Hello, friends!
Another busy week. The first few days were hot and laying low was the order of business but the rest of the week was spent helping Dad pack and go through things in the mornings and then dealing with whatever–including crashing–in the afternoons. Writing happened late afternoon or at night when there wasn’t basketball.
This coming week is the Big Move. I wrote a little about the experiences in today’s essay. It’s been…a lot.
Welcome to the 128th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and some thoughts about the coming summer.
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Project: Moons saw about 3,000 words added to it this past week. I only missed working on it on Monday. The story/book is about 69 pages now with a total of around 16,500 words.
I decided to change my Daily Progress feature on Patreon to Daily Check-In in order to write about whatever I want, not just the work done, though that’s still the main focus.
I worked a little on some pre-writing for a potential future project. I see it as a science fiction/fantasy story. The more I think about it, the more excited I get. Relistening to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books, rewatching the Star Wars movies, and the current world are all coming together. I think. I’m not ready to write it, not really, but I’m growing more attracted to this world and its stories. I just need to know a few more things. I also just need to finish do the third draft of Project: Amusement Park, write Project: Moons, and continue querying agents, etc. But I really do feel pulled toward this world, mainly because I want to find out more about it. As writer, there’s only one way to really do that.
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This past week I spent a lot of time going through drawers and looking at old papers. There’s more of this to come, too. My father is moving closer to me and my family so that we can help him more. The thing is, he’s been in the same apartment since we moved there in October 1988, and on the same street since sometime in 1974, when he moved in with my mother. There’s a lot to deal with and it’s been…strange.
When my mother died in 2019, I should’ve gone through her stuff. I didn’t entirely, though. There were many reasons. Every time I tried, my father would let me get an hour into it and then shut it down. Going through it was painful for me. I’m stingy with my time and preferred to use the summer to write or whathaveyou. I figured I’d get to it.
Then Covid. When Covid shut everything down in 2020, there was no going over to go through things. Even by 2021, I only wore a mask when I went. I didn’t stop wearing a mask around my father until last year, and even now, if there’s a lot of stuff going around at school I’ll mask-up around him.
All these things sound like excuses now. I didn’t do my duty as his son. That’s really how I feel. With Dad’s continued health problems, moving him became a priority. It hasn’t been easy.
Now here we are. He’s downsizing so there’s not a lot to move, but there’s a ton of things to go through. Going through some of my mother’s things the other day, I found things related to my Uncle Billy, for whom I’m named after, who died ten years before I was born. I found a letter a friend of hers sent to apologize back in 1994 after a few years of not speaking. I found photographs, one of my parents in their early years together. Another of Mom and I, me sitting in her lap, all of two years old. I also found yellowed newspaper clippings about young people dying, no doubt pieces she related to because of the loss of her brother. My eighth grade “diploma” and my first tooth. Things related to my sister. Things for my grandmother and an aunt, both gone now, Grandma for more than 20 years now and my aunt who died a few months before my mother.
My father also has things that I’ve found that have made me smile and laugh, and that have broken my heart. Just today I found two cards he must’ve bought early for my mother that he never got to give her. My dad never met a bank receipt he didn’t love. I found a trove of them in empty envelopes that went back to 1975 and a bank that no longer exists, all tucked neatly into a drawer. There were things that, for some reason, had some significance to him that no longer do because the memory faded. There are things he kept for obvious sentimental reasons.
What gets kept? What gets thrown out? I’ve been in charge of that. It’s usually an easy choice. However, it’s been taxing. Not only is it physically taxing because I’m spending hours in rooms without air conditioning and packing and moving things, but also emotionally taxing. My mother’s handwriting is everywhere.
It’s like being Indiana Jones only I’m looking into artifacts that made me. Even though many of the papers I’ve gone through and the artifacts I’ve encountered have no actual bearing on my, they are things that my parents kept at one time or another and, in some ways, that’s a part of me.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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