Because I Said So: It's survival of the feddest as students brave TCAP

The column, "Because I Said So," is about my kids. Or, supposed to be about my kids, but I can't help talking about myself and my own childhood in many of them. It isn't narcissism (I don't think ... maybe it is), but more because, even at the age of forty, I don't feel so far removed from my kids' ages of four to thirteen. It seems as though it was only yesterday that I was running through my neighborhood in jeans with a hole forming in the knee searching for a new tree to climb or insect to pester.

I still have that sense of childhood within me. Either that or a very, very good memory.

So I like to reminisce a bit before getting into the meat of what it is my kids are getting into. Today, I remember standardized testing (I have to say, too, that this is one of my favorite headlines of any column I've written - It's survival of the feddest as students brave TCAP. Thank you to whomever wrote it). I remember the pencils and the erasing and the long hours of silence and watching the clock. What I don't remember is the food. That must be new. Standardized testing today is just as dull, just as mentally taxing, yet a whole lot more delicious.

Once every year as grade school students, our regular curriculum of multiplication tables, phonics and dodgeball would be put on hold so that we could take something called the California Achievement Test. It was ostensibly to find out whether Tennessee's elementary school kids were smarter than those of California. I hope I did us proud.

Our usual lessons, like Han Solo frozen in carbonite, were still there, though merely hibernating and awaiting that standardized diversion to end. During that week, it was imperative that we show up to school on time and with two No. 2 pencils sharpened to acute points.

Other than the pencils, I don't remember much else that was expected of us during these daylong timed tests except to sit still, focus, keep the lead within the little answer ovals and erase thoroughly if necessary.

That menu has changed.

Memphis City Schools has administered the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) achievement tests to a very suspecting student population this week. As I write this, I sit surrounded by a ream of informational letters sent via my kids' backpacks regarding TCAP preparedness. In addition, I count 34 e-mails sent since Jan. 1 of this year and several voicemails last week from the board of education concerning the tests.

In these e-mails, forms and phone calls, we parents are encouraged to have our children sleep, feed them and even send food to school to snack on throughout the day. I'm not sure how the rigors of standardized testing affect their hunger, but I picture a room full of kids penciling in multiple choice answers while running on treadmills. The available buffet is necessary to keep them hydrated and fueled as though this week is more survivalist reality show than cerebral question and answer.

It seems that in addition to being tested on multiplication, vocabulary and reading comprehension, they may also be tested for body mass index, glycemic index and cholesterol levels. After force-feeding them heaping helpings of anxiety over their test performance the past few weeks, the administration is imploring them to eat healthy during the course of this week.

The pleading for rest and food has been ceaseless and the advice obvious. It is the time of the school year when our children are tested in basic aptitude and parents are tested for common sense. We have even been handed a script. One of the informative voicemails is a team of concerned callers who banter back and forth like a lethargic Abbott and Costello, advising us to provide positive motivation to our kids with phrases such as "I know you're going to do great" and "The TCAP won't know what hit it."

It was inspiring.

My son brought home a TCAP practice workbook, and I tried my hand at a few of the math problems. I found that I am woefully below standard in the subject. Not only that, but I found that I was incredibly hungry and quite sleepy after.

I understand that the tests help the school administration, though I am unsure of how, or if, they help students. I can rest easy, though, knowing that at the end of the week my children will be well fed and well rested, and probably just as standard as ever.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Alley and Stacey Greenberg, the mother of two boys, take turns on Thursdays telling stories of life with kids in Memphis. Read more from her at fertilegroundzine.com and diningwithmonkeys.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

Behind the Wheel, pt. 4: The Book Covers

I know what you're all waiting for. You're waiting for the celebrities. There were celebrities, and I'll get to them soon enough, but the most interesting people I ever carried in the back of a limousine weren't the glossy, well-known faces contrived to be winsome by People magazine. They were the normal, everyday folks.

I learned, several times over while behind the wheel, that even these average people weren't so normal, and that one should never, ever judge a book by its cover. I know it's cliché and that we all do it, I still do, but sometimes you meet somebody and the label you apply to them in the first few minutes just peels right off.

I got the call one day to pick up a couple of tourists at the Holiday Inn Sunspree on Panama City Beach, The Boss wasn't sure exactly what they'd want to do or where they wanted to go. Business must have been slow that week because normally this is the kind of job we would have declined; you just never knew what you were going to get with driving tourists around, it could very easily be a group of 17-year-olds looking for a place in which to drink, hang out the windows and, eventually, get sick.

I drove to the beach and, pulling into the parking lot of the Sunspree, saw a middle-aged couple standing near the doors to the hotel. He had on jeans and a button-down, short-sleeve shirt untucked and a couple days worth of growth on his jaw. His hair looked as though he'd just rolled out of bed and he was sipping on a can of Budweiser. Her hair was bleached to an unnatural yellow and she wore a sleeveless shirt, shorts and flip-flops. They were both fairly rumpled-looking, having only recently unfolded themselves from their luggage.

Surely this couple couldn't be my fare. But when I pulled to the doors, they waved eagerly and thanked me profusely as I opened the door for them to climb in. "This is going to be a long day," I thought.

The first place they wanted to go was back across the bridge, into the city - leaving the beautiful beach and emerald water behind - to go to the mall. I tried to talk them out of it, passively telling them just how far a drive it was (about a half hour) and assuring them that there was nothing there worth seeing. But they'd seen the beach, had their fun there, and were anxious to get to a mall for the afternoon. When I dropped them off and we agreed on a time to meet back at that door, he pulled a wad of cash from his front pocket such as I'd seen only one other time (another story for another time), unwound the rubber band holding it together, gave me a hundred dollar bill and asked me to pick up a bottle of Asti Spumante for them while they were inside.

As I sat in the mall parking lot waiting on them, a bottle of sparkling wine on ice behind me, I dreaded the afternoon. I had no idea how long I was in it for or what would be next, the clients didn't seem to know for sure, either. They just seemed thrilled with being in a limousine and at the mall for a time.

The mall and the Asti Spumante must have loosened them up, because they were very chatty on the drive back to the beach. And very, very nice, asking about the area and how long I'd lived there, about my life and interests. All passengers were strangers and most of them felt compelled to talk to me as the driver, making polite conversation because they weren't quite sure what the protocol was. The protocol is that you are not obligated to talk to the driver. You certainly may because you're paying, but no one is expecting it and the Q&A usually ends up being more awkward than pleasant. But these people were an exception, they appeared genuine and genuinely interested.

Once back on the beach and stopped for lunch, they pleaded with me to join them, but I declined. After lunch they wanted to go play pool and insisted I come into the bar with them instead of sitting in the car. So I sat at a nearby table, drinking coffee and watching and talking some more with them.

They were from Arkansas, he told me, and he owned a construction company that built nursing homes all over the country. They were simple country folks, yet the more we talked, the more I realized that they were loaded. This didn't make any difference in their personality, they were some of the sweetest people I've ever met, but I felt guilty then for judging them initially as backwater hillbillies who were probably in awe of a limousine and a guy wearing a suit. When I finally dropped them back at their hotel after a day of sightseeing and more beers, they warmly said their goodbyes and he pulled out that wad of cash again to graciously tip me. I was sorry for the job to end.

I came to understand over time that that area of the country is full of people like that, simple people who have worked hard and amassed some impressive wealth, yet still live as they were brought up - simply. That goes for their accumulation of all that riches can buy and in the way they treat other people. They're good people whose money didn't seem to affect them or allow it to affect those around them.

They are a far cry, I would also learn, from the wealth of celebrity.

Behind the Wheel, pt. 3: Interlude

There is a lot of down time as a chauffeur, whole days with no runs and time to kill. I spent a lot of this time at the beach, of course, or walking the shores of Massalina Bayou to look at the sailboats and watch the drawbridge raise and lower to accommodate the masts heading out to St. Andrews Bay or back in to port. We had a little blue, homemade table by the window in the kitchen and I'd spend hours there writing. Nothing any good, I'm sure, but just practice. It was discipline.

Somewhere, in looking for ways to pass the time, I came across a job listing that interested me. I can't remember where I saw it, the internet then was little more than a pamphlet and not the rich, glossy-fronted porn magazine it is today, so it must have been posted on a bulletin board in the ship's store at the Panama City Marina or in the local newspaper. Someone was looking for help in renovating his boat, no experience necessary, willing to train; an apprenticeship of sorts. I wanted to learn all about boats and had my days free, so this seemed perfect.

I met the owner, Nick Bond, at that marina's store so we could talk and agree on a few particulars, and then he took me to his covered slip to show me the boat where he and his wife, Caroline, lived. She was beautiful. The boat. All boats are female and all boats are beautiful. This one was a 46-foot Chris-Craft motor yacht called The Southern Cross.

Nick was in the process of sanding down the hull for painting, among other projects. He was doing it all with the boat in the water, which was not such a good idea and, now that I think about it with the benefit of hindsight and in the "green" culture of the 21st century, probably illegal. We spent whole days standing in a jon boat that floated in the narrow space between the dock, a neighboring boat and The Southern Cross with power sanders plugged into extension cords which ran the length of the hull and were draped and hung safely out of the water on lines tied here and there. The jon boat had a slow leak.

So there we were, day in and day out, standing in a metal jon boat in water to our ankles, arms overhead clutching the hull to pull the small boat towards the large one, fighting to keep our balance, with an electric tool in one hand. We sanded all day with all of the flecks on us and in the water.

Though she was beautiful, she was not without flaws. As we sanded, we'd find soft spots where the mahogany had rotted. We would dig this wood out and fill it in with a powerful, quick-setting epoxy and strips of fiberglass cloth. Topside, I sanded and painted with non-skid paint, down below I crawled into the "engine room" to replace bilge pumps.

Nick and Caroline rarely took The Southern Cross out in the bay, and I never did get to ride on her, but every once in a while he would fire up those big, beautiful diesels and I could just imagine what kind of power she'd have at sea. And their plan was to take her to sea. Nick was from England and Caroline from South Africa and the long-range goal was to get The Southern Cross ship-shape and take her to the British Virgin Islands for charters. The idea was to market to corporations for retreats and incentives; good plan.

In the meantime, Caroline was working at the hospital and, as far as I could tell, footing the bill for repair and renovation costs, and that included me as I got a handful of cash every Friday. Nick, therefore, cut costs wherever he could, afraid, I believe, of having to tell his wife what he'd spent her paycheck on that day.

The Bonds had an interesting habit every evening when Caroline came home from work. A little dialogue that I came to look forward to and anticipate, imagining it was just for me.

Nick: What would you like for supper, dear?
Caroline: I don't know, what would you like?
Nick: How about a curry?
Caroline: A curry would be lovely.

Every night they had curry. I knew they were having curry and they knew they were having curry, but they still insisted on the discussion. I never was invited for curry although Nick did offer me a cup of tea once. I was excited to have tea prepared by an actual Brit, but it turned out to be the worst cup of tea I've ever had.

There was another helper who would show up irregularly, and when he did show up he was usually drunk or on his way to being drunk, no matter the time of day. Lenny was from England as well and, in fact, he and Nick grew up only about 20 minutes apart, but didn't meet each other until Panama City. He was the kind of Brit I imagine you find in the pubs over there, bitching about the queen or his futbol club or whatever it is they complain about while drinking. But he was one hell of a craftsman. Drunk or sober, Lenny could fix anything and dole out advice, which he did often and gently. He was always willing to explain to me the best way to do the work. It drove Nick mad, I could tell, that Lenny was better at spackling with epoxy or woodwork after three tallboys than Nick was after morning coffee.

Lenny just stopped showing up at one point. I can't even remember the last time I saw him, but I assume it was as he left for a "lunch" of Budweisers down at the marina store.

Nick eventually ran out of money to pay me. Or Caroline did. He was trying to get work refinishing someone else's boat that summer and offered me the job of helper on that, too. He said if I wanted to stay on and help with The Southern Cross, then when the money came through for the other job, he'd pay me back wages. I declined. You can't really trust a sailor, or a Brit who can't make tea.

A World of Art

There are things that I love and yet have little or no understanding. Women, food, art, jazz.

Jed Jackson
Cafe, 2002
oil on wood, 20"x26"
(used without any permission of any kind)

I've given up on ever understanding women. Lately, though, I've been studying the visual arts. When I say "study" what I mean is reading various Wikipedia pages, doing Google image searches, perusing books at leisure and taking in the blogs and sites of local artists like Bobby Spillman, Jed Jackson, Tim Crowder and Dwayne Butcher. I go to their sites because I can't afford their work and didn't have the forethought to work trades when I had my little cigar store (cigar smokers, all).

It hasn't been just a love of the visual, though. I've recently finished my novel, The Simplest Pattern, and art is a big part of it. The main character, Seth, is a painter and I found I needed to know as much as possible about art and how it's made to make this work of fiction somewhat believable. To this end, my sister, Elizabeth Alley, was a huge help. She pointed me in the right direction, suggested artists to read up on and explained some terms and business matters.

The more I read about artists and study their work, the more I want to know. And the more I know, the more I want to write. I may never know enough to be an art critic, although I may already know enough to know I don't want to ever be an art critic. But I do like to write about the work and the artists and the process of getting something out of nothing, of filling up a blank canvas with imagery that makes people think and talk and hear stories they may not have known were within them.

I'm not sure what kind of writing that is. So far it's a lot of fiction (this book isn't the first time in my work a character has been an artist). I suppose, too, it's the kind of pay work I already do - freelance journalism. The problem is that there is no venue for such writing in Memphis. The local publications' space dedicated to visual art is woefully small.

In the meantime, I'll keep looking, keep studying up on it because the world of art has struck my fancy lately. And I'll keep putting my thoughts down on paper to see what it might become, to see what my characters might create. Maybe, if I get it right, the story will paint a picture for you.

Behind the Wheel, pt. 2: The Rathbones

The bread and butter of the limousine business is prom season and weddings.

I only did one prom (another story for another time). We just didn't do prom runs - too tough on the car and too much liability. As a chauffeur, though, the worst jobs were weddings. Paradoxically, weddings were the easiest money as well.  A typical wedding day run involved picking up the bride and her party from a home or hotel, drive them to the venue, wait, drive the newlyweds to the reception and either wait there and drive them to a hotel after or leave them at the reception where they have their own transportation. A lot of waiting and a lot of inebriated fathers-of-the-bride throwing tip money at you.

My problem with the wedding run is that I never wanted to be the guy who ruined some woman's wedding day. That is a day for the bride. Say what you will about the bride and groom, the wedding is a woman's affair and I was in a constant state of anxiety that that day would be remembered for whatever error happened on my watch.

I would go over the route from home to church over and over in my map and mind, worried that I'd take her to the wrong place. Once there, and as the ceremony was being performed, I'd stand at the back of the car, sweating in my suit and the Florida sun, opening and closing the door in practice, worried that when the couple came out and ran down the path through storms of rice and flashbulbs, that they'd arrive to find that I'd locked the keys in the car.

I desperately didn't want to be someone's anecdote for the next fifty years.

I had a run one day that begin as usual - bridal party to church. The wedding was on the beach side of Panama City with the reception across the bridge in the city. From the church to the reception, about 30 minutes including the stop they needed to make at an ATM, the newlyweds, Mr. & Mrs. Rathbone, fought. It wasn't so much a fight, as it was the groom berating the bride. The problem, from what I could overhear, stemmed from Mr. Rathbone thinking Mrs. Rathbone lingered a bit long on the congratulatory kiss and hug from his uncle.

It was absurd and it was maddening to hear this new bride crying behind me on her day.

With most weddings, the first time I came face to face with the groom was after the wedding, so I didn't know him and he didn't know me, and if I wasn't a scrawny six-feet and 140 lbs. back then I would have pulled over and snatched his ass out of the car to teach him some manners. Instead, I drove them to the reception where I left them, glad to be rid of the scene.

Hopefully that was just the tension of the day playing out, albeit sadly. I like to think he apologized during their dance at the reception and that they both left the party laughing and in each others arms. Maybe they're even still together despite that start, and their first fight is but one anecdote from their long life together.

Behind the Wheel, pt. 1: Quincy

In 1995, shortly after we got married, Kristy and I moved to Panama City, Florida, on a whim where, for almost two years, I drove a limousine and she waited tables.

I carried a lot of characters in that limousine.

One night I was sent to Lynn Haven, a small community just outside Panama City to pick someone up for a night out. I can't remember this guy's name (I'll call him Quincy), but he sat towards the front of the back of the car so he could talk to me through the window.

He'd just come back to Lynn Haven from serving in the Merchant Marines, he told me. Now, picture in your head the kind of guy who joins the Merchant Marines. That was not this guy. Quincy was doughy, rounded on the edges and was living with his mother. I was 25 at the time and he couldn't have been much older than that.

We were on our way to pick up a girl he'd met only the night before. He was dressed nicely, though in a casual manner, and had a bouquet of flowers for the young lady. He was excited, to say the least. He had really taken a shine to this girl, acknowledging that he'd only just met her, and spent much of the drive telling me of his dreams for the two of them.

He directed me back to Panama City where we pulled into the parking lot of an apartment community somewhere off of 23rd Street, probably near the airport. It looked like the sort of place inhabited by families on the lower end of the income scale. There were beat up cars, ratty patio furniture and kids everywhere. They all came running to see the 110-inch black limousine that had just arrived. Quincy went to get his date while I stood outside the car and answered the questions from the kids and sweated.

Most of chauffeuring is about waiting. Probably ninety-percent of the job is spent standing in parking lots, sitting and reading, listening to the radio or daydreaming. So there I was, waiting in the waning Florida sun in a suit when Quincy came back to the car. Alone.

He asked me to take him to the No Name Lounge, a small pub for locals at the base of the Hathaway Bridge, on the city side. I can't recall the reason he wanted to go there now, or if he gave me one at all, but he said she'd meet him there later.

He went in, I waited.

A couple of hours later Quincy came out, mostly drunk, and said we were going to see this girl at work. She'd never shown up at No Name. I was confused as to why she was working on a night that she was supposed to have a date. And then he told me to drive to The Toy Box on Hwy. 98. This girl was a dancer at a low-rent strip club in the city - not even on the beach side of Panama City, the tourist side.

I felt bad for this guy. He'd been away from home for a while, lonely and had glommed on to the first girl who was nice to him. As it happened, that girl was being paid to be nice to him. And paid to string him along. What I couldn't figure out - and didn't ask - was how he had gotten her address.

We went to The Toy Box. He went in and I waited. I wanted to just leave, but that would have been unprofessional and I didn't think this guy needed to be let down again, though the long walk home to clear his head would have done him good. Hopefully he was having a good time in there, maybe getting something for free. Or at least for the cost of the flowers.

I went in at some point to use the bathroom and get a coffee from the bar. As I was leaving a woman way, way past her prime grabbed my hand and asked if I wanted a dance. I looked at her, at the black holes where teeth should have been, and explained I was working and then wrenched my hand free to go wait in the car a little longer.

I took him back to his mother's house alone that night, poor guy, and I went home to my wife. No idea at all what became of Quincy and his burgeoning romance with the exotic dancer from The Toy Box. Maybe they fell in love, maybe she quit the pole. Maybe they've spent many happy nights since that one sitting in a plush booth in a darkened corner of the No Name.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

I have just finished reading my second favorite novel that takes place in and around an English-speaking newspaper abroad. My favorite book of this sort is The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson, a book that follows Paul Kemp to Puerto Rico to work for the newspaper in that tropical environment of the late 1950s.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman is a novel (though I had to look at the cover after I'd read the first two chapters just to make sure) structured as short stories with characters that work for, or have some dealings with a newspaper based in Rome. In some chapters the characters overlap, in some they don't. When they do, it almost acts as a jump in a newspaper, where the story is picked up somewhere further along. Between each chapter is a short interlude in italics in which the back story of the paper and its founder, Cyrus Ott, is chronicled. These shorter sections begin in 1953 and take us to 2007.

The structure of the book is very intriguing for me. I once planned the same sort of book with stories and characters centered around a rural Tennessee church, to be titled Scenes in Colored Glass. Only one story, "Dominic," exists and it was written more than a decade ago. This book may prompt me to look back into that project.

I like this book. I like newspapers. The novel is a sort of love song to the industry, though Rachman doesn't pull any punches. He admits that newspaper readership and the very quality of content is in decline, but he can't seem to help himself.
My family is a newspaper family. My great-grandfather, great-uncle, grandfather and father all worked for the same paper, The Commercial Appeal. I was discouraged from it at an early age. My father hated working there and I heard nothing but ill about the business and the place day in and day out. As a result, I didn't go into the business. Not then, anyway. Had I been encouraged, I'm sure I would have, it would have only been natural. Even now, as a freelance writer, the work feels natural.

I've always had more of a romantic than realistic notion of newsrooms. I know my idea of what one is, or should be, is purely  based on movies and television shows, but that's fine. I like that vision. I can remember the "old building" that housed The Commercial Appeal when I was a kid and I'd go to work with my father. It was an old Ford factory and the third-floor newsroom had high ceilings with tracks and tubes suspended overhead, concrete floor, tall windows and was littered with paper and noise. That's where it all stems from, this idea of mine that a newsroom is a place where something is made. It was a factory!

It's not that way anymore. I was up on the third floor of The Commercial Appeal just last week. It's just not like it used to be ... I'll leave it at that for now.

I still like movies about newspapers, and novels. It's the romantic in me, the fallow strands of DNA in my makeup from the early part of last century when men and women were covered in ink, characters, news and cigarette ash. When you could get a beer at the lunch counter on the ground floor and nobody left until the day's paper was put to bed. And then it was with a toast and an eagerness for another day.

Some of this is captured in The Imperfectionists. It's good to have these stories, even if they are couched against the weakening backdrop of the industry. Rachman is a storyteller, a newspaperman and a chronicler of what the industry was and what it has become.

Southern College of Watchmaking

While writing a small business story for The Commercial Appeal on a new watch repair shop a couple of months ago, a source casually mentioned having gone to the Southern College of Watchmaking back in the late 1940s. I'm a lifelong Memphian and have heard of many institutions, both still with us and those long gone, but I'd never even heard of this school.

Wanting to learn more about it, I decided it was a worthy subject for the Hidden Memphis series I've been writing for The CA. Up until now, I've written the series about people and this would be the first place written about. What I found was that, even when researching a brick-and-mortar building, it's the people involved who make the story.

The school was a lot more difficult to research than I'd expected, there just isn't much information out there about it. The signs pointed me to Raleigh, the Memphis & Shelby County Room at the library, the Shelby County Archives at Shelby Farms and phone calls around town and up to Paducah, KY.

The story ran in yesterday's paper and I think it turned out nicely. Mike Maple did a great job with the photos, as usual.

There were a couple of interesting details that were left, or cut, out. The school closed in 1953 once the GIs had pretty much all graduated and their GI Bill money went away with them. The funding just dried up. However, the funding to the school was cut before that when it was found that the founder of the school, Forrest Osborne, had begun a second business, Southern Tool & Supply Co., to buy and sell tools and parts to the students. Money was given by the government to Osborne to do so, but he was selling the goods at 10% over retail, which was in violation of his contract. Once the government pulled funding, making a hefty profit was more difficult to do.

I heard of this reason from two separate sources and I put it in my story. Then I took it out. Then I put it back in. My editor and I finally decided that, with no conviction or even an official accusation, it was best left out.

The other little bit that I never did put in the story, but that I heard, again, from those two sources, was that when Osborne was in his fatal car crash on N. Parkway in February of 1950, he was with someone he shouldn't have been, an employee of the school. There was no reason for that to be in the story, so I left it out.

When I begin these Hidden Memphis pieces, I never know where they'll lead me or who I'll wind up talking with. It's a big part of what I love about doing them. Thanks to everyone who helped on this story and to all of you who read it.

(Nearly) The End

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience. He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

The passage is from W. Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, near the ending; the last page, in fact. Maugham was a prolific writer who wrote novels, short stories, travel essays and plays in the beginning of the 20th century, and a literary hero of mine.

In the past few years I've written a few hundred journalistic stories and columns, a handful of short stories, countless blog posts and, as of last night, two novels. I want to make it clear that both of the novels are only in their very early first draft stages. I've always written short stories throughout my adult life but never thought I'd be able to handle the marathon effort that is novel writing until the summer of 2009 when on a road trip with my family, the perfect time to think as the miles roll by. At that time I had two short stories that I couldn't help but see as overlapping, so I overlapped them and went from there with the goal of finishing the draft by the time I turned 40 a year later. I did that with a couple of months to spare.

The idea then was, of course, to revise, revise, revise that draft. But I wrote another short story that I felt had themes and characters I wanted to expand on, and when that story won the Memphis Magazine fiction contest, I figured I should ride that momentum. And that finished draft, with the working title The Simplest Pattern (from the passage above), was wrapped up last night to a long sigh, a cigar and the gift of a bottle of wine from Kristy and Andria.

It's a great feeling to finish a project like that, to cross the finish line of such a marathon. Now begins the work, of course. It's nowhere near finished, but it's so good to have a beginning page and an ending page and 324 pages in between. And now begins the fun - the revising, the moving around, the deconstruction and rebuilding. The ingredients are all there and I just need to get my hands into them and mix it up a bit. I'm not the best editor when it comes to cutting, but I can add a spoonful more of this and a dash more of that like nobody's business. Coming in at 69,108 words, I have no doubt I'll be able to whittle it down to 75,000 without even blinking.

It's not a bibliography the length of Maugham's, of course, it's only two stacks of papers on my desk, two files in my computer. But they're my stacks of paper and I intend to make them the best I possibly can.

Objects of Beauty

I wanted to read Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty when I first heard it would be published. I've always been a fan of his short pieces and really enjoyed his first novel, Shopgirl. I love his second, The Pleasure of My Company. An Object of Beauty is really good, though not quite up to level of The Pleasure of My Company, I think.

For various reasons, I didn't get around to reading the new one until this last week and by then I really wanted to because of the book I'm working on. It has elements of the art world in it and I've realized as I'm writing that I just don't know enough to make it believable, at least not to me. So reading Martin's novel was research for me, which made reading it difficult because I kept wanting to stop reading to write, or at least jot down some notes. I'm not plagiarizing ... I don't think, just thinking as I read along and ideas come to me, or names of artists are mentioned that I want to research further.

An Object of Beauty is the story of Lacey Yeager, an ambitious up-and-comer in the art world of Manhattan. That world is a self-contained ecosystem where all the players - from the dealers to the artists to the collectors to the journalists - know each other, who owns what and who wants to sell what. The only question in the mix is for how much a piece will sell, although prices seemed to be growing at every turn.

The action takes place over many years, but mostly in the art boom of the late 1990s when there was no way to not make money by procuring and selling. A young artist could make a piece of art one day, put it in a gallery the next and have enough money to live on for a year by the end of the weekend. Throughout the book there is the discussion of the modern masters versus the new kids of contemporary and minimalist art, and just what art is and what makes it valuable, whether it's time and distance or hype and youth.

It's really a fascinating book in that respect. Martin knows his shit when it comes to art (good and bad) and how it moves around the globe and in and out of fashion and possession. That knowledge became a main reason for me to read and practically study it.

Martin also knows people and relationships, it's what makes something like The Pleasure of My Company so very good. And his new one is good in that respect as well, but maybe not quite as good. Or perhaps it's the fact that there really isn't a character here to feel empathetic towards. The one character I found myself rooting for was the one I expected to like the least when he first entered the story.

The book is written in an interesting way because there is a first person narrative, but that narrator, Daniel Chester French Franks, is not present for most of what goes on. So there will be a chapter with two characters who are not the narrator and then in the following chapter, the narrator will say that he had lunch with Lacey Yeager and she relayed all of the details of the previous chapter. At the end of Chapter 1, in fact, Daniel intriguingly explains:

I will tell you her story from my own recollections, from conversations I conducted with those around her, and, alas, from gossip: thank God the page is not a courtroom. If you occasionally wonder how I know about some of the events I describe in this book, I don't. I have found that - just as in real life - imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.

The collectors in An Object of Beauty of strange, eccentric creatures. I've been interested in collectors lately as I've also recently read The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. It's the true story of John Gilkey, a rare book thief who became infamous and something of a celebrity in that world of rare book collecting in the 1980s. Bartlett probes that world and gets into the heads of collectors, of why they do it. It's a near-obsessive compunction they have to own a book or an author.

In discussing this with my sister, Elizabeth, she suggested I watch Herb & Dorothy, a documentary about a couple in New York who, although one a civil servant and the other a librarian, managed to amass one of the largest and most important collections of contemporary and minimalist art anywhere. I streamed it immediately on NetFlix and was fascinated by these two people. They live in a tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan and have, for years, simply bought what and who they liked. And I think that was the key for them, they got to know the artists and admired them, and the artists seem to feel the same for them. Herb and Dorothy Vogel eventually donated all of their pieces to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It took five moving trucks to move all 4,000+ pieces from New York.

I think I can see it. I wouldn't collect just anything, no snow globes or Hummel figurines, but certainly rare books or artwork. The case is made in Bartlett's book that a first edition brings the collector only a step or two away from the author. It's that game of degrees of separation. I think a painting or drawing is an even narrower gap. When you hold a painting, you're looking at something the artist touched, something actually handled and worried over by that person.

I have a lot of books, and I have a few paintings, but now I'm thinking that maybe I need some more.

For Sale: Ideas

When I was a kid, drawing was probably the number one past time for my sisters and me in our house. My father is an artist and had all of the supplies at hand, all we had to do was grab a stack of paper, a few different shades of pencils, some pastels, charcoal, an eraser that looked like Silly Putty ... whatever we thought we might need. Supplies were never the problem for me, ideas were. I would sit at the table with all of these tools spread in front of me and just stare off into space. "What should I draw?" I would ask. I'd look around the room or try to imagine a scene, yet felt any idea was forced and, therefore, I was uninspired. Perhaps this is why I never developed the skill.

Writing is different. Ideas aren't a hangup for me when I have a pencil and lined paper in hand (we're talking about fiction here, column and story ledes are a whole other matter). Now, I'm not saying all ideas are particularly good, or that they are necessarily worthy of pursuit, just that there has never been a kink in that particular creative hose.

The problem I do have, and this is new for me, is when I come up with an idea that is good, and probably much more marketable than anything else I've written, but I just don't want to write it. I've got a couple of ideas now - one is for a young adult series that involves some fantasy and passing through portals and such, and the other is science fiction and may work better as a script. These are two genres that I simply have no interest in, not enough to sit and write tens of thousands of words on them anyway.

Are ideas salable? Is there some sort of Cogitation Craigslist out there? Because I really like these ideas and would love to see them written, just not by me. So if you find yourself sitting in front of that blank page with no good young adult fantasy or science fiction ideas, send me your credit card info and they're yours. Cheap.

Traveler

Ron McLarty is an actor. The name may not strike a chord but his face almost certainly would, it did for me. As soon as I saw a picture of him, I said, "Oh, yeah, I know who that is." He's a well-cast character actor in Spenser: For Hire, Rescue Me, The Practice, Ed, all of the Law & Order spin-offs and even Cop Rock; on the big screen he's in Heartburn, The Postman, The Flamingo Kid and many others; and has narrated over 100 audiobooks.

McLarty has carved out a nice little niche for himself, it seems. He probably gets a nice paycheck, without too much stress and responsibility, for doing something he loves.

Oh, and he's also a novelist. I've just finished reading Traveler (2007) and I've previously read The Memory of Running (2004). I enjoyed them both.

Traveler is the story of Jono Riley, an off-off-Broadway actor with a few commercials and primetime television shows under his belt. He lives in New York, has a girlfriend who is a firefighter and spends much of his time tending the bar at Lamb's. The action begins when he's informed that a childhood friend has died in his hometown of East Providence, Rhode Island.

His late friend, Marie D'Agostino, is his first true love, the sister of one of his best friends and then there's the connection of Jono's presence when she was shot in the back as a young girl. She didn't die then, but the .22 caliber bullet would lodge too close to an artery to be removed and years later would "travel" to her heart and kill her. Jono returns home to pay respects and, in doing so, becomes caught up in the past, in his days with his buddies and family and of the rash of shootings. It becomes a mystery that Jono works at with all the gusto of the one-character plays he specializes in back in Manhattan.

The book is a trip through Jono's past and a sentimental portrait of the mid-sixties just the way those who came of age then like to remember it - wide-cuff blue jeans, t-shirts, crew cuts and smokes with doo-wop, girls in skirts, baseball and tough-love parents. It's all there and, though we've read and heard the stories thousands of times, manages to come off as genuine, we get the sense that McLarty is describing his own childhood, his own friends and the neighborhood in which they ran.

They mystery of the shootings is there and Jono manages to become embroiled - he never really actively figures it out, though it is revealed in the end - with the help of a retired cop from the neighborhood, a priest, old friends and his girlfriend. It's a thriller without the whodunit being overbearing. They question of who shot Marie and the others is there throughout, a subplot interwoven into chapters that flip-flop from the past to present.

Though my retention for most of what I read is embarrassingly nonexistent, I do remember enjoying The Memory of Running as one of those books you come upon and don't expect much from, but find yourself enthralled by what you're reading. It's like someone giving you a gift you didn't even know you wanted. So when I came across a first edition Traveler hardback on the bargain table at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, I couldn't resist. It only cost a dollar, but would have been worth the full price of $25 (there were a couple of others at this price and may still be there if you hurry).

I went to McLarty's website and found the story of his first being published:

Beginning with the early years of his career, McLarty’s passion for writing led him to completing 10 novels, in addition to his plays but his efforts to interest a publishing house were unsuccessful. Several years ago he was able to persuade Recorded Books into producing his 3rd novel, The Memory of Running, directly onto tape as an audiobook. It is believed to be the first recorded audiobook of an unpublished novel. Stephen King listened to it in 2002 and wrote his entire column “The Pop of King” about Memory calling it “the best book you can’t read”. This lead to the publication of The Memory of Running in the USA and fourteen other countries around the world.

I envy McLarty his niche, both in the worlds of acting and writing. He may not be setting either of those worlds on fire, but he's making a living and, obviously, loving what he's doing.

Chronic City

For the past couple of weeks I've been carrying around Chronic City (2009) by Jonathan Lethem. Ever since finishing it yesterday afternoon, I've been carrying it around still, trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out if I even like it or not. I think it's only gotten heavier since finishing.

I suppose I do like it, there are plenty of books I haven't finished because they didn't hold my interest. I liked his earlier novel, Fortress of Solitude (2003), and loathed another, the name of which I can't even remember I disliked it so much (he's written many others, try one of them before reading the one I can't remember).

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

I'm realizing that my uncertainty about Chronic City isn't new, that I didn't just close the book and then attempt to consider its worth, but that I've read it entirely in that state of confusion. I kept trying to figure out what it's about, because certainly the characters, their relationship with each other and the places they inhabit must be about more than just what Lethem has put on the page. He's an enigmatic writer and I questioned throughout whether I'm smart enough for his literary enigmas.

It's the story of Chase Insteadman, a former child star living off royalties and making his way through Manhattan society and simple afternoons spent in diners and staring out of his bedroom window at a flock of birds that habitually buzzes a church steeple a few blocks away. He befriends, through happenstance or by design (ah, the conspiracies abound in the City of Chronic), Perkus Tooth, a former rock critic and all-around pop culture savant. Through their world, spent mostly in Perkus's cramped, darkened apartment listening to obscure cassette tapes, watching Marlon Brando movies and smoking dope, traipse Oona Laszlo, Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji. An inordinate amount of time was spent by me trying to figure out what these names could mean, whether metaphors or anagrams (this book itself was borrowed from a friend - Mitch Major - someone who could have lent his own name to a Lethem character).

In and out of the daily lives of this group walks a giant tiger (or is it?), a lost love orbiting the planet (or is she?), chaldrons ( or ... you get the idea ...), Gnuppets, the mayor and the topic of rent control and eminent domain, virtual worlds and a three-legged dog.

He's a deep writer, Lethem. The prose is layered in adjectives and metaphors. He may have used all of the words of description Hemingway once shaved from his own paragraphs. Perhaps those words were in the suitcase, folded like so much laundry, that Hadley Hemingway lost at the train station and have remained lost until recovered by Lethem.

Hemingway's lost suitcase full of manuscripts is one of my sole, semi-obscure pop culture reference, yet Lethem is a master at the dropped name, the long-forgotten novel or album, the illicit relationship whether fact or implied, and I'm sure I only recognized (or at least understood) a fraction of them.

It is this confusion by me as a reader that would normally leave me with a quarter finished book place back on the shelf, dismissing the writer as too pretentious,  too intent on trying to impress rather than entertain the reader. But Lethem is good enough and the stories in Chronic City are compelling enough to keep me reading.

I also read this book while chest deep into my own novel and when I would pick up Chronic, it was with an eye toward structure, how Lethem made it from point A to point B, or from point C back to A via B. It's a tedious way to read a book, so I admit that part of the problem I had with it may have been my own doing, but so be it. I feel that, along with being entertained, if not somewhat baffled, I may have just learned a thing or two.

So, there you have it. I like this novel and it only took me two weeks and one day to figure it out. Better late than never.



*I just looked it up and the name of the Lethem novel I dislike so much is You Don't Love Me Yet (2007).

A Moveable Feast

Each weekday morning there's a lull in my routine after the older kids leave for school and the youngest wakes up and needs breakfast, dressing or just to sit on the couch with me for a snuggle and to watch Dora. In this time between the rush of lunch-making and dashing off to daycare, I've been reading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

Or, I should say, re-reading it.

When I was younger, in my early 20s, I read it probably almost a dozen times or so. After buying a little retail business and becoming mired in that day-to-day, same four walls existence, I found no time to write. For almost a decade I didn't write anything of any substance. In that time, I couldn't even think of reading A Moveable Feast, the story of Hemingway's early years in Paris (1921-1926) when he pursued the noble vocation of writing, recounting those days when he would forgo food and live in near poverty if it meant the time to write a good story, or even one true sentence. Romantic, I know, but I couldn't think of the memoir without thinking that I should have worked harder when I was younger at what I knew deep down I wanted to do. Not necessarily as a career, even, but just something I wanted to accomplish - a novel, a story, one sentence.

So I set the book aside, though I always knew where it was. The copy I have is an old paperback Scribner Classic published by Macmillan Publishing Company. It's unremarkable except for the well-worn creases in the spine, dog-eared pages and the underlining of favorite passages, not just of mine, but of my good friend Jim Phillips. When we were roommates for so many years long ago we would both read the same copy and make notes of particularly noteworthy sentences or paragraphs. Jim is a songwriter in New Mexico now.

"on the train"

Several years ago, my sister Elizabeth was going to Paris for a vacation and I loaned her my copy (I wasn't going to read it) and she made it even more special by taking photographs of areas or landmarks Hemingway mentions, cut them out and placed them in the appropriate pages within the book. So now it's a treat to read:

Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind.

And tucked in there, between pages 10 and 11 is a little two-inch by three-inch picture of just that scene and with her handwriting on the back, "fresh-washed gravel paths."

Or, on page 179, to find a photo of a street sign marking rue de Tilsitt and reading that this is where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived.

They are little treasures in a book filled with treasures. Hemingway began writing this in Cuba and there are mentions of his working on it, worrying over it as he did, all through A.E. Hotchner's wonderful biography of his later years, Papa Hemingway. He eventually set it aside to write The Dangerous Summer which would become Death in the Afternoon, and Feast wasn't completed until after his death.

It's romantic, I know, this notion of squirreling away in a Paris flat, eating mostly bread and drinking in cafes, lighting a wood stove to keep warm in the mornings while you hammer away at the great American novel. But so what. It's a pleasant thing to read and I'm glad I'm in a place where I can do it without wondering "what if" and having that depression set in when there's something I know I should be doing, but am not. And, anyway, writing should be romantic. So should reading.

I read one chapter each morning and it gets my blood flowing and my brain working and puts my heart into whatever I have to do that day. In the book, Hemingway talks of how he would prepare himself each day to write, this is how I prepare myself.

(I'm nearly finished re-reading A Moveable Feast. What's next? What other books of inspiration are out there?)

Shelby Foote's Pipe

The photo above is of a pipe that once belonged to Shelby Foote. It's a meerschaum by master carver Beckler in the image of Robert E. Lee.

In a past life I owned a small pipe & cigar shop in downtown Memphis and Mr. Foote was a regular customer (William Faulkner was a customer before my time, but that's another story). I acquired this pipe when Mr. Foote's son came around selling off some items after his father had passed away. I bought it with an eye toward profit, of course, but then found I couldn't part with it. How would I prove its authenticity anyway? I can't even prove it to you, so you'll just have to take my word.

I inherited Foote as a customer. His routine was that every six weeks or so he'd call and tell me he would be down that day, and I'd put his order together - two pounds of a tobacco I called Mello Mix and a few canisters of Edward G. Robinson pipe tobacco. He handled the blending himself. Sometime that afternoon, he'd pull up to the curb in his little white BMW, come in and pick up his package and then leave. I'd include an invoice and he'd mail a check within the week.

It's how he'd done business with the previous owner for decades and I saw no reason to alter the arrangement.

But then I did. Or, I tried to. One day he called to say he'd be down and I said, "Mr. Foote, your house is right on my way home in the evening, why don't you let me take this tobacco to you so you don't have to make the drive downtown?"

My thinking was that when I showed up at his doorstep, he'd show me in and ask me to sit for a bit. Maybe we'd have a drink and talk about writing and reading and whatever he might want to discuss. I'd get to see where he works, where he wrote the three volume The Civil War and some of his novels.

Instead, he thanked me and told me just where, outside of his front door, I could leave the package.

Be sure that, after pulling into the Footes' driveway that evening, I made my presence known. I got out of my car and slammed the door as loudly as I could and took my time walking to the door, hoping for that spontaneous invite. I left the tobacco and, as I was getting back into my car, I heard someone calling to me. I looked around, and then up, and saw the old man leaning from an upper window, from his turret, waving down and thanking me. I waved back.

Shelby Foote did not cotton to visitors or small talk with strangers. But he did, at some point, allow interviewers from The Paris Review into his home and I've just read that interview. It's fantastic. From the beginning when the interviewer writes, "Dressed in his regular writing attire (pajamas and bathrobe) Foote opened the door, a rambunctious chocolate Lab retriever named Bird barking and leaping behind him" to his tales of time spent with Faulkner, his writing process, the evils of Hollywood and, of course, the Civil War.

I took to heart, though, the answer he gave to the poorly-worded question, "What kind of advice would you give young writers?"

To read, and above all to reread. When you read, you get the great pleasure of discovering what happened. When you reread, you get the great pleasure of knowing where the author’s going and seeing how he goes about getting there—and that’s learning creative writing. I would tell a young writer that. Of course I would tell him: work, work, work, sit at that desk and sweat. You don’t have to have a plot, you don’t have to have anything. Describe someone crossing a room, and try to do it in a way that won’t perish. Put it down on paper. Keep at it. Then when you finally figure out how to handle words pretty well, try to tell a story. It won’t be worth a damn; you’ll have to tear it up and throw it away. But then try to do it again, do it again, and then keep doing it, until you can do it. You may never be able to do it. That’s the gamble. You not only may not be able to make a living, you may not be able to do it at all. But that’s what you put on the line. Every artist has that. He doesn’t deserve a whole lot of credit for it. He didn’t choose it. It was visited upon him. Somebody asks, When did you decide you wanted to be a writer? I never decided I wanted to be a writer. I simply woke up a writer one morning.  

I love to read known, established writers' advice to those of us sitting at our desks, sweating. It makes me think that what I think and do with my pencil and paper each day may, one day, amount to something.

I count myself lucky having known Mr. Foote, as much as I could know him. There was the odd time or two that he lingered in the shop and we talked. We talked, not of writing or the Civil War, but about pipes. He loved his pipes - the Canadian was his preference with its short mouthpiece and long, straight shank - and, by his count, he had thousands, many sent to him by fans.

I'm a fan and I appreciate having a pipe of his now. It sits across the room atop an old Underwood typewriter, perfect for me to look up to for inspiration and to remind me to stay right where I am and to work, work, work.

The Cool Kids

When I was first asked to write The Memphis Flyer's cover story, "20<30" - a look at twenty twenty-somethings who do good work, are artistic, entrepreneurial or just cool, my first thought was, "Why am I not on this list?"

And then I remembered that I'm 40.

40 Years Old

My next thought was, "What did I do in my twenties that might have been noteworthy?" Good question. I got married when I was 23 and moved away briefly. I came back to Memphis and worked for The Commercial Appeal. My first child was born when I was 27 and I bought a business at 28. I'm not sure any of that would have put me on this list.

But this story isn't about me. It's about them. So I settled in for interview after interview after interview. A friend recently read the piece and asked if writing it felt like a marathon. The work was more like a bunch of quick sprints. The length of each little bio - 150-200 words - didn't require an hour of interview, so I found myself trying to find the hook, figure out who these people are, what they do, why they do it and why they love it, in as short a time span as possible.

I wanted to know why Mary Phillips enjoys growing greens in Binghamton, how Sarah Petschonek finds the time to do everything she does, what it is Brad Phelan finds satisfying in the realm of film and video. I thought readers would be curious as to how Kat Gordon got into baking, what Tal Frankfurt did in Israel and Amanda Mauck did in Haiti, and how Shayla Purifoy decompresses after her workday. I wondered what Josh Belenchia's favorite meal consists of.

After the first couple of interviews, I learned what to ask to get them to open up about what I needed to know. They were all great about it and eager, forthcoming and open. I wish I could have taken more time with each and they are certainly deserving of more words.

I love writing profiles of interesting people, and this was rapid fire interviewing and writing.

Earlier this week I interviewed an 82-year-old man (it's not a "1<90" story) who learned to fly airplanes at 17 before he dropped out of high school. He joined the Air Force and went to Korea, then joined the Army to fly helicopters and found himself in Vietnam. After military service, he flew corporate planes and trained others to fly. It's a fascinating story and I get about a thousand more words to use on him. Look for that story soon in The Commercial Appeal.


All of these stories are about passions and what drives the individual to do what they do. Many are just beginning on the adventure while others are winding it down and reminiscing about life. Either way, they're good stories that are fun and enlightening to write. I count myself as lucky to be able to do so.

[The great photos in The Flyer story (including the ridiculous one above) are all by Justin Fox Burks (you can see more from him here and here. I got to watch some of them being taken and it was a blast getting to watch Justin work.]

The Music of Chance

I want to visit Brooklyn.

I want to go there and find out where Paul Auster lives and just hang out in front of his house. Maybe sit on a stoop and read while I wait. I hear Brooklyn is lousy with stoops. And then, when he leaves to walk up to the corner store, or to the office I've read he keeps nearby for writing, I'll walk with him. I'll tell him thanks for what he does and for his imagination.

That's all.

I won't wait for him to buy his cigarettes or beer or light bulbs, or whatever he's getting at the store. I won't hang around until he finishes up his day of work because, as much as I respect what he does, I respect his need for solitariness. It's what he writes about so much after all, men who are alone, either by choice or the will of someone or something else.

That's how it is in The Music of Chance, which I've just finished. The reader gets inside of the main character, Jim Nashe's, head because that's where so much of the story takes place. From the very first when his wife leaves him and he comes into an inheritance allowing him to drive across country and back again, as though it's a compulsion. And it is, to keep moving forward, alone, becomes an addiction for Nashe and the first third of the book is his travels. And then he meets young Jack Pozzi - Jackpot, as he's known - and things change. Things stop.

And I'll stop there because to say more would give away too much of this story.

I love reading Auster because he puts us so much in the mind of a writer. He makes us feel what it's like to sit in a room alone with a typewriter and imagine a man and a wager and a stone wall.

I love, too, that he's written so much (more than a dozen novels, collections of poetry, screenplays, essays) and I've read relatively little of it. It's exciting to know there's so much more out there for me. I found my copy of The Music of Chance at Second Editions, the used bookstore inside the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, recently when I stopped by for work. It's a very good condition hardback Faber and Faber Limited edition that was published for Great Britain.

I don't seek out an Auster novel, but I keep my eyes open for them in any used bookstore I happen into. That's the best way to discover his work - in a dusty bookstore, among stacks and stacks of old books, all alone.

The Ages and Stages of Music

We're a musical household. Any time we're home, whether lounging around reading, cooking dinner, doing laundry or dishes, or disciplining children, there is music playing.

Some of us (me) are more intent on having background music than others and usually end up picking the music. If it's up to me, it ends up being a shuffling of Elvis Costello, Jack Johnson, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones or, if the mood is different, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Dean Martin and Lester Young. Either way, Kristy and Andria will listen to it and rarely complain out loud. The kids have no choice.

In the interest of fairness, however, I decided some time back to create a Pandora station with the top picks from each of us to share so it could be accessed from any of our phones or computers.

With a third leaning towards Dylan, Springsteen, Prince and Lyle Lovett; a third interested in Garrison Starr, Nick Drake, Coldplay and Al Green; and a third of Black Crowes, Paul Simon, U2 and Velvet Underground, I thought we'd have a pretty interesting mix, a radio station made just for us.

I put it all together and took it live. It was awful. I don't think I even made it through a sink full of dirty dishes before I had to stop, dry my hands and delete the whole damn thing. I can't even remember what songs it threw out at us, but I didn't care for them, any of them.

We can tolerate, even enjoy each others music when we get to pick the artists, songs and albums, but Pandora should stay out of our business. And now we've got another coming of age with his own music tastes. C used Christmas money to buy himself an iPod Touch and, having turned 13 a couple of days ago, he's been given album downloads and an iTunes gift card. I helped him set up his own iTunes library and store account.

The first album C ripped from our household's collaborative CD collection was Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (a great choice). After that, I had  him go through my iTunes library (some 2,439 songs) and make a list of what he was interested in so I could copy it over to his account. His list included all of the Jack Johnson because Jack sings about the sea and C is my son, and I can't help but think a part of him would rather be on the bow of a sailboat, watching the whitecaps disappear beneath the hull and racing a pair of playful dolphins. He picked out some Beatles (though no Stones, which concerns me), Spoon, Louis Prima, Coltrane, Cory Branan and the Beastie Boys. I chose Costello's My Aim Is True because he lives under my roof.

He also had "Nightrain" off of Appetite for Destruction. I asked him about that and he said they'd played it in band. C plays alto sax with his school's concert band. I laughed at him and told him they probably played the Duke Ellington/Jimmy Forrester composition, "Night Train."

It's all a learning process, though, and one not done so much with the head as with the heart and gut. I'm interested to see where his musical tastes lie and where this explorations will take him. He perused the iTunes Store today with his store credit but he said, "I couldn't find anything." And yet, they have all. the. songs.

It takes time, I know. When I was his age, it was 1983 and I was blaring Def Leppard's Pyromania, Quiet Riot's Metal Health and Prince's 1999 through my jam box.

Only time will tell what he clings to and what tunes end up coming from underneath his door or, Lord help us, mixed into our home Pandora station.

Happy Old Year, Happy New Year

Two-thousand and ten. Fin. 

This is the time of year when, popularly, we look back at the year past and say, "good riddance." Not me. Not this year. I like 2010. There have been years recently when I've been glad to see them go. Hell, I've opened the door for them and shown them the way with a hand to the collar. This year, though, was good to me.

I turned 40 this year and it feels right. I think maybe I've been 40 for quite a while and am finally able to live in its skin. I feel like Benjamin Buttons as his body ages backwards, yet his years advance chronologically. At a certain point he was the same age as his body and that was the time he felt he got to be himself at last. It's the same situation in the novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, because it's almost the exact same story.


It was a good year professionally as well. Things clicked and my pencil did right by me. I wrote a cover story for Memphis Magazine, a cover story for The Memphis News, I was admitted to the Moss Fiction Workshop with the great Richard Bausch, I finished the first draft of a novel and am halfway through the first draft of a second, I wrote a few short stories and one of them, "Sea Change," won the grand prize for fiction in Memphis Magazine. I am currently working on a cover story for The Memphis Flyer which should appear in February. 


That's not a bad year.


I don't make resolutions for the new year, but I do look forward. I hope, in 2011, to complete the first draft of the second novel and then buckle down and get to some deep revising of both books. I hope to place some more short stories in literary magazines. I hope to keep the writing moving forward ... always forward.

At the end of 2010, life is good. My family is happy and healthy in a house that is raucous and fun - three adults and six kids, how could it be anything but? There is food in the cupboard, a stable of close friends, music on the hi-fi and the ideas come fast and furious. 

The new year has a lot to live up to, but I'm starting it with the advantage. Now here's wishing you and yours a very Happy New Year. 


Here's a view of my desk at the end of 2010:

Hidden Memphis: Nelson Smith III

Some time ago, my sister, Elizabeth, was working for the UrbanArt Commission and made a studio visit to check on a project she was managing. The project was a monument for Manassas High School being cast from concrete and bronze. The artist was Nelson Smith III. She told me later all about the studio, how packed it was with art, the crappy part of town it's in, the vastness of the space and the friends Mr. Smith had sitting around chatting with him, passing time in the middle of the day.

More recently, one of my editors at The Commercial Appeal told me that Chris Peck, THE editor at the CA, had an idea for a series on people and places around town that many people might not know about. These subjects would almost define Memphis, yet live in near-obscurity. Did I have any ideas? Would I be interested in writing it? What to call it?

Well, of course I was interested, and the first person I thought of was Nelson Smith III (Prodigious output of 'general practitioner' found everywhere from hotel rooms to dashboards to clubs; CA 12/26/10). Mr. Smith approached those who ran the Shoney's restaurants in Memphis back in the 70s and told them he could make a Big Boy statue for the cost they were having them shipped from California. They gave Smith a statue and he fashioned a mold from it, cast a new Big Boy on spec and put the two side-by-side. "Which one is yours?" he asked. They couldn't tell and he had the job. He made over 20 for the restaurants over the years.

Elizabeth told me about some of the work he had done, but also about what a nice and gentle man he is. Part of what I love about my job, about freelance journalism, is the people I get to meet day in and day out. Not just meet, but nearly inhabit for a time. I drove to Smith's studio at the corner of Thomas and Huron, in a part of Memphis that is nearly deserted now, save for the clump of houses at the end of Huron, a dead end street. There was wash hanging on lines outside these homes and people sitting on their porches. Dogs ran through the street and there were cars that looked long-abandoned in yards and at the curb. The man who answered the door of the squat, brick building appeared kind and open to questions. For the next hour, he told me all about his life and his work. He showed me around his studio, pulling sculptures from piles and telling me the stories behind them.

The studio itself is the old Currie's Club Tropicana, and Smith told me that any black artist who was anybody back in the day played there - B.B. King, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes ... he showed me where the stage had been and you could almost hear the guitar and the Hammond B3 organ oozing from the plaster and lumber he had laying about. Smith would think of something - a mold or a piece of cornice he'd sculpted - and could go straight to it, wherever it was and whatever it might have been buried under.

The series, by the way, is to be called "Hidden Memphis." It will be semi-regular and I look forward to meeting and researching the subjects, be they people or places. If you have any ideas, any at all, please let me know at richard@richardalley.com. The story in the CA got some nice comments and one e-mail from a local children's book author, Alice Faye Duncan, who said that her father had a portrait of her painted as a child, when she must have been two or three, but never knew who the artist was. It was simply signed 'Nelson III.' My story led her to the artist and she has contacted him to buy some of his artwork. Helping with these connections is another reason I love my job.

Nelson Smith III is a fascinating subject, he is locked into the modern history of Memphis through the artwork and signage he's produced for some of our most iconic establishments - Libertyland, Mark Twain restaurant, Holiday Inn, Shoney's, Shakey's Pizza ...  the list goes on. And so does Nelson.