The Word Man

Photo by Jim DeLillo

Some days even the introvert in me needs to come out.

On the fourth day anywhere I know the land. The room is mind. Usually the room staff has given up trying to convince me that the wastepaper basket and the phone should be where the hotel decides, and he or she begins to leave them where I want them to be.

The staff in this hotel was special indeed. I’d bought a small, stuffed floppy dog for company while I was there. Each time when I returned to my room, the dog was placed somewhere new upon my bed—on the corner looking at the door as if waiting for me, on the pillow as if asleep. It was fun returning to see where my invisible housekeeping friend would place my inanimate pet next.

On this fourth day, Kelley had gone to speak with a woman who had worked with kestrels in North Central Florida. I grabbed my book and went out to the beach to read. Well actually, not om the beach, but to a bar along the beach.I thought I’d be with people while I was alone with my legend, my view, and a nice pina colada in the ocean breeze. It allowed me to imagine that I was anyone I might want to be. I did. I made myself the heir to the Levi Strauss family fortune. That made me sit slightly taller in my bar stool.

I read and listened for a while, until finally the bartender could stand it no longer.

“How can a lovely miss be reading with so much sun, sand and beauty around?”

“I like the book. I like the drink. I like the air. I’m happy.”

He cleaned the bar around where I sat. He placed a bowl of snacks near me. It was obvious that he felt that I was wasting a good day reading. I looked up at him. He said he called himself Mike and that he was a writer.

“What do you write?”

“Words, mostly,” he said. A clever one, I thought, this Mike is a clever one feeling bored and wants to play with me.

“That’s good. Words are good things to write. Do they make sentences that make sense?”

“Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.”

“Does anyone read what you write?”

“Why yes.” He then pulled out a book, It was a book that I had read.

“Your name isn’t Mike,” I said, “It’s Lee and I love your books. I’ve read this one and all of the others. Let me buy you a drink for the days like this you’ve kept me company in bars when I was far from home and I had your words to read.”

He surprised me and said, “Yes.”

We talked most of the afternoon about what makes a book a book, about how words come together and make sense. I think we’d both been hungry for that kind of conversation. I know I had been. I stopped off at the party at Crabby Bill's to meet up with all of my friends. We shared some drinks and danced on a few tables. I'm not sure Key West will be the same.

Later, I walked back to the hotel with them having finished only five pages in my book. My stuffed dog was waiting, legs up over the arm of the chair, looking at the door for me. I picked it up and sat down on the giant feather bed with it. “You know, pup. People are like words. You put certain ones together, and they make sense, They make something new and meaningful.”

—me strauss Letting me be