A Time to Write

It was a dark and stormy night. It actually was. Ernest was flying down the four-lane, right in the middle, weaving from one yellow stripe to the next as he picked up speed. The sky had just begun spitting rain, as the booming and striking clouds in the distance approached him one rain drop at a time. Suddenly, he was sopping wet and sliding sideways down the mountain highway. In a flash, he thought about his decision to leave his helmet in the garage at home – not a forgetful decision, but a helpless one. What could his future hold for him anyway? If he crashed and smashed his head, maybe his hopelessness would take care of itself.

With a snap from slow to fast motion, the present peril demanded his full attention as a screaming ambulance came toward him. As he twisted the handlebars to steer clear of the approaching headlights, he careened off the road’s edge into a shallow grove of trees that bordered a rocky ravine. As he shot out of the trees into the jagged wash, leaving his bike in the rustling branches, he worried about his mom – she dreamed for him when he could not dream for himself. How would she pay for his care? His funeral? BOOM! Silence.

When he woke, Ernest was in a white windowless room, sitting at a white acrylic table with no blemishes, with a fountain pen and a little black notebook opened in front of him. Both were just like the ones his father had used – a funky pen with blue swirls on the barrel, and a bound, black notebook with crisp, blank pages and an elastic band that secured it closed. “That paper really takes the ink – and doesn’t bleed” his dad used to say. “If you have something to say, you have to say it with the right tools!”

In the far corner of the room sat $20,000 in cash in a neat white box with a sign on top: “Use as you see fit.” There was no door for exit. He sat for minutes. Hours. Days. Silence. Not avoiding anything. Just his thoughts. No urges – hunger, thirst, tiredness. He didn’t know what to do with himself. No guidance, no direction. Table. Pen. Paper. Silence.

Moved by life’s quiet mystery, he began to write. He wrote down jokes he could remember. He told funny stories. He made lists. When he didn’t like what he had written, he didn’t bother tearing out the page. His father had told him – “Leave the pages in…just turn to a new page and begin again. That way you have a record of your thoughts.” The scratch of the nib audibly released the ink onto the page. What else was there to do but write and fill up the empty pages?

Soon he was writing about things that mattered. About his parents’ struggle to enter the country and make a life for his brother and him. About his father’s illness and death when they were little boys. About his brother’s seemingly untapped reservoir of motivation – that one really pissed him off. I mean, how is that guy so perfect? About his mother’s long absences as she worked several jobs to provide even a basic existence. About the lousy apartment he and his mom lived in. About how his brother went to college and made it out. About how unfair it was – everything always came easy to him. About the many jobs he had worked, each one less life-giving than the previous one, and each one ending with him simply not showing up to work. About the drugs. The booze. The failure. The sadness. The hope of someday almost always destroyed by today. Regret. Wishing he could simply start over again and do something different. Anything. Different.

He dreamed of what he would do with the money. A boss new car. A beach vacation. Perhaps a fling with a beautiful woman. Dreams of excess gave way to the real kind. He dreamed of making a better life. Of going to school. Of making up for lost time. Something different. Something real.

Suddenly his mom slapped him on the back of the head. “Boy,” she said…”there’s no time for napping. Let’s get moving.” She looked at him over the rims of her glasses with a slight grin -”Remember…if you want to pass, go to class.” Yet another example of his mother’s brilliance manifested in trite colloquialism. She had a million of them. His brother yelled from the apartment front door, “Let’s go…the bus is here.” Today was the day Ernest was meeting with his counselor to see if he was “college material.” He could be a screw-up, but he had made some lists in his black notebook of jobs he might like. As he ran out the door he tripped on a small but heavy white box with a little note on top.