In which we discover the author has already fallen off the wagon and not written anything in a while.
I think it's been about a week since I've written anything. Very bad start. This portion is one I had previously written and will also change with research...since I've also never been to Madrid.
Wichita Falls wound up being as much of a blur as everything else in his life had been since his draft notice had appeared. The wedding, where his sisters still unhappy about the marriage promised to check on his new bride. "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Course we'll look in on her. We'd take her to church with us, if she'd come," his youngest sister said. "Just don't expect us to be doing each others hair or anything like that." The departure, where his dad drove him to the bus in awkward silence. Basic training, where he did well and got along fine with his fellow airmen-to-be. In Wichita Falls he excelled at the training, picking up the skills quickly. The work came naturally to him and he enjoyed it. No one in Wichita Falls treated him like a high school drop out. They treated him...they treated him like someone they could depend on — to show up on time; to do the job; to do the job right the first time; hell, to fetch the coffee if that's what needed to be done.
In the fall Bernie boarded a plane for Madrid, Spain. At 20, it would be his first trip out of the country — not all that unusual where he was from. He had been assigned to a unit based in Madrid, though he would only be there a few days before joining his detachment in Athens, Greece, the city they would work from.
Though he wasn't expecting it, the temperature in Madrid was exactly the same as the temperature in Wichita Falls. It hovered around 68 degrees in early October. From what he could glimpse of the city in the blur that was the time he was there, that was the only similarity between the two places.
Madrid felt alive in a way that Wichita Falls, Texas, and Collins, Mississippi, would never know if they continued to exist for 1,000 years. Millions of people will help do that. But even still there was something in the very air of the city that felt both intimate and inaccessible. It was perhaps the feeling that always comes when the crush of people trying to survive collides with the seat of power; when old men sit in cafes sipping drinks as young couples take their turn flirting late into the night; when throngs of theater-goers in The Gran Vía are brought, momentarily to a stop by the passing of the long-hooded Citroëns carrying General Franco's government officials into the night. In Collins, old men sat outside too, but mostly they did a lot of spitting and complaining; and there was never, ever the chance that the country's president might drive by in his armored limousine before passing on into the night.
Bernie saw very little of this, as the Air Force base was about 15 miles northeast of the city, and that is where he spent almost all of his four days in Madrid. But he caught a glimpse of it on his one foray into the city proper. More importantly he felt it in the air when it touched his skin. Bernie wasn't particularly poetic, but he could think of no other way to describe it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Hi! So I'm wondering how much of this is from tidbits a la your parents, and how much is your own making? Also do your parents know that you're writing a story they inspired?
Well so far, I'm pretty much making it up...except for the part about the draft. My dad really did get drafted for Vietnam and then turned around and went to the air force recruiter and enlisted. Actually, I guess a lot of it is true, now that I think about it. He had some friends who enlisted...though he doesn't know what happened. I know my dad was married when he went into the service, but I have no idea when he got married or anything about that woman. So I just made all that up.
The outline of the story is supposed to be the same, but the details are made up since I don't know them. I did some research, but I need to do a lot more on the decade and how one actually processes through the airforce.
Oh and he did build radars and antennas. That part is also true. I imagine a lot of the stuff will change, though, in subsequent drafts.
They don't know I'm writing a book. I don't think they'd care, but they'd be all like, "Oh our story isn't worth a book." Then they'd go tell everyone in my friggin' family that I was writing a book and then every Thanksgiving and Christmas forever after it would be, "How's that book coming" or "When you ever going to get that book published" or "You work for a newspaper. They have a printing press. Can't you just print your own." Then my Uncle Jerry will tell me about some article her read in the paper about Internet publishing.
The only upside I could see in any of this is that it might distract them from asking me when I'm getting married. But I just don't think it's worth it, overall.
"You would think that a woman who could find the time to write a book, could find a nice man to marry."
"Our neighbor knows a nice man who likes to read."
Post a Comment