https://musingsbygarrett.com Musings by Garrett Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:53:30 +0000 https://musingsbygarrett.com en https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-1 Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:53:29 +0000 Musings by Garrett https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-1 <img width="1898" height="1236" width_o="1898" height_o="1236" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/031d968f9bffc847ee66db456d8ce245a06cf8b4703b481c54bf18ac91c76882/Captura-de-Pantalla-2023-03-10-a-las-9.56.29-p.m..png" data-mid="171275309" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/031d968f9bffc847ee66db456d8ce245a06cf8b4703b481c54bf18ac91c76882/Captura-de-Pantalla-2023-03-10-a-las-9.56.29-p.m..png" /> Mobile Homes 1. Single Wide We watched the trailer burn from across the street that night in Miss Ronda Calvert’s front yard. It was just after midnight in Meadow Green Mobile Home Park and I was twelve years old. The sky was a tar-black smear emblazoned with stars that went from visible to obscured as the billowing smoke from the fire intensified. The dusty gray plume like a spirit rising upward into the night. From one direction, I heard the screeching guitar riffs from Paradise City emanating from a neighbor’s window. From another, I could hear the dissonant chorus of exotic birds in Ronnie Pruitt’s trailer squawking and singing in rising tones, as if they knew my home was smoldering to the ground. Sirens came later, accompanied by the bright red and blue lights of the deputies, the firetruck, and the ambulance. Our trailer, ablaze and consuming itself, was all the news that night in Wilmer County. Miss Ronda Calvert had made hot chocolate for me and my little brother, Jon Jon, while Mama smoked a Virginia Slim and watched the firemen put out the flames. I remember the way she held my hand so tightly, tears and mascara trickling down the sides of her leathery cheeks. She looked so pretty with the lights from the patrol car and the firetruck dancing along her face, even though she was so sad. We all were, except for my Dad. He was already drunk — two sheets to the wind, as my Granny used to say — and getting taken down to the Wilmer County Sheriff’s Office for some questioning. “Fuckin’ crackheads gonna ruin it for everybody,” Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend yelled at the deputy’s car that took my dad away. I didn’t know what a crackhead was back then, but I knew it had to be something bad. I had heard Mama use the word before to describe a group of guys who had been evicted from a trailer a few lots down from ours the year before. “Was my Dad like those guys?”, I wondered to myself that night. As far as I knew, both of my parents were good people who worked hard and paid the bills on time. We always had enough food and groceries in the house, even though Mama made us keep track of how many Little Debbies and Walmart-brand sodas we drank. She made us adhere to the hand-drawn “sweet sheet” on the fridge, a straightforward system of check boxes to make sure we weren’t being too gluttonous. No more than two Little Debbies and two sodas a day was the rule. I didn’t see Mama get angry too often as a kid, but the quickest way to get her there would be to finish off a box of her favorite sodas, Diet Mountain Lightnings, without asking. The last Diet Mountain Lightning was always for Mama. Mama worked on and off at the local diner in town, always quitting over some dumb spat with a customer, only to return a few days later. She sometimes picked up shifts at the Arby’s on the county line. The owner was an old high school crush who gave her the work when she really needed it. Dad worked as a mechanic at the Jiffy Lube Express down by the Wilmer County Post Office. More often than not, when I think about Dad, I conjure up an image of him with tousled hair, covered in grease, and smelling like BO. I knew my Dad and Uncle Rob liked to play cards for money and they definitely drank a lot, but my Dad was the sweetest man I knew, regardless of his questionable habits and short temper. By the time the Wilmer County officials and the firemen left the scene, my childhood home had been reduced to a pile of ash. When I close my eyes, I can still smell the stench of the trailer fire — a mix of chemicals and paint and burnt rubber and charcoal — as if I’m still barefoot in Miss Ronda Calvert’s yard, little wet blades of grass sticking up between my toes. Weakening wisps of smoke made their way out of the rubble and into the air. Our trailer looked like the turkey from the Thanksgiving before that Mama had put into the oven and forgotten about because she didn’t set the timer. Dad got so angry that day and yelled at Mama for what seemed like forever while Uncle Rob laughed with a dizzy grin across the room. We ended up eating KFC with our dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pecan pie that year. The days that followed were, surprisingly, some of the best of my childhood. We got to miss an entire week of school following the fire. Miss Ronda Calvert let the four of us stay in her extra bedroom and her pug, Cinnamon, would curl up to me and Jon Jon on our pallet of blankets on the floor at night. All of our neighbors were so kind to us after the fire, something that my Dad thought was “fucked up” and “fake.” As kids, Jon Jon and I thought it was pretty great and it made us feel special. In those days, the trailer park was more like an amusement park than anything else, so naturally, getting to spend an entire week inside of Meadow Green instead of going to school felt like the best thing that could have happened to us. During the days following the fire, Mama made phone calls to relatives and friends, while also waiting to hear back from the insurance company. She was so proud that she had opted for rental insurance, something that, as she would quickly let you know, wasn’t common for most folks living in a trailer park. “Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance — the Six P’s”, she still preaches to this day. Mama told her friends and our cousins that she was in between waitressing jobs even though the truth was that she could go back to the diner or pick up a few weeks at the Arby’s anytime she wanted. Instead, she had been taking cash from the savings account that held the money she got from Granny’s life insurance policy. We would end up moving into a crimson red and off-white trailer, A-17, near the front of Meadow Green, but we had to wait five weeks for the insurance claim money to come through. Our little family hunkered down in the humble guest room at Miss Ronda Calvert’s place until move-in day. I remember that Miss Ronda Calvert and Mama would watch their soaps — mostly Days of our Lives and General Hospital — while Jon Jon and I just roamed around, existing and yet not existing in Mama and Miss Ronda Calvert’s world. This whole fabric of life that usually played out while Jon Jon and I were in school was now something we were forcibly woven into — at least for a little while. Half apathetically and partially because things were just different back then, Mama didn’t mind what we did during the day. We were free to roam the trailer park from sunup to sundown. As long as we didn’t walk out of the front gate of Meadow Green and onto County Road 145, we were good as gold. All of our clothes and what few toys we had were all burned up the night of the fire, but we received so many bags of donated goods afterward that we ended up having to give some of them back to the Tri-County Goodwill. Some of the clothes didn’t fit Jon Jon and I very well and I remember one of the bags of clothes that were actually my size smelled like my Uncle Rob’s aftershave. So there we were, no home, no toys, and running around in somebody else’s clothes in Meadow Green, all while I smelled like my goofy Uncle Rob. Cindy Miller lived in the first trailer right past the front gate of Meadow Green and was a boisterous redhead in her mid-fifties. She had lived there in her fading, baby blue single wide trailer for over a decade and also was a part-time property manager for the trailer park. I once saw her kick the front door down of a trailer across the way from Ronnie Pruitt’s. She got into a huge fight with the woman inside and pulled a lock of her hair out before the cops came. Apparently, the woman hadn’t paid rent in four months and was using the place for bad stuff. “Cindy done beat the hell out of that hooker living in B-25,” my Dad told Uncle Rob after the altercation. Mama used to tell us that even if there was no money left in the world that her and Dad would find a way to pay rent as to not have to get into a squabble with Cindy Miller. I suspected that Mama also needed to preserve the relationship for other reasons, namely because she used Cindy Miller’s tanning bed, which was tucked squarely into a back corner of her living room next to a small aquarium with a single beta fish inside. For all of that meanness inside of her, I nonetheless always admired Cindy Miller because she stood up for what she thought was right and she didn’t take any BS from anyone. She let Jon Jon and I put together jigsaw puzzles on a foldout table in front of her trailer while she cross-stitched and crocheted. We put together the same thousand-piece puzzles what seemed like dozens and dozens of times. One was a picture of a pair of killer whales jumping into the air at sundown and though it was missing several pieces, it was mine and Jon Jon’s favorite. It bothered me so much the first time we got to the very end of the puzzle, only for us to realize that we would never fully finish it. But, after a while, the missing pieces made me like the puzzle even more because I was able to imagine a million different ideas of what those pieces might have on them. Maybe they just completed the image or maybe they changed it somehow, revealing something that we didn’t notice before. Those two beautiful creatures, highlighted by a molten sunset were wearing what looked like a smile. Most likely, because only they knew what we could not. In the cold, dark waters of whatever place far away from Meadow Green that they swam in, they knew what the other pieces of the puzzle looked like. The Summer before the fire, Cindy Williams gave Mama a small, cream-colored circle of cloth that she had embroidered. It said “Too Blessed to be Stressed” on it in violet lettering, surrounded by a mix of red and yellow tulips stitched with near-perfect precision. One of many items from our past that would be incinerated in the fire, I remember that gift was one of Mama’s favorite possessions. She hung it directly over the entryway to the kitchen in our trailer and always told visitors that she knew the woman who made it. And so we had Cindy Miller and her tanning bed. But we also had Ronnie Pruitt and Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend, some young blonde with braces and a belly button ring whose name I forgot long ago. We had my Uncle Rob and Miss Ronda Calvert. We had Miss Ronda Calvert’s son, Charlie, and his son, Clint. We had Nathan Cartwright, who had not one, but two trailers inside of Meadow Green. While some people tend to think that everyone who lives in a trailer park are trailer trash who don’t come from nothin’ and will never have nothin’, my childhood memories disprove this in so many ways. *** Ronnie Pruitt had an obsession with exotic birds and snakes. Over his few years living in Meadow Green, he had accumulated at least two dozen of them. Who needed the Zoo when you could just go visit Ronnie Pruitt and Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend? We used to talk for hours on end to an old, rather rough looking Blue-Gold Macaw named Sandy who would repeat anything you said to her. There were cockatoos and parakeets and other birds, but Sandy was always my favorite. There were snakes too, like the reticulated python, Monty, that once escaped his enclosure only to be found in Ronnie Pruitt’s front yard, curled up beneath a lawn chair. Snakes always gave me the creeps though, so I would usually stick with Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend, Sandy the Macaw, and the birds while Ronnie Pruitt and Jon Jon hung out with Monty and his reptilian friends. One time, Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend took one of the small cockatoos out of its cage and sat it on her lap. It started to nibble on her belly button ring, peaking out from under a tie-dye crop top she wore. I wonder what that bird thought of living in Ronnie Pruitt’s trailer, a million miles away from the jungle, looking at me side-eyed, Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend’s cubic zirconia body jewelry under its tongue. Uncle Rob used to live with us when we first came to Meadow Green, but he ended up renting his own trailer, C-11, at the far back side of the trailer park soon after. Uncle Rob was covered in tattoos, including one of Snoopy smoking a joint, which Jon Jon would end up having replicated onto his own forearm years later. Uncle Rob was a ladies man and was known around town for his devilish good looks and for selling pot. We used to go to Uncle Rob’s and the one thing I remember more than anything was his huge TV. “It’s a plasma. This is the future. It’s like multi-colored gel that oozes behind the screen to help make the picture high-definition and, like, it makes the colors really pop.” I remember Uncle Rob trying to explain how the new TV worked and how great the NASCAR races and football games were going to be on it. All I could think about was the plasma. Was it like lava? Or Play-Dough? Or was it more like water? My answer came to me a few months after Uncle Rob bought the TV when he cracked the screen by accident while moving a coffee table across the room. The picture was distorted in the exact spot where the screen was cracked but, to my surprise, nothing seeped out. I don’t know why this disappointed me, but somehow it did. That TV stayed cracked like that for years and I can no longer remember what it looked like in its unbroken, new form. And well, Miss Ronda Calvert was like a second mother to me during my family’s time in Meadow Green. As Mama liked to say, she was a God-fearing woman and she would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it. She had a hot tub behind her house and had to forego having hot water in her half bathroom so that this bad boy could be heated. It felt like such a luxury, rain or shine, hot or cold, to hop into the jacuzzi and lean against the whirring jets. The smell of your skin after getting out of the hot tub was both a good smell and yet a foul one at the same time. As a kid, I never fully understood why Miss Ronda Calvert always told us we needed to shower after getting out of it. “I just shocked the tub and that chlorine is strong as Hell. Go rinse it off, right now, y’all here?” I can still hear her voice every time I see a hot tub at a hotel or on TV to this day. When Miss Ronda Calvert died my junior year of high school, her son, Charlie, sold the hot tub to a man in another trailer park on the other side of Wilmer County. I knew there were other places like Meadow Green, but I didn’t like the idea of another one having a hot tub like we did. At that point, we hadn’t used the thing in years ever since Miss Ronda Calvert was diagnosed with breast cancer, but it was the idea that mattered. I really loved Miss Ronda Calvert and she inspired me to want to be the kindest person I could be. Mama has a polaroid of Jon Jon and I holding slices of watermelon and smiling while flanking Miss Ronda Calvert. She keeps it in her wallet. A snapshot of a forgotten, wet-hot day in Meadow Green that Mama found on Miss Ronda Calvert’s fridge after she passed. Charlie Calvert and his son, Clint Calvert, lived right next door to Miss Ronda Calvert. Although Clint and I went to school together and were both the same age, we didn’t really get along or hang out in the same circles. He was always a bit of a bully and Jon Jon used to say that Clint Calvert had one freckle on his face for every kid he had beat up. Indeed, Clint Calvert had a small, squished face chock-full of freckles, a buzzed, sunburnt head, and an intimidating disposition. Before he was ever a teenager, he was already dipping tobacco and drinking beer in broad daylight, even when grownups were around. I know it hurt Miss Ronda Calvert so much when she saw how Clint behaved, but she always said she was praying for him and knew that it was in God’s hands. Even though Clint Calvert was not to be messed with, when he visited his mom over in Lakeside, we would go and take over the trampoline he had behind his trailer. Charlie Calvert had bought it for him as a birthday present and we never once saw Clint Calvert jumping on it. It was such a shame and on more than one occasion Jon Jon and I thought about asking Charlie Calvert if we could have it. If we didn’t think Clint Calvert would have shredded us to pulp, we probably would have. When Charlie Calvert got back with his ex-wife, Clint Calvert’s Mom, they moved over to Lakeside and left the rusty, forgotten trampoline behind. By that time, it was all ours, but Jon Jon was always gone off with his girlfriend, Macy Burgess, and I was working my rear end off to have a shot at going to college. Instead of jumping on that trampoline in Meadow Green, I was on roller skates working double shifts at the Sonic Drive-In to save money for an SAT prep class that was held on Saturday mornings over in Green County. That SAT prep class would end up “getting me off the mountain”, which was my Granny’s old way of saying getting the fuck out of Wilmer County. My senior year, my parents got divorced and my Dad moved all the way down to Wilkins County, a two hour, boring, straight-shot of a drive down Interstate 65. Nothing but truck stops and “Jesus Saves” signs and fast food outposts along the way. Jon Jon, a year younger than me, had failed 10th grade and decided not to go to Summer School that year. Him and Macy Burgess went to live with my Dad in Wilkins County and they both dropped out of high school. Jon Jon got his GED and started an apprenticeship working as a carpenter, while Macy Burgess worked at a nail salon next to a Mexican restaurant. “High School and College are such a fucking scam, dude,” I remember Jon Jon saying to me when I went to visit him and Dad. “It’s like all this bullshit that you’re never going to use again, meanwhile, did you know there is a major shortage of folks like me and Dad who actually fix people’s shit when it breaks? And people who make furniture and build houses and do plumbing and AC? And no fuckin’ lie, there are nowhere near enough electricians to go around these days. Holy Hell, it’s just all such a fuckin’ lie. All that shit they tell us growing up about good grades and gettin’ into college and shit like that.” My final year at Wilmer County High School was also my last year at Meadow Green. I was seventeen and I passed a lot of the time working, studying, and also over at the spare trailer that was owned, not rented, by Nathan Cartwright. Nathan Cartwright was a giant of a man, but of the most friendly varieties. He was six-foot-four and easily weighed over 400 pounds. He would often eat an entire box of Zebra Cakes in one sitting, seated in his electronic wheelchair alongside a three liter of soda and a tin of holiday popcorn mix. I’m not sure Nathan Cartwright would have lasted one day in our trailer with Mama and her sweet sheet on the fridge. Nathan Cartwright was what Mama called a hoarder. He had stuff — trinkets, boxes, food, trash, clothes, stuffed animals — everywhere you looked. I could often hear the sounds of Gameshow Network reruns echoing from the windows of the trailer he lived in. Match Game 76’, The Price is Right and $25,000 Pyramid were a few of his favorites. He had arranged a deal with the owners of Meadow Green a long time ago to rent-to-own his trailer. When Meadow Green changed ownership the Summer before my senior year, the new management company offered people deals to buy some of the older trailers in the park. One was just not enough for Nathan Cartwright. “Nathan Cartwright gone on and bought that ole’ beat-to-shit brown trailer next to his, y’know that?,” the Son of the Woman with the Oxygen Tank who moved into Ronnie Pruitt’s old place said to me one morning as I was getting back home from my SAT Prep course. When I ran into Nathan Cartwright at the community mailboxes the next week, I asked him why he needed to buy another trailer in Meadow Green. “Runnin’ out of room, I reckon. I got a lot of stuff,” he said, beaming back to me with an innocent, but swollen face. His eyes with a tinge of yellow and a bead of sweat on his forehead. An orange stain on his chin and on the upper part of his white tee shirt. “I ain’t living in it or using the kitchen or anything like that. Mostly just for storage and I might rent it out one day. No cable in it right now, but there’s power and hot water. If you ever need a space to go, consider it your own little hideout. I keep the key under the flower pot on the front steps.” Apart from the occasional conversation at the mailboxes, I barely knew Nathan Cartwright. For some reason though, I trusted him and didn’t consider him a threat. After all, I had a feeling I could outrun him if he ever did end up being a crazy person. There was no way on God’s Green Earth that his wheelchair could go over five miles per hour. I ended up taking a sleeping bag and a few SAT prep books over to his spare trailer the next evening. I would often use that space to decompress, study, sleep, and whatever else I wanted. I smoked weed for the first time on the back steps of that trailer. My friend Lacy Benton showed me how to make a pipe out of a Sprite can and that was the way it went down. Nathan Cartwright’s spare trailer was like having my own world apart from the rest of Meadow Green. A world where I could be good or bad or loud or quiet, slowly marching toward adulthood to the backdrop of low ceilings, the smell of weed, and Fleetwood Mac on my Walkman. A few years ago, Mama told me that Nathan Cartwright’s Sister found him dead in his trailer. The Wilmer County Coroner said he had been dead in there for at least a week, still seated in his wheelchair. All I could think about was what gameshow he was watching when his heart stopped. Did someone hit a perfect dollar on the spinning wheel in The Price is Right and it was just too much for his heart to handle? Or, perhaps, did Betty White say something hilarious in Match Game and it sent his pulse into a frenzy? I imagined a parade of plump little zebras galloping through his arteries until they reached his heart and gave him one collective kick. Nathan Cartwright was such a generous and kind-spirited man, but beneath that kindness was an overwhelming loneliness that would be his undoing. He held on to everything, but he left this Earth with nothing. The familiar faces of Meadow Green were the supporting cast members of my most fond memories as a young person. It was all I had ever known, from age nine when we moved in after Granny died, to the Summer of my eighteenth birthday when I left for college. Turns out, all that studying had paid off. I was headed all the way up to New York City where I would attend nursing school and start a new chapter in my life. The bright lights and constant noise and omniscient smell of piss, pizza, and garbage would serve as a new world for me. I got as far away from Meadow Green as possible, but Meadow Green would always take up space within me. Meadow Green taught me that most everything you need is all around you. Nobody felt better than anyone else there because once you entered into the trailer park, all people were equal. Everyone knew this to be true. It was as if time and status and ambition were all suspended on the inside and it didn’t all start moving again until you touched the pothole-littered asphalt of County Road 145. You see, in that trailer park, we all knew who we were and who we weren’t. We didn’t live in normal homes, but rather, in mobile homes. The concept is that these houses, which sit atop a set of wheels, could be picked up and moved from one place to another with relative ease. I always liked to imagine all the places we could take our trailer when I was a kid. My Mom and Dad and Jon Jon and I could go to Las Vegas or Canada or New Orleans or Maine or anywhere in between because our house had wheels. I always thought this was the best kind of home someone could have because you didn’t have to pick just one place to be. You could be anywhere. Even though I had never seen anyone take their trailer with them when they left Meadow Green, I just assumed it was because they had another trailer somewhere else. Or, perhaps, they were moving to a real house with two stories and everything like my friend KC Williams and his family lived in. They owned the local barbecue restaurant and five different Chevron gas stations in the Tri-County area. The kinds of houses that KC Williams and his family had were stuck in one precise place forever. This never appealed to me, and so regardless of us not having the choice to own a house like that anyway, I always considered us the lucky ones. Mom, Dad, Jon Jon and I had Meadow Green and all of its curiosities and personalities. In those days, I didn’t think I needed anything else. I was an adult, somewhere in my mid 20’s, when I realized that the reason mobile homes are so easy to move around isn’t for the people who inhabit them at all. It’s for real estate folks and property developers to be able to cheaply and conveniently move them from the plant in which they’re made to a place that will most likely be their final destination. These so-called businessmen take advantage of the fact that to have a dream is but a privilege for the people they market to. They know their audience and, like predators, they have poor people build trailers in the night and then sell them for ten times more to their cousins, brothers, mothers, neighbors, and friends. They sell the idea of mobility to the immobile. The name mobile home just seems so wrong for something that will never move. Upon realizing all of this, I felt a pang of shame in my chest for ever thinking it could have been any different. Our trailer on a hill somewhere in the Puget Sound. Jon Jon and I watching the Orcas from Cindy Miller’s puzzle jumping out of the water at sundown. 2. Double Wide During my sophomore year of college, Dad called me twice — once in March and again in November. The November call would bring me back South. It wasn’t uncommon for Dad and I to go long bouts of time without talking and it had nothing to do with how much we loved one another. This was just our cadence and it still is to this day. He sometimes pokes fun of me for being a complete Mama’s Boy, as I usually talk to Mama a few times a week. *** In March, Dad’s voice was abnormally perky and full of joy. He was talking a mile a minute. “Your old man’s gettin’ hitched to a pretty lady. You gotta come down for the weddin’. I just know you and Misty are gonna be thick as thieves. She’s really the best, I swear it.” Misty Evans met my Dad when her silver Ford F-150 sputtered to a halt, as faith would have it, right in front of the Richard &amp; Son’s Auto Garage where my Dad worked in Wilkins County. The rest is history, as they say. My Dad fixed up her car — it just needed a routine oil change that had been neglected for way too long — and worked up the nerve to ask her out on a date. I imagined Misty Evans listening to my Dad’s awful jokes while they drank coffee and ate late night breakfast at the Waffle House. He could be quite the charmer, and after five years of being sober as a judge, he had found a penchant for going to the gym again. He proposed to Misty Evans after less than six months of dating and while I would not end up being able to make the wedding due to end-of-semester finals, I had the local florist deliver three dozen white roses to a woman I had never met. As for my Dad, I ordered him an orange necktie, his favorite color, and cufflinks from an online store and had them sent to Wilkins County. My Uncle Rob told me that Dad shed a tear when the gifts came in the mail. I was happy for my Dad, even though I knew Jon Jon was causing him grief. Jon Jon had inherited every ounce of love for the trouble and the bottle that my Dad had given up. I heard things — from Mama and my cousins and old friends — but I could never imagine Jon Jon doing anyone any harm. For me, that was that and I kept in close contact with Jon Jon. The year before, Macy Burgess gave birth to twin boys, Cody and Randall. The spitting image of Jon Jon with their blue eyes, cocoa brown hair, and fair white skin, Cody and Randall brought me into Uncledom and I was the happiest man alive. I made the trip down to Wilkins County the day after they were born. In tow, I brought with me a copy of my favorite childhood book, Goodnight Moon, some booties, and a pair of fuzzy blankets. I spent over a week helping out around the house and spending time with Cody, Randall, Jon Jon, and Macy Burgess. Jon Jon would often fall asleep with both boys on his chest, laid up in the Lazy Boy recliner in the living room of his and Macy Burgess’s double wide trailer. Dad and Jon Jon split the cost of a brand new double wide the year before the boys were born and it sat on the back half of Dad’s property, a modest 10 acres in Wilkins County. Staying at Jon Jon’s practically meant staying with Dad. “These trailers don’t even look like trailers no more. I mean, shit, we got a front porch, a side porch, a brand new carport, and a pool out back over at my place,” Dad told me one night over a dinner Macy Burgess whipped up for us. Stroganoff Hamburger Helper — my favorite dinner as a child. I wondered if someone told her this or if, perhaps, it was just meant to be. “They even started making damn triple wide trailers at the plant over in Jenkins last year. Them fuckers look like a ranch home or something from the 50’s. Real nice, I’m tellin’ ya.” The irony of Dad trying his hardest to make a trailer seem like anything but a trailer evoked a strange duality within me. On one hand, I felt a sense of pity for Dad because I knew that he wanted to prove to the world, but mostly Jon Jon and I, that he was a good man. Just like our old trailer back in Meadow Green, Dad had burnt himself down to the ground and started over. He was right with God and off the booze and in the gym and working as hard as he could to make things right. On the other hand, it was hard not to admire how hard Dad worked to make a mobile home a real, permanent one. And he had accomplished just that. Dad still manages to tend to the garden out back, clean leaves out of the above-ground pool, mow the lawn, and touch up any chipped paint on the vinyl siding of the double wide, all before most people even get out of bed. I have fond memories of those few days spent with my darling little nephews, Jon Jon, Macy Burgess, and Dad. Inevitably, I told myself I would be back very soon to see Cody and Randall. They grow up way too fast at that age to let too much time pass between visits. And so, we ended my stay down in Wilkins County with an early dinner at the Cracker Barrel. Afterward, I made my way back north toward Wilmer County to spend the night with Mama before headed back to the big city. Mama had moved to a small two bedroom apartment in Lakeside the year I went to college. She was cleaning houses now full time and hadn’t stepped foot in the diner in a really long time. Admittedly, she still goes through the drive-through at the county line Arby’s from time to time to catch a peak at her high school crush. On my way to Lakeside, it hit me that I would have to pass by Meadow Green along the way. When I saw the old, dilapidating sign with its mint green letters (Welcome to Meadow Green Mobile Home Park) and long-ago-blown-out bulbs from a distance, my stomach lurched. It could have been the Cracker Barrel but I knew it was something else. As I pulled my rental car into the entryway of Meadow Green, I promptly made my way back to A-17, the last trailer I had ever lived in. To my surprise, a woman was outside smoking a cigarette while walking two small dogs in what you could call the front yard of my old trailer. We briefly made eye contact and, though I tried to immediately look away, it was too late. She motioned at me with a little half-wave and then signaled for me to roll down the window, cranking her hand in midair while she held the lit cigarette in between her lips. “Are you lost, young man?,” she said to me, as I let the window roll all the way down. The warm air of the South was already stifling in early Spring, mixing with the cool AC of the rental car. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t lost at all. I wanted to tell her that I used to live in this very trailer that now she called hers. I wanted to tell her about learning to ride my first bike and jumping a makeshift ramp behind B-5. I wanted to tell her about Miss Ronda Calvert. About how I masturbated for the first time in my life in her hot tub one night and then felt guilty about it for weeks. About how the spot where a dumpster now sat was once a pile of ashes that was once my old home. I wanted to tell her about how I took six practice SAT exams in a trailer that belonged to a dead man. I wanted to tell her how to smoke pot out of a Sprite can. I really wanted to tell her to put out that cigarette. To run as fast as she could until she got off the mountain and could see the world outside of Wilmer County. Instead, I feigned ignorance, pretended to be lost, and let her give me directions to Lakeside. She incorrectly told me to turn left at the Wilmer County Post Office even though I well knew it was a right turn. She watched me slowly put the car in reverse and head back toward County Road 145. In the rearview mirror, I saw she maintained a fixed stare on the rental, still puffing on her cigarette, taking a slow draw and exhaling straight up into the air like the smoke I once saw rising from a single wide on fire in the dark. That night, Mama told me a disturbing truth. She told me Dad was cooking meth amphetamines in the bathtub for Uncle Rob to sell the night the trailer set fire. I cried so hard that I thought my eyeballs were going to burst out of their sockets. All of Dad’s hard work and his reformation now made sense to me. I thought about Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend calling my Dad a crackhead. How did she know and I didn’t? Did the birds and snakes whisper secrets to her that only she could understand? Or were there yet more pieces to an altogether different puzzle that were missing for me? To this day, I’ve never uttered a word about my hidden knowledge to Dad or to anyone else for that matter. It’s now just another strand of Meadow Green that lives like a vapor forever in my head, able to be summoned, like the others, when the moment is ripe for it. *** In November, Dad’s voice was bone dry and slow. “Our Jon Jon’s dead,” he said, crying through the static of the land line. Macy Burgess told my Dad that she found Jon Jon foaming at the mouth on the living room floor of their double wide. She tried calling for help, but it was too late, as Jon Jon breathed his last strangled breath a few minutes later. I was at a complete loss for words and began to sob. Confusion came first, then anger, and weeks later, guilt, as my younger brother was dead and I never saw it coming. I couldn’t help but think about Macy Burgess and what she was going to do. About Cody and Randall and how I hoped they didn’t see Jon Jon like that, shaking and foaming on the floor like some kind of dying monster. Opioids. Meth. Drinking. Plenty of visits to jail. It all finally caught up to Jon Jon. While Macy Burgess was out grocery shopping with the kids, Jon Jon emptied a bottle of Jack Daniels and a handful of oxycontin. I pretended not to know all the things I heard and had chose instead to focus on what felt good when we talked on the phone. Ignoring the ugly, like I had been conditioned to do my entire life. The last time we spoke, he was talking about a man who was buying up all the land in town and was going to put up an apartment complex and a laundromat. He was excited that there was a Chick-fil-a in town now, because that was his favorite. I told him about a container home I stayed at in Upstate New York and he thought it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. “Haven’t you done got enough of your trailer livin’ out of you, bro?”, he joked, giggling through the phone. He wanted to have another kid and Macy Burgess hoped it was a girl this time because the twin boys were driving her halfway up a wall. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t wish I could have asked him about what was really going on. About how I could have helped. I wonder if Jon Jon would have known what the missing pieces from Cindy Miller’s puzzle looked like if he would still be here with us. He never got to see the Orcas, even though last Summer my boyfriend and I went whale watching. I finally got to put together the missing pieces and, as it turned out, they just completed the picture. No surprises. This consoled me. Even though he didn’t get to see the whales, Jon Jon got the gist of it. When I went back down to Wilkins County where Jon Jon’s funeral was held, everything felt unreal. Black and white. Without sound. A hazy, speckled filter applied to every condolence. Every fast food meal that we ate as sustenance. Every box of Kleenex discarded into the trash can. November in the South is just as cold as other parts of the country sometimes, but most people who aren’t from those parts don’t know that. I could barely stand to look at Jon Jon in the casket. He was all dolled up and in a suit — not fitting for him and I couldn’t help but think he was grimacing from above. When I closed my eyes to just cry and not have to look anymore, I saw Jon Jon, foaming at the mouth like the forgotten corner of a tide pool at the beach. It was all too much to have to open my eyes. To close them, was just as painful. 3. A Different Mountain My favorite place to eat breakfast in New York City is a southern restaurant that reminds me of home — biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, grits, and sweet tea. I traded in Meadow Green for a dorm room and a dorm room for a series of shitty apartments before landing a job as a nurse, now an RN, for one of the cities top public hospitals. I live with my boyfriend, Keith, in a luxury condominium in Tribeca, the complete antithesis to Meadow Green. I’ve told Keith about my days in Wilmer County and he looks at me, wide-eyed in disbelief when I tell him stories about my time in Meadow Green. For a lifelong New Yorker raised within the city’s confines, it all must sound like complete make believe. But alas, I had the trailer park and Keith had Central Park. “You don’t even have a southern accent when we talk, but when you talk to your Mama, it really does come out. It’s like a different person,” Keith said to me. He was referring to those moments where cement&nbsp;becomes see-mint and pecan becomes pee-can. It is a different person. From a different life. One that I can never forget about, because it made me who I am today. Forged by the fire of a single wide trailer that my Dad accidentally burned to the ground. My rough, country edges smoothed out thanks to the kindness of an overweight hoarder who secretly had a crush on Richard Dawson from the $25,000 Pyramid. Thanks to people like Miss Ronda Calvert and Nathan Cartwright and Cindy Williams, I truly am today Too Blessed to be Stressed. I often think what it would be like to host Miss Ronda Calvert or Nathan Cartwright or Cindy Williams or Jon Jon and Macy Burgess or Ronnie Pruitt and Ronnie Pruitt’s Girlfriend for dinner and wine here at my condo. We would overlook the skyscrapers and the Hudson River and the new condos popping up like bamboo shoots in Jersey City. Maybe they would want to move their trailers smack dab in the middle of Union Square Park or Broadway or the Brooklyn Bridge or Fifth Avenue. Or, maybe they wouldn’t understand why I chose to pay the absurd cost of living somewhere half the size of a single wide trailer in a building with hundreds of other people. The other night, I had a dream that awoke me in a cold sweat. I was transported to a day when the humidity surrounded Jon Jon and I like a fog made of maple syrup. The sun a descending, peach-colored circle in the early evening sky. We jumped and jumped on the trampoline behind Charlie Calvert’s trailer and the cicadas sang their song. Clint Calvert couldn’t hurt us and school was out for Spring Break and that was back before the trailer burned. Out of nowhere, the wind began to violently pick up and a tornado appeared on the horizon the way things in dreams can appear so senselessly out of the blue. I told Jon Jon we had to leave right away and I folded him up and shoved him into my suitcase, his body bending and melting like the plasma in Uncle Rob’s TV, a spittle of yellow foam bubbling in the corner of his mouth as he looked at me. My thirteen year old self sped a car I didn’t recognize toward the entryway of Meadow Green. As I was pulling out onto County Road 145, I had to swerve and just barely missed Miss Ronda Calvert, who was waving goodbye to Jon Jon and I. As I sped further and further away, I realized we were no longer in a car, but that the car had turned into a killer whale and we were in the Hudson River, making our way to my condo where I would introduce Jon Jon to Keith and everything would be okay. *** Unlike Dad, I never internalized a single ounce of shame in my being for having been raised in a trailer park. Growing up, it was just our reality and I lacked a certain self-awareness that our situation in Meadow Green was indicative of what some might call being white trash. Well into my early 30’s now, I still proudly tell folks that I grew up roaming the dirt paths of Meadow Green. My mind wanders to KC Williams back in Wilmer County. I wonder to myself if he still lives in his two story house and wakes up before the roosters crow to start smoking brisket. Long ago, I learned that when you forget where you come from, you forget who you are and where you want to go. We often need to forget more in life than we need to learn, but forgetting where you come from is never a good thing. As much as my Granny would be proud of me today to know that I got off that mountain, she would be just as proud that I still tell people about my where it all began. In Meadow Green. Watching my trailer burn like the tip of Snoopy’s joint on Uncle Rob and Jon Jons’ arms. https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-2 Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:53:29 +0000 Musings by Garrett https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-2 <img width="1678" height="1238" width_o="1678" height_o="1238" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3cc1e8dded9351a4624ef5dd63405eb215c96394d6ccd5414c09bd62f89c9f3b/Captura-de-Pantalla-2023-03-10-a-las-10.30.45-p.m..png" data-mid="171276346" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3cc1e8dded9351a4624ef5dd63405eb215c96394d6ccd5414c09bd62f89c9f3b/Captura-de-Pantalla-2023-03-10-a-las-10.30.45-p.m..png" /> Tell Your Sister&nbsp;You’ll Be Okay I met Marco at a vintage market near my house when I first moved to Atlanta. He was plopped down on an old leather sofa that sat atop a falling-apart tartan rug in the back of the store. While a girlfriend of mine flipped through a collection of old band tees, I took a seat in a chair facing him and started up a casual conversation. We chatted for a while, swapped Instagrams, and after giving my “I’m looking for community here in Atlanta spill,” he suggested we meet up later that evening. My friends and his. For drinks and video games and whatever else we wanted to get into. And we did. And now, a few months later, here he was — clad in wool, nearly-knee-length socks sitting on my bed and feeling nervous as a wave of sexual tension saturated the room. I feel like the wave could be seen and felt rolling in from afar, but instead of swimming away, we just sat there, prepared to let it crash over our heads. We wanted to feel it sweep us under, contort our warm bodies in violent motion for a moment or two, before we came back to the surface for a gasp of salty air. The bedside was littered with empty, sticky-bottomed glasses, stained crimson from the evening’s dousing of sweet vermouth. Before the vermouth was the champagne. And even earlier was the bottle of Chardonnay we downed while devouring a roast chicken I had made to show off my blossoming cooking skills. We talked about indie films. About how we both wanted to make documentaries. I played the piano and sang for him. We professed our mutual love for beat up sneakers and vinyls and Japanese street fashion and herringbone pants and reading and polaroid photography and New York City. “I feel really comfortable around you. And like, I was a bit nervous before coming over because I didn’t know if I was going to be awkward or what we were going to talk about. But, here we are. I’m glad I came,” he said to me. “Aww. Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. We definitely need to hang out more often.” This wasn’t one of those scenarios where I was blowing smoke up his ass and feigning interest and fake-smiling and all that just to get laid. I was actually feeling something for the first time since breaking up with my ex-boyfriend. I was enjoying myself and was confronted with someone who also cared about making art. Who cared about debating the poignancy (or lack thereof) in award season films. Who cared about my newfound love for cooking and guitar lessons and studying Italian. Careful to not confuse drunk feelings with real feelings or anything like that, I kept giving myself micro pep-talks in my head to stay present and realistic. “He’s straight, you idiot.” “Don’t fuck this up.” “Communicate your intentions so things don’t get weird.” “He definitely wants to mess around but you can’t just go for it because then he’ll know you're on to him and then he’ll feel like a big, non-discreet piece of shit and it’ll be all your fault.” “Just pour some more vermouth.” “Didn’t he say he was into trans girls the first time you met him? That practically makes him queer already, right?” To get out of my own head, I poised a question that kind of fluttered out of my mouth without me giving it much thought: “You’ve really never been with a dude before?”, I asked with a tone that implied every man who calls himself straight in this day and age has definitely done a little bit of same-sex experimentation. “Nope.”, he says back to me in a hushed tone. A reply without eye contact. Lips unevenly pursed and resembling a smirk. A stare meeting the ground as he sits perched on the edge of my platform bed. “Oh. Interesting.” “Yeah, I guess I’ve thought about it a lot before, but it’s never really done anything for me.” “What does that even mean?”, I thought to myself. “Done anything for him? Like, how does he even know what a dick or a man-on-man kiss or anything of the sort does for him unless he tries it?” A quiet blanketed the room for a moment, even though it seemed like an eternity. I leaned forward and put my hand on the small of his back. He looked up at me, his lips slowly pulling apart from one another at this point, a touch of punch-drunk, tipsy boyishness in his face. My cheeks were warm and the amber light from the bedroom floor lamp gave the room a foreign feel to it that could have been anywhere but where we really were. We kissed, slowly and intimately, and afterward, to appear like I was playing it cool, I leaned back onto the pillow where I was previously positioned and smiled at him. “So, how was that?,” I asked. “Interesting. Very interesting. But not so bad,” he replied as he let out a restrained chuckle. I waited on him to come to me. To make the next move, leaning down and laying on top of me as we would continue to kiss and rub our bodies against one another. I wanted to keep our clothes on as we kissed until he could no longer restrain himself. I would patiently wait for the curiosity within him to explode into a ravaging, primal moment of passion and release. But instead, he asked something that caught me off guard: “Have you ever been bullied for being gay?” “Mmm, I mean I guess, but nothing horrible. Why?” “I was just thinking about how, growing up, I was bullied pretty badly for being Latino. Hispanic, as the kids and their parents used to say when I first moved here. Ya know, kids threw rocks at me. They spit in my school lunch. They called me a wetback. They bullied my sister too. Somehow, after a while, they called me a faggot too. I guess they called me that because I didn’t fight back. I never did anything. I just stayed quiet. Or cried. Or let them do things to me.” “Oh shit. I’m so sorry, Marco. That’s awful.”, I said quietly. Talk about a change of energy in the room. But yet, I wasn’t upset that things had taken this direction. Rather, I was listening and feeling sympathetic toward him. I really liked this guy and that was the only thing keeping me in the moment. The man on the edge of my bed, now rendered a boy in his socks and basketball shorts and his oversized tee shirt. I thought he might cry or go to the bathroom or just leave, but rather, he kept going: “One time, this guy who was definitely a teenager and much older than me shoved me down behind the school bleachers after a pep rally. He called me a faggot and pissed on me in front of a group of other boys. My sister saw what was happening and just looked at me from a ways away and was crying. She had tears running down her face and I had this dude’s piss running down mine. I feel like I was such a bad brother. I feel like that is why my sister and I don’t talk that much and aren’t that close. It was so dark and sad and I just don’t know why I let it happen.” I wasn’t sure if there was anything I could say in that moment to make things go back to how they were when we were kissing. When the energy in the room was still glowing from the embers of the evening we had taken part in up to that point. Maybe that wasn’t what I should have been aiming for. Something that just minutes before was aglow now felt damp and cold. Like a wounded animal that now needed more care than ever to make sure it made it through the night. For me, something that felt erotically seismic, yet tender and smooth had somehow managed to evoke something dark, buried, and deeply hurtful within Marco. Our sexuality is a meandering road that has a way of leading us past reflective pools we would, at times, rather not glance into. For Marco, to question his sexual identity, meant to glimpse over his shoulder, backwards into a world that he didn’t want to remember. Faggot Hispanic covered in piss while his sister watches on. Boy sitting on the edge of my bed wanting to kiss me and to be inside of me. A wave crashed over us and the cold water was a surprise. It felt good until it kept coming, pouring over us and dragging us down deeper and deeper. Sticky glasses, completely emptied on the blue carpet by my bed. I taste the vermouth on my lips and wonder if Marco can taste it too. Can he taste me? Or has he gone to that place in his head and I’ve lost him for good? At least for tonight. The orange light of the room now feeling gray and empty. The sun begins to peak through the curtains of my bedroom window as we both realize we have managed to stay up until dawn. “I should probably head home. I have this thing where like, I don’t know I’m like an anxious sleeper and I can’t sleep unless I’m in my bed. And you said you have to work in the morning and it’s already morning and so, you need to rest,” he calmly says while looking at me. I walk him downstairs and we look outside. It’s drizzling rain and we can both tell it’s cold outside before we ever open the door. I tell him he should call a car but he insists on walking. We share an embrace that must have lasted at least fifteen seconds, each rubbing the other’s back and telling each other how good of a time we had. Marco walked into the rain and I shut the door, letting out a sigh and starting to feel anxious. He looked like a lead character in one of our beloved indie films walking past the red stoplight by my house in the early morning sprinkle. I can’t help but think if I will see him again soon. If he will call his sister and tell her he is strong now. And that he will be okay because he met a boy who he likes and who knows how to roast a whole chicken and who will never hurt him because he really cares. https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-3 Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:53:30 +0000 Musings by Garrett https://musingsbygarrett.com/Reading-3 READING 3 ︎︎︎&nbsp;Marcel Proust, Selection 3 from À la recherche du temps perdu Prof. Olivia Theyskens, born April 15, 1976, is a fictitious American literary critic and Sterling Dean of Literature at the fictitious Cargo University. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; She has published innumerable fictitious reviews and articles, as well authored two fictitious volumes of short stories. She is perhaps best known for the fictitious story The Tin Ribbon. This will be her third fictitious workshop for The Writer’s Retreat. <img width="2162" height="3000" width_o="2162" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e68f8fef3cd030e4019b9b9629e6909fb15125acc87aeedb4e2fa8c3a263713a/Professor-Georgette-Theyskens.jpg" data-mid="122291957" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e68f8fef3cd030e4019b9b9629e6909fb15125acc87aeedb4e2fa8c3a263713a/Professor-Georgette-Theyskens.jpg" /> I would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little sentry-box of canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might be coming to call upon the family. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form; for it would volatilize itself in some way before I could touch it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's, whose grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed and bought it there simply because I had recognized it as a book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes, of the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat of our Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once spring up on either side of her like complementary colors.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colors not its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the scenes in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more vividly portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray could spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the selection that the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting a revelation, these scenes used to give me the impression—one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which I might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undistinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—of their being actually part of Nature herself, and worthy to be studied and explored. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilize all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I isolate artificially to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion—were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my life. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and, when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading, until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface, and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.