Personal Letter

Alice,
It was kind of you to send that one update. About the deaths of GWW and JBW. Dad told me that the had renewed contact with his brother in the mid eighties. I often wondered how that went.
Sorry that the post on that website was so garbled. I copied it from another site and expected it to retain formatting.
The information, Mail address and contact, all suggest GWW as the author of that particular contribution.
I should provide you with the reference So that you can compare Dad's information with that on the website and see if that was an e-mail address that he maintained.
I'd like to thank you for your Generosity in sharing your Telephone number.

But I have to ask you, please write to me before you make a call to my number. You have surprised me in the past and I don’t need surprises.
If there is an emergency certainly call, but if you want to remember dad or discuss things we shared growing up together, I would appreciate it if you wrote about is and if you gave me some warning before you do call. As the woman in the John Prine song says, "just give me one thing that I can hold on to." I have maybe five things that come from my life before 1984; a wedding photo a few shots from 'the honeymoon,' when Dee told me she did not love me; a tie died shirt you made; a couple of letters from you describing miscarriage, money lost in drug deals; some letters from Dad, calling me a lazy criminal, a child killer, and warning me that I no longer welcome to visit their house.(actually those letters are later, after I moved here.) Oh i do have a guitar that I bought from Ceci's brother Miguel, and a Motor scooter that i bought from John Cleany, now rusting, though I was still riding it in 1999. There's a really dilapidated deck of tarot cards, the Ravenswood deck and i have one or two battered notebooks mostly filled with highly abstract ramblings about kabala and tarot. (tended to tell about things through the symbols and connect events to the images.) I think i brought a copy of a Gregory Bateson book and Shades of Gray. All of those things are worn around the edges and merely shadows of life before 1984. Twenty years of silence and regret have made a grey veil over all my memories of home. Stir things up to fast and o choke on the dust. all I know is that you kept in tough with Mom and Dad and went home for Thanksgiving talked about times past and present and kept the memories alive.
What i am asking is that you take the time to write things down so that i have time to think and respond. If you want to remember Dad, take a mental journey through the past, but bring a golden thread like Theseus as you walk past the yellow phone on the wall and open the door to the basement, descend the wooden steps and smell the sawdust and iron and the stale drain-water. He's just around the corner sitting in that old grey-cushioned bentwood chair, probably smoking a pipe, (the disreputable black hickory,) wearing an old flannel shirt a pair of paint-stained Khaki work pants and Clark's desert boots. He wont have finished his Courvoisier, He will look up from his ruminations and be glad to see you. and if he has that old boxer Mini with him give her a pat for me, will you?

• I know you can write. Make the time. Ten minutes a day? It's time you take for your self. try Goldberg's rules of writing

.

1. keep your hand moving ( you might want to use a pen if you've been keyboarding all day)


2. Be specific. (love is vague, a poached egg, three slices of bacon and a bowl of apple cinnamon flavored instant oatmeal for breakfast before you went to school every morning, that's love.)


3. Lose control. (Wander around your memories as if you were six. you are alone in the house, it is OK to look at the rose canton china tea set in the back of the cupboard in the dining room.)


4. Don't think. (If you think you will think if you write you will have something to think about, [and share])

You don't have to send everything you write. just type up the good parts that you want to share.
I realize that you know all this and read good writers and went to college and everything. But if you want to Talk about Dad it is really important that you put stuff in writing. you had my address but you never told me that he died. And who left my name out of all those obituaries. You want to 'Talk' but on paper I'm as dead as uncle John. It's not that I don't want to hear the sound of your voice.
I just need some warning before you call.
bill