Notes from Prison

Just received a call from T.  He is on the road.  Didn't leave until this morning.  Sick stomach.  Been down.  Etc.  Like all drive-time calls, he was in no hurry to hang up.  Now. . . my morning is running a bit behind schedule.  Realize my life is routine now, and I've been thinking.  You know how prisoners get so used to being in prison that upon release, they can't function and commit a criminal act that takes them "back home"?  Recidivism in high in the U.S., or was.  I just read that the rates have dropped a lot in the past few years.  But. . . I think I've been "in" long enough now that I do not know how to function on the "outside."  In the few hours I have each day, I am more and more loathe to do the things that once seemed normal to me.  I keep looking at the clock now wondering if it is time to go back "in."  

I think I am now "damaged goods."  

Selavy.  

I took my mother to do some banking yesterday.  As soon as we walked in, the woman who handles her accounts knew her name.  Since I've been with my mother, we've gone to this bank together once.  The woman is very kind.  I gave her some paperwork for my POA, and she said that was a good thing.  She asked if I was still staying with my mother.  

"You're a good son," she said.  

Yea, yea, yea. . . that's what they say.  To sacrifice your life for the life of another, etc.  I didn't mention the prison thing.  

It was early morning-ish when we went to the bank which is on my side of town.  We drove down the tree lined brick streets with the early morning brilliance, then down part of the Boulevard with light and shadow dappling the street.  This is what I no longer see.  This is where I no longer go early mornings to take a breakfast.  The neighborhood looked gorgeous in the early morning light.  

But the day turned hot, 97 degrees in the late afternoon.  The entire calendar has to be moved one month forward now, I think, a 13th month added, the first month cancelled.  The planet is warmer, and though I have hope that with increased oil prices consumption will go down and, as in the time of Covid, the world will begin to heal, that hope is small and I feel this is the new norm.  Still, the day was gorgeous and the air was dry so that the heat was not at all oppressive, at least to me.  I love the summertime dry heat of the west.  It is the sickly humid heat of southern summers that weighs down on one like a wet wool blanket.  

By four, having avoided going anywhere, I decided to go back to mother's.  Travis had dropped off a book for me, "The Art of Fiction" lectures of James Salter.  I would take the book back to my mom's, make a cocktail, and sit in the dry heat of the garage porch and read.  Salter, of course, was my dissertation topic, but since his death, I haven't kept up with any Salter publications, so this was a surprise.  

I have pretty much sworn off afternoon cocktails, but yesterday I made a rum Negroni and began to read the introduction by John Casey.  It was a good introduction, an enviable one, and it brought out a number of emotions all at once.  In it, he mentions people with whom I was once, long ago, personal acquaintances.  One night I went to dinner with my dissertation director to the house of another prof who was a friend, somehow--I no longer remember-- of Salter.  That night in his giant house on a hill overlooking a rare valley at dusk in my own home state, a house with large rooms decorated in the manner of a large French villa, we ate jamon and cheeses he had just brought back from Spain and drank his good wine, his beautiful, sad wife darting in and out and about the room as we talked.  His life was in turmoil.  He had taken a student along to a conference, and a scandal had broken.  Both he and his wife wore the pathos of it.  I understood him and wished only to succor her.  It was Nedra and Viri to the core, I felt, in Salter's most lovely book.  

That night, though, we talked literary and the prof gave me Salter's home phone number.  

"Be careful," he said.  "Tell him I gave you his number and that you are doing your dissertation.  But he can be churlish.  He is a VERY formal man."

I did meet Salter in a reading in NYC at the 92nd St. Y, but it was obvious he didn't care for me.  There might have been reasons.  He had given one of the worst readings imaginable, a bad story from his new short story collection.  He admitted afterwards that it had not gone well.  He read after Michael Ondaatje who set the bar high, and he had ducked well under it.  But, I had waited until the line had gone and was the last to step up.  Still, Q was second to last and the two of them got on like thieves, so I have to assume it was me.  

Yea. . . I never used the number to his Aspen home phone. 

 Casey is a good writer, and I felt myself longing once again to try.  When I was cleaning out my old desk, I found an email I had written to the members of my department at the factory when I was the new floor foreman.  It made me sad.  It was a lovely letter written not in the manner of a factory administrator but in the manner of someone who could emulate the work of a writer.  I read the letter that someone else seemed to have written with profound envy and great guilt.  Once upon a time. . . . 

My new desk has inspired me to write rather than type, and I am quite surprised by how hard it has become.  You cannot edit on the fly.  Once the ink hits the paper, it is done, and of a sudden the art of letter writing, a lost art by and large, becomes apparent.  One must think, as in a chess match, many moves ahead.  One sentence must connect to the next.  Syntax must flow.  Every stroke of the pen is of consequence.  

I am sure it is good for the brain, and I will continue in my own pathetic way hoping to improve.  In truth, I have never really been a letter writer.  The art was never lost by me.  It was simply undeveloped.  

Much like my handwriting which is in large part why I never wrote letters.  It is illegible.  My manual dexterity is only good with sporting things.  I've always envied the women I know who are such fine and lovely scribes.  I save every note they write to me.  They are, if nothing else, a very visual art.  

What should I call what I do?  These are notes from prison, I guess, now, at least.  The photo at top is from my one day trip out of town in the past few years, that time I was given leave.  Don't know when that will happen again.  

Oh--one last thing.  Q wrote me yesterday: "You do know that Mudcrutch song is Tom Petty, right?"

Oops.  I did at one time, but I didn't yesterday.  Darn.  There are just a whole lotta things I don't know anymore.