Once, I wrote a story about a young man in a bar. He decided to write his life’s story on the back of a matchbook. What he wrote didn’t fill the back of the matchbook. He wrote: I was born. I live. I love. I must be going soon. I don’t remember what happened to that story. It was typed. On paper. Not printed. It was typed on a Smith Corona electric. Brown with beige lettering on the keys. There was no ENTER key. Instead, the largest key was marked RETURN. I remember the smell of the ribbon and the smell of correction fluid. (Correction tape hadn’t yet hit the market in a big way.) I wrote a story about a young man in a bar, long before I even knew what it was like to sit in a bar and write on a matchbook. I wasn’t of legal age yet, but, somehow, I recognized the social and spiritual importance of bars. In the days before I could legally enter such an establishment, one could still smoke in them. I was always fascinated by smoky, beer-scented rooms. Dark rooms. They were like giant confessional booths with booze. And—invariably—a jukebox. One of the songs on the jukebox was—invariably—“You’re the Reason Our Kids are Ugly.” Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynne? I can’t remember. Tara posted an image: “Timeline: Influence and Synthesis.” It was life in three chapters and she asked if it was similar to our own stories. I immediately thought of three lines in a long-vanished story. Three lines. Four sentences. On the back of a matchbook. I wondered if my life could be represented in three frames of a diptych…a kind of emotional graph that functions more in the realm of art and abstraction rather than in some literal…um…graphic sense. I thought of Honesty, Judas’ Coin…and everything else a particular plant is called: I’d discovered such a plant while walking with Corey, and I’ve begun work on a story involving that plant and a social custom that takes advantage of its dried seed pods. They’re shaped like flattened peapods: as they dry, they separate into three planes…the two outer shells and a thinner, rather diaphanous membrane on the inside. The seeds fall out, and the husks remain…almost like the three pages of a book. I saw such a seed pod and thought: “Three Pages of Honesty” which is the title to a story I will soon finish (after Escherelm’s first literary expression: it’s coming soon.) I saw “Timeline: Influence and Synthesis” and thought of three pages of honesty. I thought of Corey. I thought of Pavl. I thought of Victor. I thought of writing on an electric typewriter, going to Prague, and eventually reaching Moscow. Life in three chapters. Three chapters of Honesty. Corey is my best friend in Chicago. Pavl is my best friend in Prague. Victor is (more than) my best friend in Moscow. Each of them represents a page of text written on the thin seed-pods of Honesty. There is more to it than that, however; and maybe something of that is embodied in the graph represented above. As always: thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and Thank You, Tara, for putting an idea into my head. This image is just one facet of that idea. The other will arrive—somewhat soon—in the Writer’s Gallery.