Catholic-schooled, considered ‘slow’, coming of age in a shitty MN railroad town - reading (once I mastered the jigsaw of it and found the books to steal) was everything. In so many writers’ cliched childhoods, books were the preview to ‘out there’. Stories were tickets out of a small town dusted orange with taconite dust and taunted by the sounds of departing trains. In our church boys were routinely damaged. Skinny, homely, mildly dyslexic girls didn’t merit much attention, or abuse, thank Dog. The nuns were indifferent and incurious. We had poverty and faith, and while either can stunt, both at least gave face to what monsters to flee. In Proctor, MN during the 60s and 70s, the place itself suggested exit.

The boxcar I jumped was the library, where I discoverd a musty novel about a girl my own age who also had a drunk parent. Francie Nolan lived in Brooklyn, where her joys were small but exquisite, like mine. She had a fire escape, a peppermint stick and a view of her neighborhood with all its grit and characters. I had a dry bank at the edge of a wetland within sight of the roundhouse, where in summer a rug could be laid and tall grasses knotted overhead into a sort of cathedral. My own view beyond pond scum and fronds was trainsmoke, sky and clouds - the alleged heavens. Together, Francie and I sidestepped the coarse. Too skeptical for joy or promise, we sought the neutrality of the middle, where cracks sometimes gave way to allow - if not quite to dreams, at least possibility.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was the story I read at the exactly the right time and place, because if a girl as disadvantaged as Francie could have dreams, I could. She showed me the path to the possible, and eventually, to writing. Francie was fictional, made-up. If imagination can create such a thing as a friend... and a world for that friend to inhabit, then books seemed a good enough place to inhabit. I began to suspect authors must live the best lives of all, though it took me until 40 to understand that people who wrote books were not special in some way. A story only need be told. The telling doesn’t require a superpower or graduate degree, only craft and a ransom of imagination. Of all friends I ever had, Francie may have been the best. After launching as many novels as I am decades old, and writing dozens of bakers’ dozens of stories, I’m practically fiction myself.

I’m a coder, and I like video games. One writer person did change my life, though. Some guy named George Eliot?

I couldn’t get a date, so I decided to do something about it. I found an app called “The George Eliot Conversational Etiquette Game: Correcting Your Ability to Converse with Little Reminders,” designed by “STEMinEnglish.” I downloaded it onto my AR glasses.

Later, my bud Tommy was talking about different Spidermans, and he kept saying “dude” this and “dude” that. I was like “why do you have to say ‘dude’ all the time?”

Then suddenly a black and white photo of a woman with droopy eyes, a bulbous nose, and hair like a travel neck pillow wrapped over the top of her head appeared in my field of vision through the internet glasses. As she spoke, her pupils moved and the mouth dropped like a ventriloquist doll.

No, no, my dear! One mustn’t be Mr. Aristocrat, assessing another’s speech in lieu of listening to what they say. Are you sure you’re not just distressed? -10 points

She kept popping up.

When the trainer explained to a group of us coders how workouts are more mental than physical and I mentioned listening to ABBA while on the treadmill, the lady popped up (Mr. All-About-Me, -17). At the Afternoon Ideation meeting, when I corrected a slight inaccuracy in someone’s comment about HTML, she popped up (Mr. Nitpicker, -14).

There was no reason to these rules. My etiquette score was -87, a rank in the “lesser arthropod” category.

Then I got a notification for an expansion pack, designed by “MeatCleaverXXX”: Improve your training with Pavlovian negative reinforcement. This app would like to access the heat coils in your thermoregulated clothes. Do you give permission?

I did.

Tommy said something dumb again, and she popped up (Not-so-honorable Mr. Judge, -30). This time, I detected the seams in the coding where the expansion pack picked up.

The woman’s eyes glowed red.

Time to burn, hombre!

Ten milliamperes of alternating current jolted my torso. I shrieked and jerked forward.

“Whoa, you ok?” Tommy said.

Apologize! The hologram said, nostrils flared.

“Yes! I’m sorry for being rude!” I gasped. The shock stopped.

It hurt, but I kept trying. She kept popping up. A lace collar never induced so much terror. But I NEVER quit a video game.

Just when I was concerned my speech would be permanently slurred, I got a call about an Extended Warranty for my car. The dude talking to me sounded stale. I couldn’t hang up or I’d be shocked. I just kept saying “Ok. It’s ok. I understand.” My back started to sweat, which would make the shock worse.

“Wow, I never got through this whole script,” he said. Then he started crying. He said he hated this. I said it’s ok. I understood. Then I started getting good scores. We talked three hours. He--Daryl--apologized. I forgave Daryl (+500). Daryl said I saved his life (+10,00).

I was a night watchman in a building oppposite Lincoln Center. “The Collected Sories of John Cheever” had just come out in paperback and I took the book to work. I read “The Swimmer.” Then I read it again.

There was a typewriter there and I decided I had to write to John Cheever. I wanted to thank him.

What should I say? Should I mention the story’s change of seasons within a day or the length of a day within a life? Should I mention the quest of a damaged man, Neddy Merrill, on a homeward journey of suburban swimming pools in the inexplicable growing chill of air and human contact? Or just say, “Thank you”?

“The Swimmer” offers the reader layers of craft and layers of interpretation. It changed my approach to writing and my approach to the other arts I’m involved in. The empirical has parallel texts (as well as subtexts) which can work at once as well as separately. Not unlike a view from kitchen window on a winter day; you can focus on the spaces between the snaggle-toothed back fence, or the snow-flecked screen, or the brilliant blast of color at the bird feeder in between. Putting such choices into a single work of visual or written art where all the approaches exist, struggle, and merge simultaneously is the route and challenge Cheever gave me -- to make work where the woven interactions of the real and its abstractions are worth discovering.

I made my watchman rounds and decided to wax unpoetic. I’d just say, “Thank you for the gift of your stories.”

At the end of “The Swimmer” Neddy Merrill is locked out of his home. He is cold. His family is gone, the house is bare.

I typed my letter, and after work I mailed it outside O’Neal’s Balloon before going inside for a beer. (Lincoln Center had demanded no “saloon” within its view.) Liv Ulman sat down next to me at the bar. In profile she looked a bit like my mother. I did not bother her. Liv and let Liv. I ran the letter to John Cheever back in my mind. “Thank you for the gift of your stories.”

Cheever died two weeks later. I read “The Swimmer” at work again that night. I later learned that Cheever had found many doors locked in his lifetime, and I hoped he had found the last one open.

Before going to work the next day I found a letter in my mailbox. The return address was like a cardinal in the snow: Cedar Lane, Ossining, New York.

John Cheever had written me back to say, “Thank you.”