Katherine, you need to write a book about Uncle Otis! Never mind the other stuff! Write about Uncle Otis!
Actually, I'm serious about that! 
(I remember the town drunk from Mayberry. 
)
I actually have fantasized about spending a year in my dad's hometown, on the western edge of Iowa, and writing about it. Maybe 17 years ago or so, my family went through the town on the way somewhere else. I had spent some time there when I was a kid, when my grandmother moved back there toward the end of her life. (She had spent the interim years in Des Moines.)
We were there for an afternoon, and had lunch with my dad's cousin. At one point, her son came in. He was the mayor, and said the town had asked Johnny Carson to donate to its big new athletic center. (Months later, I just happened to be reading the "people" column in the paper, and there was a little item saying he did! Total serendipity, since I don't usually read that column.) Johnny didn't grow up there, he grew up in nearby Omaha. But his cousin Rex was a childhood friend of my dad and his sisters, and family legend has it that my grandmother dated Johnny's father.
After lunch, we went by where my great uncle and aunt's motel used to be. It was called the L&M Motel, after their names, Lloyd and Mattie. Now it was a little clinic of some kind. At that point, this woman walked up to our car and asked if we needed help or directions. Turned out she had been Lloyd's housekeeper (he lived across the street) and cared for him during his final years/days. He'd been born in 1898 and had hoped to live to see three centuries, but didn't quite make it. Now this woman lived in his house. I can't remember her name, but in the essay I wrote about it later I called her Roberta, so I'll call her that.
I joined Roberta in her giant old car, my husband and kids following, and we all drove to the cemetery, where Roberta led us to the family graves. One was a huge -- like, 12-foot-tall -- monument with my dad's name on it. Of course, it wasn't my dad's grave -- he had the same name as his father, but it wasn't his father's grave, either, judging by the dates of birth and death. It must have been his father's father. Other Reads had been buried in this same place, people with names like Maude and Beatrice.
Roberta then led us to the old family house, this big white house where my dad had grown up and where his senile grandfather (a traveling salesman who always thought he was living in a hotel and the family members were the hotel staff) lived for a while, as did Uncle Otis. Roberta told me Lloyd's attic was full of old papers and other stuff, including Otis' court records, written (of course, at the time) by hand.
After that, we drove to my aunt and uncle's house for dinner in a town not too far away. I asked my aunt about Roberta, and she recalled that when she was in high school a girl got pregnant, and she thinks the child was Roberta. I asked about the giant cemetery monument and what she knew about her great-grandfather, and she said she knew nothing about him. Which is so odd, because he had apparently owned a lot of property in town and it was a very small town. My grandfather inherited money, but lost it in the Depression and never worked again. When I was really little, he killed himself.
Anyway, I've thought it would be fun to go back, live a year, go to the courthouse and look into the family records, see if Roberta is still around and if Lloyd's attic is still full of stuff, and also generally write about the experience of living in an extremely small town. You don't hear much about that experience, or see it depicted in movies or TV shows -- they're always slightly bigger small towns, like Mayberry. Often they're cute and quaint. This one isn't particularly. If you've seen
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? it's like that town.
So although it's pretty close to Omaha, it would be a scary adventure in culture shock. But just think of what I'd saving on housing for a year! If I could get an advance book contract to do it, I'd probably do it.
