed to a smooth surface. But the merchant won’t let me back in for another couple of weeks. I guess I shouldn’t be too angry with him; he didn’t call the cops on me. He just tossed me out the back door to this alley, through the steel door, one way exit, no handles.
I remember going to his tea shop as a boy with my mother. She would wear a flowered dress, bring her crocheting in a large bag stuffed with motherly kinds of things; knitting needles and aspirin and throat lozenges and checkbooks, wadded up tissues used to wipe my nose. I’d get a cup of juice while my mother would get a two cup pot of dark English Breakfast, lightened with milk and sweetened with two teaspoons of sugar. She would break off small bites from her scone and feed them to me. The tea merchant was younger then, face not so red, hair thicker and body slimmer. He’d flirt with my mother, though she mostly discouraged conversation with the merchant. We were here to get away from men, I suppose, all of whom were mere reproductions from that single deplorable image of my father. At least deplorable to her standards. My standards had not yet been formed, but I knew something was not right with the man that lived in our house, whom my mother discouraged me from calling “dad”, instead referring to him by his first name always: Chester. Chester was not the head of the household. Chester was not her husband or my father. Chester was a boarder in the attic, sleeping on an old army cot.
What was so bad about Chester? Beside the outbursts of profanity, the nervous ticks that would fling dishes or silverware from table to floor? I don’t think the primary reason was his stink: he was afraid of water, afraid of drowning, which he did one day in three and a half inches of bathwater, an accident for which my mother was acquitted. What really bothered her I suppose were his poems, written with charcoal on the walls of our cellar. Poems she would whitewash away each Sunday morning, but which would appear again throughout the week; different poems, magnificent, brilliant, rare glimpses at the colorful expanses of Chester’s fractured mind. She was afraid of it, perhaps, angered that the emotions and beauty remained either locked in his mind or confined to the cellar. Or maybe she hated that Chester’s poems were better than hers. I remember her poems only faintly, as they were quite forgettable; I only remember the flowery bindings of the vanity presses, the booklets that took much of her money to have printed for herself and relatives, signed in sprawling loops and squiggles carefully practiced. My mother, lover of tea, offender of bad poetry, guilty of neglect and cruelty towards her Tourette’s ridden husband referred to not as sweetheart or father or husband, but only as Chester.
I hold two dollars and seventeen cents of change inside my pants pocket, spoils from an afternoon of panhandling along the mall; why don’t I go inside for a cup of tea? I’ve been banned, that’s why, by that red faced, heartless tea merchant recently exeunt from the alley, stage left.
Okay, so I exposed myself from under the table to a couple of elderly ladies sitting at the table next to me. But that was months ago. Since then the voices have subsided, the roiling waves of my subconscious calmed to a smooth surface. But the merchant won’t let me back in for another couple of weeks. I guess I shouldn’t be too angry with him; he didn’t call the cops on me. He just tossed me out the back door to this alley, through the steel door, one way exit, no handles.
I remember going to his tea shop as a boy with my mother. She would wear a flowered dress, bring her crocheting in a large bag stuffed with motherly kinds of things; knitting needles and aspirin and throat lozenges and checkbooks, wadded up tissues used to wipe my nose. I’d get a cup of juice while my mother would get a two cup pot of dark English Breakfast, lightened with milk and sweetened with two teaspoons of sugar. She would break off small bites from her scone and feed them to me. The tea merchant was younger then, face not so red, hair thicker and body slimmer. He’d flirt with my mother, though she mostly discouraged conversation with the merchant. We were here to get away from men, I suppose, all of whom were mere reproductions from that single deplorable image of my father. At least deplorable to her standards. My standards had not yet been formed, but I knew something was not right with the man that lived in our house, whom my mother discouraged me from calling “dad”, instead referring to him by his first name always: Chester. Chester was not the head of the household. Chester was not her husband or my father. Chester was a boarder in the attic, sleeping on an old army cot.
What was so bad about Chester? Beside the outbursts of profanity, the nervous ticks that would fling dishes or silverware from table to floor? I don’t think the primary reason was his stink: he was afraid of water, afraid of drowning, which he did one day in three and a half inches of bathwater, an accident for which my mother was acquitted. What really bothered her I suppose were his poems, written with charcoal on the walls of our cellar. Poems she would whitewash away each Sunday morning, but which would appear again throughout the week; different poems, magnificent, brilliant, rare glimpses at the colorful expanses of Chester’s fractured mind. She was afraid of it, perhaps, angered that the emotions and beauty remained either locked in his mind or confined to the cellar. Or maybe she hated that Chester’s poems were better than hers. I remember her poems only faintly, as they were quite forgettable; I only remember the flowery bindings of the vanity presses, the booklets that took much of her money to have printed for herself and relatives, signed in sprawling loops and squiggles carefully practiced. My mother, lover of tea, offender of bad poetry, guilty of neglect and cruelty towards her Tourette’s ridden husband referred to not as sweetheart or father or husband, but only as Chester.
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