I’m working on the book tonight, diagramming out some plot and thematic subtext in a series of four of my chapters. I started thinking about a poem I wrote in 1990 about a visit to my brother in San Francisco, as it happens that my protagonist also goes to visit his brother in San Francisco. Why? Because the brother needs to move to a big city and become successful, and I want it to be in California, and San Francisco is the coolest big city in California.

NOTE: If you live in LA, and wish to differ on the basis of LA’s coolness and get us all to sing along with that Randy Newman song, I have two points: No, it’s not as cool as San Francisco; Please quit driving up here to Santa Barbara every damn weekend to get away from how cool LA isn’t, then driving back in a big herd on Sunday evening.

Well, the poem wasn’t on a computer, because I didn’t own a computer in 1990. So I had to go to the closet and find my old notebooks. I finally found a draft of it, which is weird because it was published in ’95; but like I say, no computer. I also found a lot of other interesting stuff I wrote going back to 1980, most of which actually sucked. But I found one piece called “In the Midst of Beings,” from 1990.

Beings is about my neighbor lady, who lived in the house next door to a guest house I used to rent across town. She believed that her home was haunted by the ghost of her father, who died in Ohio some years before. She said that after he died, he gave his favorite frayed old brown coat to the Goodwill. When she got home, it was hanging in the closet. She took it again, and back it came. After a few more attempts, she decided to keep it, and it hung to that day in the closet of her place next door to me.

She said she saw her father from time to time, as a shadow, a silhouette of a man surrounded by tiny stars. But mostly, he just locked doors and played with her radio. I shared with her that I’d had some mysterious experiences myself.

Solitude is a screen door in sunlight.

from In the Midst of Beings by Kyle Kimberlin, © 1990

My neighbor moved to Oregon or Washington about nine or ten years ago; she and her family were going to live on a farm. Lots of room for spirit relatives to roam around. I have no doubt that coat is in her closet still, if by the mercy of God she is not yet a shade described by tiny stars.