Proust has his madeleines and tea, a moment that unlocked and threw open a door of “involuntary memory.” Proletarian that I am, I have a cane. Or rather, my wife has her grandfather’s cane.

This morning in the living room, as my wife finished her morning stretch routine, she stood up and reached for her grandfather’s cane to initiate and facilitate a new stretch.

As she turned the cane sideways and gently hooked her own neck I found myself transported to Alderson, West Virginia, to my grandparents’ house in the early 1970’s.

There was a good-sized gathering of family and friends in the kitchen and in the hallway running past it. Somehow, I’d been able to stay up late to watch The Tonight Show the previous night, and I wanted to share some of Johnny Carson’s opening monologue with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles. (At about eight years old I was the youngest person in that kitchen by a good four or five decades.)

I have a phonographic memory (if that’s really a thing); that is, I remember best what I hear. In the center of the kitchen I had everyone’s attention, as I recreated Johnny’s monologue, word-for-word from the previous night. I had his timing, his pauses, his cadence–and I was killing! It was a heady feeling for a child. But after four or five minutes, I realized I was about to run out of material, and I was desperate to keep it all going. So, I inserted my own material, which was an ill-advised mix of the arcane, the illogical, and scatological. The laughter faded, but I soldiered on.

Though I sensed that my grandfather was looking uncomfortable, I had no intention of relinquishing the stage when from behind me, a great aunt reached out with her cane and pulled me backward with it, an improvised Vaudeville hook.

She had suffered a stroke some years earlier, and I don’t believe I had ever heard her speak, but she liked to be in among people. She had not laughed during the earlier portion of my performance, but then, I think the stroke rendered her physically incapable of doing so. While everyone howled with laughter at her “joke,” her body shook and tears came to her eyes. My eyes must have registered hurt and confusion. Seeing my face, she dropped the cane and drew me to her in a tight hug. Her body still vibrating.

No one who was there remembers my dazzling rendering of Johnny Carson’s monologue, but everyone remembers “the hook.” And my great aunt, bless her.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hook lately, and not only when my wife uses it for her stretches. I’m beginning the rewriting/editing of the second full draft of Witness Tree, my “pinot” noir tale set in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Too often, as I wade through my tortured (and tortuous) first-draft prose, I find insupportable diversions, dismaying breaks with diction and tone, convoluted reasoning…and first draft cutesy-ness.

It’s slow-going, and I read each page aloud, cutting this, clarifying that, excising paragraphs wholesale and putting (*)asterisks next to words or passages that I can’t decide about, but that I think I should (re)review.

My great aunt passed away many years ago, but I could really use her right now.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

He’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

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