It’s 5:45 EST and the sun is just starting to show itself through the trees. I’ve been up since 4:00. I’ve already put in about a half hour on my new novel, “The Gospel According to Judas,” a story I’ve been working on for over 20 years.
I just completed a novel entitled, “Young Hitler: The Lost Memoir.” That idea first came to me about 20 years ago, but in a totally different form. I believe that some stories need to ferment before they’re any good. I hitchhiked to Alaska when I was 18 years old in 1978 with the express purpose of doing something to write about. I finally figured out how to write it 30 years later, and it was published as “Going Hollywood” in 2009. The point of that story is that if you stick with an idea for long enough you might figure it out.
I love telling stories. The best stories generally have a point.
As I considered what this newsletter out to be, my first inclination was to follow up on George Carlin’s approach, which is complaints and grievances. But I don’t want to do that. Far too many people are grievous and complaining right now, and I don’t care to add to that.
I live in a wonderful neighborhood ten miles outside Detroit. We have dirt roads, dense foliage, families of deer wandering around, and five kinds of turtles in the little pond on my street. I have personally saved four big turtles over the past 20 years. Three of them were about the size of an elongated hubcap, at least fifty pounds, with that nasty hooked nose and severely bad attitudes. They had come out of the pond and were in the road, on a curve. They would absolutely get run over.
The most recent turtle encounter was this week. I took a thick stick and turned the turtle around heading back toward the pond. The turtle aggressively bit the stick and snapped at me. If looks could kill I’d be dead. With difficulty I got it turned around, but it was too heavy to push with the stick to make sure it would go in the right direction. I went home, two blocks away, and got a shovel. When I returned the turtle had skadaddled up a path into the woods and was way farther along than it seemed possible for a turtle that size.
So I’m driving home about 18 years ago at perhaps 3:00 AM. I was returning from a friend’s house where we had just done a lot of cocaine. I came around the curve in front of the turtle pond, and smack in the center of the road, and thankfully going the correct way back toward the pond, was what had to be the biggest oldest turtle in that pond. It was so big you couldn’t put your arms around it, nor would you want to. It’s shell had moss and rocks stuck on it, and looked like an island. It had to be at least 100 years old.
I stopped my car. I put on the flashers, sat down on the front bumper three feet from the turtle, lit a cigarette and watched as it slowly made it’s way back to the pond. It acknowledged me with a couple of sidelong glances, but I was obviously not a threat. So the old turtle trudged on, hauling Barbados on it’s back. Why it needed to venture into the neighborhood I’ll never know, but I guess it hadn’t liked what it had seen and was wisely returning home.
It took well over an hour and I supervised.
So that’s four big turtles in 20 years. I am the turtle crossing guard.