junkmail for blankets

rough fruit

A few paragraphs from the rough draft of this weekend's writing:

I see a bird flying by itself and wonder where it’s going. Whether it’s lost or is headed home, homesick. In a certain mood, I tell myself that it doesn’t trust the other birds to show it the way home. This kind of thing happens when I’m lonely, or after I see a movie. This is the kind of thinking I do when I believe God might be watching.

To some degree, this is a book about home, both lower- and upper-case, both the place I left after high school and the idea, at least, of a place I’m moving toward. Were my life a film-script, home would appear as both title and a handful of memory sequences.

One of the early sequences opens in a backyard in Bartlett, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis. My best friend Robbie Reed and I have been throwing dirt clods at dragonflies. As I scan the ground for more ammo, Robbie grabs my arm, points across the yard, and says, “Look, man, them dragonflies are humpin’.”

That’s the movie version; I don’t know if those are the exact words, but they seem right. Robbie somehow knew about those things. Robbie lived three houses down, and Robbie introduced me to sex, death, and, thus, God. I remember acting like I knew what his words meant, and I remember what those two dragonflies looked like: backlit like by the sun, wings jerking and beating body and air, 360 frames per second, a movie reel tattered from twenty years of mental replay.

This is how I do it. Both in the replay and in the living, I imagine my life as movie, or at least think it should be one . . . .