You knew what was going to happen, but you did it anyway…
The problem with family is that some of the best stories you own cannot (or perhaps should not) be told until the subject(s) whom the stories concern die, and who knows how you’ll feel about it then? You could spend a goodly portion of your life waiting for this to happen, which is in itself a highly dysfunctional act that carries within it a cautionary tale. The other option is to do what many have before me; pull the pin, toss it into a crowd and see what happens. From Pat Conroy to David Sedaris, many have canonized their own brand of familial lunacy to varying degrees of ire and abandonment. Conroy’s father, The Great Santini himself, attended his son’s book signings, proclaiming to his fans “I hope you enjoyed my boy’s work of fiction.”
Anyway. There’s some darkly humorous familial vignettes sitting in a dusty digital folder. Every once in a while, another absurdity from the past, stranger than fiction, will rise from the depths and the folder will grow by one. I recently looked through some of these (some are quite old) and saw the collection in a new light. Following the publication of Two Hours Before Winter, people I’ve known a long time have commented after reading it something along the lines of: “Whoa, man…what kind of mind thinks this way? You seem like a fairly nice guy…”
He seemed like a nice guy is often the closing quote, usually made by a puffy, painfully caucasian neighbor, in some gruesome news article about a nutter who did something terrible. Being aware of this, it’s interesting to hear it said in a roundabout way about me. In looking through these stories, however, I saw an unwittingly scrawled map of personal psychological development, replete with monsters, harpies, succubi, satyrs, saints, martyrs, etc. Follow the roots of Two Hours Before Winter backwards into the fog of memory and you’ll find them knotted up in these other stories, which is to say they are rooted in me. All good and honest stories, be they prose, film or orally told, bear witness to the formative events that shape us all. Hopefully, the telling makes us reflect.
In the occasional darkness of life, through whatever medium of expression that suits us individually, I hope we can all find the levity and necessary humor to express what the darkness is, stand in light after it passes, and breath deeply and laugh in the face of our own mortality with awareness, gratitude and grace.
I’ll be putting a few of these pieces out soon, for what good is a tale if it not be told?