Paul Erland

The Misforgotten Paul Erland

Memories make us what we are. So does forgetting. Sully is a fifty-something-year-old barfly playing out his days, until a series of events rouses him, and opens the floodgates of memory. At the library, where he works, he's asked to lead a Great Books class, and not until after he agrees does he discover that all the participants happen to be homeless. A mystery at the Hi-Note, the bar he haunts, inspires him to begin writing a detective story. He starts seeing Linda, a woman he works with. He's enlisted to write an essay for the Dive Bar of the Year competition by the Hi-Note's owner, in exchange for a free tab. And the memories-of his days as an athlete and his career as a drinker-come fast and furious. As he takes up again in earnest two enthusiasms of his youth-reading and writing-Sully also discovers a cause. Justice, he decides, is owed as much to the things we can't remember as to those we can't forget.