By Will Schuck

In just nine months, the Sherwood Anderson Project has grown from an idea into a budding reality. Little did anyone know that a single meeting positively would change the course of the “project.”

In February 2001, while on my way to work at 6:30 a.m., I heard a spot on Kent State University’s radio broadcast about the university’s executive development program. I jotted down the phone number while driving in the dark with the hope that someone at Kent State could help me uncover the source of my dilemma: an inability to build public support for the Sherwood Anderson Project. After meeting with Dennis Ulrich, the director of Kent’s executive development program, one word stood out as the key to success: follow-up.

By regularly following up with those who showed an interest in the project, I found that a following naturally formed. In a month, eight people enlisted. We now have 42. But increasing numbers was (and is) not the mission of the group. Increasing awareness of Sherwood Anderson, cultivating an appreciation of his works and spreading knowledge of his life in Ohio was and is its mission. The group then began to focus its efforts in that direction. During this time, another critical relationship was formed. The Lorain County Historical Society agreed that Sherwood Anderson’s presence in Elyria and Cleveland was a little-known fact and something the public needed to know.

In 1999, in the spirit of Sherwood Anderson, I had formed a group for adult writers to bring them together and help them improve their craft. We quickly moved this program under the umbrella of the Sherwood Anderson Project and began “branding” it as our first literary program. The next step was to begin educating the local public about Sherwood Anderson. Thus, with the help of the Lorain County Historical Society, “Sherwood Anderson Day” was born.

In September 2001, Sherwood Anderson Day was held at the Lorain County Historical Society’s Hickories Museum. The museum is just blocks away from the site of Anderson’s Elyria paint factory and his 1906-1913 residence there. The event drew about 40 people and went a long way toward putting Anderson’s name in front of the public. Elyria Mayor Bill Grace even declared September 29, 2001 as Sherwood Anderson Day to commemorate the author’s arrival in Elyria. Mayor Grace also attended the event. The local media, as well, were open to publicizing the event and re-examining Anderson’s life and times in the area. A supportive Sunday editorial in Elyria’s Chronicle-Telegram ran the headline: “Anderson Center Sure Would Be Nice.” It was then that our group realized that “Sherwood Anderson Literary Center” would be a more fitting name for what we proposed to offer the community.

And just what were we proposing? In addition to the adult writers’ group and Sherwood Anderson Day, we would provide a summer writing camp for children, online tutoring, a series of author lectures, an informative web site, an Anderson book discussion group, writing workshops, and classroom presentations on Anderson’s life and works. And the list continues to grow.

The literary center has also become involved in supporting efforts in Clyde, Ohio, to re-establish and refresh Anderson’s reputation there. For instance, the Ohio Bicentennial Commission has approved our proposal for a historical marker in Clyde to commemorate Anderson and his works. Dorcas Harms of Storytown Tours in Clyde successfully gained support from the city. The city will provide $500 toward the cost of the marker and will designate a location for its placement. Others in Clyde have agreed to donate time and services to install and maintain the marker.

With a formal business plan developed and a core of eight committee leaders (including myself), the Sherwood Anderson Literary Center heads into 2002 with a bright future devoted to inspiring enthusiasm for the value of thoughtful reading and writing and promoting understanding of the life and work of Sherwood Anderson.

For details about the literary center and its activities, please visit www.sherwoodanderson.org. To make a financial contribution or to participate as a speaker or attendee at Sherwood Anderson Day 2002, please contact literary center Director Will Schuck at 440-933-0865 or wschuck67@hotmail.com or write to: The Sherwood Anderson Literary Center, c/o The Lorain County Historical Society, 509 Washington Ave., Elyria, OH 44035.

By Edith Brilliant

[Reprinted from the Sandusky Register, Sunday, August 29, 1926]

From grocery boy to novelist is the path that Sherwood Anderson, writer, has trod in his climb upward to his place of prominence in the “Who’s Who” of the world. Sherwood Anderson, although born at Camden, O., was a former Clyde, O., resident and the town is full of anecdotes about his life.

There’s a little cottage on Cherry St., the home of Miss Lucy Hurd, where Anderson used to come as a boy to play with his chum Herman Hurd, Miss Hurd’s brother. Miss Hurd remembers the boy as a tall, rather slim youth with black hair. He often came to visit her brother and he was known as a rather shiftless, carefree youngster.

Brother is Artist

None of his Clyde friends recall that he showed any remarkable talent for writing or anything else. But the “artistic” strain showed itself in his family in his two brothers, Carl and Ray. Carl Anderson is a painter of some fame and his work is frequently seen in magazine covers and commercial advertisement.

Anderson, however, had all the melodramatic background for the famous man. Clyde residents remember his father as a town ne’er-do-well. The mother, it is said, helped to support her family during the none too successful days of the head of the family. Young Anderson picked up anything he might do to earn a few extra pennies. When the Buckeye St. sewer construction was being laid in 1890 he was a waterboy. He delivered groceries for T. P. Hurd, the town grocer. He took care of the neighborhood furnaces and chopped the wood. Anderson was ambitious in a carefree way.

Had Several Trades

The father of the family plied a number of trades, including house painting, harness worker in Ervin Brothers Harness Store, and paper hanger.

Sherwood Anderson is only one of two already famous people produced by the little town while Anderson was a resident there. He went to school with John Emerson. Emerson recently married Anita Loos, famous for “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds.” Mr. Emerson has been a prominent figure in the theatrical world of New York and will soon picturize his wife’s novel.

But Clyde residents are not the only people who knew Sherwood Anderson in his teen years in Clyde. Mrs. J. D. Parker, wife of Dr. J. D. Parker of this city, often visited in Clyde and met Sherwood Anderson. Anderson often came to the home of Mrs. Parker’s sister, Mrs. W. E. Gillette, to pay court to Mrs. Parker’s younger sister, Miss Harriett Day, who is now Mrs. E. E. Messmer, Bowie, Texas.

When the Gillette family moved from Clyde, a number of letters written by Sherwood Anderson to the family were destroyed. The Gillette family and Mrs. Gillette’s younger sister were close friends of the Anderson family and especially with Sherwood Anderson and his sister Stella, who died a few years ago. When the family moved to Chicago, Mrs. Messmer visited the sister, Stella.

Remembered Clyde

Although absent from the community for 25 or more years, Anderson has retained a good memory of its inhabitants. A few years ago Sherwood Anderson was asked to appear before the Federation of Women’s Clubs in Toledo. Mrs. Gillette, who lived in Toledo and was a member of the Federation, remembered the boy who had become a famous man and attended his lecture. Following the lecture she stepped to the platform to shake hands with the boy who had been such a welcome visitor at her home in Clyde.

“Mother,” Sherwood Anderson cried as he recognized her and took her into his arms to kiss her and weep as he remembered the many times when Mrs. Gillette had been a real mother to him in the days in the town of Clyde.

Place in His Writings

Anderson’s life in Clyde is taking its place in literature. Winesburg, Ohio mentions Sandusky, Cedar Point, Monroeville and a number of other nearby towns and often refers to the rich vineyards of this district.

In “The Sad Horn Blowers,” appearing in Harper’s Magazine for February 1923, Mrs. Parker and many other people who are familiar with his life believe that he has pictured himself in the life of the small town. Anderson calls his town Monroeville but by the names used it is believed that the village pictured is really Clyde. The father in the story is a house painter like Anderson’s father. The familiar Clyde names used in the story are A. P. Wrigley, Mr. and Mrs. Bradshare, Mrs. Childers, Alfred Geiger, John Wyatt, Dr. Musgrave. Anderson also refers to Piety Hill and Maumee Pike.

The Anderson family are well remembered in Clyde. The children included Sherwood, Stella, Ray, and Carl. Before leaving Clyde, the sister, Stella, taught in the Clyde schools.

Anderson’s experiences were rich during his life in the town. His difficult life gave him hardships from the day he was old enough to assume any family responsibility. During the Spanish American War he served in the company that went from Clyde.

By Sherwood Anderson

Editors’ note: This is the second of two speeches Anderson delivered at a writers’ conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in 1937. This one, apparently entitled “The Obligations of the Writer,” was presented in the evening of August 10.

I think I shall have to make my second talk here at this conference more or less personal. I must have been in a rather reckless mood when I gave Mr. Davison the titles for the two formal talks he asked me to make out here. I would, if possible, rather like to make my two talks a little hang together. I am not talking off-hand. As you will see, I have a manuscript with me. I presume that all writers, and particularly the story teller type of writer, is inevitably also something of an actor. I know that I am. I think I have always tried to set for myself certain parts I am to play in life. I have tried to conceal this fact as much as possible, but almost all of my intimate friends are on to me. Some of the roles I have set for myself in life I have played miserably, and others I think I have played pretty well. I am so much the actor that often I ask myself the question-“Is there really any such person as Sherwood Anderson?” Not only am I an actor, but experience has taught me that I must also look rather like an actor. As it happens, I have a good many actor friends and often, when I am in New York, I go with one of these friends into the actors’ clubs, the Lambs or the Players, and inevitably the same thing happens to me. Men rush up to me. They greet me warmly. They grasp my hand.

“Why hello, Harry, old chap. I thought you were in Los Angeles.”

I might also say that formerly I was often taken for William Jennings Bryan and for Elbert Hubbard. There must have been a good deal of the actor in these men also.

And so being this thing, half the actor, half the writer, the actor in me must have a part to play. As a writer I am compelled to write the lines for the actor. Two or three times I have tried speaking on some set subject, offhand, and the experiment hasn’t come off. I have found myself too much going off into side alleys and losing my way. So I have prepared my lines to be spoken here. As I prepare them, I am at home, in a little cabin by a creek, where I do my work as a writer. The cabin is in the Virginia hill country. I have a secretary working with me. She sits at her desk taking down my golden words.

“Really, how wonderful this is going to sound,” I say to myself. “At last I am going to be an influence upon the young.”

Into my cabin in the Virginia hills come certain sounds. A chipmunk plays on a log, the birds sing. I can hear the chattering of a small stream over stones. A little wind blows in pine trees. I find that chipmunks, pine trees, and birds make a very good audience. They do not talk back, do not ask embarrassing questions, do not challenge my statements.

Perhaps I can best get at what I would like to say here by telling a little of my own personal experiences as a writer.

As I have already pointed out in another talk, there are, as I see it, two approaches to writing. A man may take this business of writing frankly as a way of making a living. He may look upon it in that way.

Or he may get at it in another way, taking it rather as a way of life, as a rather functional matter.

I think my own experiences, as a boy and young man, are not uncommon experiences with young American men. There have always been two impulses pulling at me. I might as well say frankly that I take myself as an artist type of man. I know no reason why I should be ashamed to take this position.

It may be that nowadays things are somewhat different from what they were in my own youth. I was a boy and young man before the period of the World War. I believe that the world War was rather disillusioning. A definite change may have come over the attitude taken by our present-day young men.

But when I was a boy and young man there were certain ideas always being pounded into me, often by people who wished me nothing less than the good life, and these ideas were all alike. They concerned what we call success. The idea was that a man should strive to be big, to be an important figure in life, if possible he was to develop his acquisitive talent, get rich.

I myself was born into a financially ruined family. We lived in a small house, in a rather shabby street, in a quite charming little Ohio town. There were a good many of us. A year or two ago I drove through this street on which stood the house where I spent my boyhood and young manhood. I was filled with curiosity and wonder. There were so many of us. “Where in the devil did we all sleep?” I asked myself. My own father was somewhat of a waster. He was a man who refused to take life too seriously. He was not what we called in Ohio a good provider.

However, I must say that the man had his good points. If he was a waster, he was a rather lovable waster. In my own books from time to time I have used the figure of this man a good deal and I think that on the whole I have hardly been fair to him. The man had a kind of inner gaiety. He could not take the fact that we had no butter to spread on our bread very seriously.

“Well, heaven and earth, you’ve got the bread, haven’t you?” he would say.

It is a little strange, I think, how the charm of such a man, leading such a life, sticks. As a boy I think I rather distrusted my father. He loved to get in the back of a small-town saloon with other so-called “no accounts” of the town and spend whole afternoons, when he should have been at work, providing for his children, seeing to their education, laying up money to send them through college, preparing them to associate with cultured people, such as I dare say are gathered together in this audience, in song singing and tale telling.

In my own boyhood and young manhood I became the thing we know so well here in America as a young hustler, a young go-getter. I made up my mind that whatever else I turned out to be, I wasn’t going to be like my own father. There were certain figures of men I had heard and read about, Garfield of my own state of Ohio, risen from canal boy to presidentother figures looming.

The city of Cleveland was nearby. We in our town read the Cleveland newspapers. I myself hurried through the streets selling them. Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who had already come up from poverty, having, as it happened, a father very like my own, was already a big figure in the state.

There were enough of such men, in my state and neighboring states. The newspapers praised them, magazines ran articles holding them up as rather ideal types of manhood. I made up my own mind I was going to be as much like them as I could.

How shall I describe it? I remember well another young man I met at about that time. We were both in business. We worked for the same firm. One day he said something to me.

“Anderson, you are a damned plausible cuss,” he said. “You are too damned slick,” he added. At the moment I rather succeeded in dismissing from my mind what the young man had said to me. I had put something over on him or I had put something over on someone else and he has seen through my operations.

“He is jealous of me,” I told myself. I tried to lay this salve over the wound he had given me.

However, what he had said did, in spite of all my efforts, rather rankle. The wound he has given me didn’t exactly heal. His words kept coming back into my mind, coming most often at night. I think it is very interesting, to any of us, to think back over our lives and realize how much we have sometimes been influenced by what at the moment seemed like chance remarks. You will see that I am making this talk something like a confession. The truth is that throughout my own boyhood and young manhood I had always been a little too plausible, a little too slick. I was proud of my ability to put something over on others. I did it to my own brothers, to my one sister, and to my boyhood friends. I rather enjoyed doing the thing to people and even yet I recall, often at night and always with a kind of shrinking, as though from an impending blow, certain things I did to my own sister, now dead. This whole matter came into my mind when I was trying to prepare this talk to be delivered out here because when I was in the act of preparing the talk, an old photograph, a family group, was sent to me by my brother’s daughter. I was trying, you see, to figure out how it had happened that I became a writer, what impulses had led me to become a writer. When I first began to write, I was no longer a young man. I was well into my thirties before I ever attempted to write a story.

I have spoken of an old photograph I received on a certain day this summer when I was trying to prepare this talk. In the photograph there my sister was. She was a rather beautiful and intelligent looking girl, surrounded in the photograph by her five brothers. I was already a little better dressed than the others. I had just a little forced myself in front of the others of the group.

And now as to my relations to my sister. I was always trying to put something over on her and usually I succeeded. The child would make a certain assertion. She had a certain belief. She was very positive about her belief. I listened to her.

“Ah! Now watch me. In two days I will make her say, and be just as positive about, the opposite of what she has just said.”

I went to work on her. I did not go at her directly, did not argue with her. I got up conversation, said all sorts of suggestive little things. Often I worked away at the job as though my life depended upon it. I concentrated on her. Usually I got her. I would make her change her mind and when I had done so I had a queer and, I must say, nasty feeling of triumph. I think now that I was practicing on my sister. It was a way of preparing myself for success in life. I practiced also on others. I think you will all see how such a talent, to make black seem like white, this practiced until one becomes efficient at it, plausible-even let us say slick-how all of this would be a tremendous help to a man in business.

I think it did help me in a way. I continued using the talent when I had got into business. I used it on others in the office where I worked and later I used it on bankers. Often by using it I managed to borrow quite large sums of money without much security. Presently I launched out into various enterprises. I promoted companies. I managed often to make another man take a risk, while, if there were any profits, I grabbed the major share of them.

And what has all this to do with the art of writing? Wait. Be patient. I hope I shall presently be able to come to that.

As you will see, I am taking the art of writing also as a way of life. The writer-and again let me say I am speaking of the writer in a sense of the tale teller-does not write just with his head. In reality he writes with his whole body.

I am trying to get at an approach to something by putting it on a rather personal plane. I am using certain facts and experiences out of my own life to try to illustrate my point.

I had got into business. I was an advertising man, a writer of advertisements. We all know that there are all kinds of commercial products being advertised. Some of these advertising products are worthwhile and others are worthless. The men who were selling these products depended upon us writers to bring them to the public. There was always-at least this is true of the time I was working at this job–an element of fraud. My own plausibility, and a kind of cleverness I had developed, helped me a good deal. I could sell my plausibility to others. I became rather a star man. Had I decided to stay in advertising, I think it possible that I might have made a good deal of money. Recently I saw, in a magazine devoted to advertising, an article on my own experience in this kind of life. The article cracked me up a good deal as a kind of wizard at the game.

But it was a game and I grew sick of it. I had a quite uncomfortable time for several years. I dare say I had become a rather well dressed, alert, bright young business man.

But there was something in me that realized that I was selling people out. I drank a good deal. I had affairs with women. I tried to lead the life of a young blade. I remember now that at that period in my life I thought a good deal about the life of my father whom I had formerly almost despised. Suddenly his life began to seem to have more point and purpose than my own. At any rate he had a great fondness for other men. He did not want to cheat them. I remember going home one day to my native village. I was passing through and spent the day there. This was at the height of my experience in being a successful young man. I was very well dressed. I walked with a certain alert determination through the streets. There was an older man who stopped me in the street. He had formerly owned a little hardware store in the town but had failed. He was a man who had had a good deal of trouble in life. His wife had died of a terrible disease and his only son, a young boy, had been killed by an accident. The son, a bright, playful fellow, had tried to hop on a freight train but had missed his footing. He was with several other boys and they were daring each other to jump aboard the train for a ride. The train was going rapidly and his body was thrown under the wheels and ground to pieces. The father had neglected his business. He had taken to drink. He was a former crony of my father. He stopped me on the street and spoke to me of my own father.

“You have misunderstood him,” he said. “He was a great fellow. What stories he used to tell.” I got from him the impression of my father as one who had understood the little hardware merchant when he was going to pieces. My father had been his friend, had tried to stand by him, had tried to make him forget the tragedy of his life.

Well, presently I decided to get out of advertising writing. I think my motives were not very clear. By a certain slickness and cleverness in writing for others, I was making money for them. Why not make the money for myself?

I am sure there was this idea and there was also another. Perhaps I thought there would be something cleaner, purer, better, in making goods for people rather than in helping others to buy and sell goods. I went home to my native state. I was full of ideas. I went from man to man raising money. I visited bankers. I did raise money and started a factory. It was a quite commonplace occupation I got into. I manufactured house paint.

But here again I found the same thing I had found as an advertising writer. I had to compete with other manufacturers of house paint. Some of our laws were not as rigid as they are now. We have all read stories of the beginnings of the lives of most of our successful men. I cheated a little on the materials I put into my product. I found that no one noticed and I cheated more.

It is a little difficult to tell exactly what happened to me at this time. I had my factory. I employed salesmen, I borrowed money at banks. I hurried through the streets. I was, I think, pretty much the type of the average successful young American man.

And then suddenly there came a change. I do not know exactly what happened to me. I had joined a golf club in the town and often spent an afternoon with other business men playing golf. Earlier in my life I had been a great reader but I had stopped reading. I was one day with a group of men in the clubhouse of a country club. We sat together for several hours drinking and talking. Suddenly a strange, blank feeling came over me. I was with men all much more successful than myself. It seemed to me suddenly that their lives were all empty and that my own life was the emptiest of all.

I got up and left them. Evening had come on and I went walking in country roads. From that moment I began to neglect my business. Day after day I walked about the country. I began to stop and talk to little farmers along the road. I got on a train and went away to the city and spent days wandering about the streets. It seems to me now that I had passed through a half insane period that must have lasted for two or three years. I did not want to be what I was becoming. Again I drank a good deal. There was, I think, a period when I might well have become a confirmed drunkard.

And then one day another change came. I was in my own house. I had become more or less estranged from the members of my own family and from my former friends. I was very lonely and I still think that one of the most significant things about our American life is our American loneliness. I remember that I went up into a small room at the top of my house and locked the door. I sat down at a desk in the room and began to write. An idea had come to me. I would like to make this idea clear if I can. I could not understand my own life and what was the matter with it. It seemed to me that, pretty much, I had only been doing all my life what older men had advised me to do when I was a boy. I had been struggling for material success in a world that puts great value upon material success.

The idea that had come to me was something like this. “I cannot understand my own life but perhaps it is because no man can think clearly about himself.” I had got the idea that it might be possible by attempting to create figures in an imaginative world to get through these figures a little better understanding of self.

And so I began to create imaginative figures. I took the figures of other imagined young men and put them through experiences I had been through. In order to avoid too much confusion in this process, I developed the trick of making them physically unlike myself. Now I have touched upon this point in another talk I have made here at this conference, have tried to point out how in changing the physical fact of a figure in the imaginative world, you change the figure quite completely. You make a separation that is very important. At least it was important to me.

I began writing and at first all my writing took the form of novels. I wanted if possible to create a quite complete picture of the individual in the kind of American life I myself had known. I wrote furiously. I thought little about style. I do not believe that at first I thought much about publication. I began a novel, sometimes writing forty, fifty, seventy-five thousand words, and then threw it aside. I began another. Now I no longer cared about drinking. I had become drunk with writing. More and more I neglected my business and one day, realizing that by my neglect of business I was being unfair to those who had invested money in it, I left the business and the town. And now here is something rather interesting. When I first went to my Ohio town to go into business, I was quite successful. For the first year or two there I made a good deal of money. I think that had I stayed faithful to the business, expanded it as it might well have been expanded, I might very well have become a rich man. Nowadays we in America think little of a man’s leaving a wife and children, but to walk off leaving perhaps some thousands of dollars seems to us a kind of insanity. Anyway I walked off. Afterwards, in fact up until the present moment, I have always made my living in a rather precarious way. I have been paid to come here and speak to you people, Quite often, when I am broke, I do what I am doing here. I go before people and talk to them. They pay me for it. As a writer I have never been a very successful man. Most of my books have never had much sale. However, I did have one novel that sold largely and with the money I bought a little farm and built a house to live in in Virginia. I think I can say that since the day when I walked down a railroad track, out of a certain Ohio town, leaving the business there for others to run, succeeding or failing with it, with but a few dollars in my pocket, making no claim to any future profits there might be in that business, I have led a rather full and happy life. I think that if I should die tomorrow, I could die feeling that life owed me little. I have collected rather richly as I went along.

And now as to the point of all this. There is a point. It is I think that the arts, any of the arts, rightly understood, rightly approached, are and should be, curative to the artist. Someone has said that the artist, in releasing himself, releases others. We all want this release. I think there is a good deal of absurd talk about a thing called genius. I do not believe in it much. I believe there is a certain value to be got out of my own experience. It is perhaps true that I, as an individual, could not have come to certain conclusions about living and the attitude toward life of the artist man if I had not had the experience of trying to succeed in another field. I think that right now in America it is more important to be little, with perhaps just a trifle flair to your littleness, than it is to be big and important. Personally I would rather be loved a bit in my home town than known to all the outside world. Perhaps I have merely come back to the point of view of my own father, a man I formerly thought a no-account. I would rather live in a hall bedroom to which there might come occasionally a friend or, if I am extremely fortunate, a woman who loves me, than to have a dozen big houses that would over-awe my friends.
I do not think you can shoot directly at happiness. I do think that sometimes, if the gods are good to you, you may incidentally get a touch of it. Everything in this world worthwhile shooting at is a little too subtle to be defined.

This, however, I believe is true. There are in this country and perhaps in this conference an infinite number of bright, talented young men and women. There is a job to be done. The opportunities before the American writer are certainly rich enough. The job that terribly wants doing is the creation of more and more understanding of man for man. I think that is the most important of the story tellers’ jobs. I certainly do not intend to pretend for a moment that I myself have always been faithful to this job. I have told something of my own personal history here merely to try to dispel a little the illusion that there is any particular happiness to be got out of success. I think what satisfaction there is that can be got out of life must be got in another way. I think you all know as well as I do what, from the artist’s point of view, is the real way.

By Doug Crandell

Author’s note: The novel Mother Belle is narrated by Lance Bancroft, a man in his late twenties who has never used his Bachelor’s degree in psychology, which he doubts is of any consequence. He is in the throes of a divorce and custody battle over his baby daughter after having moved from Indiana to Georgia so his wife, Sherry, could attend a master’s degree program. In Indiana, Lance was employed as a crop duster and has opted to work at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport rather than use his psychology degree. In this story about the New South, Lance befriends an older man named George who himself is struggling with connecting with his troubled, adult daughter. Lance becomes embroiled in the life of George as well as his own attempts to stay in his baby’s life.

Chapter 3

We close up the apartment; George wants me to turn the dead bolt three times to make sure it’s aligned securely. He makes certain his boat-of-a-SUV is properly locked up. He almost begs for me to listen to the nifty chirp his key chain makes when the doors are all securely battened down. I am getting less and less patient. He says with a look of bewildered astonishment on his face, “Can you believe what they can do these days with those microwave chips?”

I take the few boxes from the back of the truck and try to set them on the doorstep, but George won’t have it. Then I try to tell him I’ll just put them inside the apartment, but he insists that I place the junk, which most people wouldn’t pay two dollars at a garage sale for the whole kit and caboodle, inside his dealer-ordained, vehicular equivalent of a bank vault. This activity allows George to once again show me his high-tech key gizmo and honestly, I am starting to wear down. While George has helped take my mind off what I have come to conceive as the equivalent of legal boils seeping over the heater vent in my new place, I can now feel his same presence bringing me back down to the reality of my upheaved life. I have to be at work in Atlanta in less than two hours for the four to twelve shift, and I still have to make the crucifying drive with George from my place to his subdivision in Austell, a twenty minute drive, at the least.

We get into the truck as George mumbles something about a newly added item in his house. I can hear the words “Alice” and “Laura” and something about a wall and a photograph and his mother, but my mind is now too mired down in the worry of Marie to make much sense of what he is yammering on about.

Inside the truck cab, with no place for me to go hide, George is still rambling. He says, “Is that okay?” He is looking at me as if I need to give him permission to pass through some guard gate. He arranges his brow queerly, repeats his question. “I said, is that okay Lance?” I shake my head yes, but then think twice about it. There have been a few times where I’ve agreed to something George has asked of me only to wind up and find myself a few weeks later at one of his union ticket raffles where I’ve offered, unbeknownst to me, to be the dope sitting in a dunk tank.

So I say, “Now, what George? What did you ask?” He smiles as if only he can understand such a forgetful young man as me. He says, “I asked if it would be okay if we picked up mother on the way? You know she lives just right off Cobb Parkway, at Simon’s Personal Care Home. I want her to see it too.” I don’t ask what the “it” he is referring to is, and contrary to what George assumes I know, I am unaware of just exactly where it is his mother lives. I am sure he has told me so on a number of occasions, but right now I am not interested in the location, only the added time it will take to pick up the poor creature that had the unfortunate experience of pushing such a big lunk from her loins.

I stumble, “No, it’s not a problem. I mean, sure, we can pick her up.” George gleams, sits back into the bench seat of the pickup as if he can only now truly enjoy the ride. We backfire out of the parking lot and sputter up to the four-way stop to Atlanta Road. At the blinking red light George leans over and tries to turn on the receiver. He says, “Lancie? Is it all right if we get some tunes going here?” It’s another attempt at trying to sound hip and with it. “I like that station where the two fellas are always razzin’ each other ’bout how the other is always screwing up.” I don’t have the faintest idea of who or what he is talking about. I never use the radio in my truck for precisely the reason George is trying to get us on the same FM wavelength now. I prefer the CDs of Martin Zellar and The Smiths over the irritating, adolescent hogwash George is now having trouble poking into fruition via the digital controls. The receiver in my truck is worth more than the truck itself. When he can’t seem to get the radio to make him appear wise to the scene, he says, “I had that dealer write right in the sales contract that he’d put me in a radio with knobs. I said, ‘listen here greenhorn, I want a radio in that van.'” He pauses, trying to name what it is he drives.

“Or whatever you call it. Truck, I guess is what it is, anyway, I said, ‘I want a radio I can tune without having to go to computer school to learn how to operate it.” I can’t remember seeing the radio in George’s SUV but I make a point of it to look when I get the chance; I can only imagine the ancient piece of crap the kid at the dealership had installed in the old guy’s van or truck or whatever you call it. I feel sorry for George as I think about the jokes the salesman must’ve made at his expense as some burnt-out auto-techie installed a dinosaur of a receiver into his newly purchased SUV.

I lean forward at the same time George rares back from the radio, out of the corner of my eye, I can see a slight crease of defeat at the corners of his mouth. Beaten, he goes like a lump back against the seat. I don’t allow myself to shake my head. I punch the neon buttons until I can hear the talk show I assume he is referring to. He almost claps his hands when the two bickering voices begin to issue forth from the static.

He says, “You mind turning it up?” The request takes nearly all of my patience. George has again worn me down. I poke the volume up a few notches, only to see a glimpse of George still straining to hear, a look of rocky effort in his squinted eyes. At least I hope that’s what he’s straining from. Among all the other personal tidbits George has so graciously bestowed upon me there is one I hope is not the cause of his strained affect. He’s told me that from time to time, which in George speak means as frequently as daily, he encounters bouts of, oh shall we say, gassy disturbances that he claims can hit him like a ton of bricks. “Anywhere, anytime Lancie and I mean big time.”

As I steer the truck around slow moving semis of pine logs, a never-ending road hazard here in Georgia, I nonchalantly try to get a gander at George to see if I need to make a quick pit stop for him so neither of us will be any the wiser, but he looks okay, fine even, as I race to beat a yellow light going, once, twice, three times a lady. We zoom through the intersection; George is smiling at the guys blabbering on the radio but manages to comment on my daredevil antics. “You little pooper you. You could of got us killed. Gaul-lee!” The first part of the comment seems as if he has once again been inside my head; only a few moments ago I thought he was the one worthy of such an excrementally appropriate title.

We take a few more daring turns and illegal lane passes, through a winding side street in a neighborhood that looks remarkably similar to the one George lives in and I’ve left behind. At the last light, before we turn left into the personal-care home George has said he hated to leave mother in but had no choice, he speaks up, tries to turn down the radio, and asks me for some help. The truck cab is quiet now.

“I guess I should let you know Lance that mother is a little on the senile side.” He looks at me as if to apologize, like he’s sorry he can’t do something about aging, fix it or annul its effects. George thinks he should have an answer for everything that has seriously gone wrong.

“Okay George, but aren’t they all. I mean don’t most of the folks there have a few mental stumbling blocks.” I say it as a statement but George can’t hear it; he thinks I am asking him a question, which is fair, but as soon as the words have left my mouth I want them back. There is nothing more George enjoys than a person willing to ask his opinion on family affairs, on questions of the heart, or for that matter, on any subject whatsoever.

He says, “Well, yes, most of the elderly there do have problems remembering first names or their wedding anniversaries (another chunk of bait tossed in the pool of Lancie to tempt a bite) but what I am talking about here is more than that. Mother is diagnosed with old-timers.” He stares at the light along with me, makes his face scrunch up with the feigned effort of trying to give me a more intellectual, technical explanation for his mother’s problems.

He says, “Let me put it this way Lancie, you could say mother is a few bricks short of a full load.” At first I think he is talking about his confessed back door problems, that the brick analogy is something that runs in the family, but I force my mind to pay attention and realize he is talking still about her mental functions. I turn left into the parking lot, a yellow power company truck honks at the way our two vehicles miss one another by only a hair.

After I park the truck and turn off the key George says, “Lancie could you stay here and I’ll go get her?”

I am not sure why George is asking me if this is all right with me; it’s his mother. Does he think I could simply walk into the throng of senior citizens and pick out the old woman from the masses because I know her son?

I say, “Sure George, I’ll stay here. I mean I’d love to go give it a whirl and see if I can pick mother Kramer out of all the others, but somebody has got to stay and listen.” I point to the radio.

George laughs, unsure of himself, and then tells me, “No, I mean, could you pull the truck up to the back door?” Now he’s the one pointing. “She won’t come out the front.” He pauses and looks at me, his bulbous hand on the door handle, ready and poised to go get mother. After a few moments of George looking at me warily I say, “What are you talking about George?”

“It’s just that mother is not all there, like I said, and she, well she may, at first that is, try to fight me.” I raise my eyebrows, and surprise myself by non-verbally asking George to spill his guts. The guy will tell me more than I want to know about his ass problems with the drop of a hat but now is holding back, ashamed or scared to make me privy to the fact that his mother has trouble leaving her home. He takes my goading cue, swallows a deep breath and blurts out: “Well last time she thought I was Hitler.” He says this with relieved frankness; the release allows him to gather the energy to go on.

“She thought I was Hitler and she…” He stops, takes another deep breath and lets the ugly cat out of the bag. “She offered me sexual favors if I’d spare her from the death chambers.” I did not need to hear this, but George has taken the plunge; he is pulling up on the door handle, leaving the truck with me spell bound inside. Before he slams the door shut he says, “It’s nothing really. The nurses say it’s just her darkest fears rising to the surface.” He looks at me for assurance, but I can’t help him. I am trying to get some awful images in my mind’s eye to retreat. And just like he is so good at doing, George seems to loosely know my thoughts. He says, “You know the mind is a funny thing.” He leaves. It is a funny thing, I say in my head, as I watch monstrous George, Mrs. Kramer’s only boy, lumber across the parking lot toward the glass sliding doors of the home. I conclude he must look like a mountain man coming through the doors to most of the old people inside. I imagine a few of the little shriveled up ladies screaming and pointing as he barges in the entryway. In my head they are crying, “Good Lord, Good Lord Almighty. It’s the devil in red plaid himself come to take us to hell!”

The brief movie snippet in my imagination has helped keep me from thinking about Marie and the foul papers lying on top of the register back in my empty new pad, but now I have a silent truck cab to deal with and while it makes me wonder about my own sanity, I begin to get antsy for George and his crazy, old-bird of a mother to pile into the front seat. It hurts to visualize Marie as a name on a legal document. She is so much more; she is not just a “minor child” as the papers read.

I feel hot around the collar of my neck. I start up the truck and rev it good a few times; I can see the hot exhaust billowing out from the tail pipe into the cold afternoon air. I have come to like the weather in Atlanta with its few really cold days of the year amounting to no more than a full week at most, but there has been an uncommon string of bitterly cold days which seem to have no end in sight, according to George that is, which I’ve also come to rely on in matters of weather and the price of nearly everything under the sun.

I pull up next to a taupe colored door with no handle on the outside; it’s close enough to the dumpster that I begin to wonder if there might be another back door George had been talking about. I look at my watch and get an instant ache of dread when I see I will have to go straight from George’s place to the airport for work. It means I will have to spend my entire shift worrying about what the legal papers really say; I’d wanted to go back to the apartment and get them so I’d be able to try to make sense out of them on my breaks at Hartsfield, but now I’ll have to go cold turkey for eight hours, go back to George’s after I get off at midnight, and pick him up so he can get his SUV. He’ll act as if he doesn’t want me to bother when I leave him there at his house with his mother, but then will have me paged at work (I gave him that number too) and ask me pretty please will I please swing by the house.

As I wait, I wonder if he’s told me if his mother stays over night. I make myself try to recall past conversations or rather the past meandering, zigzagging familial philosophical waxing and waning George does with me to see if I can pick up on some fragment about him and his mother’s sleep-overs. The Hitler/sexual favors comment sneaks into my brain and I hate myself for what I am so easily able to do with it.

I am about to back up the truck and circle the building to see if there is indeed another back door hidden somewhere, when I see the door I am parked beside ease open. George peeks his fat head out of the ever-widening crack. He looks both ways and then gives me a thumbs up. Are we kidnapping this old woman? Does George even have a living mother? Has he completely lost it from fantasizing about the good ole’ days with his dead wife Alice and is now so goofy he is willing to snatch up any woman no matter how old to fill the void? And finally, will this kidnapping not do me any great justice when it comes to a custody hearing? Will my accomplice role in the theft of an old woman to soothe the pain of a widowed aging husband endear me to the judge or further serve to make me out to be the villain in Sherry’s daytime soap opera? These thoughts are like piranha at the lobes of my consciousness as I try for the life of me to figure out why George is not moving from the door but continuing to give me a contrived thumbs-up.

I peer out at him from behind the windshield, trying to get him to do something. Then, like a surprise he is shy about showing me, he pulls from behind him, into the gray dull light of January, a small, frail thing of a woman, dressed in a poodle skirt and a matching fuzzy angora sweater, wearing in her chromatic hair a pink and lavender bow so big it seems to make her head fall forward from the sheer load of it.

George ushers her gently to the truck door; I reach over the seat and pop the handle because it sticks from the outside. He again sticks his tremendous head inside a door, this time saying, “She doesn’t usually dress this way Lancie. The good ladies in there at the help desk threw them all a 50’s style party with costumes and everything. They don’t get to keep them.”

He looks at me with water in his eyes from the cold, as if I am supposed to be impressed to the point of clapping. The old woman patiently stands behind him as a furry but benign figure; she doesn’t seem like she could even muster up the strength to talk, let alone get her speech ordered to the point of seducing what she thinks is evil incarnated, but that happens to be her very large son.

“George, aren’t you the one from the 50’s. She should be dressed as a flapper if they’re trying to bring back memories of her youth. In the 50’s she had to be worried about you fornicating with a loose girl and disgracing the whole Kramer family.” I think what I’ve said is funny, the first time since I got the papers that I feel on top of my game with George and I am not counting the shower curtain scare. But he looks displeased, tries to shield his mother from my vulgar talk; it’s the Alice in him. After he doesn’t seem to want to “get a kick out of me,” something he says every time I mock or poke fun at his expense, I realize I need to hurry this abduction up, if indeed that’s way it is.

I say, “You gonna let momma in or just stand there and hope the cold air will keep her from making you propositions.”

He frowns at me in a way I know is how his wife did when he sipped a beer or told an off-color joke, which is to say it contained some awful word like “pee-pee” or “derriere.” George moves aside, goes behind his mother and begins to verbally coax her into lifting one leg up. When the talking doesn’t seem to work, the old woman as motionless as the embroidered black dog on her sunken chest, he starts lifting her limbs for her. From where I am sitting, the poor creature appears as if she is a marionette in a poorly done show: after all, you can see the puppeteer clearly, and he is obviously jerking the wrong strings if what he wants is to get the doll to look as if she really is getting into a truck.

After several attempts George manages to get mother into the seat, but it’s me who has to ever so gently pull her over so she is positioned squarely in the middle of the truck. George climbs in and we are off, out of the parking lot and back onto the roads, heading to his place to get me a mattress and show mother “it.”
As I drive, George is holding her head with his mighty hand; she has quickly drifted off to sleep and is now leaning on his shoulder snoring, or rather, making shallow clicking noises in and about her chest; I glance at her curled figure. It’s for sure, the noise is coming from under the doggie some place.

I do a double-take now. George sees me trying to figure out what I am witnessing; mother’s hair is coming away from her head. I can see the under weaving of the wig. There is a two-inch space between her downy head and the meshy material of the pinkish colored piece. George whispers, “It’s a wig Lancie.”

I keep driving, but slower than what I had when we were en route to pick her up. The truck seems cold so I flip on the heater. Mother stirs when she feels the waft of warm air under her skirt. She stops making the clicking noise and snuggles up to her son and I wonder if in her failed, bald head she is back eighty years, in a chair with her own daddy. Or if she has ceased to dream, saving all the drama and weirdness of sleep for her next awake stint, which, according to my watch, will be right about the time we hit George’s driveway.