CHAPTER 4

Billy Ray Barnwell here, a while back Udella showed me a letter she and Juanita got from their old friend Ila Faye Hostetter who lives down in Micanopee Florida and it was right intriguing so I said let me have Ila Faye’s address I might want to write to her sometime, so she did and I did and I’ll be dog if we didn’t strike up a whatchamacallit, a correspondence, last month I sent her an original poem I wrote, it went like this:


Whene’er urine micanopee
I hope that yew will thank of me
And ever time I thank of yew
I’ll be micanopeein’ too.


She wrote back and said my poem was real good, she liked it a lot and that she was mighty flatured, so I wrote her back last week and said that I have not been mighty flatured in quite a spell but I keep a special spray can in the bathroom for just such occasions, I can’t wait to hear from her again, well I know this is short but I have to run over to the post office and check my box, so this is Billy Ray Barnwell temporarily putting it on Pause.

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Okay it has been three days since I got back from the P.O. but I have been unable to write one single word until now because I am completely devastated, I got a short note from Ila Faye that said, “Do not ever write to me again, I am no longer amused by references to bodily functions, I have started going to a Pentecostal church, you need to get right with the Lord” and that was it, well excuse me but from what I hear I think Pentecostal people are interested in a lot of bodily functions, I mean waving your hands in the air is a bodily function, speaking in tongues is a bodily function, rolling around on the floor is a bodily function, the whole Pentecostal ball of wax seems to be a very physical experience plumb full of bodily functions if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, okay I will concede that swinging from the chandeliers is not a bodily function, it’s more of an acrobatic skill, not that I’ve ever seen anybody actually do that but I have it on very good authority that that’s what they do, gosh I sure am going to miss hearing from Ila Faye, I wrote her once that I owe my love of stream of consciousness to Joyce and she wrote me back and said “Joyce who?” which made me laugh, it reminded me of the time I had to go by the church to rehearse a song with Mary Louise Calcavecchio and Calvin Bryson for someone’s wedding and I got there first so I sat down at the piano and started playing Clair de Lune to pass the time and towards the end of it Mary Louise came in and said “what is that?” and I said Clair de Lune and she said “who wrote it?” and I said Debussy and she looked puzzled and said “W. C. who?” but I did manage to keep from laughing that time, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.