| Finding the equation of a life |
| Joe-O goes home |
| My stepfather was driving the highway between Boulder and Denver in his red Volkswagen Beetle when it happened. The wind whipped through the window he'd left open to enjoy the cool caress of an early summer breeze. His jacket lifted magically off the seat and glided toward freedom. He reached out an unsteady hand to yank it back, and my life was changed forever.
I was in a bright orange life vest bobbing up and down in the warm touch of Lake Travis when the call came to us in Texas. My father broke the news to his children that the big, jolly man who'd stolen our mother's heart was dead. I hid behind our family lake house with my eight-year-old arms gripped tightly to the useless orange vest and cried alone. I didn't know it then, but my tears mourned more than my stepfather; they rued the loss of a part of me that was to never be. I'd lived in the Denver suburb or Northglenn for two years. Just long enough to discover the joys of snow, make a few good friends, become an expert at Kick the Can, and fall in love with a blonde-haired, freckle-faced girl named Collette Black. In an instant that world vanished and I was again a Texan. My mother hired a company to load our possessions and transport them to an Austin house no more than a mile from the one my father now occupied alone. My summer vacation in Austin had become permanent. I was back in school with kids I'd known in kindergarten, before the divorce. Life went on and on and on. In the next 25 years I fell in and out of love many times, graduated from college twice, saw my real father die, married the perfect woman (who bears a striking resemblance to Collette), experienced uncountable moments that molded and defined me as a human being. I thought about Northglenn often. It was a dreamy memory of innocence and deep sadness. Did I understand at that age what a divorce was? Did I blame myself? When I made the decision to turn from newspaper reporter to fiction writer, the first short story that popped out of me was based on the cold Colorado day my older brother had written "Joe Loves Collette" on the back of my winter coat. My first-grader friends tried their best to read it as we walked to school, but they were still learning. I wadded the coat and shoved it in my desk until the end of the day. I froze during recess as Collette, unaware, skipped rope with her friends. Her blond pigtails floated in the air, timeless. In an instant the needle skipped across the story that was to be my life and replaced it with a new version of the same tale. A Texas transplant learning how to skate down icy sidewalks quickly forgot snow when he was thrown back home to the Lone Star State. Life bolted down a new, yet familiar path. But what of the story left behind, unfinished? That "what if?" is the question that haunts. It's the one gaping black hole stubborn enough to suck fiction writers in and hold them hostage for eternity. No, make that endless eternities, because the first thing a writer throws out is the silly concept of time and all of its black-and-white absolutes. To write fiction is to create possibilities, Bizarro universes where my stepfather lives and I own a dozen pairs of galoshes that I don for my job driving a snow plow, where Collette and I have been divorced for a decade and remain bitter from the custody battle over our 12-year-old daughter Hannah. No, make that Sarah. For more than 25 years I have had no contact with the Colorado version of my life. It was an artery bluntly severed with only disjointed remnants to lend the least hint of reality. An address: 1007 E. 111th Place. A white, third place ribbon in the baton relay. A faded newspaper clipping no larger than the palm of my hand in which my stepfather's Volkswagen skids off the page. A Polaroid of a grinning boy washing dishes, his front two teeth missing. The funny story I tell of my brother writing "Joe Loves Colette" across my rust leather jacket. |