Susan S. Kelly
Biography
Susan S. Kelly
The real me lives in a two-story house with husband, a black lab named Tar, two teenaged sons and a daughter who reads Charlotte's Web, The Little Princess and other books aloud to me with such innocent poignancy that I weep. I tend a flower bed that looks tolerable considering it lies in the hazardous zone beneath the teenagers' basketball goal.
The real me has no studio or office, only a corner nook in my bedroom so small that whenever the door opens it bangs into my chair. On the wall is the requisite bulletin board with the requisite quotes and pictures (Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech, the last page of The Great Gatsby, two New Yorker cartoons, a Willa Cather quote: There are all those early memories, one cannot get another set...) The real me is addicted to 44 ounces of Diet Coke daily, a decidedly self-destructive habit given that I have only one kidney due to a horseback riding accident when I was 11.
You wouldn't look twice at the real me in the grocery story. I'd be the one checking out what everybody else is buying, and eavesdropping on conversations (best line overheard in grocery story: "The days of shopping like a lady are over."). I talk a big game about moving somewhere like New Hampshire (the state slogan amuses me - live free or die) or Massachusetts, in hopes John Updike's vocabulary might osmose into me (if osmose is a verb), but actually, you couldn't dynamite the Real Me out of the south. I love every 100 degree day and tobacco leaf and redneck accent in it.
Susan S. Kelly
