Lakewood Lake No. 3

As the lone Geezer, I walked one lap of the outer loop and one of the inner around Lakewood Lake No. 3 for a total of approximately two miles in 31:55. It was cold and rainy, and no one else showed.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Seale sat in a large recliner. A college football game was on television with the volume turned down. Green walked the den’s perimeter, reading dust jackets among the hundreds of books shelved floor to ceiling, examining art and photographs on the dark paneled walls as wood crackled in the fireplace. He stopped at a black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged white man walking with two black teenagers. They each squinted as they marched through what must have been bright sunlight. “This is from Selma, isn’t it?” Green said.

“Well, it’s right there somewhere,” Seale said. “I cain’t remember exactly where that picture was took.”

“Is this you?”

“Yeah, about twenty years and fifty pounds ago.”

“Which day was this?” Green said.

“I think that’s from the second march. Have you read much about ‘em?”

“No, not a lot. I’ve read your stories, of course.”

“Well, good, so you know my somewhat distorted truth. Good for you.”

“Distorted?” Green said. “What do you mean?”

Seale seemed momentarily distracted by the game. Green looked at the set long enough to see that a team in orange jerseys was close to an end zone.

“I’ll tell you,” Seale said. “I’ve always maintained that writers always distort the truth. I mean, they don’t do it on purpose, but they just cain’t help it. You see, in my mind, a writer or a reporter can only tell the story the best he sees it, and the best he sees it is gonna be at least a little different from the way anyone else saw it. That’s why you cain’t really believe nothin you read. All you can do is hope it was close to the way whoever wrote it saw it.”

“So how do you know what’s true when you read the paper?”
“I’ll tell you, that’s a hard thing to ever really know. Truth ain’t nothin but an inner quality, at least to my way of thinkin. It ain’t really transferable. They’s almost never any sort of absolute truth. Mine, yours, theirs, hell, they’s all different. I’ll tell you this. If you write about somethin and someone who lived it tells you that you got it right, or even most of it right, then you got lucky.” Seale pushed himself up from his recliner to stand beside Green in front of the photograph. “I had a few people from them marches tell me I was close, but ever time, ever one of ‘em, they all said, ‘But here’s somethin you missed,’ or, ‘That was good, but you left this out.’ One young fella said, ‘We wasn’t all marchin for freedom. I just didn’t have nothin else to do, and they was all them good lookin girls.’ I don’t think I put that in there anywhere. So you could say I missed the truth, and hell, they still gave me the goddang Pulitzer. I probably wouldn’t of got it if I’d of put in there that at least one of them kids was marchin for pussy.”

This was something very new for Green. He had never experienced genius so beautifully disguised, at least not in such a pure and talented man. “You remind me of Mark Twain,” he said.

“Hush son. Flattery won’t get you shit around here.”