Who is Charley?

 


Charley was John Steinbeck's Standard Poodle. I first met Charley, and John Steinbeck for that matter, in Union Station in Los Angeles. It was the culmination of an escape from my college dorm with five friends and a Buick Special which threw a connecting rod just outside of Kingman, Arizona in the middle of the General Motors strike in Detroit.

Over the years I have written many short stories about that adventure, toyed with making it a coming of age novel except only men seem to write those, named every computer, and half my journals or blogs Charley. I have also read all the John Steinbeck novels since that day I used some of the last of my travel money and bought the just out in paperback Travels with Charley. If I had gone ahead with getting my masters I might have made my thesis about John Steinbeck's works. 

I abandoned the masters when living with someone who was doing his masters on Moby Dick. That may be a portion of my life I need to examine more fully. It is all mixed up with Richard Nixon, Watergate, equal rights for women (which we still do not have) and discovering my own America. I have written a coming of age novel very different from the one I would have written about that week of dealing with what fate tosses in front of you. That novel made it to an agent but never to publication. I always sort of thought of it as the one you wrote to lock up and forget so you could get down to what you really wanted to write. Life and a head injury got in the way.

Life is what happens when you were making plans for something entirely different. Maybe it is time to re-read Steinbeck. But at the moment I am re-reading J. A. Jance's Ali Reynold's series. Or filling in my jumps. She has written way more than 22 books.  And I never read them in order and obviously missed a lot of them along the way because I had fallen into picking up books at used book sales, reading the title  page for the date of publish, the first line and page 53 to see if I had read it before. And to be fair she had several series going on at once. The Joanna Brady series will be my next to fill in the blanks on. She writes about Arizona and Kingman, a place that has haunted me since the demise of the Buick.

I did at one time entertain a career as a literary critic. A college professor said I would be great at that. But I have my favorites and I might be biased. Not at all sure I support modern trends in novels. Even Stephen King got to violent for me ultimately and I have only read his books up until his drug addiction.

But back to Charley. Travel's with Charley was my first ever read of a book which had not been on an official reading list for high school or college. It started my travels through reading for me and not for grades.

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