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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
December 30, 2007
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2007 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Handwritten Draft, 1969
© 1969 by Bud Grossmann
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MANY WORDS ABOUT FEWER WORDS
From: Audrey Reiter <a—@hotmail.com>
To: Dave Fischer <d—@juno.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:50:12 -0700
Subject: =?Windows-1252?Q?RE:_I_Won=92t_Call_You_on_Christmas_Day.?=
I liked this story by Segal...so much unsaid. Kinda like your Christmas poem. Am winding my way thru the rest of the issue though I'm now back on the treadmill - my first draft of my thesis is due in February. I'm trying to organize three hundred or so pages into a seamless, interesting, relevant, smooth-flowing whole. Hope your Xmas was good - mine was a two-sided coin. Cheers. Aud
From: David C. Fischer <d—@juno.com>
To: Audrey Reiter <a—@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:57:41 -0600
Subject: Coins With Sides and One Edge; In God We Trust.
7:37PM. Considering the variety of pretty pictures coming out of the U.S. Mint nowadays, I'm going to have to think awhile about the applicability of your chosen cliché. But I realized after you and I had rushed through a phone conversation, Audrey, that I had not asked you about sons and grandchildren. Or health or immortality. Or the good things I take for granted, such as some people's marriages.
I loved seeing the full-page photo of a page of edited Carver manuscript; TNY recently ran a similar photo, of Don DeLillo's own cross-outs and insertions, as I recall, in an article about a library that buys writers' notes. I've made several small improvements on this computer screen in the six minutes I've been typing these, let's see, I'll run a word count, 129 words [and now, at 8:15PM, thirty-eight minutes into my rushed composition, my mother napping in the guest room for longer than I would wish, the word count is 147 up to the words "word count"; I composed three paragraphs about cousins, in the last thirty-one minutes], but my earlier word choices evaporated from the screen (and from my porous (hmm!) mind) (sieve-like? hmm! what allows steam to rise and disappear?).
Clarissa's little brother Doug, visiting from Michigan, came to my house for a couple hours this afternoon with his pretty wife Diana and four school-age children, to see my parents. Doug is very much like Clarissa, I think, in several ways, including being excellent at showing interest in my folks and Aunt Jeanette and Uncle Lloyd (who took him into their home for a couple of his high school years when his dad, my beloved Uncle Jack, died). Diana is pretty, as I say, and smart, quiet, glaringly judgmental in a vegetarian way—I assured her I strained the caffeine out of the Mountain Dew I let her sons pour into mugs, out of her line of vision in the kitchen. I don't know her well, but I like her. For a very few minutes I rescued Diana from family chit-chat by inviting her and the youngest kid, a totally cute six-year-old who can annoyingly whistle tunes through her widely spaced front teeth, to walk the one block to the Fjord Fjarmacy to pick up a bottle of my blood pressure pills. Icy sidewalks, lovely day, wonderful town.
My cousins ate lunch at Clarissa's. Clarissa works at three today. She took Vince with her because he has an ear infection, and she wanted him to see a doctor. I didn't ask if it would be a VA Hospital doctor. Mom and Dad picked me up at nine this morning to go with them to Mom's p.t. session in Ninian (headache relief, going very well). Then we saw my (our) lawyer in Ninian to discuss our respective estate plans. I now have a draft of my Restatement of Trust and Latest Will, etc., on which the lawyer had somehow "dropped the ball" for a bit more than twelve months, and about which I, champion procrastinator and finances avoider, hadn't asked him again until Dad invited a purveyor of presumably overpriced, packaged estate plans to the farm.
So, as I say, cousins had eaten lunch, and they came in the early afternoon. I served lemon pie and pumpkin pie (had about half-a-pie of each left over from Christmas Eve dinner; I would have eaten lots more pie yesterday, but I destroyed my intestinal tract with second-rate macadamia nut chocolates, sent by my charming-but-neglectful daughter). My sugar-deprived cousins were warmly appreciative of the pies, although they didn't finish off the pumpkin.
Back to paragraph two above, editing, visibility of revisions. Did you ever hear an NPR report about a guy who compulsively spent all his waking hours writing in his diary, producing like boxes and boxes of typed pages, essentially saying, "It's such-and-such a time, and I'm writing my diary, oh, and by the way, I also ate and drank and went to the bathroom"? Well, he died this year, and they ran the original piece, which was from far more years ago than I would have guessed, since I'd often thought about it and it had stayed rather fresh in my mind. I like our old handwritten letters, RLed and sometimes RRLed. It would be ridiculous to display the exact time of each cross-out and insertion, but I do enjoy tracking the visible progress of literary composition.
Okay, I guess I just started out to discuss coins (those with two sides) and to tell you my little brother metal detected a lot of coins out of the Atlantic Ocean on Christmas Day, including a corroded silver Spanish coin with legible date of 1777, he says.
Eight-twenty-six p.m. I think I better wake my mama, escort her to the bathroom, and help her sort her dreams from my reality. An hour ago, she was waving at the windows and telling someone not to put poison so close to his mouth. She has very good eyesight when she is sleeping.
I will look again at Segal's little story, which I judged harshly because I thought you had complained about her writing. I had heard two Segals at once on NPR same day I spoke to you about the two Moodys. Moody, Rick and Moody, Blue Dave. But just because I have a good excuse for mixing up Segal and Moody does not mean I don't actually have Alzheimer's.
Speaking of which, I heard interesting reviews of The Savages (haven't read the review in current TNY) and recall your review of Alice Munro movie re Alz., and I'm beginning to think I might enjoy having a Fjord girlfriend, someone with a comfortable sofa, a 32" TV whose screen does not face the front window, soft hands, a Netflix subscription, and an appetite for the movies I think I'd like. Maybe I'll put an ad in the Fjord Shopper and fjordwisconsin.com.
Thank you, Audrey, for your little e-mails and our occasional phone calls. I understand you are busy.
Love, Dave
8:36PM
♦
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