Memoir

Tom-Rob 2016

Tom Beaver

25 Jun 2026 • 17 min read

Feb. 25

Dear Rob—There was a time when I would finish a five to 10-page letter to you, muscle it into an envelope, apply the necessary instructions and binding tape and a book of postage stamps, carry it to my Dad’s car to avoid a strain on his back—he was the family mailman—then return to my typewriter and continue the chronicle. “Dear Rob, Just sent you a letter. Let me tell you some of the things I’ve been doing and thinking since then.”

My letters are lighter and farther between, now. There’s not time for long daily ones. But then the things to tell you and the number of your letters to reply to build up into such a mountain I don’t reply at all, for a long time. When I do, it’s just a short letter after all, and isn’t that hard to write, and seems to be as long and newsy as a letter needs to be in this day and age, if not more so. I keep thinking I’ll learn a lesson from that.

I hope this finds you free of kidney stones. To answer a question you once asked: no, I never had another kidney stone after that first one. I think the ER doctor told me to expect another, that she had seen something in the pictures to indicate one forming, but maybe that one passed quietly. Or maybe it’s still quietly building, like the next New Madrid earthquake. The first one changed the course of the Mississippi River, you know. But the pain meds helped.

Another question you asked—how’s my novel coming. The news there is that I finished a first draft. Paid typists to transcribe my notebook pages. It came in around 400 pages and needs to be carved down to 225 or fewer—180 sounds like the right number. I’m waiting for a chance to get back to it. And champing at the bit to start a fresh one. It was a very happy time, writing fiction 2-3 hours every work day and 10 hours or more on the weekends. I learned things while writing this one that should make the next one easier and better. One lesson is to write less. Having to cut a manuscript nearly in half seems like it will be a harder kind of work than the original writing, and I probably have to find time to do it at my desk, rather than on commutes. It’ll be better if I can write more to final size as I go.

Dog is standing up and pushing at my leg, making sounds in her throat. If you had laryngitis and needed me to take you outside for a walk, you would make those same sounds. She’s one genetic mutation away from being able to say, “Come on, damnit.”

That took half an hour. Hope you’re still here. Maybe you started reading that Thomas Covenant novel while waiting. I’m curious to find out if it’s to your liking. I remember that my first reading of it, back in college, felt all uphill for long stretches, long periods mired in the confusing internal struggles and reluctance of the hero. But then a character or an action scene would come along that makes it a whole different book. Delicious, gritty, realistic literature. Henry Miller’s books are that way. He’ll go on for 30 pages on some philosophical point that never even starts to make sense. Very abstract, drab, nearly pointless stuff. Then he remembers some housewife he used to bang on his lunch hour, and its back to vividness and color. What you find over time in the Covenant books, though, is that all the slower stuff contributes directly to some payoff down the line. There’s a lot of great storytelling in these books. But it’s fantasy fiction, and I don’t know if that’s your cup of tea.

I like your tale of the Peter Brook production, and you getting to experience it through this old diary, mind-traveling back to a legendary moment that you kno was taking place in New York while you were starting high school in Missouri. Came close to giving me the time-travel goosebumps.

Back to my programming now. I’m between jobs/gigs again. Learning new technology and building new demos again. Pretty much seven days a week since Jan 1. My Flash career is over. Will be little or no more work in that technology, and can’t even afford to take it when it does come, because it keeps me from forging ahead in the technologies the world is using now. I do enjoying playing with new technologies. But the unending learning curve doesn’t leave enough time for many of the other things I want to do. Still trying to get off that treadmill.

Nothing new to report about Lydia. Nothing to tell you about Bill and Dad and the tractors and all that. So, until next time. Hoping you are doing well.

May 15

Dear Rob—It’s been 22 years already? That blows my mind a little. Nice to hear that my wedding gift was the kind that still comes up in such a nice way.

I’d like to hear more about Emerson’s influence on The Andy Griffith Show. You might be onto something unique there.

Can’t wait to read this novel you’re writing. That time of your life was vicariously romantic for me. I got most of it through your letters, and that in itself was close to reading a novel. In some ways better than a novel. But now I’ll get to have those experiences exactly as a novel. I’m already considering this novel one of the things I’m glad I lived long enough to experience.

Started a new job three weeks ago. Pay has been hitting my bank. Another period of unemployment behind me. Looking like this will be another 9-to-5 kind of job. Gearing up to do my writing again on the commutes.

Surely we’ll get together sometime soon. Lots of catching up to do.

Congratulations on the first 22 years.

June 15

Dear Rob—Hello Rob. Very sorry to hear about your father in law. You’ve said nice things about him over the years, making me like him without even knowing him. So wonderful that you guys recorded him telling his best stories. Give my condolences to Celia. These must be sad days for her.

I think this Thomas Wolfe movie is one we should see together.

Aug. 16

Dear Rob—Lovely and smart little meditation on a variety of subjects there. You should compile these into a book. I’ve suggested this before and I’ll probably keep on suggesting it. I think it would be a book that thoughtful people of any age, any time and place, but especially young people and aspiring artists, would find enjoyable and—looking for a word here. A phrase will have to do: they fill find the book to be a kind of treasure box of thoughts, opinions and appreciations they’ll want to their own. I don’t think I’m flowering this up. You have that kind of voice and touch, a way of teaching and convincing by making things appealing and free for the taking. If you don’t commit to this book soon, I might try to write one like it myself. I think yours would be much better, though. Let me write fantasy novels for kids and you do this one.

Sorry I’ve been so out of touch. For the first few months of my new job I was working a lot of extra hours, and now I’m putting most of my free time into the novel I’m writing. Haven’t been having fun with other people instead of you. Just been having fun on my own, out here in far Brooklyn.

How’s your novel coming? I’d rather read this than a newly discovered novel from Salinger, Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe. I want to read again about Jeff Wobbe jumping over tables for no reason except that he was young, about your acid visions of God, about your interesting buddies and those pretty, open-minded girls you guys hung out with, about your creative writing and lit classes, your poetry writing, your house fire, your discoveries of literature, your adventuruous nights and weekends in St. Louis.

You’ve probably seen that Thomas Wolfe movie. I can’t hold it against you. I didn’t stick to our plan.

I’m back to my early-rising routine. I get up at 6 a.m. and walk 25 minutes to a local diner, where I have breakfast and write. I get in about two hours of writing before walking back to the apartment and starting my programming day (my job lets me work from home). I just discovered that I can buy a membership to the Brooklyn College Library, a 15-minute walk from here. I can go there on Saturdays and Sundays and spend a full day writing. I walked through the library one day last week during lunch, checking it out, and I got an excitement in my guts that felt like I’d taken a youth serum. It triggered memories of college—spending whole afternoons in one of the four college libraries in Springfield. Working in a library makes me feel like time has stopped. Might be the closest I’ll ever come to feeling immortal. The library’s winter hours start in another week. I’m looking forward to my first weekend tucked away among the 17 millions books, drinking coffee from a thermos and typing up this adventure I’ve been conjuring.

An old girlfriend has been wanting to get together for sex. She’s got very big breasts, a pretty face, a round rear end, a brainy, playful sense of humor, little or no neurotic stuff. She wants to play BSDM games. She’s separating from her husband, but with two young children she’s not likely to want a lot of time from me. It’s just about perfect. But I haven’t taken her up on it. I’m trying to put together some kind of business that will get me off the programming treadmill. And spending time on this novel. So there’s a snapshot of my priorities right now.

I want to read that book about The Sun Also Rises. I wouldn’t have been sure that I was the one who read Hemingway first. By the way, as much as I liked The Sun Also (smile), I liked The Nick Adams Stories more. But back to who read who first. You introduced me to Dickey and Twain, that’s certain. But who got to Faulkner first? Fitzgerald? We were both exposed to Steinbeck in our high school classes, of course, but who loved him the most? I think Wolfe was one my discoveries. I think Salinger was one of yours. Do you remember for sure? Do you remember the day we went to the university library, maybe two different libraries, looking for uncollected magazine stories of Salinger? For us that was like sailing to South America and marching to the interior, searching for gold. Those were the years when we first went circumnavigating literature, discovering new seas, islands and continents. It sounds grandiose to talk about it that way, but I think that’s how it felt to us. We were adolescents, which is to say we were loaded to the teeth with desire and curiosity, and our emotions were like new guitar strings, at peak responsiveness. I don’t know if that captures it. We were intellectually and emotionally excited most of the time as we discovered new examples of the things we wanted to fill ourselves with.

You’re right, Hemingway did have a Trump-like quality but, like you say, “that sensitivity and talent.” A triumph of the artistic drive or purpose, maybe. Grace beating nature a good part of the time, thanks of whatever being an artist is.

I just read a book by Paul Theroux (The South) and now, coincidentally, I’m reading a book by Thoreau (his travels in Main, still a forest frontier at the time). I’m marking favorite passages as I go. I want to go back and read these passages onto cassette tape, then listen to these tapes as I take walks. Paul Theroux is sort of the Hemingway of my adult years. I love his intellect and sensitivity, the excellence of his prose, his journalistic rigor, his vividness and specificity, his novelty of expression in just the right amount, his touches of poetry that are rugged and exciting more than pretty, his self-confidence and opinionatedness that are masculine to the right degree. He’s in his 70s now, but his reporting and writing are as solid and robust and freshly observed, freshly felt, as rousing and pleasurable, as they ever were, from what I remember—he stills seem to be in his prime.

Bedtime now. Some reading, some thinking on one specific problem or another of my story as I fall asleep, several interesting dreams before morning, then up at 6 for another two pleasurable hours of writing.

Oct. 9

Good Walk and Talk

Dear Rob—That was a great evening. Walking and dining in Central Park, drinking again later at that large but cozy bar near Lincoln Center. Talking like we’ve always talked. When we’re doing that, we seem ageless, life endless. We know it’s an illusion, but we’d be silly not to enjoy it. Wish I had a way of reliving these visits we’ve had across the years. The memories of what we said and where we were are spotty. But I do remember that every one of those times has been enjoyable, stimulating, brightening, happy. I do know we’ll keep doing this as far into the future as we can. Not a small amount to have.

I mentioned how pretty Jack’s sister, Beverly, was. She was about four years older than Jack, so she wasn’t so much a girl I dreamed of having as a kind of girl I dreamed of having. She was one of the reasons I wanted to get from first grade to fourth, from fourth to eighth, and so on.

I found this picture of her on Facebook. She’s the one at far left: probably around 22 in this photo. I remember her as not only pretty, but as a girl who was always greeting her friends in a happy way and who would say hello and goodbye to us younger kids. A sunny, friendly, exciting presence, a sunflower of those weedy lands. You can see in this photo how she would look straight at a person. I think you will agree that a boy might take a face like that as a promise of something very special and lovely, thrilling in some way yet to be fully revealed, waiting to be his in his future. She made an anxious, introverted, sometimes friendless boy glad to go out and suffer another school day.

Females and TV and movies and books and playing games of imagination and…and creeks. These made the plain days, the bleak times of year, the anxiety, bearable if nothing else, but sometimes glorious by association.

Oct. 26

Dear Rob—Looking at webites of St. Louis rentals like my Dad said the pilot of a small airplane must always be looking for landing spots. Except that I’m not looking just in case.

So many familiar names: Clayton Road, Skinker, Big Bend, Delmar…Hanley, Kingsbury, Bemiston, Wydown…

How many addresses did you have in the city after leaving Marthasville—four, I think?

It’s blowing my mind to think I might live on one of your old streets. That I might be watching movies at the Hi-Pointe. That I might be walking those same sidewalks we walked together (on the other side of our New York lives), and where you lived out the material of that coming-of-age novel you’re writing.

I was doing a street view of one address, don’t remember which one, and found myself looking at some overland kind of route a city kid might take between buildings, then saw a big lawn and long building that looked like a high school campus, and I remembered the story of On My Leg. That high school boy running one morning, taking shortcuts through neighborhoods, to get to his first school class of the day, late for a reason he wouldn’t want to tell (though the reason was plain to see, written on his pants leg—in what is definitely a kind of code).

This experience is like when I moved to New York in 1987, but in reverse. Hard to feel it as progress, even though I know it is. It’s not like I’m the first person who had to move for work. Or had to leave a great place for one that wasn’t as great, even if it was, in those circumstances, better.

I like your idea of weekly Skypes. We can start doing that soon, maybe after I hit Missouri. I’m expecting we’ll have a chance for another visit before I leave.

Dear Tom—I feel like I’m on this adventure with you. The power of your paragraphs.

I’ve enjoyed every one of our conversations, whether in chairs, on a bus, written on paper, or digitally. But there were a few times, that I was aware in the moment, when the floor kind of burned through to another level of camaraderie. Once was when we were helping make the sophomore float (or was it freshman year?). Tying tissue to chicken wire. Some girl’s house, in the burby part of Washington. And you and I decided to walk to the A&W, or someplace, and we were joking as we hurried down the empty darkened street. And we were laughing. And I felt great friendship.

Another time was when you visited shortly after we moved back to Clayton. We were living on Oxford, I had that little suite on the third floor, and you and I were walking at night on Wydown. And I felt intense gratitude for the way we could relate.

Yes, four address in St Louis after Marthasville, before New York. The first was in Kirkwood, the town house that burned. The second was in Clayton, on Oxford. The third was the flat on Kingsbury. The forth was the little house on Bemiston.

Visiting you in St Louis will be like when I started therapy and the woman lived on Pershing Place. So, I would go to talk about my past on the street where I lived it.

This is gonna be fun, Tom.

Maybe we do a Skype tonight...

Oct. 26

Dear Rob—Looking at webites of St. Louis rentals like my Dad said the pilot of a small airplane must always be looking for landing spots. Except that I’m not looking just in case.

So many familiar names: Clayton Road, Skinker, Big Bend, Delmar, Hanley, Kingsbury, Bemiston, Wydown…

How many addresses did you have in the city after leaving Marthasville—four, I think?

I like your idea of weekly Skypes. We can start doing that soon, maybe after I hit Missouri. I’m expecting we’ll have a chance for another visit before I leave.

Nov. 5

Dear Rob—Hey Rob. Thanks for the previous note. “This is gonna be fun…”—that puts the right kind of spin on it. I’ve integrated that into how I’m thinking about this.

It’s definitely happening. I’ve given my notice on the apartment. I’ve made arrangements with movers. I’ve bought a car. My sister Linda is doing some clearing-out and fixing-up so I can have her upstairs for my first few months. I’ve begun saying “see you later” to some of my favorite NY places.

The car was a big job, but an enjoyable one. Spent one whole day with the staff at a used-car place in Queens, test-driving, getting the opinion of an outside mechanic, getting financing, ordering out and eating my lunch at the salesman’s cluttered, decrepit desk, talking a Trump-supporting salesman into thinking about some ideas (sane ones) he hadn’t heard yet. I ended up not buying a car from those guys, though. I then spent another whole day test driving cars being sold on the street near home. Drove three cars, bought one. A day with blue-collar guys, talking cars and whatever else came up along the way. That was Sunday. This week was a lot of time in chaotic garages with mechanics who have to be part hustler to make a living, making some necessary repairs to the new car.

I’ve taken the car on two evening drives in Brooklyn, one to Coney Island, one to my first solo Brooklyn apartment, the one in Dumbo where I had that rooftop party. Some very good memories in both places, but especially in Dumbo. My downstairs neighbor is apparently still where she always was, still posting hand-drawn signs about JESUS and REPENT in her windows, the dear. A narrow three-story building just across the street from mine is still where it was, still absorbing the full onslaught of a blazing streetlight all night, it’s windows still hung with heavy black polyethylene, looking like a hotel in purgatory. The neighborhood is different and unchanged at the same time. Still the same narrow cobbled streets between high windowed walls of brick, still the strange, steady moonlight of streetlamps making it neither night or day, still no other soul but you all up and down the narrow street—until there momentously is. A sexy young woman walking her dog or a young mom walking her baby or a middle-aged couple walking one another. You might or might not nod a greeting, but the mutual awareness is palpable. I sat outside a bar on one corner, it’s doors open to the street, warm light and merry noise spilling out a little, but not enough to change what still seems like an urban ghost town. People streamed by continuously, mostly in one direction, starting their commutes home, mixing with the locals who were already home and out strolling, but somehow it still seemed like I was almost the only one there. It’s the oddest, loveliest mix of derelict and modern, hip and old, bustling and serene, that I’ve seen. One block completely closed up except for a fashion store like you’d see in Soho. A young woman in heels, walking her coiffed dog and talking on her 21st century phone and passing a cluster of electric wires on the side of a building arranged so chaotically and dangerously they look like they were put there when electricity was the new thing in town, and installed by anyone who could use a hammer. I wanted to live there again. But then I remembered the reasons I’m leaving, and leaving seemed better than staying.

I’ll be leaving at the end of the month. Still three and a half weeks. Fully intend to visit you again before then, but I’ll still be looking forward to your first visit in St. Louis.

Nov. 25

Dear Rob—Hi Rob. Still want to meet up, but can’t keep our appointment for Saturday. My well-laid plans didn’t stay that way. Just got back from four days upstate, emptying out my storage unit there. I’ll be packing all weekend for a Monday morning move. But I’ll be sticking around a few days after that. I’m still juggling things to know just how many days that will be. I hope to stay through Saturday, hitting the road Sunday morning. That would give us several days/evenings to choose from.

I’ll keep you posted.

Dear Tom—You must have felt a good Christmas warmth, yesterday, ensconced with you family, in your old home state. Your new home state.

I felt good on Christmas eve, wrapping Celia’s presents while she taught her class. After which she hosted an Open House for her students, former and current.

So, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, watered our tree, and thought about Christmases Past. And all other seasons of past.

I bought Celia a comb, faux tortoise, and gazed at the dental array of it, remembering the pleasure I had as a boy, planing the moist dirt off each individual tooth with my nail. Ellen Schwartz said it was gross, but seemed hygienic and thorough to me.

Is Linda’s place in Washington? Or nearby?

Nov. 15

Dear Rob—> Had the pleasure of walking into lovely Three Lives Bookstore and buying David Lida's novel.

> Finished it last night and was able to write him in praise of his work. Told him honestly that I had been pulled through the experience without looking at the page numbers and felt, at the end, that I knew the people. Wanted them to have the best.

> If I'd read it in manuscript I would have had some suggestions. Important scenes happened as expected. Other important scenes, to my mind, did not take place. And a major coincidence near the end.

> I could see why he'd had a hard time finding a publisher. I think it could have been a much more popular novel without losing literary value.

> But what an achievement. I'd like to see the same for us.

> Would like to set a date with you before the day you move. Let me know when would be good for you.

Nov. 25

Dear Rob—Still want to meet up, but can’t keep our appointment for Saturday. My well-laid plans didn’t stay that way. Just got back from 4 days upstate, emptying out my storage unit there. I’ll be packing all weekend for a Monday morning move. But I’ll be sticking around a few days after that. I’m still juggling things to know just how many days that will be. I hope to stay through Saturday, hitting the road Sunday morning. That would give us several days/evenings to choose from.

I’ll keep you posted.

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