The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

C, and so on to the end of the quarter. On my last essay, Milt awarded me an A-plus and a recommendation for Honors English. My essay, by the way, was about Norman Rockwell. Scarcely had I learned what an irony was than I had committed one.
    Many years later, I was at a dinner for a large number of people and Milt happened to be there, so I told the story about receiving an A-plus in his class. Milt roared out, “I never gave an A-plus in my entire life!” But he had. And he had singlehandedly turned me into a writer.
    By my sophomore year I was selling features to the Lewiston Morning Tribune . Although I would have a series of actual jobs for the next twenty-five years, my major drive was finally to make a living at freelance writing. This happened in the 1960s, although I would continue with actual employment for a few more years.
    My stories in those early years were based on facts, requiring research and photography, but it was all exciting and wonderful. I wrote for two hours a night, seven nights a week. Perhaps the one distinguishing element in my factual stories is that I tried to include humor in each of them. Two of those stories are included in this collection: “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” first published in Sports Illustrated , later abridged in Reader’s Digest , and “There Goes the Indian with the Digital Wristwatch,” published in TV Guide . Those two stories formed the pinnacle of my career as a factual freelance writer. I probably could have continued as a factual writer from then on, but a peculiar thing happened.
    One night I finished an article in the first hour of my two-hour writing schedule. It was about the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife, hooking up assorted wild creatures with radio transmitters so scientists could study their movements at night. Because I stuck fiercely to my two-hour writing schedule, I decided to write a piece of nonsense to fill up my second hour. My head was already crammed with factual information about telemetry, so I decided to write a piece of nonsense about it, the comic idea being that eventually all wildlife would be hooked up with radio transmitters, which would simplify hunting immensely. I knocked off the piece of nonsense in an hour, stuck it in an envelope, sent it to Field & Stream , and forgot about it. I had a rule in those days that everything I wrote, no matter how bad I thought it was, I sent off to a magazine (a confession some critics have picked up on). Weeks passed. And then one day I went out to our mailbox and there was a small envelope from Field & Stream . My heart leaped. Writers place major importance on the size of envelopes they receive from publishers. Large envelopes contain the rejected manuscript; small envelopes contain checks. This small envelope contained a check for $350. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it transformed me. Writing factual articles is hard, time-consuming work requiring much travel and research. A factual article I had just published had paid me $750, but I had spent weeks researching and writing it. Now here was a check for $350, payment for a piece of nonsense that had taken me an hour to write. I did some rapid calculations and was instantly transformed into a humor writer. Within a year, I had more markets than I could keep up with, and the rates of payment grew with every sale. Suddenly I had achieved the goal I had set for myself at that little log cabin school in the backwoods of Idaho—freedom! That freedom required that I work all the time, of course, but it was still freedom, and that freedom eventually took me all over the world, beyond anything I had ever imagined as a seven-year-old.
    Along the way, I acquired a wife, Darlene, also known in my stories as “Bun.” There is an essay in this collection that tells of my pursuit of her. I was still in high school when I met her, and she was already in college with a boyfriend in the service. The odds