Monday, December 6

Saturday, I went out on some errands. I forgot people were shopping for Christmas.

The library was closed because of the Christmas parade.

I was glad we didn't have to go to it, as we did when Balder was in the high school band.

I stopped at Cooper's News and bought a paperback copy of Twisted Justice, a retired colonel's account of the Sandy Creek murders. They have a wire rack of books by local authors.

I was interested in the Sandy Creek murders because I almost wrote a mystery about them, once.

I couldn't have written a true crime book, because I didn't have the time, working full-time, to track down and interview people, during the day, and I didn't know how to use newspaper morgue files and police records to do research.

Brenda's going to bring some plants inside for the winter and wants to raise the blinds and hang unbleached muslin curtains, so I went to Jo Ann's Fabrics and Crafts, in Gilberg's Plaza, to buy four yards of material. The traffic at the intersection of Highway 77 and 23rd Street was dense. People short-tempered.

I drive a tad slow to suit them.

I look in my rear view mirror, and say to them, "Maybe if you left a little earlier, you wouldn't be late."

I wondered if I'd see Amy Fletcher at Jo Ann's. Brenda told me she worked there.

Brenda worked with Larry Fletcher at SAIC. He was an Annapolis graduate, who wore a class ring.

He played trumpet in a swing band, as a hobby. Somehow he kept his chops up.

When we lived at the house on Martin Lake, we invited all our bluegrass friends, all my co-workers from A/C/T, all Brenda's co-workers from SAIC, to the house for a pick-in and barbecue. People brought side dishes and I cooked chicken on a charcoal grill, on the deck.

I cooked all afternoon, and into the night.

The house on Martin Lake was on a point. There were 119 live oak, pine, magnolia, and dogwood trees on two acres of waterfront property. People played under the trees, lighted by the floodlights from the house, on the deck.

Another group played in a driveway under a drive-through roof, from the back door to a planter, under roof lights.

Balder and Owen sat in on fiddle and mandolin. Sometimes they played guitar, or string bass.

Larry Fletcher gave Balder some pointers on trumpet. Balder played trumpet in the high school band.

One of our picker friends, who'd only seen us at bluegrass festivals, in K Mart tents, said, "I had no idea you all were so prosperous," and once, when Dion Wright, and Ruth, visited us, Dion said, "You're going to have trouble selling that starving artist bit once people get wind of this place."

I was a starving artist living above his station.

When we moved back into the trailer, behind Granny Brown, I hadn't been busted, I had been reverted to my permanent rank. Yardbird.

Two high-tech, high-income jobs was a temporary rank.

We were both to hold good jobs in Atlanta, for a time, but we don't have them anymore, and probably never will again.

It's like thinking you'll never get laid again.

Our peak earning years are behind us.

When you get too old to make a comeback, how do you reconcile that with the American narrative myth of (1) success, (2) decline, or retreat, and (3) triumphant resurgence, like Frank Sinatra, or George Foreman?

When I was out of work, before we lost the house, I saw Larry Fletcher at a Book Warehouse, across from the Navy Base, and he asked me to send him a resume. He was the site manager at A/C/T, just before Actaeon bought them.

He asked me to come in for an interview.

I thought I'd done well, at the interview, but whether they didn't get the money they were expecting to get, or someone who remembered me from before put in a bad word for me, the job fell though. I was never sure which.

I was still trying to keep from losing the house, then, borrowing money from my mother to make the mortgage payment.

I was like the great Gatsby in that house.

Maybe I brought my own sorrow down on myself by putting on airs.

No good comes of flaunting wealth.

Anyhow, Amy Fletcher wasn't working, Saturday.

When I got home, Brenda was tired.

I cooked French toast with leftover French bread and yard eggs for supper and we stayed in and listened to Leon Redbone, then read, glad not to be sitting in a folding lawn chair on Harrison Avenue, waiting for the Rutherford High School Band to pass by, so we could leave.

Q: I thought the American narrative success myth was the man who started out slow and gradually built his reputation, as he mastered his craft. Over the course of a career.

A: That's once version, certainly.

Another is the man who hits the jackpot out of the starting gate, then tapers off. Or woman.

Think of Donna Tartt.

Still another is the early success who falters, in mid-career, then scores a grand retrieval.

Q: What about the man who is a posthumous success, like John Gregory Toole?

A: Or Sylvia Plath.

Q: Are there any examples of chronic failures who succeed late in life?

A: Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

To a lesser extent Charles Bukowski and Charles Willeford.

Q: Do you think that could happen to you?

A: It certainly doesn't look like it is going to. And that affects your outlook.

It gets you down, not to see any chance of it happening. And time running out.

Q: Can you think of any examples of a writer who was neglected all his life then died and was forgotten. Who never succeeded, even in death?

A: We wouldn't know, would we? Unless we were related to one.

I suspect there are more than a few.

People who didn't give up. Who died trying. And didn't measure up.

They were weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Q: Do you ever think you're one of them?

A: Most of the time.

Q: Why do you keep struggling?

A: It's my métier.