Once upon a time

Since the beginning of the year, the main occupier of my time and energy, and my main source of income, has been a gig doing ghost writing for a blog hosted by a corporation whose name we all know. It’s been okay. The people involved have been a bit much, as it must be when working with those on the verge of saving the world, but it’s been regular income and, should I be inspired to look elsewhere, a source of very current writing samples. It’s also been a gold mine of opportunity for me when it comes to practicing how to deal with people. One of the things I’ve been practicing is to counteract my gut instinct to say yes, to accommodate by going along and, in the process, avoid uncomfortable conversations. So I’m learning to say no without thinking about it. With no as a starting point, I can then make concessions one at a time … or not. For me, for some reason, it’s easier to go from no to yes than it is to start at yes and move gradually to no. I knew this project was coming to an end when I was not invited to participate in a meeting to discuss, among other things, “future directions.” When I receive bad news I usually react on a physical level. It’s as if every cell in my body stops, and the stillness becomes not exactly painful, but not exactly comfortable either, so I think it would have been irresponsible of me to not notice that when I was told – directly, voice to voice – that this gig was coming to an end, my body did not ingest the information as bad news.

Instead, my body and my mind drifted back to a night in the summer of 1969 or 1970. It’s a long, long story, but here are the bare bones of it. A tavern across a creek from the town where I grew up was robbed. A few people were killed. The men who robbed the tavern got away on foot. As the entire town exploded with the scream of sirens and the blinding, blinding searchlights from the helicopters overhead, one of my brothers hid in a ditch beside the railroad tracks as two of the killers ran past. My one brother’s perilous whereabouts were revealed to my parents by another one of my brothers, who fled the instant he heard gunshots and ran back to the house. My mother was on the phone with the police in the kitchen, describing my brother. “Please do not shoot my son,” I heard my mother say. I was four years old, maybe five. I was at the foot of the front stairs as our house filled with so much light that I could see fear on my father’s face, an expression I would never see again in this lifetime. My brothers had had one of their backyard campouts that night – their last, as it turned out. Once our parents were asleep they’d jumped the fence and crossed the creek and gone to collect golf balls that were shot out of the driving range, which was right beside the tavern. My entrepreneurial brothers would then sell the golf balls back to the range manager in the morning. But not that time.

That night was but the beginning of a story that is a living and breathing entity to this day. If the town I grew up in were a surface of glass-smooth water, that night was like a stone, dropped in from directly overhead. The ripples, though smaller with time perhaps, are eternal. And since today is my last day of regimented employment for a while, I’m going to force myself, or try to, to put that story on paper.