I'm guessing that this photo hails from before August 15, 1973 because I'm smiling and don't show signs of either witnessing a violent nervous breakdown or undergoing one myself. I'm happily pecking away at an old Royal typewriter that my father probably used before me––and if I got his old one, it means he must have gotten a new(er) one, which means that at least a little money must have been flowing at the time. I had friends, as you can see from the "club" sign on the desk. I hadn't yet imploded into fear of my father's rage and insanity, at the prospect of carrying it within me myself. 

In fact, I wanted to be like him. A writer, pecking away for the rest of my life on a typewriter just like this one. For all the time I knew him, my father was a writer; though he never published anything in his lifetime, I grew up falling asleep to the sound of him pecking away in his basement office. The man surrounded himself with books, as I later did myself. Had I sensed, through his example, the protectiveness of the literary cocoon? 

I have my books

and my poetry to protect me

as Simon and Garfunkel sing in "I am a Rock." I sought the same refuge as he did, wanting to be like my daddy the way any boy does. Some follow their fathers into the sanctity of fishing; I chose the sanctity of books. I followed him even into his weakness and fear, building myself a cocoon out of the same web of words as he did. In the hope of finding him there, maybe? Among the other cocooned writer souls whose words I stole from around their bodies and wrapped around my own? 

If Thomas J. Wingate hadn't died––and done it so dramatically––would I have wanted to be a writer at all? I might have passed through the phase, never needed the cocoon, and you and I wouldn't be here at all.  

1. BEGINNING WAS WORD
2. READING MY FATHER
3. WRITING MY FATHER
4. WRITING AND MY SONS