Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

Also, I am uncomfortable addressing you in a familiar way by using your first name. You have left me no choice, however, as you introduced yourself that way. However, I gave you the courtesy of letting you know my last name, and yet you insisted on addressing me as Edward. This, too, is entirely too familiar given our limited interaction.

Your son, Kyle, is a very courteous young man, if a little exuberant. I can only assume that he learned his manners from someone other than you. That said, I do not like assumptions. I prefer facts. Perhaps we can discuss this issue at a more appropriate time, while referring to each other in an acceptable way.

I thank you for your consideration.

My eyes open at 7:37 a.m. I am on my side, facing the clock. This does not happen often. I usually wake up on my back. On the 290th day of the year (because it’s a leap year), I have awakened at 7:37 for the sixteenth time. There is no correlation between those numbers that I can see, but as I have recorded both in my notebook, my data is complete.

Through the big bay window in the dining room, I can see both the garage (now the color of Behr parsley sprig, although not for long) and, in the other direction, signs of life on Clark Avenue. People are heading to work and school and who knows where else. Today, I will be joining them. I have volunteered to make calls for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I do not like to talk on the telephone, as I do not do spontaneous conversation well, but I have been assured that I will have a “script” to use, and that I can do. I can read very well. Dr. Buckley encourages me to stay as busy as possible, and volunteering to help the Muscular Dystrophy Association seems like a good way to spend a day.

I found out that the Muscular Dystrophy Association needed a volunteer through reading the Billings Herald-Gleaner a week ago. I am now reading today’s Billings Herald-Gleaner , and the front page says the high temperature will be sixty degrees today. Of course, that’s just a forecast, and forecasts are notoriously off base. I prefer facts. I will know for sure tomorrow what the temperature reaches today.

Today, however, I know that it reached sixty-six degrees yesterday, with a low of forty-four, and I record those numbers in my notebook, and my data is complete.

In any case, I can deduce from the advisory and from what I can see with my own two eyes that the garage should be dry today, while I am off volunteering for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

As I’m dressing—brown corduroy pants and a blue button-down, long-sleeved shirt, as today I will be working in an office—I think that it makes me feel good to have a job to go to today. It’s not really a job, of course, but it seems like one, in that I will be in my car when everybody else is going to work, and when I get to the Muscular Dystrophy office, I will be making phone calls and writing things down, just like a person who has a job. I wonder if I will get my own desk. That would be neat.

If everything works out all right, I might even take a coffee break. I don’t like coffee, but if that’s what they do at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, I think it would only be polite to do the same.

I used to have a job, many years ago. In 1993, my father helped me get a clerical job with Yellowstone County. I liked the work very much. I maintained files in the clerk and recorder’s office, and it was very orderly work. Paperwork would come in, and I would find the file where it belonged and put it away. I was very good at keeping everything in order, and when I was asked to retrieve a file, I could do so quickly. My boss was very complimentary of my work, and I was left alone to do it. I liked that job very much.

But I stopped working for Yellowstone County in 1997. A new clerk and recorder was elected the previous November, and she wanted things done completely differently from the way I was doing them. She did not like my work at all, and she told me that I had to do it a different way, her way. I did not like her way, and I told her so. She told me I had to do it anyway. I told her that I wouldn’t. She told me that I would or I would have to find somewhere else to work.

My father had to come down to the office after I removed every file and shook its contents onto the floor. The new clerk and recorder told my father that she was going to call the deputies if he did not remove me immediately.

After that, I did not have to work anymore.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association office is in the West End of Billings, a few miles from the house on Clark Avenue, which is in a part of Billings that I suppose you would call central. But I have read histories of Billings suggesting that where I live, at Sixth Street W. and Clark Avenue, used to be the western edge of town. I suppose that the idea of what is north, south, east, or west of something else depends a lot on what point of history you’re looking at. These are facts that change. This flummoxes me.

At Nineteenth Street W. and Central Avenue, I see the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course. My father loves golf, so much so that he wears golf shirts no matter what time of year it is. He looks like a tool. (I love the word “tool” in the pejorative sense. I also love the word “pejorative.”) He and my mother go on vacation in places like Pebble Beach, California, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. I’m not sure what my mother does in those places, but my father plays golf.

When I was a boy, my father took me to the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course and tried to teach me how to play. We went once, and I have never been back. Golf is a stupid game. You cannot hit the ball the same way every time and get the same result—not even Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, can do this. I do not like such unpredictability. Our golf outing ended when I threw three of my father’s golf clubs into the water. He didn’t talk to me for two days after that.

I take a right turn on Monad Street (I like right turns), then a left on Twentieth Street W. (I don’t like left turns so much), cross over King Avenue W., and see the Muscular Dystrophy Association office. I pull into the parking lot.

I am a little bit nervous. As I reach for the keys, I hear through the car speakers the opening bars of R.E.M.’s “Try Not to Breathe,” and it seems to me that this is just about the worst possible advice right now.

Inside the Muscular Dystrophy Association office, I am met by a woman named Sonya Starr, who smiles a lot and wears too much makeup. She firmly shakes my hand, and I think she notices that I recoil a bit at that, but her smile stays firmly attached to her face.

“Thank you so much for coming in and helping us, Mr. Stanton.”

Sonya Starr has more teeth than anyone I’ve ever seen, although I know this is just an illusion. The normal adult human mouth has thirty-two teeth, and it defies all statistical probability that Sonya Starr has thirty-three teeth and everyone else has thirty-two.

“You’re welcome.”

She smiles again. “We had expected to have two of you making calls today, but unfortunately, our other volunteer had to cancel, so it looks like it’ll just be you.”

“Do I have to do the work of two people? Because I don’t think I can do that, since I’ve never done this before, and if that’s the requirement, I should have been told of this when I called last week.”

Sonya Starr is not smiling anymore.

“It’s no problem, Mr. Stanton. You do what you can do in the time that you feel you can give us. You are a volunteer, and we appreciate you for offering your time.”