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Frank’s joints creaked as he swung his ninety-one year old legs over the edge of the bed.  His slippers, that were older then the young couple across the street, still felt like home.  The walk to the kitchen from the bedroom had turned into a shuffle he called the arthritic symphony.  Each step for the first hour of the day felt like it could be the last, which at his age was a definite possibility.  Frank wasn’t sure what he liked more in the morning, the smell of the coffee brewing or the tingle he felt when the first dip was placed firmly under his lower lip.  The smell of the arthritis rub and the warmth from it came in a close third.  He felt a slight ruffle on his leg, stooping down he petted his old poodle Buttons.  “Well old girl, one thing I can count on is if my sight goes I’ll still be able to smell you.”  Taking his hand away Frank realized it was only the old shag footstool he had made out of discarded carpet he was petting, Buttons long gone, still smelled though.  He opened the plastic crinkling box of day old donuts and grabbed the last one, depositing the container in the trash. “Martha would have a fit if she saw how I was eating”, Frank mumbled, “or maybe you do see me eh?”  With two bites and a smile the donut was gone.  All in all this morning was going good for Frank.  Pipe in hand he strolled to the window to see that it was a clear cold day for early February.  With one final smoke ring Frank took his pipe and tapped out its contents in the misshapen ashtray made by one of his many grandchildren or maybe a great-grandchild?  Plopping down in his favorite recliner he reached for the lever, pulled it, and relaxed into his sunrise nap.

Immediately a dream came to him that he’s fallen into before.  Frank dreams of his time down in the mine where the only thing you were certain of was that the temperature would always be 45 degrees.  Frank was luckier then most because his mind was sharper than his back was strong.  Because of this his days of being a laborer were short and he rose quickly into supervision.  This also helped him snag the cushy job as mine inspector, a position he held until retirement.  In this dream the death of a young Finn comes back to him.  Charley was his name, a tall man of six foot two with a chiseled face, dark blue eyes and a full head of blonde hair.   Charley would say “Francis”, as only Charley would call him, “Francis, it must be nice to be you.  Six foot, give or take and inch, flat footed and lean as the day is long and not an ounce of real work in ya.”  Charley would smile each time he said it.  After any blast it was Charlie’s job to knock the rocks loose that didn’t fall from the blast.  On this one occasion as Frank stood by commenting on Charlie’s lack of sweat for such a “hard working Finn”, Charley found a dead spot in the rock.  One tap and a ton of copper imbedded rock came crashing down on him. Frank started to dig and shout at the same time.  When they dug him out they were amazed that he didn’t have one scratch on his face, but his hands were another story.  In his attempt to save himself Charley had placed his hands over his face where they took the weight and crushing of the rock, stripping them down to hamburger. What killed him was the impacted rock simply squeezing the life force out of him. The open casket amazed everyone who heard the story but not one person would lift the shroud placed to hide his hands.   With a twitch of his leg Frank was awake, rubbing his hands together wishing he could forget this and many other dreams that plagued him daily.

The clock read 8:35am, which meant it was time for a morning nip.  With one clean sweep of his lip the now tasteless snuff was out. “Martha you’d never give me kisses unless the lip was clean, well pucker up,” Frank jutted his dry cracked lips out into a pucker kissing only the dry air. The bottle of Hartley’s was almost gone, so Frank made a little larger then normal drink, (which he would do even if the bottle was full), tossing aside the juice glass with the pink and white flowers on it he had picked, grabbing a larger cut glass tumbler.  Frank smiled as he sipped his brandy, thinking again of his dear departed wife Martha.  At the end of her fight the cancer liberated her as it grew in her brain.  The once quiet housewife had become an impolite foul-mouthed person who shared her opinion on everything and everyone. “You sure have gotten fat” or “Why the hell you visiting me now, wait for the Goddamn funeral!” Tears came to his eyes as he recalled her warm smile and those bitter comments that came out of her mouth those last few weeks.  Tears turned into a chuckle as he remembered the looks on the faces of family, jaw dropping mutterings of “mother how could you”.  Frank’s smile faded as he finished his drink, sadly the liquor was the only warmth he would feel today.

It was now eleven and the Price is Right glowed on the RCA floor model TV.  Somewhere between “come on down” and the spin of the big wheel the larger brandy closed his eyelids once again.

This time he dreamed of his middle son’s funeral.  At forty years old his heart pumped its last beat and ceased to function.  Frank felt as if he were watching the events of the funeral from above the room.  Martha wept inconsolably, screaming, “My baby, my baby”, while Frank worked the room, chatting emotionlessly with friends and family.  “Doesn’t he look nice?”  “It was such a shock”.  These phrases were thrown around and from his new viewpoint all Frank could think was no, he doesn’t look nice, he’s dead. “Forty and dead is not a good combination,” Frank told one stunned mourner.  In a swirl of lights the room changed color; Frank was brought down from his viewpoint of above the room to in front of the casket, alone in an empty room.  Looking into the casket Frank could only think of one thing to say, “My baby, my precious baby.”

“Help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered”, Bob Barker’s sign off broke into the dream.  Frank awoke to find his face moist with the dream still fresh in his mind.  Resetting his recliner Frank rose up on his ninety-one year old legs.  It had been fifteen years since his wife’s passing and nearly thirty since his son’s, both still fresh as if they had happened yesterday.  Frank’s blue faded mine inspector jacket with his name missing the “k” reading “Fran” still hung in the closet where it had hung for the past twenty-six years.  The old miners’ helmet sat on the shelf above the jacket, dusty, with the long burnt out light still clipped on top.  The jacket still fit due to his body shrinking with time with the sleeves longer then he remembered.  As he slid the helmet on he felt the bump on his head caused by not wearing the helmet years ago and not ducking when he should have.  “You know Francis, someone as tall and dumb as you should duck,” Frank smiled as the voice rang in his head. The bump a permanent reminder of the dangerous job he, Charley and so many others had faced in their lives and a reminder of all the lives lost for a pale metal worthy of only a penny.

Frank opened the door and for a moment stood on the porch of the home he had shared with Martha for over fifty years. With the fresh air in his face the scent of lilac and old poodle faded from his mind. The wind had died down but the cold February air chilled him in the thin and loosely fitting jacket.  Each breath Frank took billowed out like smoke in the frigid air.  The snow under a winter sun glistened illuminating the countryside.  The tear that had started to fall down his cheek was now frozen as if time stood still. In the distance he could see the two trees that marked the opening of Shaft Number 5, Charlie’s shaft and the mounds of spent rock that rose behind it.  Reaching up Frank flipped the switch on the dead light and in a whisper Frank spoke for the very last time, “Charley, Francis is coming home.”

The vibrations of my phone made a sound penetrating my sleep. The sound entered a dream where the sound became a boat motor trolling along Torch Lake in hopes of a pike striking at my Red Devil lure. Just as the pike struck my leg kicked and I climbed out of the fogginess of my antihistamine laden sleep, only to realize that it wasn’t a trolling motor but my phone dancing on the nightstand that pulled me awake. Without putting on my glasses, and not being able to focus on the time, I flipped open my phone and answered.

“Hello”, the illuminated screen identified the caller as my sister Evelyn.

“Ben…. its dad”, I could hear her breaths being forced out rapidly, swallowing and drowning in tears; “he’s failing to live”. Evelyn’s word choice had always amazed me, the clear understanding of,” failing to live”, simply meant that our father was dying. “Please come, I can’t do this.” It wasn’t I can’t do this alone, it wasn’t I won’t do this, it was a true statement; Evelyn just couldn’t face watching our father die alone.

“I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll drive up.” Up being the correct word. The local airport had limited flights so driving the 400 miles was the easiest way to get home. “Home”, it’s funny when you think a word and then speak it aloud and how different if feels. When I think of home I think of a misspent youth, a dead mother, and now it seems, a soon to be dead father; I’ll be parentless, a forty-five year old orphan.

It had been five years since my last visit. I had forgotten how brilliant the colors of the leaves on the trees were. How the oranges and reds collided with the crusty brown of the bark. I was thankful too that some of the leaves were down, allowing me to see deeper into the forest; deep enough to see the deer contemplating a suicide run across the lanes of traffic. After eight hours on the road I made my familiar left turn onto Eddie Street. I drove up the hill to the house and turned into the driveway. It had been years since the house was last painted. I had painted it with my father on the visit prior to my last visit. Had it really been only two visits in ten years? The windows had been replaced, a new door, the garbage that had accumulated over the years removed when scrap metal prices soared. Gone were my $150 Escort Station Wagon and the bush-beater Chevy Blazer. Both were mine but my father had told me to just leave them, he would take care of them. The driveway now empty, except for my VW Bug and my sister’s van; my father hadn’t driven in years. Soon the house and driveway will be empty.

“Ben it’s good that you came”, my sister embraced me the way you hug the bride at a wedding, stiff enough not to wrinkle the gown but soft enough to be genuine. “He’s been asking for you, wanting you, well really us, to put together a memory board”. Ah yes, the Freemont memory board. We had made one for my mother when she died of what my father would say was “woman’s cancer” when really it was brown bottle cancer. It took a long sleepless night to find pictures that didn’t show a bottle or glass in her hand or her crooked little three-sheets-to-the-wind grin in them. Ultimately the board had wedding photos, ones of my sister’s birth, and my birth just hours after we were delivered; only two years and two months apart. My eyes focused from my recollection to that of seeing my sister staring at me wondering where I had gone.

 

 

 

 

“Eve, how long does he have? What are we looking at? Days? Weeks?”

“Hospice is coming in twice daily. They figure a week; but one never really knows for sure.” My mother died on a Tuesday, two days after they said she had a “good couple weeks left”.

“It’s funny Ben, he keeps calling me Eevi, and when he says it’s as if he’s looking through me.”

“Your name is Evelyn, I call you Eve, sometimes Eevi, why is it funny?”

“He says it with an accent, I think it’s a Finnish accent, and the last time I checked father isn’t Finnish.” The puzzled look on her face along with her pale skin saved her from my joke about; well obviously, we’re not Finnish either. “Come in, see for yourself.”

My father’s lung cancer was progressing quickly, so quickly that the upstairs lost its use a few months back. He was in a hospital bed. They placed it in the spot where his worn and tattered recliner had sat for years. My mother’s chair stood in memoriam next to the bed, the doilies covering the worn arms now covered in dust and fur from our long dead cats. “Hi dad”, I said it as if he was deaf, not dying. He awoke from his morphine induced nap.

“Ben, is that you?” His voice held that dryness that only a moisture robbed throat could produce.

“Yes it’s me, how are you?” I chuckled under my breath at the irony of asking a man on his death bed the question we use whenever we see an old friend on the street. “Evelyn is concerned about you; she called me and told me to come.”

“That’s a lie, I told her to get you here, and I doubt that she’s concerned about anything more than what she gets when I croak.” Evelyn flinched as if she had been struck again, but this time not by our mother.

“Dad, she says that you been using a nickname when you talk to her, Eevi, and that you stare at her, and why are you so sure she’s taking care of you just for the Freemont mansion?”

“Don’t sass me boy! Evelyn is not Eevi and never will be!” His shouting caught us both off guard and the coughing the followed lasted a minute with both of us waiting for it to end to find out what he was talking about. “Eevi, she was the one”.

“Dad what are you talking about?” Evelyn went from the flinching meek little girl who never raised her voice to a cold chill clone of our mother. “You were married to mom for twenty-five years, who, what, Eevi? Dad, who the hell is Eevi?” I stood between my sister and my father, both who minutes ago were both pale, Evelyn from the exhaustion of taking care of a sick old man, and our father pale with death’s breath on his neck. Now both were flushed and panting as if they had just finished the father-daughter potato sack race at the church picnic.

“Dad, Eve, both of you shut up. Dad you’re dying, we don’t need to speed it up with yelling at each other. Eve, does it really matter at this point? Let’s do what we came here for; search for some photos that will make it look like we’ve had a happy life.” I had just joined the race. The silence that followed was unbearable. It was as if we were already at his grave wondering if we should speak. The silence was broken by my father’s voice.

“In the garage, in my toolbox, the red one, there are letters, pictures, Eevi”. My sister steadied herself on the rail of my father’s bed. I left the house and walked out towards the garage. The garage, the one place we were never to go into unless ordered. It had been twenty years since I last went into that building. I last went in to take my cat’s last litter of kittens, (to save them from my mother), and to take Misty to the vet to stop the breeding. I knew where the toolbox was. It sat on top of a grime covered workbench that at one end held a vice and the other end an anvil. I went in and walked straight up to it and stared at it like I was getting ready to open the Ark of the Covenant, not knowing if I would turn into dust or have the power of the Heavens bestowed unto me. I opened the top and found tools. I opened the first drawer, more tools. The bottom drawer held a stack of letters bound together with string and another string held together another bundle of photos; Eevi.

I carried both bundles into the house, back to the man who never cared for anything or anyone. My sister raised her finger to her lips to silence me as I began to speak.

“He’s sleeping”, she said in a whisper. Evelyn’s eyes followed mine back to what I was holding. “What are those?”

“Letters to Eevi, and pictures, they must be of her.” The pictures were old Polaroid’s that held dates; dates that showed they were taken before our parents were married. A strange feeling came over me, a feeling of thankfulness that whatever these letters and photos meant to my father, happened before our history.

“Should we wait?” Evelyn asked, and before I had answered she removed the bundle of photos from my left hand. She looked at each picture closely, perhaps hoping that the thousand words would fall out and tell the story. I slowly untied the letters and realized that they didn’t hold postage, they had never been mailed. I opened one and began to read.

 

 

Eevi My Love,

I miss you with every passing day. Remember the beach? I’m looking at the photo of you in the dying light of the day, the photo in which you are dancing to the music of my heart. Your face is hidden by your long auburn hair, as you always wore it, down and curved, framing your beautiful face. Your smile is peeking out between the strands, your soft lips cradling your teeth. You always had your hair down; you were so beautiful, why did you hide behind it? You would brush your hair out of yours eyes and I would have to catch my breath and then remember to breathe again as your blue eyes came into view. In this photo I can’t see your eyes but I can see so much more. The curve of your hip that, oh dear, I’m blushing just thinking of that curve! I’m holding the picture up to my face wishing that I could smell your skin, that freshness, that purity that I miss so dearly. One picture is all I can look at today, my heart breaks with every glance, rest well my love.

Forever yours,

Mitchell

I carefully folded the letter and took the stack of photos from Evelyn. I found the beach photo and I too blushed at the curve of her hip. She was beautiful, the hair, the smile, and now I ached to see those eyes that my father once lost his breath too. There were only six photos and each one was out of frame. Eevi stood left, right, cropped off legs, but her head was never cropped off. I held tight to the letters that outnumbered the photos two to one. Twelve letters, eleven more than I thought I could bear. Evelyn shook my arm, my father was awake.

“I found them dad. I found the letters and photos.” I stared at my father as his features softened and tears began to form in his eyes.

“Show me the pictures….please”. Please? This was a word I had never heard spoken from my father. I held each photo in front of my father. The tears slowly rolled down his cheeks, “next” he would say and I would hold up the next photo.

“Dad, do you want me to read you the letters?” The sound of my own voice offering to do something nice for the man who had never been nice to me shocked me.

“No, I know them all by heart, I wrote them”. I now saw what Evelyn had seen; he was staring through me. “Eevi was my one true love. I blame my love for her for why your mother drank so much. She could never live up to my love for Eevi. When I named you Evelyn, and insisted that your name stay that, no nicknames, in tribute, well….your mother, she gave up. I worked, we then had you Ben, I worked, she drank, I smoked, now, well, this is where we are.”

“Dad, what happened, who is Eevi?” Evelyn stood to my left, ashen, ashamed that she was named after someone her father had loved so much, yet had failed to love her.

“I met Eevi at a 4^th of July dance. I was charming then, believe it or not, I talked her into dancing with me. I joked and smiled and it all seemed so right as the fireworks went off in the sky; at the same time they going off in my heart. We dated all of that summer, the pictures, they’re from that summer. I loved her with all of my heart. What we didn’t know was that she was sick, Leukemia”, my father’s voice cracked as his lower lip began to quiver. “I loved her with all of my heart. That’s why when she died I died with her. Don’t get me wrong, I loved your mother, but it wasn’t, it couldn’t be the same. My Finnish beauty was gone and so was my soul. Thank you Benjamin, thank you for getting the pictures for me, and Evelyn, you, you’re what kept me going, knowing that at least in my heart a piece of her lived on. Now both of you, go away, I need my rest”, and with that my father, this stranger, drifted off to sleep with the campfire photo in his hand.

“Why didn’t he ever tell us?” Evelyn shook her head in disbelief that this secret, this past life was completely hidden from us. I had assumed that my father’s bloodshot eyes were from the beer he drank in the garage. I would have never imagined that he was in there crying, my father, my big greasy mechanic of a father, crying? Unconsciously I was opening the letters one by one, looking, not sure for what, but looking. I found what was the final letter and read it.

Eevi My Love,

Your pictures are becoming stained with the tears of my heart. My soul aches for you daily but it’s been a year since you left me. I’m young yet, and you told me, you told me! “Live your life, I’ll meet you on the other side”. My Love, it’s time for me to follow your orders. Every time I see a woman brush her hair out of her eyes I’ll think of you. Every time I light a campfire I’ll think of you. Every time the wind blows I’ll think of you. I love you, now and forever.

Forever Yours,

Mitchell

The other letters were similar. They all held a man that I never knew but think that I would have liked. My father died with his Eevi in his hands, two days after I had arrived. His features never hardened in those two days, it was as if this weight was lifted that he kept hidden and now he could relax. Maybe when he was looking through us he was seeing her?

The picture board at the funeral had some of the same photos, our parents wedding, our births, and Eevi. When asked who she was we simply said “someone special” and smiled at each other. We placed the letters and the pictures plucked from the board inside his casket. We both agreed and hoped that she really was waiting for him on the other side.

 

 

The sign in the window of the Kaleva said OPEN but the For Sale by SNB said otherwise. Toivo cupped his hands to the window to look inside.  Nothing had changed.  The cash register still had a key in it, the menus stood in their holder and the bakery case still held some long stale Nisu.  Toivo tried to see if his booth was still there, which of course it was, but he couldn’t see to the back even with the illumination of the exit sign. Toivo glanced behind him to see if anyone was watching him.  Across the street sat a man dressed in black.  The man was gaunt in the face, stubble covered his chin and he couldn’t weigh more then a buck-o-five.  Toivo doubted that the bottle in the paper bag in his right hand was anything but booze. Toivo wanted to see if the door was unlocked but feared the skinny little man would call the cops.  Abandoning his thoughts of the Kaleva, he headed for the Crystal Room.

The Crystal Room was his haven for hair of the dog.  The light was never brighter then a dusty forty watt bulb.  Beer and peanuts more often then not were his breakfast.

“Toi, why you looking sad?” asked Barb one of his morning companions of the lopsided stools.

“The Kaleva, it’s closed you know” he said.

“So what, remember how the food hit you if you were rough?”

“Barbie girl there wasn’t anything better then a couple of cakes to fill the void in the a.m.” Toivo said.

“Wasted space if you ask me, a couple on tap fills me up just the same”.  With that said Barb squeaked off the stool and headed for the door.  Toivo continued drinking well past his normal five or six.  It was nearly noon now and he was shit faced and pissed off.  Toivo threw a couple crumpled up smoky bills on the bar and left.

Toivo found himself standing in front of the Kaleva.   Looking left and then right he couldn’t see anyone on the street.  The outer door was unlocked and opened with a quick push.  Once inside the door he tried the Kaleva’s door, which was locked.  Toivo was drunk and angry because this was his restaurant!  With one solid kick the glass gave way under his steel-toed Red Wing boot.  Toivo didn’t know how to unlock the door so he crawled through the broken glass and made his way to his table.

The vinyl seat of his booth was cool to the touch and could be felt even through his Carharts. Toivo didn’t notice the rip in his pants nor the blood from the gash in his leg, which was bleeding onto the already multi-stained floor.

“How bout them Packers Stan”, Toivo asked.  “I take it by your silence that you feel like I do.  It could be worse Stan; you could be a Lions fan”.  He chuckled at his own joke as he reached for his coffee.  “What the hell, waitress, my coffee, where the hell is my coffee!” Toivo satisfied that she had heard him, turned to his left.  “Charlie, what’s going on here?  Why is everything changing?  Why in my day a man could get a cup of coffee simply by nodding his head, you know what I mean?  Now I got to bitch just for some piss poor brew.”  Toivo continued his one sided conversation as the puddle on the floor grew darker.

Harold returned to the bench across the street in front of Superior National Bank.  Harold thought he saw shadows inside the Kaleva.  Leaving his familiar perch he walked across the street.  Peering through the glass just like he saw the old man do earlier he saw an outline of a man in the back booth, arms waving and shoulders shaking as if he were laughing.

“Hey asshole” Harold yelled.  When the man in the back didn’t move Harold took one last glance and pulled his hands away from the window.  Harold gripped his bag tighter and headed back to his bench.

Toivo started to slump to his right.  “Stan, you’re getting blurry, I haven’t had anything but coffee this morning so it can’t be me.” Toivo chuckled softly and picked up his empty cup and took a sip.  “You guys remember the old day’s right?  When a man was a man and his woman was his woman?  What’s wrong with you two, cat got your tongue?  Why I ought to just get up from here and, and who am I kidding.  Stan, Charlie, there’s nothing left for me.  Glad died two years ago, damn kids wanted to stick me in a home, said I was losing it.  I told them you try losing your wife of fifty-six years and see how you feel, damn kids”; Toivo said his voice trailing off.  “I’m getting tired, I think I’ll just take a quick snooze, do think they’d mind?”  Toivo pulled his Packer hat down over his ears and leaned his head up against the wall.  “Wake me when they bring my cakes.”

“Honey, it’s time to go”.  Toivo opened his eyes.

“Gladys?”

This article could have been called learning to fly or learning to levitate because in reality that’s how hard writing can be.  I’m a newspaper columnist and short story writer.  It’s the newspaper gig that helps the most.  Having the opportunity to write a column has been a blessing for two reasons. First it was a goal of mine to be published in a widely read publication; which my local newspapers readership is over 10,000.  Secondly the column forces me to write on a consistent basis, which for the most part is good.  Being a procrastinator since birth; the deadline imposed by the paper forces me to create.  For those who have read my column; they should be able to spot the work that was up against the deadline verses the columns that I thought out.  I know the critics are going to say being forced to write can’t possibly be what makes you a writer.  We all go to work every day because we need a paycheck, that’s forcing. Which brings me to the reason for this Off the Cuff column; I receive feedback from readers most of whom I bump in to in the street, who ask, where did you learn to write?  The smart-aleck in me wants to say first or second grade, but here’s the truth.

As a young child I wrote stories about aliens and comic book heroes.  As a middle school child I entered contests like the Voice of America, which I placed, not sure how high but I still have that certificate.  In Junior High School I had a history teacher that didn’t use textbooks, students copied the notes he wrote on the board.  It was then that I realized I liked the smell of erasers and the feel of a number 2 pencil in my hand.  In High School I wrote essays that brought tears to teacher’s eyes because my empathetic soul related to the emotions of the subjects I wrote about.  I took Creative writing, short story reading, and research paper writing, an elective, just to write. All these experiences taught me that I liked to write, but they didn’t teach me how.

I read.  I started with Dick and Jane, moved on to Archie comics that I still read occasionally. I have loved words since that first Dick and Jane book.  See Dick run. See Jane run.  Simple words that teach that if you read those sentences, and then close your eyes you can truly see them run; it’s pure magic.   I read novels in and out of school, newspapers, and flyers and basically anything I could get my hands on.  By reading you hear the voice of the writer; you can sense their mood when they wrote.  By reading you find out what you like and dislike.  There’s a writing exercise in which you copy a paragraph word for word of a writer you admire just so you can get a feeling for their flow, there vibe.  Reading still isn’t what taught me to write, writing did.

There’s a mantra for writers, just write.  That is the single most important thing a writer must do, but there’s still more.  In my college Creative Writing class we used a book called The Art of Fiction-Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner.  If by “young writers” he meant writers that are at least twenty-five then I can believe the title.  The book is difficult and merciless on the craft of writing.  From editing to style, this book made you think about what writing is.  Writing is art and writers are artists.  This book was the jumping off point for me.  Through the exercises in this book I realized that if I worked at my art it would improve.  Other important books are The Elements of Style, The Elements of Grammar and The Elements of Editing.   These three books are like freshman English all over again.  Magazines that focus on the art of writing like The Writer and magazines that set the bar high for short fiction such as the New Yorker; these resources feed the hunger.

No, I wasn’t an English or Journalism major in college, but I did take over thirty credits in English and Literature, which in retrospect, never take more then one Literature class in any given semester. Writers are their own harshest critics which prevents a lot of writers from succeeding. We are snobs sometimes and want what’s perfect but we must try to remember that we must fail before we succeed.

Those books, writing, reading and life is what taught me to write.  The smell of a new pad of paper, the smell of ink and every error I find in what I read, that keeps me writing.