August 1, 1956
Attorney
Atlanta , Georgia
If you recall our conversation, I'm going to be selective and answer only some of your questions and perhaps, pontificate, because, as you agreed, sometimes that is what attorneys do!
Favorite foods, films, books (“To Kill A Mockingbird”) generally reveal nothing. If it helps, I love a good filet mignon and fine red wine.
My true feelings about getting older are unpredictable and disturbing. In the middle of the night before this August 1 just past, I often found myself awakening. Yes, I would run to the bathroom and each night, I would grab a stick-it on the way back to bed to remind me to call to have my prostate checked in the morning. It must be Freudian, because the yellow slip's purpose (I never write on it) seems obvious but I draw a blank about why I find it on my side of the bed. I remarried recently and she's my third wife; she turned forty recently. She looks like a little girl. I watch her sleep. I would not sell my soul for another easy ten years, but she looks peaceful.
Why shouldn't she? I just funded her interior design degree and relocated from Philadelphia to Atlanta , which is a tinker-toy, one-note city (though I haven't struck the exact sound) and although the South is more affordable, Jesus, it's still the South. We should have gone to Albuquerque .
I figure I have another twenty good years left. That alone is a frightening realization. None of us knows when the hour of death will come, because if we did we'd go mad. But mine will come sooner than my wife's. Her children are adorable. I had never had daughters, I am enjoying them. I indulge them greatly. My own kids from the other marriages range in age from 14 down to eight. I have not earned back their trust. It's as if they have secret meetings and decide ways that they may joust with their father or put him down. My therapist and I go over their methods but come up with none of our own. It's difficult.
In terms of my health, as I said, I have a prostate concern. I also have a heart concern, because I am fit but about twenty-eight pounds overweight.
I am grey, quite grey suddenly. I think my mother got sick and that did it. Shock at seeing the future in a hospital in Miami can sprout grey hair, I think. I noticed it in the airport bathroom on my way back home. She will die soon, and my older brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. It is going to be very lonely. Why else would I have married Louisa?
