Tim is a character created in 1974. He began not as a character in a story, but a drawing of a boy wtith no pants or underpants on, but wearing a striped t-shirt, white with wavy blue horizontal stripes that were three fourths the size of the white stripes. It was an almost-portrait of a boy named Dewey ( or possibly something that began with the letter “T” because I make it a rule to never use real names in true stories about my actual past) that I had been watching from three tables away in the library during study hall. If you are thinking like a psychologist, you are probably thinking this sounds like a homosexual thing, but I promise I am not now nor have I ever been gay. I only have sexual fantasies about brown-eyed girls. It was the willowy and vulnerable shape of him, the quiet mystery of his quiet behavior and even quieter patterns of speech. I saw something of myself in him. A nerdy something about him that connected him to the thing that happened to me at the age of ten, and at that time was hidden from me by my traumatic amnesia. He represented the part of me that had been lost when the Big Bad Wolf in the forest caught me and ate my innocence completely.
I was never a friend or acquaintance of Dewey. He was a freshman when I was watching him as a senior in high school. We did not have PE class together, so I never saw him naked. The no-pants thing was not about him when I drew him. I never showed that picture to anyone. It was private, a thing completely about me in my own mind. I didn’t know anything about Dewey as a person, and his only personality in my estimation is what I imagined into him. So, he began fictional life as only a picture. In 1995 my oldest son was born. In a few years, the empty vessel that was Tim became more of my son than he was about me. My son inherited some… or most of my abilities as a liar, storyteller, imaginer, and devious thinker. Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher, and grandson of a wise handyman who could do a little bit of everything, became full of fifty-percent son and fifty-percent father. He was both a portrait of my son and a self portrait.
So, what’s the purpose of writing about where this character came from and who I modeled him after? As you get older and closer to death, you have to come to terms with a few hard truths. I will probably never be read widely as an author during my lifetime, and probably promptly forgotten as soon as I am gone. But, as a writer, I know in my very bones that it is in my DNA to need to tell a story. I have to make meaning in coherent sentences and paragraphs about the greater reveals of WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND MOSTLY… WHY? Life is not to be lived in a trance, unable to burble about anything but your own pleasure and pain. Life is tragedy… comedy… romance… and reverance. And the story has to be told… and rewritten and retold. We are not real people until we allow ourselves to believe our own lies.
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Catch a Falling Star 