Dawn and I sat in the car in the Dairy Queen parking lot eating our sundaes with the windows down watching the other cars come and go through the drive thru, all the people in the suburbs walking their dogs. We talk too much about work these days and not enough about our dreams and plans. But Dawn’s good about bringing us back: the banana sundaes her dad used to get, the shape of the container, the Peanut Buster, marshmallow toppings. We tried to walk Ginger in the park but she’s getting too old and we didn’t get far.

Imagining the cat from the windowsill watching me as I get into bed with my eye pillow. His tail twitching. How the senses expand in us over time, like an aperture opening in youth and closing in our decline. How sad the last thing we see at night or the first thing each day is a screen. How many times a day I reach for my phone, too many to count and more than I’m aware. What that does to our senses can’t be good.

Four in the morning is no time for anyone to be awake. But it’s my favorite hour. So quiet, it is just that ever present din, the thrum of a distant freeway or possibly the wind building in the trees. The freeway cuts through a valley so the sounds carom off the hills. It is not the sound of stillness but the underlying ambient sounds always there. And the beginning of the day’s first birds. The stars their brightest, the black of the night sky just becoming blue. This is the time I like best for it’s just me and all this, my first thoughts too.

I finished the David Wallace book, his last and unfinished book. Dawn thinks it was unfair for them to publish it. How that would irk him to know they did, unfinished like that. I said yes but I’m sure they consulted with his widow and family, his sister. Even so, it’s his book, she said. But if he died by suicide he would have known it would go unpublished so he could have burned it. Yet they found the manuscript arranged so neatly on his desk which tells me he wished someone to do something with it. It’s just all so sad.

And yet I couldn’t imagine him destroying it because when you write it’s a part of yourself. When you go wouldn’t you want to leave the best parts behind, to be remembered for who you were trying to be? We are all of us unfinished, right until the end.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, David Foster Wallace, death, Memoir