Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, January 30, 2024, or: Coping with a Restless Night Requires Novelist to Take an Early Rest Break….

Late Morning, Tuesday, January 30, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, there. It’s another cloudy, cold (but not snowy) New England winter morning here in Carroll County. The current temperature is 22°F (-6°C) under mostly cloudy conditions, and with humidity at 68% and an easterly breeze blowing at 3 MPH (5 KMH), the feels-like temperature is 27°F (-3°C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 27°F (-3°C). Tonight, we can expect partly cloudy skies and a low of 4°F (-15°C).

My Long, Exhausting Morning

It’s been a somewhat…long and tiring morning for me. I don’t know at what time I fell asleep last night while I watched a few episodes of World War I (a 1964 documentary series that originally aired on CBS) on DVD rather than watch Silver Bullet; however, I know all too well that I woke up at 2:15 AM, partly because “nature called” at a most inopportune time, but mostly because I had a rare but strong anxiety attack. (That…wasn’t fun.)

I eventually relaxed enough to go to sleep by focusing on the most pleasant topics I could think of – attractive women and sex – but because I didn’t turn on my phone to check, I don’t know when I dozed off. It might have been at 4, it might have been at 5 in the morning. I only know that it was still mercifully dark outside and that when I woke up it was 7:15 here in my humble but cozy home in Madison.

Bottom line: I’m going to keep this blog post relatively short so I can take a longer-than-usual morning break and rest for a while. I have a novel to work on, and I’ll be cross with myself (and the Universe) if I have to take today off because I’m too tired to write coherently.

On Writing & Storytelling  – Reunion: Coda Progress Update

Before I go on my badly needed rest break, I will give you a quick situation report on the current status of Reunion: Coda.

As of this writing, the manuscript – including the title page, epigrams, and the main text (12 complete chapters, with a thirteenth currently in progress) – is 166 pages long and has a word count of 68,694 words. If my calculations are correct and I only have two or three more chapters to go before I type “The End,” Reunion: Coda will exceed – hopefully not too much – the 200-page mark, at least on Word. I’m not shooting for a specific “total pages” target; the story will end when it reaches a natural “stopping point,” just as the shorter Reunion: A Story did when I  wrote it in 1998. If Reunion: Coda winds up with a page count of between 220-250 pages (not including the front and back matter stuff), I’ll be happy. Of course, if it somehow ends up being a bit longer than that, I’ll be okay with that, too – as long as the novel is good and readable.

As for yesterday’s writing session, it went well. I’d slept well the night before last, was “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” and got off to an early start (1 instead of 2 PM), so I finished the first scene of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios.

Because Scene One doesn’t have any spoilers – except for people who have not read Reunion: A Story – I will share it here in toto:

Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios: Commencement Day, Friday, June 17, 1983

1

5:30 AM

The cube-shaped silver-gray Sony Dream Machine alarm clock with blue LED digits pierced my eardrums with its shrill wail, snapping me out of a fitful slumber filled with Goyaesque nightmares. I groaned and, annoyed, jabbed the SLEEP button several times, wishing I could stay in bed for another hour. Or better yet forever. I muttered to myself, “Why do I have to get up so freakin’ early?” It was not like it was a normal day or anything. However, nothing was normal about this day. It was the end of an era, the closing of a chapter, the final goodbye to a place that had been my second home for three years. South Miami Senior High School, where I had met the girl of my dreams, and let her slip away after waiting for too long to tell her how I felt. The school year had officially ended two days ago, but today was the day that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The day that I would see Marty for the last time and watch her walk away with her family.

That is, of course, if I saw Marty at all. Like all the other high schools in the Dade County Public Schools system, South Miami Senior High School’s graduating classes were too large to accommodate students, faculty, administrators, and, of course, friends and family members of the graduating seniors within the school itself. The only space on campus where all 535 of us seniors had ever been assembled as a group was the school gym/basketball court, but even that cavernous space was too tiny to hold the crowd of 3,000 that was expected to attend the Class of 1983’s commencement ceremony. As a result, my fellow grads and our guests who had tickets had to go to the Theodore R. Gibson Center at Miami-Dade Community College’s South Campus instead.

I had never set foot on Miami-Dade South before. To me, it was just a blur of buildings and trees that I glimpsed from Mark’s car as we drove from one place to another. He was my best friend and chauffeur since I had a license but no car of my own. I wondered how big the campus was if one building could fit over 3,000 people for the graduation ceremony.

We weren’t going as a group as we did for field trips on those Aspen yellow buses with DADE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS in black letters. We had to find our parking spots, wherever they were. That meant I had no idea if I would see Marty after we got our diplomas and returned our caps and gowns by the pool next to Gibson Center.

Marty. The girl I had loved from afar since our sophomore year…a lifetime ago, or so it seemed. The girl I had finally written a love letter to and slipped into her hand, neatly folded, and tucked in a sealed envelope marked  For Marty – Do not open until after Graduation on Wednesday at the end of the sixth period on our last day of classes. The girl whom I hadn’t seen since then.

What if she hated me? What if she thought I was a creep, or a coward, for confessing my feelings at the last minute? I felt a pang of regret and fear in my chest.

I lay in bed, staring at the blue numbers on my Dream Machine: 5:35 AM. It was still dark outside, and according to Bob Weaver’s forecast on Channel Four last night, the sun wouldn’t rise until 6:30. It was going to be a typical South Florida summer day: hot, humid, and sunny. No chance of rain to wash away my worries.

I should try to get some more sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to look like a zombie when Mom took pictures of me in my cap and gown. But sleep was the last thing on my mind. Instead, visions of the recent past flickered before me as in some kind of movie theater buried deep in my subconscious…in living color and Dolby Stereo sound…and with 1950s-style movie posters with angsty titles like The One That Got Away and Wasted Chances – starring, of course, J.K. Garraty and Martina Reynaud – displayed prominently on the theater lobby walls.

I felt a twinge of pain deep inside my chest as I saw – still inside that nightmarish movie theater in my skull – Marty as I had last seen her less than two days before: clad in Levi’s jeans, a white and orange SOUTH MIAMI HIGH CHORUS T-shirt, and girls’ Keds sneakers. During our last conversation in South Miami’s choral practice, she had been pensive, sweet, gentle, wise, vulnerable, and (was I imagining this?) unexpectedly affectionate. Especially at the end after I’d given her The Envelope with my last-minute confession of my love for her and made her promise that she would not read its contents till after the commencement ceremony…less than seven hours from now, I thought glumly as the conscious part of my brain noted the time – 5:38 AM – on the face of the Dream Machine.

I wanted to screw my eyes closed to avoid watching Wasted Chances – or The One That Got Away – and not see the bit that I knew was coming “onscreen” next. But like a driver rubbernecking at an accident scene on Bird Road – or Miller Drive, or even goddam Flagler Street, I couldn’t avert my gaze from the panoramic view of Room 136, lit in cold-white, fluorescent lights, almost unfurnished save for a shrouded Kawai piano and one gray metal folding chair, and currently occupied by two jeans-clad 18-year-olds: Marty and me in The Big Farewell Scene. You know…the part where Our Not So Gallant Hero picks up his much-used olive drab Jansport backpack, turns to The Girl He Loves, and tries to imitate Han Solo…or is it Indiana Jones…?

Jim (turning to Marty in leave-taking): Well, this is it, sweetheart…

Holding his backpack in one hand, Jim makes a beeline for the chorus practice room door, but before he can take more than a couple of steps, Marty reaches out and gently but firmly tugs on Jim’s free hand. He stops in his tracks with a surprised look on his face and turns to face Marty.

Marty (smiling shyly) Hey, you’re just going to leave without…

She pauses, looks Jim directly in the eye with laser-like intensity, and pulls him closer to her.

Marty (CONT’D): Without a kiss goodbye?

Before Jim can react, Marty wraps her arms around him, closes her eyes, and puts her lips firmly but gently on his. Still (somehow) holding on to his backpack, Jim hugs Marty with his other arm and falls into the spell of her kiss. It’s a loving yet somehow innocent kiss; like the kind of smooch you’d see in old-timey movies like Casablanca or To Have and Have Not – no dueling tongues or passionate moans, but still conveying love and yearning.

(Cue John Williams-style love theme)

Before the Skull Cinema’s sadistic projectionist could show me more of The Big Farewell scene, my Sony Dream Machine’s alarm wailed insistently yet again, sending the movie-like presentation of that one-and-only kiss between Marty and me back into the deep dark recesses of my subconscious, leaving me to stare balefully at my radio-alarm clock’s LED display. 5:45 AM? Fuck it – I can’t sleep with all that weirdness scrambling my brain. Might as well get movin’.   

Well, it’s time for my rest break, so I’ll take my leave of you here. Ciao for now, Constant Readers!