From somewhere I had a complete cache of my dad's writings for The Urban Hiker, a local zine that was around at the turn of the millennium. Over the last few months I read through all of them, about eight little articles about dad's perambulations through the Triangle and his trips to Australia, New Zealand and India during his post-marital wanderjahre. All of them were accompanied, naturally, by a couple of his poems.
First, let me get the poems out of the way. I know he fancied himself a poet but I am not ready for them yet. They are shot through with his would be zen but nonetheless high-handed didacticism, which promises the reader with insight but delivers little.
The prose was better. Here and there are pleasant vignettes from his childhood with siblings Ballard and Frances, interspersed with fragments of good-natured wit. Also occasionally the reader finds one of the truly good jokes which resided in his encyclopedic (if under-curated) mental store of them.
When I got to the end of them I was a little bit sad to be done. I am capable of skipping past his endless retellings of how he met Laura and she changed his life for the better and ignoring the fact that he barely ever pauses to mention that he has kids and let alone grandkids to search for the nuggets of dad's good sides, and I'd be willing to spend a few minutes a month doing so, if no more than that.
I scanned and recycled them then sent the pdfs to Leslie.
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