The gay couple who renovated Prichard House never found my sobbing story, but a cold-nosed developer with an eye to multi-use stumbled across it and took it home. Unable to decipher the handwriting, the dips into vague poetry, she gave the book to her teenage daughter who read, understood and wrote a paper on it at The Padeia School and then used it as the basis for an editing project in Accelerated English. She is now an editor at Simon & Schuster.
At the same time, a poetry major in Long Beach tripped over the corner of that collection, dug it all up and wrote a thesis that eventually secured him a job at The Atlantic Monthly.
Not all the Virginia-Highland books were found but one was discovered by a friend of a friend who’d met my old roommate at a meeting of The League of Women Voters. The friend took it upon herself to give the book the roommate who read it avidly, against her better judgment. Then she burned it, singeing off most of a really dreadful home permanent, which forced her to get a decent haircut, something that so changed her spirits and attitude that she met the man of her dreams, married him and was enrolled in law school before the year was out. All of this I know be I wrote it. For the first time, the voice inside that had led, then left me with a void to fill, became my own.
At the same time, a poetry major in Long Beach tripped over the corner of that collection, dug it all up and wrote a thesis that eventually secured him a job at The Atlantic Monthly.
Not all the Virginia-Highland books were found but one was discovered by a friend of a friend who’d met my old roommate at a meeting of The League of Women Voters. The friend took it upon herself to give the book the roommate who read it avidly, against her better judgment. Then she burned it, singeing off most of a really dreadful home permanent, which forced her to get a decent haircut, something that so changed her spirits and attitude that she met the man of her dreams, married him and was enrolled in law school before the year was out. All of this I know be I wrote it. For the first time, the voice inside that had led, then left me with a void to fill, became my own.
2 comments:
Cast that pebble into the pond and you don't whom the ripples will affect.
Your writing makes me think. Ouch!
Billy Shears
oh good. thanks
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