CHAPTER 25

Billy Ray Barnwell here, when I get around to writing that novel, Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna are definitely going be in it, and also a set of boy twins that I invented recently, Darnell and Parnell Witherspoon, they go by the nicknames Tooter and Scooter which their mother, Lucy Maud Witherspoon, gave to them when they were small and only God knows why, I mean why she gave them those nicknames, not why they were small. Lucy had to raise the boys by herself after her either darling or no-account husband Herbert either died of the herpes or ran off with trashy seventeen-year-old LuAnn McLeroy from two houses down, I can’t decide which, but I’m sure it’s going to be a wonderful book, greatly beloved by all who read it, maybe I will have Myrna and Verna meet Darnell and Parnell at the big dance during Smyrna’s annual bluegrass festival and they will all fall madly in love with one another and get married in a big double wedding at either the local Elks Club or the Holy Ghost Tabernacle Of Fire-Baptized Believers Church fellowship hall followed by a lavish double honeymoon in either Honolulu Hawaii or Rio de Janeiro except that none of them can speak Portuguese which is what people do in Brazil in case you didn’t know, I mention Brazil because that is where Rio de Janeiro which means River of January is located if you are completely clueless, and then they might could all end up living next door to one another and raise their children like brothers and sisters which is practically what they are anyway being double first cousins and all, I just love being a writer, I wonder if Fannie Flagg started this way. I can hardly wait to get started on my novel but first I have to finish this book, which by the looks of things it may just go on and on and never stop, speaking of which lots of people nowadays have blogs on the worldwide web but that’s way too high-tech for me, other people keep a big notebook handy so they can journal their thoughts, hold the fort, my old high school English teacher back in Not Grapevine Texas Mr. D. P. Morris would definitely say that journal is a noun, not a verb, and people do not journal their thoughts, they write their thoughts in a journal, like how they feel about their dentist appointment next Thursday afternoon or how far they went on their date last night, people used to call that a diary and kept it under lock and key. I wish you could have known Mr. Morris, he had us memorize a little poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that begins “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies” and ends up wondering what God and man is, that should prolly be what God and man are, even Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson might could have benefited from knowing Mr. D. P. Morris. Well I find that I have nothing else to say at this time, so this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.