Due to poor Cingular coverage in St. Louis my Treo spent most of last weekend roaming, probing for a signal that twas never to be. The constant search ran the batteries down in twenty-four hours instead of the normal ninety-six. Natch, I forgot to pack a charger or shut off the phone. Nothing like a funeral to bring out the absent mindedness streak. With a standard phone running the batteries down to zero would not be an issue; data and system settings persists in memory. Tragically, the classic Palm operating system deals with power deprivations in an irksome manner. Older Palm phones reset themselves. And not to the most recent operating state, either. They revert to day one fresh from the box brand new.

Besides my call log—a handy feature when retrieving someone’s number or the last call attempt—and a ton of pictures, nothing was irreplaceable. Except my contacts. If you haven’t heard from me lately, that is why.

Now I realize how dependent I was on the type ahead phone listings. Dialing these days is like coming home to find the front door swinging into the foyer. Oh sure, the place is still there, but it’s different.

After my grandmother’s funeral something interesting happened at the cemetery. An older couple dressed in Cardinal’s gear cruised up in a bus sized SUV. The woman tied two massive helium filled balloons—officially Major League Baseball sanctioned inflatable novelties, of course—to a bush enveloping a three-foot high brown marble headstone. She sauntered back to her car, turned on the stereo, and cranked Queen’s We are the Champions across section forty-seven.

Later when I mentioned this scene to my stepfather, he quipped, “There’s your victory parade, right there.”

He may have been right, because I witnessed the festivities downtown the following afternoon. Cemetery fans did put on an impressive showing.

As a family we laid my grandmother, Cecilia Hilliard, to rest on Saturday, October 28th, 2006. Never believed I might say this about a funeral, but the ceremony was beautiful. Nearly every family member played a key part in the services. Some presented flowers, others served as pallbearers, and a few read scripture. Seeing us unite reminded me how important she really was to us, and how perfectly our coordination reflected her wishes that we all come together by choice and by love.

When my aunt asked me to deliver the previous entry as grandma’s eulogy, I was humbled. For some reason, the priest was very old school and would not sanction the reading of the piece anywhere except the tail of the service. A curious edict, especially since both my aunt and mother decided that based on the structure and flow of the services they designed the eulogy fit best earlier. But the priest was having none of it.

My relatives spared me the back room negotiations, which was a good thing, because another surprise decision bumped the piece back even later than the programs indicated. Up to the moment I crossed the altar, I was uncertain whether or not it was really a go. Or if the priest might inveigh halfway through. He did not.

As I read, I realized that my grandmother had bestowed one last unexpected gift. By writing her eulogy, Grandma’s passing gave me an opportunity to see my writing reach a group of people I care about.

It was the sort of real-time feedback that comes so very rarely for a writer, where the time ticks by in isolation, and the signposts are slim and none. A comment I’ll never forget: “You said what we were all feeling but couldn’t find the words to say.”

And I thought to myself, that’s as good as I can do.

And it’s good enough.

I barely knew my Grandmother as an adult, but all the same, I’ll never forget what she contributed to my childhood. Thinking back, the memory that bubbles up first is Christmas. Years when the whole family gathered at Grace Avenue for turkey, presents and good cheer. Perhaps those December nights stand out so prominently because the scene repeated many times, and the large cast of characters remained consistent each year; we were fortunate like that. Even more blessed, our numbers steadily grew. So when the family descended on Ground Zero for the big day, we were a huge brood, indeed. In the early eighties, it seemed like fifty people celebrating, each one spilling out of a corner or cranny, each one with a smile or a joke. Maybe it was more. Maybe it was less. But it was indisputably a lot of people for a house that size.

Christmas meant singing, too. Everyone was welcome to chime in for any verses to the Twelve Days of Christmas. Except one stanza. One line was Grandma’s and Grandma’s alone, and when I think about it, the sound of her voice comes right back through the years. The volume paused, the background chatter dipped, and every person watched the big smile on her face as she sang in a measured tone, Five Golden Rings.

There’s another moment of consequence. A grainy black and white picture of Grandma as a child. Today it sits on a table in my cousin’s living room, and on a bookcase at my mother’s house. A family portrait with her father, mother, and her sisters taken by a professional photographer. Despite her age, and height—she was just a little girl—my eyes without hesitation settle upon her. Grandma stood off and away from her sisters, away from the entire family, in fact. And though it’s clear who she belonged with, she distinguished herself, her arms and hands higher, her head tilted differently. Even as a child, the world was on notice. Cecilia Hilliard had something to say.

She was unique, and she lived a different kind of life. One where she was not afraid to stick out now and again, or take a few chances. Of all the places and people I’ve seen, I can say honestly, no one else was quite like her. I’m lucky she was the person she was.

Thank you for Christmas.

Thank you for my mother.

Thank you for Five Golden Rings.

Once the subject came up with a friend, perhaps more of an acquaintance, of what we might do with our last day on Earth, provided we were in excellent health and everyone we loved was alive. I’ll never forget their plan. Invite them all to the beach for BBQ, touch football, and horseback riding. Sip chilled beer as the sun drifts below the horizon, and lay beside their significant other on a big blanket at the edge of a bonfire. Later, fire off a few roman candles, and then listen to the waves break against the cool dark sand.

That’s not a bad way to close out any day, come to think of it. A hell of a finish, really.

INT - DAY
6 AM. Fall morning. A phone rings. Half-awake man stumbles to answer it.

Sam (croaks): hello?
Boss: There’s smoke pouring out of the server room. I need the passwords to shut everything down. We’re going to yank the plugs soon.
Sam: Uh..is the gear hot? What about the UPS’s?

Boss checks.

Boss: All cool to the touch.
Fire chief: If you don’t shut those servers off now, we’re ripping the walls out!
Sam: Wait! If it’s the gear shorting out then why is everything operational? Are the walls hot?
Fire chief: Could be a problem outlet. Why are we listening to you anyway?

A buildings and grounds staffer rushes in.

B&G: A rubber belt in the air handler on the roof snapped. It’s burning. That air handler vents right into the server room. Let me shut off the HVAC system.

In reality this drama took thirty minutes to play out. Five hours later the server room still smells a bit…rubbery.

Because all hands were on deck Saturday for Parent’s Weekend, attendance at school Monday was optional. Which meant seven hours of work on the novel today. Even managed a workout and a chiropractor visit. Nice. Consecutive days off are good. Forgot what they felt like.

Towards that end, about fifteen pages require a complete scrub down and another fifty need light revisions. The last five will be heavily modified. This is a good and solid draft, and very different from what the Eight read. Because of their input, and Team Eagle Eye, the manuscript is very different. Much better, too. While there may be more work to do—some say the revision process never ends—if nothing else the story moves forward constantly. And the filler level? I’ve got a huge file in Notepad containing extraneous scenes and snippets I cut. I killed lots of darlings. Yes, they are dead. All of them.

Speaking of cut lines, here is my favorite:

Emptiness. A void the night could not fill.


I have no idea why I savored that one so, but I did. Anyway, the emptiness passed.

Four readers are lined up and primed.

The wrap date is the weekend of October 22nd. I budgeted seven days for three start to finish read-throughs and revisions. Unless there is a mail service issue, the crew will have their copies by November 2nd. Since my poor scheduling damns the bulk of their task to the wrong side of the holidays—learned nothing from last year’s lesson apparently—likely only only two will finish by Christmas. Honestly, I have no expectation that anyone will punch out in less than ten weeks. And that’s OK. I have a certification exam to study for and a longish story in progress. There’s feedback on the Stash to implement as well. Plus I plan to enter a script in the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship in 2007, and I’ve been kicking ideas about for that. Have the urge to write a lot of dialog, I guess.

I see a good year on the horizon.

After five years of false starts, promises, two years of expired permits, the landlord began the unthinkable project. Yesterday he and a small construction crew—my first floor neighbor, a carpenter by trade, among them—started ripping down the old and busted porch and replacing rotted out columns with temporary metal strut supports. Long a scourge of the neighborhood, I often cursed this eyesore. It’s been a joke among the long term residents in passing.

When it rained, more often than not, water saturated the wooden planks so completely that walking across the surface felt like forced baby steps across a twenty by forty foot sponge. It has been a home to at least two raccoons, gophers, and the Bumblebores of Doom—bees so large that I offered my wallet up to them, no questions asked. They refused my pleas for mercy.

And ugly, man. Bad aesthetics are one thing, but the crumbling porch gave the entire home—a meticulously maintained older mansion converted into apartments—an urban renewal project gone terribly wrong look. Prospective tenants stood up the landlord at scheduled walk-throughs, without explanation, because they spied the porch from a block out and kept driving once they realized that it was the right address.

The landlord says the new porch will be done by Thanksgiving. Let’s translate that number with a landlord labor output theorem. The formula rests on five years of observing his work habits. Six week estimate x Unknown number of distractions + Cold weather fronts = Multiply original estimate by three and add two weeks.

My birthday is in February. His crew might make that date. Maybe.