"Lookin' for it"

Just how it is that I am sitting here now in a piney Minnesota cabin, this MacBook Air on my lap, why I'm doing what I am has never been clear to me. The Minnesota part  isn't hard to explain--we've been coming up here for a week in October for several years. We look forward to the sojourn all summer long.

It's dark and quiet all around. My good friend and fellow traveler is a flight of stairs above me, fast asleep and comfortably oblivious to my sitting where I am, typing. Were she even half-awake, however, she would know without having to descend the stairs how it is she's in that king-size bed alone.

What's never been clear to me is why I'm putting words up on a screen in front of me. Why has writing been a constant in my life for a half-century. Thank goodness not everyone is so obsessed. But why me? I had no role models. My mother was a teacher, and a good one;but my dad was an office manager-type. I don't know that he had any idea of who, say, Emily Dickinson was. If there were writers around when I was a kid, I certainly didn't know them.

I was never much a reader--later on this morning, Barbara will disappear into a book. She is capable of losing herself in what she reads. I've never had, nor have, any similar propensity, even though I most certainly love The Big Sky, the old A.B.Guthrie novel that's here right beside me. 

But why have I spent so much of my life with my fingers on a keyboard? I don't know. 

Last week I cleaned out an ancient folder of high school papers and handouts, some college things, and a dittoed copy of a 12-page, single-spaced story in faded blue, a story titled "Lookin' for it," a story that has to have been my very first non-assigned work. I wrote it a half-century ago. If it hadn't turned up in the folder I was going to trash, I would never, ever have remembered it.

It's embarrassing--I didn't know what I was doing and was poisoned by a terminal case of mannered writing.; the story isn't me, but then I'm quite sure I didn't know who me was. There's immense aspiration in the story, made perfectly obvious by a tendency to use a dozen words when, clearly, time and time again, three or four would do. 

A summary: The unnamed narrator is looking for meaning in his life--I never explain why. I simply rely on the trope that most young people were also looking for meaning in the late 60s, when I grew up. He's on his way to New Orleans--why, isn't at all clear-- when, right there along the highway a pair of hitchhikers appear (I did some hitchhiking myself and occasionally picked some up). They too were on their way to New Orleans, although, like the narrator, they're not at all sure why.

There's some boring conversation between them, but eventually they stop at a greasy spoon somewhere in Louisiana, where some rednecks give them a hard time because, in late '60s fashion, they're hippies, I guess. It's a really soft core version of the old Peter Fonda flick, Easy Rider, where similarly befuddled bikers, all of them "lookin' for it," get themselves killed by the same brand of redneck Southerners. 

"Lookin' for it" is a terrible story, really--I mean writing-wise. In other ways it's merely inoffensive. Nothing really happens. By that time in my life, I'd been to New Orleans, and I'd eaten breakfast in a gulf-shore greasy spoon where I felt as if I was from another planet. I was using my life to detail the story, but creating something other than memoir, fiction. 

The narrator is older than the hitchhikers, and he likes them, helps them out by not only giving them the ride they were looking for but also buying some eats. I have no idea whether I was thinking about it at the time, but the older narrator's appreciation for his younger passengers may well be sourced in my appreciation for the high-schoolers I was teaching at the time I wrote the story. In that restaurant, the three of them are of a kind--Yankee hippies. When they leave, they're bonded into family.

What reality I was working with was a reminder that in 1970, the Vietnam War still raging, the nation was split like a ripe melon between young people in henleys and bell-bottoms, and an adult world who remembered World War II far too clearly. The rednecks in the cafe were a circle of Archie Bunkers. We were the meatheads. That's the whole story really, but it reminded me that the royal gorge the nation is experiencing right now-- is not something that never existed before. A minority of 74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 (91 for Biden). That's just huge.

But the answer to the larger question still eludes me. Why do I sit here every morning and march letters across the screen in front of me? Why have I spent so much of my life here? What kind of compulsion is it? Those questions are not answered by a dittoed story titled "Lookin' for it." What the story does reveal, however, is that when I was living alone in a town named Monroe, teaching high school kids in a rural setting in the southwest corner of the state of Wisconsin, I most certainly had the itch.

Back then, I honestly didn't know a thing about how to do it, but I must have spent hours turning out this story anyway. "American Literature" it says at the top of the first page. I'm embarrassed to say that I must have used it somehow for junior English. That's how sure I was that what was in this story was important--more important for me than for them, I'm sure.

It was something I wanted to do--and did.

It was something I wanted to do--and still do, this morning, right now, those strange letters continuing to march across the screen in front of me.