Your Precocious, Presumptious, Pretentious Putz

Hey dad. I thought I should tell you something. When I was little, every now and then I would rummage through your desk drawers. I know this sort of behavior is dishonest, but I had to find some way to while away the time during those lazy summer days when I'd be home alone with Scott. Although, I don't think Scott would ever rummage through your things.

At any rate, the most interesting thing I had ever found was your lockbox of items which I presume to be dated from your college days. The contents of this box included your high school diploma, which had a crisp two dollar bill tucked away inside of it. There was also an old leather wallet with some old photos and the cards of businesses that are no longer extant. You also stowed away some poetry you once wrote on some torn out pages from a smallish stenographer's notebook. I have to admit that finding the poems was a surprise, even at such a young age, because I guess I never presumed you to be the sort to write anything. And then I actually read the poems. They look a lot like you dad. Silly. Dated. Yet to the point.

I don't remember the poems now, and I'm not going to go through the effort to dig them back up (even though I'm pretty sure of their exact location) because I want to remember just as I experienced it as a little kid. The only thing I remember though is that you inexplicably started a poem with the line, "On top of Ol' Smokey." This I consider to be a grave offense to the written word, but oh well. You then went on to describe some guy getting his head split open -- hardly the type of literature you would want your impressionable young son to come across.

I guess it occurred to me though that what I'm really doing is creating a longer, wordier, and more self-obsessed version of the short-lived literary effort that you once made, stowed away, and then blissfully forgot about. I bet you wrote those poems for a class you once took. That wouldn't surprise me because although I previously made clumsy attempts to write short fiction, not until I took a class on it at Wabash did I really get the process of it. Vonnegut once said that writing short fiction is the best way to help your soul grow, and that's why creative writing managed to spread to every university in the land, even though the prospects of making a career out of it are slim to none.

You were young once too, and you don't hesitate to remind me of that or to reassure me of the strange direction that I'm headed. So, thanks dad. But I have to ask, why did you stop?