The Brazen Derring-Do of Ms. America Coot: An Epistolary Travelogue (ePub)

Dear Gentle-eared Reader,

My Gran spoke only in tongues til I was 10 years old. Just when I'd be close to understanding her, she'd switch languages. It's not that she ever comprehended any of those languages, just their tongues. In actuality, Gran spoke in tongues in 68 different languages. Not including dialects.

It was on the waning, piebald eve of my 10th Birthday when she spoke an actual sentence I could lay ear to. She turned to me, as I was blowing out the still viable, significantly tattered and almost entirely melted down to the foundation of the wick hot purple taper candles we rescued from certain defeat out of Ms. Florencia Concertina's overstuffed, ample trash, and said, 'Yur 'bout as deep as'n America Coot's a**hole.' After that, she never said another word. Just spat out the frog legs she'd been sucking on, slumped without fanfare over into my red velvet birthday cake. Dead as a rusty, untended, lodged tight, hammer bent doornail.

So from that momentous juncture onward, I mantled the name America Coot, relinquishing my former name and way of life, setting sail in my Gran's Heavenly ordained Corvair, Monarch. Liberating myself from the portentious grasp of the overly zealous authoritarians looking to encapsulate my orphaned being.

In this epistolary road trip of adventure and longing, I invite you to join me, Dear Reader, on the embarkation of my vagabond education journeying away from the isolated, reclusive existence I've known, bounding with renewed energy and openness, toward the uncharted backroads and byways of the corporeal world where other seekers and I, and now you, unite in our own particular pursuit of understanding and love affirming revelations and profound, bally-hooed epiphanies, both great and small. Amen.