<p>RE: four old dudes and then some more.</p>
<p>Laura, thanks for you edits and encouraging words.&nbsp; Glad you liked the additions.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I wrote a story last year titled &ldquo;The Corners.&rdquo;&nbsp; I may incorporate pieces of it into the Life&rsquo;s a Poem series, from the eyes of the guy from San Diego. In that story, the born-again guy and his troupe occupy three of the four corners (main street intersections at Zenna Falls) and begin their &ldquo;repent&rdquo; shouts and Bible waving. The 4th corner is then taken up by a guy who begins shouting names, addresses and phone numbers taken from the Yellow Pages phone book. (I got that idea from Steve Martin in &ldquo;The Jerk&rdquo; when he got excited when the phone book arrived.&nbsp; The chants between the bible guy and the phone book guy turn into a &ldquo;dueling banjos&rdquo; type shouting match. This all creates a frenzy of activity among the locals, including one person who recites poems he&rsquo;d written and never shared until that moment, another reads out loud the local weather report, an old woman walks around encouraging people to vote for Roosevelt, etc. It&rsquo;s quite a scene. &nbsp;</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m also thinking about brining into the story, the young girl who sits at Bernie&rsquo;s, humming and drawing.&nbsp; I thought that at the end of Rules of the Road, when the young kid, as the hitchhiker, is about to get into the car, he hears a voice yell out, &ldquo;Hey&mdash;wait for me!&rdquo; coming from the direction he stood at the side of the road, and sees that it&rsquo;s the young girl with a backpack. The driver guy has his regular shit-fit, but agrees to giving her a ride west.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s on her way to LA to take over a tattoo &ldquo;practice&rdquo; of a famous tattoo artist, named Geronimo who died of &ldquo;ink poisoning.&rdquo; She was his unknown understudy and has a ready made client base of famous entertainment stars, many of whom (he called his &ldquo;bodies of work&rdquo;) were left &ldquo;unfinished&rdquo; when Geronimo died. I guess I should send you my story titled &ldquo;Geronimo.&rdquo;&nbsp;</p>
<p>So, here we have three characters; the kid from Scranton, the guy from San Diego, and Geronimo&rsquo;s understudy.&nbsp; Maybe the story (novel) has each going there way, eventually they just fall off the page and the reader is left thinking about where they are now.&nbsp; Just like people who come in and out of our lives. Here&rsquo;s three more!</p>
<p>For the next 5 - 6 weeks, I&rsquo;ll be on a 6 day, 12 hour shift that will leave little time to write.</p>
<p>Thanks again.&nbsp; Take care,</p>
<p>Dan</p>