Lend Me Not

9^th June 2015

Dear Cassi,

I think I’ve told you of the fellow Turtle Nose called Mr. Potato Head, and now that I think of it it’s just easier to call this fellow Spud. In middle school Spud had been my longest standing friend. I’d known him at least from second grade on making it then six years by the end of middle school.

I had known a few folks longer but had little relation with them. It did take me a few years to remember this fellow’s name, but then I had little ability to remember names and faces back then. My life was a burning blur of pain with little substance.

Now Spud was an irresponsible fellow who was always borrowing money. Then one day I told him no. It had been little more than a dollar a day, or something there about, but when it came clear that he would just never pay me back I was done lending. He was furious.

He insulted me, he heckled me, he complained to his friends. It made no difference to me as I was sick of him owing and never paying. We figured some time that by my freshman year in high school the fellow owed me about two thousand dollars. He never paid and frankly never stopped asking for something.

I think he was the first of the dead beats I had to remove from my life. I haven’t spoken to this fellow in fifteen years. Well, good riddance.

Take out the trash, little sister,

        

Richard Leland Neal

The Old Machine

1^st February 2015

Dear Cassi,

       

I recall I once told you of my first computer. I cannot recall if I mentioned the events leading up to the fail of my word processor which was an old silver gray thing with a blocky body. In short it broke and needed fixing in length it wasn’t worth keeping around, but an important part of this was my depression.

       

It took me forever to do anything at the age of fourteen. I could hardly lift my hands to type and so it would take me all day to write anything. A great question is ‘why I lived my life as a cold sack of meat?’ and I haven’t any real answer. One possibility is that I had a vitamin deficiency, another that I was just depressed, but the question is irrelevant now.

       

There was an assignment over the summer, the first assignment of high school English, to read ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens and then pick out quotes to talk about in a paper. I remember having to build a fort of books to get this done. I couldn’t lift my hands far enough to type and so made a structure that would permit my hands to rest on the keyboard while I was lying down.

       

Now the old word processor was a hand me down from my two older siblings and it should have been a few years past its life expectancy. It didn’t take well to my slow workings and all that time running and conked out.

       

My homework was trapped on the proprietary file format of that old contraption, and we had to get if fixed. I did try showing my teacher the disk and having him try to open it, but that proved fruitless. We had the machine repaired, and I got my work turned in but the word processor failed a second time.

       

It was at this point I pushed for a computer and got Alan’s normal response ‘now is a bad time, there’s too many new things coming out.’ I looked at him and said ‘there are always new things coming out’. In a week I had a computer.

       

As an odd note, he took the word processor to be used by my step siblings and I never saw it again. Good riddance, they had a computer but it was rather old and, as I recall, had no hard drive.

Never fear change, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal