The paragraphs that follow appear at the request of one Wilson Miner, who has written three such paragraphs of his own, with detail and colour.
One year ago, in the April of 2005, I was finishing up the seventeenth grade and seeing about graduating from the University. I had an apartment complete with a bedroom, a living room, a painting studio, a couple yards, and a spacious kitchen with a flooding problem but no cockroaches. The floor of my studio was cool, and I would sleep there as much as I’d paint, listening to baseball games on the radio. Nobody was asking for any paintings, and I wasn’t trying too hard to make them. I was between two schools, one in New York and one in Saint Louis, and I treated the decision like it was a watershed moment in American history, which it was. I had great friends, each of them good in their own way, and unlike any friends I would ever find again. Just as I had been warned. I did a lot of casual drinking and walking, thinking about a whole lot of nothing on the wet and dusty streets of my neighborhood. I had a dog, he was white and sleepy. I was in love with being in love, and happily lonely. I was listening to Calexico, Animal Collective, and Bob Dylan. My favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye.
Five years ago, in the April of 2001, I was finishing up the thirteenth grade, my freshman year in college. I lived not in a dorm, but in an apartment. I arrived at the University with a profound and buttressed belief that I had pretty much figured everything out. I desperately missed my high-school girlfriend and only liked about three people. Two of them lived in Lisbon, so I arranged to live near them for a while, in my own small apartment by the ocean. Its lack of memory was forgiving. I was a headache of a person, and in desperate need of some eye-opening chemical burn. It was in that April that I watched spring kindly turn on a city other than the one to which I had been born. I was listening to Dave Matthews Band, U2, and my roommate strumming. My favorite book was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ten years ago, in the April of 1996, I was finishing up the eighth grade. I was fourteen years old. In each class but English, I was teetering on the tipping point of failure. Even Ancient World History, a class I adored, was taught by a teacher that once wrote Robert is too creative with history next to the precarious D my efforts had earned. It was around then, that I began “pulling things off.” School was for the most part very boring, as was life, and I became most interested in the challenge of pulling off the most valiant passing grade possible, after a teacher had uttered his or her belief that I would not in fact pass at all. It was in April, I believe, that one sage science teacher told my angry mother that if he had to guess, I’d be flipping burgers one day. In that busy, bubbling spring of 1996, I became interested in cars for obvious reasons. But instead of getting a car, I got myself a dog. His name was Riley, he was black and my only friend. A week or two before I took him home, I went to a lake house and smoked marijuana. I got sunburned and flirted with a seventh grader all weekend long. She’s got two kids now. I was listening to Bush, Oasis, and Pink Floyd. My favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye.