PREMISE
Friends spent years nagging me to commit my anonymous life to paper, perhaps to make it easy to burn. I don't know?
Forever I said I would do no such thing. It is blatantly egotistical. Is it not bordering on the tawdry? It smacks of being showy and tasteless like standing on the street tooting a horn and yelling "look at me, look at me". But then I remember I am a guy who once wore orange Flag-Flyers so it wouldn't be the first time I was tasteless and showy. And I obviously didn’t snap on orange shoes to fade into the background.
It was unnecessary. I have been a writer since age 12, read my stories and you’ll know my life, no need to make it formal. This is really a lie, of course. Every writer becomes a character somewhere in what he or she writes, but even in the most autobiographical of fictions it is still fiction. It may be close to the actuality, but there is a nip or a tuck here or there to make it fit some fictional plot. After all, the main character in “Ground Dog Day” was an eight-year old girl named Jenny, not a boy named Larry. And speaking of standing and tooting a horn, no character ever borrowed a trumpet to blast notes down a Groundhog hole, although the rest of that story is pretty factual.
“She knelt, putting her face against the snow to peer into the dark. There was nothing to see. She sat back on her heels and brought the trumpet to her lips, pressing the bell to the opening in the ground. She puffed up her cheeks and blew.
F-a-a-ph!
She lowered the mouthpiece and sighed. What made her think she could get noise out of the thing? That wheeze wouldn’t startle the ground hogs. She wanted a blast that would waken deep nesting slugs and frighten the ground hogs out their back door. She sighed again and in her head pictured Thomas playing his horn. Thomas never puffed his cheeks out like some croaking frog. His cheeks collapsed against his teeth when he played. They vibrated on some notes.
It was sour and it wobbled and whooped and died into a hiss at the end, but it was a definite blare.”
— Excerpt from "Ground Dog Day" (Written 1967)
Barnes & Noble Read Aloud
Ann Murphy,Editor
Wilmington, Delaware 2003
Collected in Currents of The Brandywine and Other Creeks
Thus I take a fling at penning (are we still allowed to say “pen”) my minor life and see where it goes. I will try to be honest in what I write. Will that be the truth? I don’t know. I titled this Impressions of My Life because that is all we have to give. I am in my eightieth year as I begin. My memory is tattered and torn in spots. Perhaps what others remember differs from my own memory. Much of my early years are hearsay, but even where I was an active participant and witness, I only see it through these two eyes. Maybe if I saw it through different eyes from a different spot it would be a different truth.
I make no apologies for what I will write. I am not a perfect person, far from it, but I hold no grudges and hate no one. If in the course of things I give unflattering portraits of those I’ve known it is not out of malice. Would you have me lie? The most unflattering character who will appear in these pages will most certainly be me. I am a much-flawed individual, but I believe here in my dotage a better person than I ever was before, but I still falling short on God’s measuring stick.
God’s forgiven me; I hope you can.
