Brenda asked me how I heard about the Walter Anderson Museum, and why it meant so much to me.

She and I had heard about Walter Anderson from Larry and Hazel.

You used to be able to stop at the gift shop in the train depot and get the key to the Community Center, where he had painted some murals, and turn the key in when you left.

We had seen the murals.

The gift shop sold Walter Anderson prints, clothes, and jewelry, but not books, then.

Maybe a book about a housecat. Robinson.

When I was unemployed, during Reagan-Bush, and we lost our house to the bank, I read out-of-town newspapers, as part of my job search.

I read in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the community of Ocean Springs was building a Walter Anderson Museum of Art, to adjoin the Community Center.

One end of the museum would debouch into the Community Center.

At the other end would be the Little Studio, also with murals in it, moved from its location at Shearwater Pottery. You could go in there, shut the door, and commune with the spirit of Walter Anderson.

I looked forward to visiting the museum after it opened.

Indeed, I would drive over there and leave a resume at Ingalls Shipyards in Pascagoula. Halter Marine in Moss Point. It would be a business trip.

One of the places I went to look for jobs was Tallahassee.

I would come back the coastal route and stop at The Oaks to eat.

I bought a copy of Jack Rudloe's Living Dock at Panacea at The Oaks, the edition with the Walter Anderson watercolors in it.

In an introduction, Rudloe talked about seeing a movie called The Islander, on public television, about Anderson's life and work, and how, after he died, his wife and daughter broke into his cabin--it was locked--and found 30,000 pieces of art work--a treasure trove of art unmatched, so far as I know, in American painting.

As Rudloe collected the very specimens Anderson studied, and painted, on his trips to Horn Island, Rudloe was extremely curious about the man, and his work. He drove over to Ocean Springs and met his wife, who showed him some of the work, and allowed him to use them, in the reprinted edition of his book.

Rudloe and I talked about him, about the new museum. I told him I intended to go over there as soon as the museum opened, to see it. I would make a pilgrimage, like.

I did go, not long after it opened.

I saw the movie The Islander. A 30-minute educational film. The one Rudloe had seen on television. I saw the murals he did for the high school. I saw the murals in the Community Center. I went in the Little Studio and saw the murals in it.

I saw the pictures in the museum, the furniture, the sculpture, the woodblock prints, done on linoleum, the figurines he did at Shearwater Pottery, which he called widgets.

Designs for a second mural, in the Jackson, Mississippi Post Office and Court House, were rejected, causing Anderson considerable frustration. This defeat, coupled with the death of his father in 1937, a lingering attack of undulant fever, and the struggle to eke out a living with work he detested (manufacturing figurines) led to a mental breakdown, with psychotic episodes, in Spring 1937 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Inglis_Anderson).

In all, it was an overwhelming experience. Too much for me to take in, on one trip.

I bought Horn Island Logs, and Approaching the Magix Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson.

Approaching the Magic Hour was written by his wife, Sissy. Horn Island Logs was excerpts from the notebooks he kept, the same kind of black granite Composition books I used, and still use, when I am away from my computer.

One difference between me and Anderson is I shout, "Won't somebody help me," like Little Richard in the GEICO commercials, and Anderson didn't.

My request to the Division of Cultural Affairs to help me find a publisher for the books of my stack and a library to sell or give the original manuscripts to was a cry for help.

Help yourself. Give one copy of the manuscripts to Larry, for safekeeping.

Put the other copy, the original, the ribbon copy, in a rental storage shed, your room--I once called the outbuilding I kept my manuscripts in, a tin shed, The Slave Quarters--on zip drive disks, in your computer, on the hard drive. Hope the wind doesn't blow it away.

Hurricane Katrina didn't blow away Larry's copy, and I only lost one box of my copies to rain, when it was on the porch outside the trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown, after we moved into Granny Brown's house, and before I put all the boxes I had stored there in the shed I rented for that purpose. What's one box--I can spare it.

Nobody wants them anyway.

Hell, once I had an auto-da-fé, burning my own books.

I thought that, once the museum opened, Anderson's oeuvre was safe, but the family built a building at Shearwater Pottery to protect the collections and that building was damaged, and much work was destroyed, because it wasn't in the museum. The museum was not damaged. He lost more than one box of book manuscripts.

A book about the Little Studio was published, and a book about redwing blackbirds, or birds. I bought these and read them, then gave them to friends.

A show was put together for the centennial of Anderson's birth, and a coffeetable book was published, showing many of his paintings.

A biography of him was published.

I bought these, and read them, and loaned them to the Gallery Above, where they are in the library, for people to read.