Builder of flames and friend to hobos

Alright, I feel pretty comfortable with my manuscript again. I’ll start shopping it around again soon. A few more cleaning sweeps first.

When I was a youngster, my grandfather used to take me out almost every night we stayed with him to a sort of makeshift campsite a couple hundred yards from his home. He’d get a fire going and we’d sit around the flames listening to the sounds of the night and talking. He’d tell stories and talk with my mother about the news of the day while I sat and watched the fire dancing. He usually kept hounds of one sort or another, and we’d hear their braying off in the forest whenever they caught the scent of some critter or another. Of all these memories, the stories feature most prominently.

They would be tales from his past, mostly. Recollections of his time riding the railways with the hobos during the Great Depression, descriptions of his limited childhood education, snippets of conversations with fellow workers in California – the topic changed from night to night, and he often tread over familiar ground. Some of his stories I could recite to you today, nearly word for word, so often did I hear these stories of his. My cousin recorded some of these stories of his, and I’ve got a copy of them somewhere. I’d like to find them and make sure I’ve got a digital version that can’t get scratched. He lived during wild times. People may say the same of us one day, I suppose, but his tales felt … different. Like him, they were from a bygone era, stories that happened in the time they did, and not transferable to any other. I’ll try to find them.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers