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• Monday, January 5, 2009 01:45 PM

  Glenn

  About the pain in the butt wannabe editors:

  You obviously enjoy the art of writing, and you rebutted the nonsense that sentences must be forever short or compact or whatever. Just for fun and out of intellectual curiosity, read this short story called The Vertical Fields by Fielding Dawson:

  The following is the not at all short first sentence.

  On Christmas Eve around 1942, when I was a boy, after having the traditional punch and cookies and after having sung 'round the fire (my Aunty Mary at the piano), I, with my sister, my mother and my aunts, and Emma Jackman and her son, got into Emma Jackman's car and drove down Taylor Avenue to church for the midnight service: I looked out the rear window at passing houses, doors adorned with holly wreaths, I looked into windows--catching glimpses of tinseled trees and men and women and children moving through rooms into my mind and memory forever; the car slowed to the corner stop at Jefferson and the action seemed like a greater action, of Christmas in a cold damp Missouri night; patches of snow lay on the ground and in the car the dark figures of my mother and sister and aunts talked around me and the car began to move along in an air of sky--at bottom dark and cold, seeming to transform the car, my face, and hands, pressed close to the glass as I saw my friends with their parents in their cars take the left turn onto Argonne Drive and look for a parking place near the church; Emma Jackman followed, and I watched heavily coated figures make their exists, and move down the winter walk toward the jewel-like glittering church--up the steps into the full light of the doorway--fathers and sons and mothers and daughters I knew and understood them all, I gazed at them with blazing eyes: light poured from open doors; high arched stained glass windows cast downward slanting shafts of color across the cold churchyard, and the organ boomed inside while we parked and got out and walked along the sidewalk, I holding my mother's right arm, my sister held mother's left arm (mother letting us a little support her)--down the sidewalk to join others at the warmly good noisy familiar threshold: spirits swirled up the steps into the church and Billy Berthold handed out the Christmas leaflets, I gripped mine.

  http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vrtclfld.html

  —Kitt Read Kitt's other letters
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