Pegalou checks in

This is my first post. I just spent a few days at the Whiteley Center on beautiful San Juan Island, writing the crisis chapter of my book. The crisis always occurs 90% of the way through a novel. My novel's crisis went well, with no resolution, but everyone's to blame, they're talking straight out of their subconscious, and nobody's talking about the same thing. Yes, that's right, it's about a family. I have wanted to write a happy ending, but the thing is that in a novel, your reader absolutely must "buy" the reality that the writer is putting her into and who would buy that a novel about a family has a happy ending? Perhaps I will just let the thing end.

So, in a month, Kathy, Rosemary and I are packing up my father's car and heading to Tulsa. I have no idea what to expect, but am wise enough to know that whatever I picture won't happen. It's an American road trip, so things are unpredictable.

Marc would like the idea of us seeing red dirt country. I'm not a big country music fan and I don't know the difference between red dirt country music and other-colored dirt country music. What I know is that Marc loved what he loved, and he was a big proponent of red dirt. He was an expert in it, too.

Many of our more entertaining exchanges were based on a common characteristic - we both have bent senses of humor. We both liked South Park, although my line and when I turn off the program are different than his line and what had to be crossed for him to turn off the t.v.

I miss Marc and always will. But I will look out the window of my father's car and see the Oklahoma and Texas landscape, and know that what I am seeing is what Marc Ringwood saw.