Fiction Attic

June 10, 2006 What a handsome wee chap! Oscar looks exactly like you–is Kevin pissed? (Janet’s kind of ticked off that neither of the kids look much like her. Thomas started off looking like me but has gone on to find his own face, and Rona favors me more than Janet too.)

No doubt about it, raising kids is awful. It’s embarrassing to have people over (people who don’t have kids anyway, or who don’t know my kids), because Thomas never, ever shuts up and crawls all over anybody. The more you scold him the more amped up he gets. He crawled into bed with us about 5:15 this morning and peed. But last night he read almost verbatim a whole Thomas the Tank Engine book to us. It wasn’t a See-Dick-Run type, either–it was a real story, about thirty pages long with lots of dialogue and lots of characters. He didn’t really read it, of course, but he had memorized it from us reading it to him just this week (it’s a library book so he did it within the last few days.) He has an amazing memory. If I try to do any condensing while reading a story I’ve read to him before (like the 100 page Disney version of 101 Dalmations), he corrects me. I can’t even leave out a “he said.” I wish there was some kind of contest I could enter him in, or something he could make money at in Vegas. But I don’t think I could stay at home with him all day the way Janet does. No wonder she’s always in a bad mood. I think when he really learns to read he’ll calm down a lot, but it will also ruin his life. Better him than us.

You haven’t heard Richard Thompson? I’d think Kevin would be a big fan. He’s been around since the sixties and is one of the most amazing guitarists and songwriters ever. I’m a fanatic. He’s an English guy who started out as a kid with some Celtic folk group called Fairport Convention and then split off and recorded with his wife Linda Thompson through the seventies and early eighties. Their album “Shoot Out the Lights” is on most every top-whatever great albums of all time lists. He’s certainly on my top five list of all time saddest songs with “Beeswing.” See if you can download or upload or i-pod or whatever you do with songs and the internet. It’s about a wild woman the singer falls in love with (”She was a fine thing/Fine as a beeswing/So fine a breath of air might blow her away/She was a lost child/She was runnin’ wild/She said as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.) It will break your heart, especially the end:

 Last I heard she was sleepin' rough
 Down on the Darby beat
 White Horse in her hip pocket
 A wolf hound at her feet
 And they say her flower has faded
 Hard living and hard booze
 But I guess that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse
 And they say she even married once
 A man named Romney Brown
 But even a gypsy caravan was too much settlin' down

Also listen to a song he does with his son called “Persuasion.” It’s the most beautiful melody I’ve ever heard. I could go on for pages about Richard Tompson. His most famous song, which you probably have heard, is called “Vincent Black Lightning.” It’s a love song about a woman and a bank robber and his motorcycle–very cool and very spooky. The guitar is unbelievable–it’s only Richard Thompson but it sounds like three guitars. Best place to start with him is an a sort of best-of album called “Action-Packed.” If I could figure out how to burn a CD I’d make a copy for you– maybe I’ll try. He also does a bad-ass acoustic version of “Oops, I Did it Again,” but that’s on a different album.

For my birthday we went to the bookstore. I got Edward P. Jones’s short stories, “Lost in the City,” because everything else I’ve read by him has blown me away. I also bought Ethan Canin’s “Carry Me Across the Water” because it was marked down to $2.49 in hardback. I got James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” one of those books writers are always talking about but that I’d never read. I started reading it last night and am about halfway through it–it’s only about 190 pages. You’d love it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s very sexy. Janet got me a couple of books for my birthday through Amazon: “Ain’t Got No Cigarettes,” which is a collection of a bunch of conversations with various Nashville people about Roger Miller (”King of the Road” guy), who must have been the funniest person who ever lived. (I’m going to start using one of his lines. Whenever the telephone would ring he’d say, “Get that. It might be the phone.” I don’t know why but that just cracks me up. When people would avoid picking up the check at a restaurant he’d say they had “shellout falter.”) She also got me “The Tao of Willie,” which is a pretty embarrassing book, and I’m the world’s biggest Willie Nelson fan.

Love, Wade

June 6, 2006 Fussy, I still want to get up there to see you and the boys but blah, blah, blah. The summer keeps filling up with weddings and trips to Scotland and baby showers and crap like that. Maybe in September? I am an idiot in that I cussed out my credit card company a few years ago when I found out everybody else gets air miles and I’d had the same credit card since 1989 and they’d never given me squat. So they started giving me airmiles for $75 a year, and they’re on American Airlines, which means of course that they’re useless if you have two kids, since every flight has to go through Dallas. Things that are so easy and natural for other people are the things I suck worst at. Janet’s no good at those things either, but she’s got an excuse since she’s foreign. Anyway, I got something like 100,000 air miles that I need to find a way to burn.

Below are some pictures of my kids. My little girl is so mean. Thomas was always a conniver, deal-maker, negotiator, wheedler–he manipulates you in a way to try to make you believe you’re winning when really he’s getting everything on his list. Rona simply amps up from zero to sixty when she doesn’t get her way. She goes from a grumble to a screech. She doesn’t cry, usually–she just screeches when she’s pissed off, and she gets pissed off a lot. Thomas and I call her Little Grumbly Granny or the Screech Owl. He’s very sweet to her, and she adores him–they gang up on me and Janet all the time Check out the last two pictures–he’s showing her how to write letters. Very sweet. Wish he’d show me.

I keep up with you through your blog. I wish we had a Mongolian baby-sitter. We’re getting a sitter tonight, one of maybe eight or nine times we’ve had a sitter in the past four years. It’s my birthday (happy birthday to me, etc.), so we’re going to go do something, probably to the mall, where Janet will clothes shop and I’ll screw around in the book store or record store until she’s finished. It’s amazing how un-eclectic my tastes are, and they’re getting narrower all the time. I used to listen to both kinds of music, country and western (favorite Blues Brothers reference of my undergraduate years). Now I don’t listen to anything but Richard Thompson. I’m a Richard Thompson fanatic. Luckily he puts out a record every eleven or twelve minutes so I have plenty of new stuff to listen to. He sells stuff only through his website now, and stuff goes out of print after a week or two, so you have to act fast. I’ll go to the record store anyway and look at their Richard Thompson CD’s, if they have any. If they don’t I’ll go to the book store and see if they have a copy of The Moviegoer, because that’s the only book I read now (not counting your books, of course.)

That’s not entirely true. I found a tape Kevin made for me ten years ago–Graham Parker on one side and Steve Forbert on the other. It still works! I used to listen to the Graham Parker all the time but assumed I’d lost the tape, and I was very excited when I found it, and now Thomas’s favorite song is “Short Memories,” which is also my favorite song on that tape. We especially like the way he says “shovelin’ coal” in the verse that goes “My daddy fought in Mycacea/Egypt and North Korea/He came home to a good career/Shovelin’ coal!” Thomas makes me sing that part over and over again and cracks up every time.

Write me back!

Love, Wade

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