This afternoon looking for a pen in the back of a drawer I came across the photograph of a young man I knew for a week thirty-four years ago. He was a carpenter and I was a visitor at the house where he was working. The bumper sticker on his pickup read Too Cute To Stay Home, a gross understatement, and after a brief conversation that took place on either side of an enormous snapping turtle in the path between us, he declared, “I’m taking you four wheeling.” We knew absolutely nothing about each other, but if it had been a movie one of us would have had to die, because it was a short but perfect love story. One week. “Stay,” he said, “I will build you a house.”
In the photo he is sitting on a porch railing, half naked, perfect, crooking his finger and grinning at me. There was nothing ho-hum about him. He was turning twenty-one and I was forty-eight. “Tell me about your work,” I said. “ Really?” he asked.” Really,” I said, “Tell me everything.” “Well,” he said, “to begin with, the plumb line is God.”
I am eighty-two now, and I brag about my twelve grandchildren and my two great grandchildren, and grab all the gravitas I can about being in my eighties, but right now I’m surrendering to the pleasure of this photograph, and the longing it awakens, grateful that I can still be undone.
Abigail, I guess I'd follow you anywhere too. Your work always lights a fire in me that says, "Notice everything. Forget nothing. Write it better." So I keep trying. ~Linda Clare, writing The Deep End.
PERFECTION
This afternoon looking for a pen in the back of a drawer I came across the photograph of a young man I knew for a week thirty-four years ago. He was a carpenter and I was a visitor at the house where he was working. The bumper sticker on his pickup read Too Cute To Stay Home, a gross understatement, and after a brief conversation that took place on either side of an enormous snapping turtle in the path between us, he declared, “I’m taking you four wheeling.” We knew absolutely nothing about each other, but if it had been a movie one of us would have had to die, because it was a short but perfect love story. One week. “Stay,” he said, “I will build you a house.”
In the photo he is sitting on a porch railing, half naked, perfect, crooking his finger and grinning at me. There was nothing ho-hum about him. He was turning twenty-one and I was forty-eight. “Tell me about your work,” I said. “ Really?” he asked.” Really,” I said, “Tell me everything.” “Well,” he said, “to begin with, the plumb line is God.”
I am eighty-two now, and I brag about my twelve grandchildren and my two great grandchildren, and grab all the gravitas I can about being in my eighties, but right now I’m surrendering to the pleasure of this photograph, and the longing it awakens, grateful that I can still be undone.
Abigail, I guess I'd follow you anywhere too. Your work always lights a fire in me that says, "Notice everything. Forget nothing. Write it better." So I keep trying. ~Linda Clare, writing The Deep End.