Being Pea Eye  − 5 May, 2008

Pea Eye Parker is a character from Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” series.  He’s none too bright, but he’s loyal, a hard worker, and has survived unimaginable hardships.  Much later in life, he becomes a devoted father.  Unlike me, he’s a man of few words.  I adopted his name as my nom de plume because my nickname was already Pea, and my husband’s nickname comes from the “Lonesome Dove” series.   I wanted to anonymize my identity a bit so that I would write whatever I wanted to write with less fear of people who knew me reading my thoughts and feelings.

I have given the link to this blog to only five people.  These are all people I trust with my thoughts and feelings.  There are more than five people who fall into that category, but these are the five people who I think might actually read my blog.  The fifth person was my mother in law.  I hadn’t planned to share the link with her, but when I saw how interested she was in my stories, and when I learned that she’d already read a bunch of my pieces on my wiki, I thought, “Why not?”

Oddly, the first person I told about this blog, my husband, never reads it.  For a while, this made me feel bad because I knew he was reading our friend’s food blog.  But he explained, kind of awkwardly, that it’s hard for him to read the blog of someone he knows.  I’m not sure how this explains why he can read our friend’s blog, but I guess when he said, “knows”, he must have meant “knows extremely well”.  So I’ve given up hoping that he will read my blog.

No matter.  I don’t want anyone to feel like he or she has to read my blog.  I want people who enjoy my writing to read my blog.  I write for me, but I also write for my readers.  I like being Pea Eye.  I’m more outgoing than the real Pea Eye, and a lot smarter too, although that’s not saying much.

The “Lonesome Dove” series is a very sentimental favorite of mine (spoiler coming up).  I’ve read the series twice, and seen the mini-series twice.  One summer, when I read the book and watched the miniseries again, I was twice in tears of misery over the death of Augustus McCrae.  I don’t know whether I can live through the death of Gus a third time.  

Pea Eye was by Gus’ side when he sustained the fatal injury.  That night and the next day, Pea Eye walked and crawled many miles from the site of the injury back to the homestead.  He made part of that journey naked, as brambles had ripped his clothes to shreds.  He also arrived blinded and incoherent from the unrelenting sun that beat down upon him.  But without Pea Eye’s journey, Gus would have died alone on a riverbank.

What I share with Pea Eye is the spirit of the survivor.  There are times when I have had to fight every step of the way in the journey to become who I am.  I have Pea Eye’s dogged determination to make it through to the other side.  But I didn’t think about any of this when I chose the name.  It just happens to fit. 

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