I have posted here for a while. I was out of the country for the last week and only spot-checked e-mail during my absence. Sometimes it’s good to get away from the Internet for a while. But the e-mail sure does pile up in the interim.
For the first several days of my trip, I was with my brother and sister and their spouses, starting the gruelling process of cleaning out our parents’ house to prepare to put it up for sale. Because of the way I’ve moved around over the years, I probably had more personal belongings in the old family house than most 40-somethings do. Part of my task was to go through all the old stuff, much of it dating from my college years, and decide what was valuable and what was trash.
For years, though, I’ve been looking for something and never able to find it: copies of short stories I wrote while in university. I didn’t do much with them at the time (I found the one rejection note from that period of my life, my first ever, in fact, from Twilight Zone magazine) but some of them followed me over the years and were ultimately published (The Lady of Lost Lake was originally drafted in 1983 and published in Dark Discoveries magazine last year), but a lot of them were completely lost to me. At least ten or twelve stories that I remembered parts of but I had no copies of. Each time I’d go back to visit my parents, I’d rummage around a little, sort of like the character in The Body who excavated under the front porch looking for the bottle of pennies he buried. Ultimately I’d end up back in the same corner of the attic, expecting that this time I’d find the stories.
It was only when we started pulling everything out of the attic that I discovered the mother lode. Several boxes that were in the back corner, obscured by piles of quilting material and old tents. Among these boxes I found a number of long-forgotten treasures, but the greatest discovery were two journals of holographic story drafts. I’d been looking for typescripts, because I recall typing most of the stories up and showing them to my friends in residence, but I never located those. The handwritten first drafts I’d forgotten about completely. I was delighted. I’ve only had the time to read through one story so far, and it was a revelation–it was vastly better than I feared it would be! Sure, there were things about it that made me cringe, and it’s the amateurish working of someone who really hasn’t experienced much of life yet, but the writing itself was pretty darned okay. The one story I read was called “Piece of Weather,” and I had the chutzpah to submit it to the Twilight Zone magazine story contest (judged by Peter Straub and won by Dan Simmons). I was ‘way out of my league, but I don’t think I embarrassed myself totally, either. The story is a little shallow, but I think it’s salvageable and may form the core of something on revision. I can only hope that some of the other stories stand the test of time as well.
Also in the journals are page after page of story ideas, some just a sentence, some a page or two of musings. This is a real treasure trove for me, and discovering these books went a long ways toward off-setting what was otherwise a difficult experience. They’re a reflection of where I was developmentally twenty years ago.
The second part of the week away was a campus tour for my daughter at my alma mater, so the whole trip was a real blast from the past. I went straight from one place fraught with memories straight to another. Overwhelming? You couldn’t even begin to understand how overwhelming. But it was really good to see Halifax again after all these years, and it has changed far less than I had been led to believe. I got to visit a few of my old haunts and saw a number of faculty members from the Chemistry Department where I got my Ph. D. (and they all remembered me immediately, which was a surprise, and a gratifying one at that).
