Our blogfriend Gerard at American Digest has a story to tell, and tells it. All writers know what it is to retreat into a world of your own making inside your head. What if it was all you had?
I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa
as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot
sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my
grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd
ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first
wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better
days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the
morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a
California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young
girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a
rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs
or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and
above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down
at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my
head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the
spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a
million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over
again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating,
finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and,
finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery
complete.
The whole thing's here. I'd read it if I were you.
