While I’ve scribbled in notebooks and on computer hard drives for years, there was really just one time that I made a concerted effort to really try “that writing thing” sort of seriously. It was a good experiment.

When I was a junior in undergrad at UNM, I ended up taking a creative writing class. In this class, we had a few slim volumes to read, but mostly, we were supposed to write.

It was spring of 1993, I think, and for some reason I have brief memory flashes of scenes that I tried to write for the handful of partial stories I worked on for that class.

One story was my principal effort for the course, the beginning of a meandering Southern gothic that was a loose mimicry of Flannery O’Connor. I remember it was called “Barter Mercy”, and it centered around a few scenes related to some key characters- a socially insightful mentally-challenged boy, a black waitress, and a cadre of self-righteous overweight windbags who presume they see the world right.

I remember I labored quite a while on that story trying to approximate a Southern world and lifestyle I knew nothing about, and I think I gave up on it after the Negress fed a vagabond felon some pork cutlets on the steps that were off of the back of the kitchen.

It wasn’t a very good story, but I then at least worked at writing something creative, and writing something completely detached from the reality of my life. For that, I gave myself some kudos.

I still have the manuscript for this unfinished gem somewhere in a box in the garage. Where I got its name, or where I was trying to go with it, I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But I think I actually wrote 20-plus pages of fiction there.

I wrote a few other little bits for that class, most of which I’ve long forgotten and lost.

To my surprise later in life, I did back then write a very personal and prescient little piece that, though supposed to be about some other guy, ended up reflecting my life a decade or so later. It was about a quiet, neurotic guy who lived alone in a small apartment that was located behind and above a broad warehouse somewhere in a big city, about a tiny and irrelevant ant in a grand colony. A guy on the edge of living and dying.

Some ten years later, after I had optimistically picked up my largely rooted life from Albuquerque and thrown myself into the abjectly foreign world of Chicago to fabricate a life with a woman, that relationship quickly eroded, and I, in numb confusion, ended up living in a small studio in a brown walkup typically sprinkled about north Chicago, alone, and for an extended spell of two years, on the edge of living and dying.

Looking back now, on how that story captured the mood and circumstances of my life at a later place, I am still amazed. That was some pretty effective writing.

The utterly true diamond that came out of taking that class, though, was written in a matter of minutes- almost as an afterthought- late one evening as a distraction from other homework, and though it was only two pages, within me it was vivid and well-constructed little scene that brought me to tears that night, and has continued to surface in my memories ever since.

The story: it is morning, and in a well-lit dining room/study, illuminated by golden sunlight through a wall of windows, a well-to-do father sits at one end of a large table, observing his son, who sits towards the other end, in his formal location for dining. For some reason, the father and son are Italian, and we can see that son is terminally ill, and that they are trying to maintain the comport of a usual breakfast, but it is all veiled. The son asks his father what it is like when someone is dead. And the father, in all of his ingrained formality, searches to come with a comforting phrase to tell his son- and after some fumbling, all he can come up with is that dying is like a rainy day, when the clouds come out and block out the light for a while. He fights back emotion and tears as he speaks, trying to keep measure tones, but his face betrays his pain, seeing his son headed for a place he himself has avoided. The two slip into the ache of unknowing together, without words for what’s impending, the son just filling his minutes with all things new each day as the clock ticks on, the father, lost as a comforter. And then silence takes over for the rest of breakfast.

For some reason, this is the scene I have most clearly remembered of anything I’ve ever written, and at the time it was written, I recall reading it and thinking, “This is literature.” What the muses gift the lucky scribe. Something terrible and beautiful. Something truly good.

The sad thing is, I can’t find that story. I have no idea where I laid it down and let it go. It’s still in me, certainly, but I can’t tell it again like I did then, in those penned words.

But it was a favorite of mine. A favorite write- and a favorite read. A tear harvester.

The class eventually came to an end, and the mostly unfinished drafts I had hacked on ended up being scattered to the wind. Or into the back of the 77 Nova. Or into a box or two in the garage. Or into a dumpster somewhere.

In the words of Chaim Potok, “All beginnings are hard.”