Fussy, a few things:
1. I want acknowledgment that I was the one who named you Fussy (full name, “Little Miss Fussybritches”) way back when in Arkansas. It’s turning out to be my only claim to fame.
2. Why beat up on poor old Garrison Keillor? I got a soft spot for the guy. Prairie Home Companion is generally a snooze but it sounds good in our sixties house on a Saturday afternoon when the light through the door into the backyard is just right and if you turn the radio down just low enough that you can’t hear it and you drink yourself into a whiskey stupor, and his Writer’s Almanac takes a beating (some poet really railed on him in Poetry magazine recently) but it’s interesting to know when writer’s birthdays are (I guess), and I haven’t read any of his books, but every now and then he publishes a little essay in The Nation exhalting democracy that will bring tears to your eyes. Yes, his lawsuit against that guy for dissing Prairie Home Companion is kind of lame, but sometimes you just gotta let the old guys stand outside and yell at the kids to get out of their yards.
3. David Koen was going to come stay in our house (which we haven’t sold yet) until all that New Orleans crap gets sorted out, but he can’t get Kittie to move to Houston.
4. Whatever happened to the Suite? I bet Kevin published it for a million dollars and didn’t give us our cut.
5. I’ll be your literary executor if you’ll be mine. I think I’d be an awesome literary executor. You would be too. We’d both be good ones.
6. Remember that song “It’s just you and me and we just disagree?” For awhile there was a guy who worked here named Dwayne Mason, which is what I thought the name of the singer of that song was, and I was always making little jokes when I ran into him in the elevator about how he just had that one hit back in the seventies and now look what happened to him. That sort of thing. Anyway, I found out the singer’s name was Dave Mason, not Dwayne, so no wonder that guy never had any idea what I was talking about.
7. Our weird little neighborhood has its own monthly newsletter called the Shepherd Park Plaza Pulse. It reminds you when heavy trash pickup is and includes a few daffynitions, points to ponder, that sort of thing. It also lists the residents who have birthdays that month. Janet was excited when we got our first issue and saw the birthday listings. “Wow, it’s a really young neighborhood. Nobody here is over 31 years old!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those numbers were the birthdates of the people, not their ages.
8. I’ll send you some pictures of our old house. Maybe somebody in San Francisco wants to buy it just for the novelty of owning a house in Houston. That’s why we bought it and we’ve never regretted it.
Love,
Wade