Making
the decision to rework The
Cataract
was a good one. It was a good one only because I knew with the little
I had, I could do with it what I wanted to do with it all those years
ago. I opened it up, a file that I hadn’t really looked at in almost
22 years. It was a time capsule of sorts. It was like reading an old
journal. I had put myself back into August 2001. I was a bartender
living in Denver, Colorado. I was fantasizing about returning to
Oregon, living in a small town somewhere out of the way and writing a
novel.
When
then girlfriend Deborah and I bought our tickets to Mexico, I knew I
wanted to spend a good portion of the mornings writing. Thankfully,
she was supportive of that. I asked my friend Kat if she would write
the first sentence for me. I do not have that first sentence to
share, but these opening paragraphs are what I did with it in that
first 2001 draft:
It’s raining here again
today because it rains here everyday. Between the puddles and the
clouds the drops fall steadily and I’m a sandwich. I watch the
clouds reflected perfectly like mirrors in the puddles obscured by
ripples of individual drops crowded now in puddles of fallen friends
and brothers now part of the whole. Puddles.I’m wearing my orange
galoshes, and what a funny word… Galoshes. Although I know it
would be easier to just use a dictionary, I’d read a whole book to
find one word, a word like galoshes, or unctuous, or saffron, or
love. Just to see it on a page somewhere in context, perhaps with an
adverb describing an adjective right after it, wow. That’s something
to make me cheer: My galoshes can find the treasures at the bottom of
an insidiously blue body of water, galoshes.As I’m walking between
puddles and clouds in the rain I spy an orange construction sign so
vivid through the cataract that reminds me orange is my favorite
color. So, I guess my story starts with just one line: I’m walking
through the rain in my orange galoshes.
I don’t have a very clear recollection
of the years after I wrote this in the fall of 2001. I have a
tremendous gap in detail from early 2002 until the fall of 2006. I
did not write anything of much consequence during that time, although
I was always writing. I do remember loving what I had written on The
Cataract.
I
printed what I had written. Once I took it out of Courier
New and
made the double spacing into single, and took the margins from 1” to
.7” the 37 page manuscript went down to 12 pages. I printed it at
the copy center the same day I did my March Zine project. I folded
the manuscript and I packed it for our trip to Astoria.
On
the plane to Oregon, I read it.
How
could I be so disappointed in something I had once been so proud of?
I decided to make a great many changes. The first change was that I
changed it from first to third person narration. I changed the names
of the characters. And I decided not to stay with the same plot.
Here
are the opening paragraphs of the 2023 revision:
It was a premeditated act.
It had to have been. It was a decision reached after weeks and weeks
of thought. And even those weeks came after an even longer period of
thought. When young, time got measured differently. It’s easy to
measure things in terms of weeks. Weeks can be a long time. But age
has a way of changing time, the perspective of time. Time becomes
measured in months or in terms of years, or even in terms of decades.
Whatever the measurement of time, Jacob had made the decision weeks
ago to shave his beard, and he had thought about shaving it, although
casually, for years.It was not an unruly
beard, Jacob had trimmed it, often, but it was thick. It had been a
fixture on his face for nearly twenty-five years. And it was the very
thought of twenty-five years that had sparked the idea of shaving it.
Twenty-five years is a long time not to see one’s face.In the bathroom, early
morning, Jacob stood and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He
stood for an exaggerated period of time, measured now in seconds, but
reeled back in years. Many years. He took out the clippers, the comb
and then the razor and shaving cream. Should it prove to be the wrong
decision, he could always grow it back. It grew fast enough. Back at
his reflection, he marveled at the thick gray hair on his face, so
out of balance with the hair on his head. He was always grateful to
have kept all the hair on his head especially when he knew so many
men his age who were thinning or bald. It was just a bonus that his
hair had stayed its youthful brown color.