Long lost loves…

Greetings!  Welcome back — belly up to the bar and have a seat.  Is that a book you’ve got tucked in that bag?  Let me see it — I’m an old lover of books.  Or a a lover of old books.  I guess both would be right.

Why my stars and garters, it’s “The Portable William Faulkner”!  You know, he’s my absolutely most favorite writer.  Amazing!  I wouldn’t have taken you for a fellow Faulkner fan.  Mind, I wasn’t always crazy about his work.  I only discovered Faulkner in college, and then it was by accident.

Ah, college — the last days of freedom.  Remember how “important” everything was back then?  You know, I met the love of my life in college.  Yes, it’s true.  I experienced that deep and lasting emotion that a man only feels once in his life.  As I recall, I did that about every other week.

In fact, that was how I stumbled into Faulkner!  You see, I went on the GI Bill after I got back from overseas, and I was older than most of the other students.  So I my heart wasn’t only available to those giggling 19-year-old cheerleaders you see wandering around the campus.  I also fell hard for several of the teachers — one of whom taught a summer course on William Faulkner.  I don’t even remember her name, but I’ve never forgotten Faulkner.

Mostly it was the way he put words together.  They spoke to me in a language that I understood.   Like when, in “The Town” he said, “Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.”  That really pulled it all together for me.  Also, William Faulkner spent a lot of his life writing about the Snopes family, and those were people with whom I grew up. No one ever described my father better than Faulkner did in “Barn Burning”.

So, yeah, I knew those people.  Knew them very well.  I’m just a little surprised to discover that you enjoy Faulkner too.  What’s that?  You picked it up for your daughter, who’s taking a Faulkner course in college?  Is her teacher a youngish, poetic sort of fellow?  You’re going right home and find out?  Please tell her to drop in anytime she wants to talk about — oh, well, goodbye then…