There is something I need to tell you about my grandfather: his name was Ben. He smoked Virginia Slims. He drove a big, low Cadillac with a beer between his knees. He was a lawyer. He helped license a line of guitar-shaped Beatles pins. Later, he worked at a RadioShack. As it turned out, he was too honest to be a lawyer. It was all the lying—he couldn’t live with himself.Article continues after advertisement
So much of writing comes down to just this—arranging details until, like a constellation, they form the shape of a living thing. If I have done my job, you may already be able to draw the lines.
What else? He loved to sail. Friends would give him their sailboats and he would take them out to the Bahamas in the middle of the night, savoring the black muscle of the water beneath him, the wide-open sky above. He was a drinker. He drank until he couldn’t feel straight, so that all of his emotions sloshed sideways and trickled away. Drank so much that he slept through the daylit parts of the weekend, when he might have brought his daughter (my mother) to the beach or the pool, or merely sat across from her at the breakfast table, taking the time to top off her diminishing glass of orange juice.
