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Dear Heloise,
I don't remember Mom on caffeine, and that is probably a blessing. It is not one of my vices, and I am extremely susceptible to it. I drink about ten cups of coffee per year, and each blasts me through the roof like a rocket. I have enough vices without being hooked on caffeine, and I must say that you are part of the reason I'm not.
I remember dozens if not hundreds of incidents from my youth of Mom getting to the careful enunciation stage of drinking, of my not understanding what was happening and of breaking into tears and begging her to "stop talking like that." I ask that you please never share this shared memory with our mother under any circumstances. Added to this were my father's substance abuse-related ruination and death and, to a lesser extent because I didn't know her well, Mary Willis's. As icing to the cake, I read long ago that the child of an alcoholic was nine times as likely as said parent to become an alcoholic. I don't want to become hooked on anything. As a blues musician, I spend a lot of time in bars in situations where my drinks are free, in addition to which I smoke three or four packs of cigarettes per week. It's not what the statisticians define as heavy usage of either alcohol or tobacco, but I keep the health hazards and probabilities in mind.
In addition to being in bars a lot, I am frequently in the company of musicians, writers and artists, and let me assure you that anything you've ever heard about people involved in creative endeavors being more likely than our societal average to abuse substances is an understatement. The most gifted people I know are the ones more pursued by what Delta bluesmen referred to in the first half of this century as "hellhounds on my trail." They are almost universally beset by recurring addictions, bulimia, and mental disorders. The creative spark seems to always have the potential of becoming a self-consuming conflagration.
I am susceptible to the temptations of alcohol, but consider myself lucky that I am, first of all, aware of that susceptibility, second, somewhat frail now and physically unable to go out and whoop and holler two nights in a row, and third, susceptible only to alcohol. I have good friends who after decades of walking the straight and narrow path still break into a sweat whenever the opportunity to abuse anything from beer to prescription drugs to illegal narcotics to cleaning fluids presents itself. Three unfilled prescriptions for morphine-based painkillers expired in my wallet after my accident, for drugs are not my vice. I make pots of tea for Miranda every Saturday and Sunday morning, but rarely drink even that mildly caffeinated beverage myself.
You fit into the picture, my dear sister, via the memory of my seeing you drink cups of hot water when your doctor advised you to back away from heavy coffee consumption. I feared doing anything that habitual. Well, this has certainly been a dissertation on one wee comment you made in yesterday's e-mail note.
I last heard from Laura early in August, when she told me that she and Jim were on the way to Florida and that she would consequently be out of e-mail touch until at least 8/21. Haven't heard from her since, but look forward to our next comment. Her first comment on my website stories was the one that pleased me more than any other could -- She said that "it was just like being back there on Adger again to read them." I cried when I read that note from her, and will request your conspiratorial silence on that fact, too. It was just such a close, familial, sensitive response from her because it was what I wanted to impart to my own daughter. You and Tommy have raised a real lady in Laura, and I presume that Catherine and Tom are equally good people.
Thank you for telling me about Tom's plans to base a career on psychology. I've been away from Shreveport a long time and didn't spend much time with him when I was last there because he was knee-deep in Velveeta or Gruyere or Edam or whatever the hell that thirteen year-old's name was, but I remember him as a very young boy from a previous trip having the mannerisms of a child psychologist, and who should know better than I? I remember him asking questions about my van or my harmonicas or my hats, and my answering, and his preceding every response to my explanations with a drawn out "Hmmmm." I can easily see the psychiatric field as being, to use a late-seventies term, "the color of his parachute."
While I'm on the topic of your domus, by the way, I will one day get to Tommy as a topic of a reminiscence letter to Caelan. To honestly enter your world of expression for a moment, I pray that my impression of your husband will always be more guided by my own impressions than by family propaganda. You and I had several conversations during your separation from him in which I feel in retrospect that I was less than satisfactorily supportive of you, but that man taught me how to tie a necktie, and that means a lot more to me than one might superficially imagine.
I worry to this day that I am handicapped in the various interactions a man is traditionally trained for by a father, and the fact that I have intensely sought and craved reassurance from the women I've been involved with over the years might account for their extreme plurality. Your husband has had a tough row to hoe, and if his tolerance for me and everyone else in our family has at times bent to the breaking point, I humbly respect a demonstrated patience and real gentility that I'm not sure I could half match. He may be a complete and utter asshole. The stories of his pride in having never read a novel as late as the early eighties, of his becoming physically ill after drinking from public water fountains after desegregation and of his arrangements for better meals for himself than for his family during times of poverty will always gnaw against the positive feelings he has certainly earned from me.
On the specific matter of him in a temper pushing you out of 108 Adger, it is frankly difficult for me to acquiesce to your forgiveness, and I hope you recognize it as a constant demonstration of my love for you that I do so. Granddaddy told me the story of how he personally chose the trees at Shackville from which that house was originally constructed and ringing their bark so that they could die and season naturally for a year before being cut, and of doing so with a homemade knife that's in my kitchen right now. A few years later, just as your current den was being added, Tommy told me that the builders had gone around the house with a bubble level and been amazed at how little the house had sunk since its construction and how sturdy it was. As you know from the Internet if nothing else, I am very subject to ancestor worship, and there will never be a real estate transaction that will supersede our grandfather's plan for that property in my mind. To me, your household's acquisition of 108 Adger was not and will never be Tommy's purchase of the property, but instead our patriarch's approval of your occupancy as a part of his plan for his family.
I am wrong by any legal standard, and Tommy would be right to think back to his own fiscal earnings going into the payments and ownership. If he saw this epistle, he would be wholly justified in going into high dudgeon against me for my feelings, but I was there on the sleeping porch with Granddaddy when he looked at 108 Adger and Johnette's house and plainly stated his notions. I absorbed those notions, and those notions can't be changed in me with a ball peen hammer. The final synopsis is what is was during your separation -- my respect and affection for Tommy can last longer than yours, but that is up to you. During said separation, I never got the message that you really wanted that respect and admiration to end.
I started this letter at three this morning. At four, my downstairs neighbor, a jazz saxophonist, came home from a gig and I visited with him until five. It is now seven o'clock, and I'm having what our Moreland kin used to call a sinking spell.
Love,
Trey