LARRY DELL WESTMORELAND

December 7, 2007: In desperation, I am back in front of this computer screen, intent on writing my way out of frustration; the book’s situation is a worry: there are, to my knowledge, fewer than twenty copies available for sale in the U.S.A.; a man out west called the other day, saying he’d found a copy. The other copies are on a boat somewhere in the Pacific and I don’t see how they can arrive from China in time for the Florida events scheduled to begin mid-January. “Oh, well,” a more experienced writer friend says, “Publication is punishment for having written.” It sure does feel that way.

On the other hand, it has driven me here, to the keyboard, this fountain of renewal I turn to when there is no other escape from anxiety: this explains most of my output. Writer Paul Varnes (Confederate Money) says that for him “writing is fun.” I’m glad for Paul, but that’s not my experience; I like having written, but most times the actual work, the not knowing what words will appear next on the page (quite often nothing like what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; . . . from emotion recollected in tranquility”; no, not poetry. Sometimes I get only words. But the great thing I want to tell you is that it always helps me get back where I belong: here, waiting for the story.

I have one and it explains the anxiety: In only ten days I have read in three places (two of which didn’t have books and one—that sublime southern bookstore, Square Books, in Oxford, MS—where the books showed up only five hours before the signing/reading). During this same ten days, my lifelong friend Larry Westmoreland moved to another dimension, a tumultuous reunion with an estranged family member surprised and delighted me, I canoed in north Mississippi, stayed in the homes of three different friends, memorized the look of Oxford’s streetlights coming on at sunset as I listened in Warren Steel’s car to a CD of his Baroque organ music, sat on a panel at the thirtieth anniversary celebration for the founding of The Center for the Study of Southern Culture and ate fried catfish in front of Barnard Observatory on the Center’s University of Mississippi lawn.

I first saw Barnard Observatory—not yet restored to its antebellum glamour, shutters hanging loose and curtains flying from its windows, during the Faulkner and Religion Conference of August, 1989, when I investigated the Southern Studies Grad Program, then flew home and put my Alachua house up for sale. One day later, a man I’d never heard of called and arranged to buy the house without even driving over. The rest is history; the rest is Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place, teaching at UCF, LCCC, NFCC, FSU (and its Ph.D. program I haven’t completed), the building of this house on the Suwannee, the losses of Ron Hunt, Laura Newman, Thom Mannarino, my Aunt Nadine, and Larry Westmoreland.

Born in High Springs in 1941, Larry graduated from Santa Fe High School and Valdosta State University. He grew up to love history and people and he always had time for his friends. He traveled to Europe and lived in Belize, was fascinated by the metaphysical, most of which he decoded from materials put out by the Southern Baptist Convention in whose shadow he grew up and for all of his 66 years he continued to interpret and reinterpret his King James Bible and subsequent versions of holy writ. A friend (said to be able to see into the past) who passed through High Springs a year ago last spring observed Larry and me in conversation, then announced that many lives back we’d been friends; I was a nun and he was a monk.

But you don’t have to look that far. Larry and I loved the dirt back roads of Alachua County, the always flexing boundaries of Waters Pond in Gilchrist County, a shot of good bourbon, theorizing about the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, and he loved his Pall Malls. He probably didn’t love his inherited weak heart, the fact he was orphaned before he started public school, his hundred emergency room trips brought on by the sugar lows of diabetes, or the cruel and secret reason that prevented his ever having learned to drive a car. His friends drove him: Davie, Mary Alice, Cindy, Bill, Kim; we drove him everywhere, including our dash just a year ago through the reds and yellows of North Florida, to Valdosta, with the car windows open so that as the colors rushed past, so we could better follow the winding loops of the wild yellow grape vines that ran like garlands through the plums and apricots, the tangerines and wines of Autumn, 2006. And we visited him wherever he was, including the Woodlawn Nursing Home which called Mary Alice at 7:00 a.m. on November 6, 2007, and told her that he was gone.

Less than three weeks later, North Florida’s fall colors are almost gone. The roadsides have reddened and yellowed and a brisk wind teases the leaves on my pear tree out back, loosening its translucent amber slivers. Larry, student of European History and opera, graduate of Valdosta State, a gifted mimic who quoted the Romantics at parties, the man who always and forever would stop whatever he was doing to speak with or listen to any friend—my friend who talked me back to Florida when I was near collapse in Mississippi in 1994, the friend of my youth who drew me home: gone, kazam! And I hope without pain. He had a lot of pain, but never mentioned it, drank coffee at all hours, went blind and took up music--arias and show tunes--with an even greater vengeance, was there in High Springs for my No Book Book Event on November 4.

What a great audience Larry and those other 52 souls were, what energy between speaker and listeners. A few hours after I learned of Larry’s death, I called his cell phone: “This is Larry,” he said, inviting and easy, pulling me to his chest, gathering me again into his arms, into the gladness that was Larry Westmoreland.