A flowchart.... (Gatsby and T) in The Book Book

It starts like this:

I went back to 750 words of a year ago. Sometimes I do that - more so now that OD is gone. I'm looking for a glimpse into into who I was and how it was and how the weather was - emotional and otherwise.

The entry was an absolute downer, misery and whining to the nth degree but I found a reference to the guy I used to work with. I said I had told him about a distant relative of mine who was bothering me. I remembered the fact that I would confide in this guy and he would listen to me. He seemed to be interested in what I had to say about anything. He wanted to know me, to support me, to make me feel good.

Hold the above paragraphs in your mind and come along with me to the next step in the process.

A few weeks ago a local obituary of the husband of a woman I knew slightly - I'd worked with her father and knew him well - was the account of how much he enjoyed the tv show 'Designing Women'. It said he would laugh uncontollably at an episode called 'Full Moon'. The man who had died had been a career military man so I thought the fact that he enjoyed the show and that it made his obituary interesting in several ways.

That lead me to a late night rendezvous with Youtube and 'Designing Women'. Youtube has much old tv - it's where I go to watch "Have Gun, Will Travel', and sure enough it has a lot of 'Designing Women'. I found the 'Full Moon' episode which I didn't think was that spectacularly funny, but I kept going and watched several of the shows. They held up well and are hilarious. They have a lovely liberal political bent and they are full of big hair and colorful women's clothes. I got to see Delta Burke's character's pig -which was a real 200 lb white gilt who performed quite well.

The episode I'm thinking of today had one of Delta Burke's ex-husbands coming home for solace. He was an unsuccessful writer. He'd just written a book about dealing with Southern womanhood called Belled and he hadn't been able to sell it. At the same time the Meshach Taylor character, a young black assistant to the decorators, was taking a community college course in literature and not having a very good time with it. He was supposed to write a book report on The Great Gatsby.

The show ended with an impromptu book club lead by the unsuccessful author in which the rest of the cast discussed The Great Gatsby. At the end the Meshach Taylor character read the great ending paragraph of the book.

Now harken with me back to this morning when I was reading my year old 750 words when I told my son about being able to talk about anything with this guy at work. I told him the guy seemed to really listen and understand what I was trying to say.

Jim turned and went into the living room where my big bookcase is. He went to the F shelf and came back with a badly used paper back copy of Gatsby. It's pages are loose and discolored. He took page out and read this:

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. .....

There is more to the paragraph about the 'elegant young roughneck' but it's more about Gatsby than it is about T.

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The ending paragraph?

Here it is:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.