Sound and Fury

Me and my 7 year old, we chat. It’s the word he came up with many months ago when we started. See, after the addition was finished, I no longer had to put the two boys to sleep on an airbed in a half-demolished room with thoughts of the morning clean up before the crew arrived. Now, they have their own rooms with their own doors and and beds that don’t require 5 minutes attached to a pump for proper comfort.

The routine has evolved to this: teeth brushing, final potty break, bathing, story in the story chair, 4 year old tucked in, 7 year old chat before tucking. And oh, how we chat. We talk Cub Scouts and Summer Camp and Zero gravity remote control cars and assorted action figures and perler beads and watercolors and so much more.

Tonight, as he found a cough from this on again off again thing that is starting to suggest a need for allergy relief more than cough suppressant, we talked literature. We talked about telling stories, loving to tell stories. I told him he was lucky to figure out that his favorite thing (and this is more or less a quote) is writing…writing stories.

Hell, it took me more than 30 years to figure out that the single common element that binds all things I enjoy most is about the same aspect – telling stories. Be they stories in song or on the written page or even with photos or doodles…it is that creative act – coming up with the story and somehow sharing it. That is where I find the most fun, the most joy, the most…you know.

It’s pretty good to be a smart 7 year old, I guess.

Oh, but here’s what I was getting at with the whole chat thing. Tonight, after getting beyond the shared love of storytelling, he told me he is wrestling with his current story about a Nerf dart war. At 4 pages, it is “SOOOO much longer” than his last major work, a 3 page autobiographical piece entitled My Busted Eye.

The problem, he told me, is that there are a lot of capital letters in the Nerf story. Too many, he insisted, and for some reason I cannot totally fathom, it is hanging him up toward the end of page 3.

So I told him that famous apocryphal story about Faulkner and his editor. Upon reading a manuscript, the editor told Faulkner he must do a better job of using punctuation and such as his work was too dense and difficult to decipher – read Absalom, Absalom and you’ll know what he meant. Faulkner’s response was to send his editor several pages of typewritten periods, commas, and other punctuation marks with a note that more or less said “put these wherever you want them.”

“Don’t worry too much about the capitals,” I told him. “Tell your story and you can always fix those little things later.”