All the things all at once for all the years

& old chapters from dead novels

I was trying to write again the other day. Just write a little poem about my family so I could stick it in my journal, and they would read it in the future when I die. Been death-obsessed again. Great. Instead, I took stock of all the DEAD writing projects I looked at when I transferred files over to a new computer. My friend Avesta has always said I should just learn to focus. On one fucking thing. She said I would be like fire if I did that. Why can’t I do one thing anyone ever tells me to do?

I was reminded of:

Two novels. One is about the minutia of middle age during a hot summer, and one is about an intergenerational road trip. They are both in terrible disarray. 

One one-woman show. Sort of finished. I am too embarrassed to ask for help.

A book of poems. Two probably. But they have no thread. No legs. I am not an academic poet. I am a writer of words on the back of Target receipts. FML.

A nearly finished film script my friend I wrote over the pany that just begs to be touched.

A whole curriculum of creativity exercises to be filmed or workshopped. 
Why don’t I do this for money? I am very dim witted with this one. 

Like 1000 tiny pieces of weird stuff in word docs. Are they poems? Stories? Spells? IDK. 

Here are some real random chapters from a novel I tried to write when I had a little baby in my arms back in 2008. It was about genealogy, dead people, Appalachia, chosen family, love letters and a vintage airstream trailer named Woolfie and a bunch of other shit.
I think about the characters (so many weird ones) sometimes over the years. I don’t know why I let it die or if it is worth the work to revisit. I do not know what I am doing. This is a theme of my life. Anyways. It’s a day to shrug. 

Chapter Two

Woolfie was really just an old Airstream trailer parked about a mile back on Cecilia Kelly’s parents’ property. Mrs. Grady, whose family owned the local flower shop, and Dr. Kelly had worked out a deal that let her park her motor home there year-round. In exchange for the space to park her beloved trailer, named for Virginia Woolf, the Grady family gave the Kellys flowers, shrubs, Christmas trees, and grave blankets each year. Mrs. Grady was supposed to have followed her literary dreams and become the next great American writer, but she got knocked up in the back of Gleason’s Bowling Alley at age eighteen and settled into the domesticated role of mother and caretaker to her large family. She told me once with her large, crazy, hazel eyes that every woman needed a hell bit more than a room of one’s own. She said we all needed an Airstream. Mrs. Grady, or just plain Grady, as we called her, came out to Woolfie three times a year by herself for some sort of vision questing. She was always there for a week in January for her New Year’s mediation, for two weeks in June, and a long weekend in October.

Her husband came with her for a few days at the end of her summer visit, but I think he was more grunt worker than companion, as he was always doing some chore or tinkering around the trailer. For the rest of the year, it was our own clubhouse.

At the foot of the Airstream, a half-dozen metal Folgers coffee cans are buried. The big ones. Some are time capsules written by young girls, some are vessels that hold cigarettes and matchbooks from long-gone taverns, and I think one still holds a quarter bag of Gold County weed. I know one tin can holds a letter to myself, a letter from my past, that even as an adult has kept me up at night thinking too long about the off chance that someone might dig it up and read all my secrets.

Chapter Twenty-two

“You know, Liza, everyone has two lives, really,” Mr. Thomas says as he holds the shiny silver hook between his old hands and snags the worm, slicing into the tiny creature faster than I can blink. He works his fingers quickly to cast the line smoothly into water off the Landon Lake dock and then sinks back into his webbed folding chair.

“How do you mean, Mr. Thomas?” I say.

He adjusts his floppy hat and says, “I mean, everyone lives somewhere else, even if it’s in his mind or really in his body. Everyone wishes they had that other sliced off part of themselves out walking around living this other portion that they were either too afraid to live or never knew they could. Sometimes we just live it in our minds.”

I had agreed to go fishing with Mr. Thomas last week after we met because it sounded like a great opportunity to seek out some nature and get to know him a bit better. He is likely my ticket to some historical information and a tutorial on how to use Woolfie. I have been researching the old manual, but it is so hard for me to understand.

I need to find something to do with Woolfie. I already know that I’m not returning to Boston. At least not anytime soon. I had called my roommate in secret silent whispers two weeks ago and told her that I wouldn’t be back, that if she would store my things in the pod I was sending I would give her three months’ rent. I didn’t own a lot of things anymore. The traveling and then the short-lived romance with a Buddhist changed my ways. I wasn’t wealthy enough for my own city apartment to fill with lovely things, so I just rented room from my friend Sally. I shared a bathroom with the other tenant on the third floor of the big yellow house. I had a storage closet and a portion of the scary basement. But I had no large furniture or expensive art. I had crates and old knick-knacks and books.

Sally wasn’t overjoyed, but she seemed to understand. She asked me if I was on a little vision quest out here in the sticks, in the boonies, she called it. My friends in Boston joked behind my back that I was the Appalachian prodigal daughter and that the hillbillies had seduced me. I laughed into the telephone and twirled the thick plastic curly phone cord of Gran’s phone as I instructed. I gave her instructions and mailed her checks. It worked out. Now I only had to tell my family that I had just moved back to Landon, Ohio.

“I could help people write,” I say to Mr. Thomas. “I mean, that’s what I do. Or did. I’m a writer. I mean, I was a poet. Or, I mean, I was trying to be a poet. Once.”

I could write love letters like Gran, I thought quietly inside of my mind.

There isn’t much else to do right now but write. It’s why I haven’t freaked out much at losing my job or leaving Boston for an undetermined amount of time. I can do this. I can change my life. People do it all the time. Right?

Mr. Thomas casts his pole.

Most nights I drink the bottles of my grandfather’s wine that stand like elderly soldiers under the basement steps. My grandmother drank only a bit of sherry here and there, like at Christmas or an odd family occasion, but my grandfather, I’m told, was a bit of a wino. I mean that in the most loving way. He just loved his red wine. He also loved his whiskey.

He collected wine and fancied himself a bit of a connoisseur. This wine is very different from the cheap beers and moonshine that sit in most of the homes in this holler. Wine is very high class, and my grandfather liked it that way. He brought his first expensive bottle back from World War Two and he left its cork along with all the others he drank in a five-gallon bucket behind the basement door.

My grandfather died twenty-four years ago, and Gran never threw the shit out.

I try a new one each evening. When I first turned on the back basement light, I noticed there were many more five gallon buckets lined up across the back concrete block wall.

Mr. Thomas flips open the beat-up red Coleman cooler lid with one hand and grabs a can of beer.

“You want one, Liza?”

“Sure,” I say. I can get drunk with Mr. Thomas if I want to. His son is picking us up in a few hours, and he can take me home, too. “What kind do you have?”

“Uh,” he said, digging around in the ice, “Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz.”

“Lovely,” I said with a smile.

“Hey, I know. It’s from Tom’s garage. He drinks cheap beer.”

“It’s poet’s beer,” I say. “It’s poor guitarist beer,” I laugh, thinking back to my old friends in college.

PBR. I crack one open and the spray hits Mr. Thomas in the leg and he reaches across and says, “Cheers.”

I look at him and he looks at me and we giggle.

“So, you didn’t just live your other life in your mind, though, did you, Mr. Thomas?” I say, afraid of my forwardness but unafraid of his pale blue eyes.

“No. I didn’t. She was real for me. That trailer that you want so badly to make your own, the trailer that was once mine and then hers and now yours, it holds a whole life inside of the metal.” And he talks like this and I swim up around in the sky for a bit, wondering how this former park ranger was not a poet, how he had not been Grady’s man.

“She and I just had our time together when we could, you know. She had a family and so did I.”

“I know,” I say. “You both had a family, so why did you keep up an affair for that long?” I ask as my fishing pole tugs and I turn my attention to the lake that sloshes at my feet.

“I don’t know why we never did anything. I suppose it had to do with the time and the security of our families. I asked her thousand and one times to run away with me.”

“Really? Where would you have gone?”

“I don’t know, but one time I had her almost convinced. The boys were older then, and she was thinking about writing her book. We even made a small list of places we could hitch up and go to. We wrote it on a yellow legal pad that she kept in the trailer.”

He starts getting more and more animated when he speaks of her, his hands wildly moving around like a tiny conductor of music.

“She said Portland, Oregon; the Carolinas, and Southern California. I said Sedona, Arizona, because they can read your auras there,” he laughed. “We wrote it down and tore it out and I carried it around in my wallet for a few months. I asked her again the next time we were together, and she just shook her head and said no. She said no with her mouth and her curls shook back and forth and I just let her crush me like that. I told her I understood, and I think that might have been the last time I tried to ask her.”

Mr. Thomas crunched his PBR can like a frat boy and threw it behind his head.

I smiled, but inside I felt sad.

“Were you ever afraid Mr. Grady would find the letters you wrote to Linda?”

“How do you know about the letters?”

“Grady read them to me sometimes when we would be out at Woolfie.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She did. I just always thought they were from her husband. We wrote love letters a lot out at the trailer together, and I suppose now those ones she wrote were to you, huh?” I said.

“Well, no. She never wrote me letters. I only wrote her letters.”

“Really?”

“Well, we wrote letters anyway,” I said. “We wrote all the time. She would read them to me, and I dreamed about love like those words. She encouraged me to write them to the people I loved. That’s what I kinda want to do, you know.”

“What, Liza? You want to write love letters?”

“Yeah. I want to teach people to write love letters,” I said without any hesitation. “Like Grady taught me. Like my grandmother was apparently damn good at.”

I start to think about telling Mr. Thomas about the letters over at my Gran’s house, but something stops me. I’ve said too much already. There is too much intimacy between this old man and me already. It’s weird.

The lake is still and we both look in the same direction, toward the trees that stand tall and make a jagged horizon. We both look out, and Mr. Thomas doesn’t even seem to make a sound or flinch when I tell him I’m going to park that trailer someplace and make it a love letter writing station. The only part of his body that moves was his mouth, the left side of his mouth. I can see it turn up ever so slowly and with such slyness as it curls up into a small smile.

We cast our poles and drink beer in silence.

Chapter Thirty

Rufus is such a hard person to read. Sometimes he’s just mean to me.

“What the hell you staying here so long for, girl? Aren’t there other towns that need your witchcraft?” he says with a smirk.

“Well, I’m just feeling comfortable,” I say as I smooth my skirt over and over with my hands. “You know, if you wrote more about your story and Lynne, it could be really good for you. You could even help someone,” I say.

“Now how the hell is it going to help someone?” he asks.

“You could remind someone that when you love someone you should go for it, you should move on that feeling. You can help inspire someone.”

“Oh, really?” he says as he picks his teeth with a toothpick and stares at me.

“Yes,” I laugh. I want to cry.

Why wouldn’t people just trust me? I think.

“I’m sure there is more love left in you, Rufus,” I say.

“Doubt it,” he says.

And he steps outside and the door slams shut and he walks up the street. I watch him until he turns the corner and is gone.

He always comes back. He avoids me for a day or two and then surfaces again like nothing is wrong. He walks right over to me like he had never stormed away in a huff. It’s like a dysfunctional love affair. Rufus loves coming to Woolfie. I think he likes talking to me about the town and his life and all the things he probably doesn’t tell anyone else when he sits over at Billy’s Tavern drinking his cheap beer.

He tells me bits at a time, like little snacks. Every week he hesitates when he walks up, like he might at any point just turn around and walk away. And we always say the same things to one another.

“Hello hello, little girl.”

“Hello hello, Rufus”

“How are things in the silver dream,” he says.

“Just the same as last time,” I reply.

“What you want to tell me about today, Rufus?”

Rufus then takes out a cloth handkerchief and unfolds it and blows his nose. He folds it back into a tidy square and says, “Oh, just the same thing as last time, Liza. Who’s going to tell you so much about their life? Who’s really going to write these love letters, kid?

“You are, Rufus,” I say with determination.

“No, I’m telling you some stories, kids, about this town and the past. That’s all I’m doing.”

But even as he tells me off it’s like he can’t help himself from talking about her later.

Within minutes we’re inside Woolfie and we’re working. “Why didn’t you just make it work?” I ask. “Why couldn’t you just change the trajectory of your life, Rufus?” I always ask him why he wasn’t with her most of his life.

* * * * *

“So, this kid keeps coming around who says he knows you, Rufus.”

I’m tidying up the trailer, working on a pile of papers and envelopes.

“Hopper? His name is Hopper.”

“Ha. Hot damn. Hopper Sims is coming around? Well. That has made my day,” he says. After a moment, he says, “Listen, this kid is like the weed mafia of Cleaver and the back hollers of Gold County, you know.” He stares at me with a serious look. “Don’t ya know it?” he asks.

“No. All I know is he’s been asking me bunch of questions about writing and telling me that he may have something for me to read. He always carries this little Moleskine. It’s endearing. He rode a skateboard here the other day, and he’s just so interesting. What about mafia?”

“Weed. Pot. Ganja. Tons. His daddy is the kingpin, you know.”

“Kingpin?”

“He never went to school, you know. None of those kids. They’re home-schooled. All them kids are smart as whips though.