Signs of Something
This will seem random to everyone I'm sending this link to, but it seems significant to me and I need someone to share with. I guess that's what blogs are for.
So here I am in Spain, sitting in my quiet (except for the sounds coming in through the open windows), neat, sparse, peaceful, sunlit apartment with my mind just meandering around. It feels good. I'm thinking about a conversation I had with my brothers about the Larry McMurtry book -- Texasville (the sequel to The Last Picture Show). Tim had been telling Joe that Texasville is a much better book than The Last Picture Show. I had agreed. That whole conversation started because we were debating what to do with Mother's books and I said we couldn't give away the hard backs in the built in shelf -- they're mostly beautiful editions of classics she had collected -- or the Larry McMurtry books. Many of those are first editions and were too precious to her. And me, too, now that I think of it.
Anyway I'm sitting around thinking about that. Thinking how odd it is that Leaving Cheyenne (by McMurtry) andSometimes a Great Notion (by Ken Kesey) are my favorite books and have been for a long time (actually they're in a 3-way tie with Jane Eyre), but that when I first read them and fell in love with them for different reasons I didn't know that McMurtry and Kesey were friends and had met in the same creative writing Masters program at Stanford where they studied with Wallace Stegner. I knew later that they were friends and that there's a character in one of McMurtry's books based on Kesey, but not when I first read those books.
So I get to wondering here in Spain if Leaving Cheyenne and Sometimes a Great Notion were the first books both of those writers wrote. If they both started those books while they were in graduate school together. If somehow the books are more intertwined than I've imagined. Maybe they actually read each other's drafts and critiqued each other in class. I don't think Leaving Cheyenne is McMurtry's first book; I think he wrote Horseman Pass By first. But since it's 2012 I don't have to wonder; I can look it up. So I open up Wikipedia and am reading through familiar and not so familiar facts about Larry McMurtry. Then at the bottom, the very last sentence says that McMurtry married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey, on April 29, last year in Archer City.
I guess I have to write this in a blog because my mother is dead and I can't talk to her about it. She would have known about the marriage as soon as it happened, I'm sure, since she was never oblivious to the news (like I am) and always kept up with things she was interested in. And, as the ramble above probably shows, Larry McMurtry was more than interesting; he was our personal family hero. We practically thought we were related to him. He spoke to us. He might as well have been writing directly for us. Mother loved Sometimes a Great Notion, too. We both read it multiple times and agreed that it was much better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. We think of Hank Stamper like a relative. Same as we think about Gid and Johnny and Molly in Leaving Cheyenne. If Mother had been alive when it happened, she would have found out about Larry McMurtry marrying Ken Kesey's widow, and she would have told me about it. We would have talked about it. Picked it apart. Counted the years, the decades since Ken Kesey's death. Marveled at how fascinating life is. Both ours and theirs. As good as their fiction is, it's no match for life.
My mother and I used to talk about taking a trip to Archer City. A pilgirmage. We could go see Larry McMurtry's bookstore. Just walk around. Get a coke at the Dairy Queen. I wish we'd done that. She would have loved it. I've been thinking recently about how much she loved the things she loved. How unabashed she was. How joyful about it. And kick ass certain. I admire that and am grateful for it.
I don't know for sure what it means that Larry McMurtry married Ken Kesey's widow, but my discovery of it feels like a sign of something. A sign that we all suffer, we all can find comfort, we are connected to each other in mysterious and wonderful ways, we are all surrounded by love.
Sending my love from Spain,
Christy
