“So what’s your process?  What do we need to do to get the magic to happen?  Crown and Coke?”

I smiled.  The thing about the Hawks is their hospitality.  Their kitchen alone is the size of a home.

I was offered a seat in the middle of the kitchen table, in front of a laptop with two Word documents.  The first was the prepared obituary that had already ran in the paper.  The second was the notes from the night before, made as each shared their stories.  Whoever typed them had done well.  Each condensed a story into single line.

Surrounding me was the family of Jim Bussanmas, now deceased.  I was nervous.  A little Crown and Coke should help with that, I thought.

A little is key.  In writing one searches for what we all search for:  redemption.  It’s best not to get sloppy going after it.

“What’s this line,” I asked, taking the first one off the screen:  “‘I never thought I would live so long and have this much fun?'”

“He said that when he went into the VA for the last time.  He was always trying to reassure us.  He did a good job at that.”  As stories continued about his final stay, I placed the line at the top of the obituary.

“It’s quite a quote.  It also says he tried to enlist at 16?”

“He sure did, but they made him wait.  He went in at 18 and became a Seabee.”  Adding that detail to the account of his military service, I looked up to find a picture held in front of me of Jim when he enlisted.  He looked more man than boy.  “Look at how trim he is.  Ladies must have went crazy for him.”

“Dad had a great appreciation for women.  It started with his devotion to Mary, and he would call all of us his ‘dollies.’  He loved my mother, and after she died he would come to love Rozella.  They were quite a pair.”

As this was being said, another picture was selected and held in front of me.  “When the two of them got to laughing the room shook until you thought the walls would come down.”  And as the stories continued, I found the sentences that mentioned both women and added another:  “In their company he was happy.”

The story of an old RV, “Holy Moses,” became a vehicle itself, conveying his love of faith, family, conversation, and travel.  Another paragraph would catch other lines that made his family’s eyes glisten.  One final sentence would capture the story that made eyes more than glisten and would mention the man that called him “Dad.”

A couple of hours, and it was done.  A few more sentences to sum up the years.  I was thanked for writing them, but I hadn’t of course.  Jim had, and a lifetime, and a family, and redemption.  And what were those but all the ingredients necessary for the magic to happen?