A Personal Essay
unnamed novel idea
Appalachian Wolves
A Personal Essay
I wrote this for an Advanced Composition class this semester, but i was very happy with how it tured out. It is a personal essay. E. B. White(the author of Charlotte's Web) is famous for them. They are typically found in magazines like The New Yorker. They tend to be the product of a wandering mind, driven by the voice of the author rather than what he or she is saying. They are generally loosely organized and are meant to be conversational. They skirt around an idea, and sort of hit the idea at the end. E. B. White's personal essays remind me of listening to my great-uncle Joe tell stories. I'm definately not a good essayist, but I was very happy with how this turned out, and was especially happy with the last paragraph. The way first paragraphs sets things up actually happened, and wasn't made up for the essay. Comments and constructive criticism are welcome.
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Reminiscence of a Formerly Immortal Man
As I sat down today to try to piece together the ragged threads of an essay that I was developing, I received a message from a dear friend. An old friend of ours from high school passed away today. I hadn’t seen him in person in years. Through time and distance, we had grown apart, but occasionally I talked to him through an online service called Myspace. Growing up, we had called him Opie, like Ron Howard’s character in The Andy Griffith Show. There was some other story, that I can’t even remember, that resulted in the nickname, but he was a short, redheaded guy, so the moniker stuck. After hearing the news, I tried to go back to the essay I had bouncing around in my head, but memories of Opie weighed heavily upon me, as if he were standing behind me saying, “C’mon man, write about me. I know we didn’t hang out anymore, but I deserve something, right?”
A few weeks ago, I was talking to another friend about writing, and I said, “Sometimes, I think that misery is my Muse. I only seem inspired to write when my heart aches over something.” She immediately replied with, “Of course she is. Misery is everyone’s Muse.” Our conversation then moved on to slam poetry, and the joking idea of a slam duo called Misery and the Muse, but the idea has stuck with me. I understand that writers are rarely ever truly hit with inspiration, and that good writing comes from continually trying to write, but when something has me horribly sad, I truly feel as if some higher power calls me to write. Perhaps it is just a coping mechanism, but the fact still remains that most of my nonacademic writing is produced amidst heartache.
While I hadn’t been close friends with Opie in a very long time, at one time we were very close. Some of the fondest memories of my teen years happened on the glorious backdrop of Opie’s house. Through the confusion, horrors, and changes of high school, there were ten of us who were all very close, and together, we made what can be a frightening experience for some into a bearable and often wonderful time together. Opie’s house was often the colorful background for our exploits. His father was an artist and a genuinely interesting man to talk to, and his mother was a fun, eccentric woman that we all enjoyed. It made a great place for all of us to gather. We could all hang out and not worry about typical parental nuisances.
We spent many nights whiling away the hours, covering such broad teenage topics as Star Wars, music, and girls. Time seemed to move much more slowly back then. We never had anywhere to be, or any obligations keeping us from enjoying whatever we had in mind to entertain us that night. One night, when one of us fell asleep early, the rest of us spent most of the night in the dark, lobbing pillows, like hand grenades, across the room where our friend was lounging on the couch, seeing how many times we could hit him with our pillow-grenades and not wake him up. When we ran out of pillows, we took turns performing the dangerous, but highly important, supply line duty of retrieving all of the pillows without waking our friend. Eventually, he rose from the darkness, like an enraged bear, grabbed the first one of us that he could find, and unceremoniously beat him with one of Opie’s mom’s slippers before returning to the couch to sleep. The allied forces retreated from the battle, defeated, but knowing that we lived to fight again. On that night, nothing was more important that that little war.
Our times together weren’t all sunshine and roses. We were teenagers, and teenage tempers often flare over trivial things. I remember nearly getting into a fight with Opie over a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It was really about mounting tensions regarding a number of things that have now faded from memory, but the game was the ignition switch. I remember sitting in a comfortable green recliner in Opie’s living room. I have always had a very sarcastic manner, and I said something within the game that made Opie angry. He was up and walking into his kitchen at the time. The next thing I know, he was barreling across the living room, fury burning in his eyes like hot coals, tackling me out of the chair. We rolled around on the floor for a moment, and I managed to get him into a headlock. I said to him, “Please don’t do this. I don’t want to have to hit you in your own home.” He struggled for a moment to get free, fully intent on pounding my face in, but then he gave up, and I pushed him off of me. I stood up among the awkward stares of all of our friends and decide that it was time for me to go home. I called my mom to come pick me up and went outside to wait for her. After a few minutes, Opie came outside and apologized. At the end of his apology, as my mom was pulling up, he said, “Man, you should have hit me. That was stupid of me.” I laughed, patted him on the back good naturedly and said with a smile, “Yeah, maybe I should have.” In that small moment, all was forgotten, because that was just how we were. We all fought fairly often, but we all valued friendship over everything else.
In those days, we all thought we were invincible. There was never any thought to any of us dying. I have been a diabetic since I was fourteen years old, but growing up, I never even considered that it could get the best of me. Even when Death swooped in like a flock of dark ravens and carried my diabetic mother away in the night at the young age of 38, I still felt like it could never take me. It was drugs that got Opie in the end, as they do far too many people in Appalachia these days. It has always made me horribly sad to see my home, and my culture, being ripped apart by drugs, but now they have taken one of my own, and I am filled with deep sorrow and white hot, insurmountable rage. None of us were meant for that. We were all supposed to get away. Death wasn’t supposed to be able to catch us, and our culture was never meant to bring us down.
As I sit here, thinking back on the good times and the bad times, trying to pay tribute to a dead friend, I feel very selfish, because I can feel the icy hands of my own mortality wrap around my weak heart and squeeze, just to let me know that it is there. As I listen closely, somewhere, behind the knowing laughter of Time, I can hear the soft, melodic voice of the Muse, singing to me, enticing me to write.