To See My Friend and Shake Her Hand...

Stephen King is an underrated artist. His massive commercial success often blinds normally sagacious critics to his genuine ability, but the first time I read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, I couldn't put it down.

Shawshank was also a novella. They're shorter, tauter and therefore harder to write than a fully-fledged novel, in which egotistical auteurs often have too much room ridiculously to ramble. The copy I got came in at a lean and mean 113 pages, not one word was wasted and he wrote lines I'll remember for the rest of my life.

And of course, once I'd got there and back again from America in 2010 like an overlarge Hobbit, I saw echoes of that trip in many things. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings... All gave me pause to think of my latter-day Alice and ask myself why the sea was boiling hot and whether pigs have wings!

I bored a lot of people to death.

But that's what Jody's grandfather in Steinbeck's The Red Pony also did until he found out what his son-in-law thought. Only then did he try to say how it had really felt. That "it was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast [and] the big beast ... wanted only westering. ... When we saw the mountains at last, we cried ... and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed."

I felt those words in my soul when I went the same way, and after I met Juliet I broke down and cried. But what I didn't previously say was that Red in Shawshank echoed those sentiments, crossing the continent and skipping across the border of an America much more like the one I knew:

I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

He took Trailways while I was stuck with Greyhound, but I know how it was.

The Pacific was as blue as it had been in my dreams.

And maybe I'll see my friend again one day, and shake her hand.