Somewhere beyond the woods, tucked gently into the folds of the land below the rising profile of the Holyoke Range, lay my family's old house, the house of my childhood.  It was a small split-level with a brief uphill driveway and white birch trees my tall father had planted on either side.  There had been a lot of farmland back then, tobacco leaves hanging in the long dark barns of the humid flats of the valley, fruit and vegetable stands by the sides of the road with bushels of apples and ears of corn.  I remember that safe feeling of being strapped into a toddler seat in the back of the blue Volvo station wagon, looking at my mom's pretty auburn dark brown hair, the warm-smelling fields going by in the summer, lit by sun, hearing the murmurings of daylight as I went to sleep, earlier than anyone else.

We'd go past the old house when we came back to visit in the summertime to see the Gregorians.  Each year it seemed a little smaller, a little more closed, a little more private, as if the closer you came the farther away something went.  The bushes and the woods had grown up all around, leaving it little like I remembered as a kid who passed freely between the three clean yards of ours and the neighbors.  

The grass was stiff under my steps.  I walked back toward the dorms.


I'd received an email from a friend of mine, a retired diplomat--I know him and his wife from the bar, going back a long way--who'd read my book, proposing I improve my visibility to local readership, something about the D.C. Library and the Library of Congress promotion of such, and there was a form to fill out, with a deadline very soon, and so I filled it out, as best I could.  I couldn't figure out how to upload a picture of its cover, selected from the options Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing wing gave me in 2010, and went digging through the pictures on my laptop, handed down from my brother, on it pictures of my father laid out in the funeral home, pictures of my cat, Miss Kitty, the birth of niece and nephew, all my travels back and forth to see mom, college reunion sentimentality, to find a picture I'd taken of it out back on the railing in the sun.  The form asked for a three paragraph sample, thus the above, and I even included the link to the Kirkus Indie Review which didn't have the best things to say about my efforts beyond that they were "ambitious."

DC Author Festival.  The rainbow wheel spins from something going on in the computer, the fan comes on, heating up, and I wonder if I've filled out the form correctly.  It was easy enough to do, though, and not much really to worry about, even were I to be selected, without knowing much about it.  I've been to literary conferences.  I've attended the awkward little workshops on unnatural things.  And I prefer to not be involved with such people, for the most part.

If I don't have to tend bar, I'd prefer to do something that helps me write, or maybe even try to write something, which is like fishing on a cold day.


Holy Holy Holy, I would like to be.  I might like to get down to Saint Matthew's for the 5:30 Mass on this Tuesday of Holy Week, right now, but Mom calls, as I wake from a nap in dank cold afternoon.  I've spoken to her around 11 AM, but it's time for another call, and she must be as lonely as I am after our visit, contentious as it was at times.  First on the cell, but that cuts out, and then on the land line.  Which takes energy.  The night shifts leave me up in the air, because you have to be prepared for them.  To get up too early isn't always good given what you have to do, at least to my tastes.  And to tell the truth I can only get so far with that sort of thing, the actual practice as it is commonly practiced.  Would I like to go to confession, or would I like to receive Holy Communion, would I like to see the people who are observant Catholics, yes, perhaps, but in the meantime, it seems the literary persona within which has shaped itself over the years mainly under the radar has a certain system, certain habits.  And from having gone down a path so far, particularly as a literary person intent on leaving the best record of thoughts he could, you cannot change certain things, but can only continue.

So why should I be afraid of my version of being who you are...   I've worked at it long enough.  I'm old enough.  It is through the light that shines through the prisms of eccentric people that we see the truer light colors of who we are.  If you have your own style, well, accept it, don't get depressed, don't put yourself down, just roll with it.

I'd like to be so, a good Catholic, but I wonder, and I don't think I can do it, except by not doing it just so.  There's always that taste, of too much dogma.  A kind of dishonesty viewed from my own tastes of who I might like to hang out with and in what kind of situation.  In the end, the spiritual honesty has to come through the writing, it seemed to me.  That's the Jesus I came to know, or the way I saw the prophets or whoever they were, these strange holy men who listened to voices and the fires in bushes, that sort of thing.  They didn't know what was going to happen, did they, when they followed their gut.

In the end you do not fear writing.  It is the thing you do not fear, after all your fears.  Writing does take a lot of patience, certainly.  But you cannot fear it.  It's a way to conquer all other fears and worries, because, as a human being, you have to take all things in stride.

MacGowan wrote Rainy Night in Soho in some state of mind listening to ghosts.  And maybe your mom slowly reveals to you her own process, listening to the same.