A lot of writers get asked where ideas come from. For many of us, the answer is, Beats me. I was just coming up the stairs and an idea tapped me on the shoulder. Remember Billy Harris? it said. All these years later, I still remember my unrequited love in 4th grade, he with every strand of hair Brylcreemed into place, he with his swell brown leather belt, he who read aloud so well in reading circle. And I remember all the other boyfriends, too. Wayne, the one in Oklahoma, with whom I shared my first kiss--albeit with each of us on either side of the glass on the front door of my apartment building. David, whose hand-holding ability bordered on the erotic. Stevie, who played lead guitar in a band, Dennis, who was an artist, Joel, who loved his statistics class in college and majored in business and sent me a dozen red roses in the middle of winter that I thought were so beautiful I couldnt bear to take them out of the long white box with the green tissue paper. I remember the ones who broke my heart. The ones whose heart I broke. Frank, who was my boyfriend when I was a senior in high school and loved Tony Bennet and sent me a poem he wrote in the mail that I still have and proposed to me standing on a curb so he would at last be taller than I. And I thought, Hmmmm. Old Boyfriends. Short stories? Essays? Im always stuck by what people remember most about old loves, which memories stay and stay. Lying on the sofa with someone and listening to The Way You Look Tonight over and over. Staying out all night at the edge of the Mississippi River to watch the sun come up. Taking a spontaneous road trip in an old, old truck and singing show tunes as the miles flew past. Hmmmmmmmmm.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 15:56:45 +0000
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