Blue river

I woke wanting something I hadn't wanted in years, but couldn't think of the name of the thing I wanted. What I wanted had a certain sound to it, and that was about it.

What I wanted was the name of a person I hadn't thought about in some time. Why this name came to me--or rather why the image of the person appeared, his face, the sound he made when he spoke, the subjects he choose to write about etc.--when I woke is a mystery, as is his name.

He wore glasses when I knew him, had a long saturnine face that masked a good nature, and wrote his stories out in longhand.

He never revised, other than a word here or there.

Most of the things he wrote made no sense, or very little sense, at all, but they looked good on the page. They looked more like poems than stories, though he insisted they were stories. 

I haven't seen him in years. He lived on the east coast and I lived on the west and in the old days we communicated by letters: he wrote  by hand and I wrote on a typewriter.

I hope I can remember his name, I'm sure it will come to me. He lived beside a blue river.