img July 1989 img

A little girl begins to eat semisolid food. A little girl’s mother begins to eat semisolid food. Someone’s finger signs improve. A bird. A plane. No, definitely a bird. An author pretends to be a reviewer. And the shortcomings of education are discussed.

 

Jewel-Lye 7, 1989

Dear Jenny,

 

You will not believe this. I spent two hours this morning writing a letter to someone about setting up a possible collaboration with Philip Jose Farmer. You haven’t heard of him? Well, maybe your mother has. He’s a fine writer, whose work I admired when I was in college. His first novel was called The Lovers, and it’s a classic. A girl and I collaborated on an oil painting suggested by it; I painted the monstrous bug, and she painted the nude woman. We don’t know where that painting is now; it disappeared into a men’s dorm somewhere and hasn’t been seen since. You say you believe that, and when am I going to get to something interesting? Give me time, girl; I’ve only started. So thirty years later I agreed to contribute to a ten-author collaborative novel. I wrote the first chapter, and Mr. Farmer wrote the second, but then it went wrong, because the later writers didn’t relate well to the first two chapters, and the editor rejected it before it was finished. Now, over a year later, the editor who rejected it wants to see if it can be rescued by making it a Farmer-Anthony collaboration, starting with our two chapters and alternating between us until it is done. This intrigues me, because Farmer is one fine writer. If you ever get bored with Anthony, try Farmer. So I said okay, and now the editor will see if Farmer wants to do it. You say you believe that, and what’s the point? Have patience, girl; you’re a teenager now, and supposed to be interested in more interesting things. Well, the chapter I wrote to start off the book was adapted from a story I did about twenty five years ago, that never sold, about a thirteen year old girl who was blinded and maimed in a car accident, and is mute, and—you say you don’t believe that? Look, I wrote it in 1963, when your mother was only eight years old, which was about the age of the girl when she was in the accident. The girl’s name was Tappuah, Tappy for short, and she developed the ability to relate to animals in a way that ordinary folk could not. In fact they would come to her. You still don’t believe? Well, I said you wouldn’t. Oh, now you believe? You say you’re a terrible teen young woman and you will change your mind as you please? Sigh. So anyway, if this project goes forward, in due course you can read about Tappy, who is your age now, and how she finds love and adventure in realms nobody can believe. Yes, she will learn to speak again; that was more psychological than physical. And I suspect she will see again, in due course.

So that was my morning, when I should have been working on Tatham Mound. In that novel, the nine year old girl Tzec has just been adopted as a daughter by the Trader, as she is an orphan. Fifteen years later she will meet the protagonist again, and marry him; she has a long memory. But first I have a lot of other adventures to figure out. Meanwhile, I wanted to mark the word “said” in the prior paragraph for bold printing, and this is the monochrome screen and doesn’t show it, so I went to the color modifier and experimented, and discovered the darndest things. I put it on blink, and now it’s blinking perpetually. No I’m not teasing you! Will you stop with that stuff! I tried putting the whole screen on blink, and it did it, but that’s deafening, I mean blinding to watch, so I put it back. Two blinking words are enough.

Ongoing matters: As I write this I have your mother’s letter, which says she hopes to go see you Friday—that’s today, in my terms—when you will see the cushion my wife made for you. We had to guess at your birthday, but maybe we came close. You can have catnaps with it. She says you may be home before the house gets revised. No, you can’t tell the house to hurry up. No, you won’t be out of your teens before it’s ready. Have patience. Your mother has little enough of that already.

Remember that power failure we had? No, it hasn’t returned—I wonder where they go, in between times?—but we still have buckets of water we dipped out of the pool to flush the toilets. Maybe we’ll have another power failure, so we can use up those buckets.

And horses: I had told you about Blue. Now I’ll skim over two others, but I can’t skip them entirely, so brace yourself, because it’s sad business. We didn’t want to have one horse alone, because they prefer company of their own kind, and also we had another daughter, so we got Cheryl a horse too. That was Misty, a white horse, fifteen and a half hands high. I represented her (with a sex change) as the Day Horse in Night Mare. She was sort of set in her ways, and preferred mooching food from people to giving them rides. She came down with foot problems, which is bad news with horses, and in the end couldn’t walk, and we lost her.

The vet happened to have another mare, called Fantasy, who was a beautiful five year old with a perfect white shield on her brown forehead. She had had a serious illness when young, and looked fine now, but was not to be ridden; she was perfect for company for Blue. She loved people, because she had been raised among them. She would have been a twenty thousand dollar horse, but we got her for nothing, because she was now worthless as a show horse. Oh, she was a darling! I had an Astroturf mat by my study door, and she could not believe it wasn’t edible, so every time I came to the study it was in a different place, where she had dropped it after tasting it. We have a mini barn we built for the horses—when we moved we built another just like it, so they would feel at home—and from the house we could see into the two stalls, but it did no good. Blue is black, and she faded into the shadow, night mare style, becoming invisible. Fantasy was brown, and she faded into the woodwork. But Fantasy was not as healthy as she seemed. When she began ailing, we called the vet, thinking it was something minor, but it was her heart, dating back from her fillyhood: it had a hole in it, so it couldn’t circulate her blood well, and now it was catching up with her, and she was gone, only four months after we got her. She didn’t deserve it.

The vet had a white pony, which someone had left for boarding and then never picked up. That’s like dumping dogs and cats. But of course the vet didn’t kick her out; he was just stuck for the unpaid board. So now we’re boarding her, and if the owner ever comes to pick her up, he’ll have to pay several times her value in boarding fees, so I don’t think he will. We named her Snowflake, after a lost filly in Blue Adept, because the vet didn’t know her name. She’s a true pony, all white and the cutest thing, trained for children to ride. But we don’t ride her, of course; no children here any more, and she’s only for company for Blue. She’s so fat that sometimes I call her roly-pony. We feed her only half a cup of grain at a feeding, but she forages well, and remains so fat we sometimes wonder if she’s pregnant. She gets along perfectly with Blue. So it has been for two and a half years. When Blue—well, she is 31 years old, which is ancient for a horse—she’s healthy, but eventually—well, then we’ll give Snowflake back to the vet, who has a relative with a child who will by then be ready to learn to ride.

And I was telling you my songs. Today I had a good run, and I sang several to myself in the shower, and the one I want to share with you this time is Rue. I needed a song for Mercenary, the second novel in my Space Tyrant series—DON’T READ IT—you may be a teenager now but you’re still below the age of consent and subject to the Adult Conspiracy—for a girl called Roulette, Rue for short, and none seemed suitable, and I looked through my daughter Penny’s collection of song books—I turned her on to music, of course, along with the value of long hair (which reminds me: I had a terrible dream the other night, that my other daughter Cheryl had cut her hair short; what a horror!), and found that one, just right. I had it on a record, in fact. It’s advice to young women, tending their gardens, and your mother will have to explain part of what makes it funny and sad because of the spellings. “Come all ye fair and tender maids, who flourish in your prime, prime; beware, beware, make your garden fair, let no man steal your thyme, thyme, let no man steal your thyme.” Second verse: “For when your thyme is past and gone, he’ll care no more for you, you; And every day that your garden is waste, it will spread all over with rue, rue …” And the third: “A woman is a branching tree, a man a sea wind, wind; And from her branches carelessly, he will take what he can find, find …” Keep that advice in mind, when.

Now our pool has crept up to a scant 84°F and is almost swimmable, for the first time this year; Cam and Cheryl are in it, and I must join them. So this letter must end, but there will be another in a week. Don’t squander your teens all in one year, Jenny!

PS—Hi, Cathy! Same for you!

The Morning After: Here is a special bulletin: 84° is not warm enough! Brrrr! We swam for half an hour, missing a phone call in the process, and I think I turned blue. But while I’m here, some additional notes: I’m enclosing the usual clippings, such as an old one I found of a woman with hair ten feet long, some fun-sheets in a catalog with things like newsprint or handsome men on them—if you ever see ones with luscious young women, let me know—, an idealized map of the country, a math riddle your mother will delight torturing you with, a tall fish story, and illustrated headaches that describe your mother’s worstest days.

And a final note: two days ago, as I rode my bicycle out to pick up the newspapers, I saw two clouds rising brightly out of the background smog, as if seeking their place in the sun. They were highlighted at the top, but their feet remained bogged down in glop. I think their names were Amorphous and Vagary. Remember them, next time you have a dull therapy session.

Jewel-Lye 14, 1989

Dear Jenny,

I consolidated the files and got all your letters together, here; this is the 20th Jenlet. Maybe we should celebrate with a cupcake with 20 candles on it. Well, you had something like that for your birthday, didn’t you? So how come I can’t—I know it’s not a birthday, but—are you going to be a spoilsport about this? Growr!

What? Who’s tugging on my sleeve? Oh, your mother. She says “Mmmph mmmph,” and the rest is indistinguishable. Oh, that dental surgery! She’s translating what you’re saying, but somehow I’m not getting it. So how can I—Cathy, do you know what—?

Ah, there’s your daddy. There’s a law I made up: every family needs a man in it, to make sense of things. So what’s the—

Ah, he explained it. You want to save that cupcake for when you can eat it. Well, why didn’t you say so? You just lay there with your teeth in your mouth, and—

How did we get into this mess? I’ve already written today to a suicidal girl and a murderer, and now—What? You say I’m the one who’s looking for the fight? How dare you! Just because the next thing I have to do is answer a letter in a fanzine that differs with me about whether there should be a Minimum Wage (I once had a job at a restaurant that paid 45 cents an hour because the minimum wage law didn’t apply)—What? Oh, yes, I earn more than that now. I think. Now will you stop changing the subject? Hm, maybe we should change the subject; this one isn’t getting anywhere.

Your mother’s situation reminds me that when I first heard from her about you, at the end of FeBlueberry, I was recovering from dental surgery. The gum was getting low at the front of my mouth, pulled down by a tendon or something attached to my lip, so they took a little square of gum tissue from the roof of my mouth and spliced it into the front. The front recovered okay, but every time I tried to eat anything, that raw empty patch in the roof of my mouth said “Make My Day!” I had to stay on a liquid or mush diet for a couple of weeks. I guess you know what that’s like. So does your mother. When the dogsled runners say “Mush! Mush!” they mean “Go faster!” but when we say it we mean “When the Censored will I be able to get off this diet?!”

Ouch—I started this letter this morning, and suddenly it’s late afternoon. What happened? Well, I ran my run, and I remembered a wonderful song to tell you about—and forgot it right after. Sigh. The mail piled in, everything except your mother’s letter she said way on va vay. (No, she didn’t sound quite that bad, but she did sound as if you had better hold her hand for a while.) You want to hear about my problems with the mail? No? Good, I’ll tell you. Several fan letters to answer, and one from a former editor about that possible collaboration with Phil Farmer—remember, the one with the thirteen year old blind girl?—explaining that the other editor associated with that ten-author project might make trouble. I may have to buy him out, in order to recover the rights to my chapter, and Farmer’s chapter. Could cost me twenty times as much as I was paid for that chapter. Oh, I can do it, but it’s an aggravation; I only did that chapter as a favor to him. I’ll be more careful about favors next time. If he gets too greedy, I’ll point out that legally I don’t have to pay him anything; the material has already reverted to me, because it’s been two years since I delivered it. But this is nasty sort of business. Which reminds me: ask your mother whether she is pursuing a civil remedy. She’ll know what I mean. Also in the mail arrived three books by Jack Woodford from his publisher. You never heard of the man? Small wonder; most of his books are decades out of print. He was an ornery cuss who got into trouble with publishers by speaking the ugly truth. You can see why I like him! It was one of his books about writing that gave me the information I needed to get going better as a writer, back in 1958. So now I’ll return the favor and give a blurb—that’s a favorable brief comment—for his books, though he’s dead now. But that means my weekend will be gone, reading. Sigh. Would you like to read a book for me? No, huh? What kind of a friend are you? I can see it now: a blurb saying “This is a great book—Jenny” and everyone will wonder how Jack Woodford ever managed to get such an important person to comment. I still have in mind getting you to a fan convention, some year, where everyone will be amazed to meet you. But first let’s see how far you progress; I don’t think you’re ready for it yet. Is it true you have prism spectacles, so you can look down without looking down? That sounds like fun.

Have I said anything yet in this letter? My head’s spinning; I’m not sure what I’ve done and what I have yet to do. Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the day: when I biked out to fetch the newspapers, I saw a raccoon on the way up and a bunny on the way back. We have an opossum on that section, too. I can tell the difference: the possum has a ratlike tail, while the coon has a ringed tail. Nearer the house I saw our Devil’s Walking Stick. That’s a plant. It’s an ugly, thorny weed here, looking like a crooked cane, with thorns anywhere you might try to touch it. But it’s distinctive. We went out to rescue a number of native plants in FeBlueberry, before the mower came to mow between the pines. We transplanted about eight rosemary plants, one ivy vine, and one little Devil’s Walking Stick which was hardly more than a section of root. The rosemaries all died; I guess they didn’t like the soil near the house. The ivy got chewed back several times, but survives. The Devil’s Walking Stick survived and put out a new fernlike leaf—which a bunny must have chewed off. So I sprayed bug repellent on it, and then it was left alone. It put out another leaf, and another, and now it’s about knee high with ten big leaves and beginning to come into its true ugliness. Wonderful; it’s a success story. Maybe some day it will be tree-size. Say, do you think if they sprayed you with bug repellent, you’d grow strong and ugly? Maybe just strong and mad.

I guess I’d better get on to the enclosures, before you enclose me in a magic shield. I hate to throw things out, even when I can’t use them, so I saved out a few of those magazine stamps: two about cats for you, one about Vegetarian Times, and one for SAVVY WOMAN for your mother. No, I couldn’t find one saying GOOD NATURED MAN for your daddy. Also a clipping about V.C. Andrews, a writer currently on the bestseller list: she gets 20 fan letters a week, though she’s dead. I know the feeling! What surprised me was to learn that she was quadraplegic—that is, she couldn’t use her arms or legs. Shows you can become a highly successful writer regardless. No, you don’t have to go that far, and I guess you don’t want to be a writer anyway. But I think the same would be true for an artist. Maybe once you get home, if they ever finish fixing up your house, and you have room for a computer, you can use the time between therapy sessions to paint pictures on the screen and become a teenage artist. Which reminds me: do you have a radio? I listen to the radio all day while I’m working: popular songs, light classical music, the news, and interesting call-in programs. There’s Dr. Joy Brown the psychologist, who addresses callers' most personal problems—um, the Adult Conspiracy might veto that. At 5:00 daily there’s All Things Considered, an excellent program; you’re a teen now, so you should be adult enough to appreciate it. There are violent liberal and conservative call-in hosts who can be fun to listen to even if you don’t agree with them. The local liberal one is running a campaign to make the Orlando Blockbuster Video store carry The Last Temptation of Christ; he’s even interviewing their customers, who say about two to one they want that video movie carried, but the store refuses. He’s really putting it to them. I like that, because I’m an agnostic—that means I don’t believe or disbelieve in God, and belong to no religion—and I support freedom of expression. I want to see that movie, which I understand is a thoughtful one, but I can’t, because no store dares carry it locally. That’s censorship, and I HATE CENSORSHIP!! (Sorry, didn’t mean to yell.)

Where was I? Oh, the clippings. Why do you let me wander off the subject like that? There’s one on a big maze called the Wooz (Zoom spelled upside down) that folk can wander through. Let’s you and I walk through that one, some day. There’s Curtis, with cheese flavored bubble gum. (Mozzarella is a cheese: we call it Monster-ella, just as Muenster is Monster cheese.) And my British mother sent a sheet for you: goofs English children made. “Noah’s wife was called Joan of Arc.” That sort of thing. So why isn’t your mother laughing? Oh, those teef; I forgot. And a chain letter I received a year ago, and ignored; as a matter of principle I never forward chain letters. Don’t send this one on to anyone; I just thought you’d like to see it. It claims you get good luck. Chain letters, in general, are a crock of—er, nitrogen; they are not legitimate. Many of them pretend to be thousands of years old, when they can’t be, and to bring you money, which they won’t. Any one involving money is illegal anyway. But let’s pretend this one will bring you good luck, though we both know this is nonsense.

Jewel-Lye 21, 1989

Dear Jenny,

Wow! It’s almost five, and I’m just starting this letter. I had hoped to have it finished by this time. My day has been—in fact my week has been—WILL YOU PAY ATTENTION, YOU DIFFICULT GIRL!? That’s better. I’ve had piles of stuff to read, and piles of complicated letters to—nuh-uh, keep that tongue out of sight!—so it’s just been a hassle, and I’ve gotten very little paying writing done since last week’s letter.

I’ve been hearing from you folk! I have two letters from your mother—I’ll get to them in a moment—and one from Sue Berres (before I thought it was Benes, but now those letters look like R’s), and two from you. The first was a Birthday Card—um, I’d better discuss that. I offered to exchange information about birthdays with you, because I wanted to discover yours, so we could catch you in time with the Jenny/Xanth cushion. I figured we could just forget about mine, after that. The truth is, birthdays aren’t nearly as much fun at my age as they are at your age, and I didn’t want you to feel obliged to send anything. But since you have already sent a card, okay, I’ll tell you. I’ll be 55 on AwGhost 6. So thanks for the card, and I’ll remember it when the ill-fated day finally strikes. The other was an Anniversary Card. I guess I mentioned our [power failure here—Ha! I had just Saved, so I didn’t lose anything] 33rd anniversary because it fell on a Jenny-letter day. Otherwise I would not have bothered you. But thanks for that card too. I understand it’s a real job for you to sign your name to these things. (That would seem like sarcasm, if we didn’t know your situation. Folk outside don’t realize—well, never mind.)

Now let me get a bit more serious. Last time I teased your mother about her supposed problem speaking. Then her letters arrived describing the progress of her jaw problem, and I wished I hadn’t. Teasing is supposed to be a fun thing, and this isn’t fun. I mean, if she had two days of discomfort, then was better than new, okay. But she’s in real distress, and for all I know that complaint could have her in the hospital by the time you hear this letter. The chances of her being there to read it to you are next to nil. Since your mother has been my main inspiration for fun insults—well, this just isn’t the time for that sort of thing. But I did want to say that even from this distance, I can see that her misery is composed of three parts. First, the actual discomfort of her mouth, which is physical and horrendous. Second, the inconvenience this malady causes, inhibiting her activity so she can’t do all the things she wants to do. You know better than anybody what that’s like. Third, it stops her from visiting you. I think that’s the worst. She wants so much to be with you, Jenny, and everything keeps getting in the way so she can’t have you home yet, and now she can’t even get over there for visits. This tears her up. I guess you’re not too pleased about this either, but I think at the moment that it’s bothering her more than you.

So she is feeling worse than she might because of you, and you are feeling worse because of her. This does neither of you much good. Of course you can’t just say “I don’t care!” and not worry about each other, or not be concerned about your separation. But I hope some understanding helps. Send her an “Okay, I love you” through your daddy, and it will make her feel better. She might even send you one back. Meanwhile, in case she has to spend some time in bed and can’t reach her computer, I’m sending her a bound galley that just arrived of my collaborative novel Through the Ice. That’s the one I wrote with Robert Kornwise, who died in an auto accident just one year before your accident, with no more justice. It is as though I am fated to encounter one such tragedy a year, and his was the one for 1988. So this isn’t a joyful association, but it’s one you folk will understand rather better than most. When your mother gets better, maybe she’ll read bits of it to you, as there is time. I hope there’s not another case like this next year; there’s already been twice as much misery as there should have been, for Robert Kornwise’s family and yours.

Meanwhile, keep up with your dull mundane exercises. I know progress is slow, but it’s possible to be slow and still get where you’re going. I’ve always been slow—slow to speak, slow to read, slow to discover what girls were (stop sniggering!), and slow to make it as a writer. Remember the tortoise and the hare. One writer, younger than I, had already written and sold forty novels by the time I had sold my first, but today I think I have done more than he has, and certainly more successfully. So speed is not the essence; steady accomplishment is. You don’t have to do everything in a month, or a year; you could take eight years, as I did to make my first story sale, and still go pretty far thereafter, as I did. Just don’t quit trying.

On to incidental things: Today my wife may have seen a hummingbird. They flit by so fast it’s hard to be sure. And on my run (yes, the little magnolia is fine), I saw tiny tadpoles in the tub we use for horse water in the pasture. We should have a whole flock of frogs! (Flock? Well, what is it called?) And yesterday I found a canoe. Well, not exactly. I was writing a chapter of Tatham Mound, and the southern Indians use dugout canoes, and my hero was traveling up to Tennessee, where the Cherokees lived, and I thought wouldn’t it be nice if he could get a birchbark canoe there. But white birch trees don’t grow in the south. I knew them up north, with their paperlike bark that you can actually write on. But maybe up high in the mountains—so I researched, and discovered that there is one variant of paper birch that grows in the south: high in the mountains of North Carolina. That’s exactly where my hero is! So he can have a birchbark canoe, which is a great comfort to him, as well as a novelty, because he has one bad arm and paddling is hard. A light canoe makes all the difference. So that was a nice discovery, and now I have him and a friend in their birchbark canoe traveling down the Tennessee river, in the year 1516.

We had three power failures in a row, trying to wipe out this letter, so I had to quit for a while, and couldn’t finish it today. Okay, hang on; I’ll finish it tomorrow morning and still catch the mail, or else. Have a good night’s sleep, Jenny. You too, Cathy.

Jewel-Lye 22, 1989—Okay, it’s next morning. I was going to finish this quickly, so as to catch the mail, but I had to check on two things—and wouldn’t you know it, that took me a #$%&*f!! hour. So now—what? No, those other items wouldn’t interest you. So now I’ll get on to the enclosures, which—what? No, those other things which delayed me are very dull, really; you don’t want to know about them. So I have the Sunday Curtis, which Sue Berres tells me is the first thing you read in my letters; now I know what you like about my letters, the comics! And an item on cats, and one on big Florida mosquitoes, and—what? Will you get off that other business;, girl? It’s not interesting! You know something, you can be the stubbornest darn thing—now don’t look that way, you know I don’t like it—oh, all right, I’ll tell you. Briefly. I had ten letters yesterday from fans, and I managed to pencil answers to nine of them yesterday during the power failures that were making this letter late. I scribble my answers on the backs of the envelopes, see, and every week the secretary types them up for me. You demand to know why you don’t rate a secretarial letter? Because those take about an extra ten days, and—ah, now you understand. So this morning I tackled the last one, and the guy apologized for what he’d said in his last letter, and asked for my opinion of his marriage, so I thought I’d better reread his last letter, which I did not remember. One thing I’ll say about you, Jenny: you don’t ask my opinion about your marriage. Yes I know, you’ll get to that a decade hence, when—let’s get back to the subject, shall we? So I checked my correspondence, and couldn’t find his last letter. Time wasted. So I turned on the computer and did a computer search of my letter record. Found it—for last OctOgre. Last week I filed all last year’s letters in the attic. Sigh. So I unlocked it and headed off into the heat to delve through the voluminous files—what? Oh, “voluminous” means the way your mother’s jaw is feeling these days. All blown up out of proportion, so that she looks like a—now stop that! You know I promised not to tease her about that. So finally I found the letter—and it bore no relation to anything the current letter said. Oh: different first name, different address. It wasn’t the same person, after all. I could find no letter by the same person, and his present letter came through the publisher, so he didn’t have my address. I don’t think he wrote to me before. So why did he say he did? Beats me. Do you know? You’re not much help, you know that? And keep that tongue in your mouth! And stop blinking at me. I’m on to all your tricks. No, don’t you dare do your thing with the finger! And don’t call me Nitrogen Face either! If you do, I’ll tell Ray what you really called him, instead of the expurgated version. Ha—that finally got to you, didn’t it! So the other thing was a letter from the fanzine I write to, where I mentioned you, and the folk there send their good wishes to you. But this letter was about John Brewer, the prisoner I mentioned: the fanzine called the TV station near Brewer’s prison, and the folk there say the man’s not on death row but serving life imprisonment. Now the fanzine is upset, because I said he was on death row. Well, I sure thought he was. So I had to check his first letter to me, way back last AwGhost—right, in the attic files!—and when I ran it down, it said nothing about anything like that. So I went through more letters, and finally found it in his third letter to me: how he killed his fiancee and was sentenced to death for it. I’ll quote that to the fanzine, so at least I won’t be in trouble with them. You see, I had Brewer write to them, stating his case, and if you want to know what happens when you drop a nitrogen bomb into an outhouse—well, these folk can get righteous about law enforcement, so I thought I’d acquaint them with the reality and maybe jolt them out of their ivory towers. Your daddy will tell you what an ivory tower is. They aren’t too pleased. You see, Brewer is trying to get them to execute him, because he says he’s guilty and deserves to die. I suspect he’s right. I only wish that drunk driver who hit you was next in line after him. Anyway, that’s where my hour went, and I still have to write that letter—right after this one. Now aren’t you sorry you brought it up? Stop looking so smug!

Let me conclude with a couple of minor things. I discovered last week that on this computer when I mark a word for bold printing, I can set it to blink. More fun. So now my bolds are blinking. Here, I’ll show you: Bold. Isn’t that something? Blink, blink, blink! Oh, you can’t see it blink on the paper? Sigh. Well, take my word: it’s a blinking bold word. And I remembered a song that seems suitable: the “Worried Man Blues.” It starts out “It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song …” and I think your mother’s humming it now.

Keep smiling, Jenny. I know it’s not easy, now, but if we concentrate this week on getting your mother better, then we can concentrate on you in a week or two. It’s your turn to be strong.

Jewel-Lye 28, 1989

Dear Jenny,

Right—I’m on my upstairs system now. Alan, who is my daughter’s boyfriend, is working for me this summer, and one of the things he does is figure out computer programs for me, so I don’t have to use up my time for it. So he’s working on the downstairs system, which is the one I usually use for letters. Okay—so you get a laser-printed missive; you’ll survive. Oh—what program is he working on? Well, I needed a good mass file-handler, so I wouldn’t erase good files and save bad ones—your mother will tell you all about that when she’s back—and didn’t have one, so when PC COMPUTING magazine offered me a disk with file handling if I’d subscribe, I decided to try it. It took them a month to send the disk, by which time I’d discovered QDos, which does a nice job. But now that the other program, DirMagic, is here, I’m having Alan put it through its paces, so he can tell me how it compares. So I’m working up here, in my novel-writing study, which is fine.

Yesterday we had the farrier over to trim our horses' hooves. A farrier is a blacksmith who can make shoes and such for horses, but mostly he just trims, because we don’t ride our horses. It’s like trimming your fingernails. Now Blue has been with us eleven years and she’s okay, but Snowflake spooks at the sight of a halter. But we don’t care to leave the halters on them regularly, because they’re free in the forest, and a halter could get hung up on something. So we halter them only at need. So there was the farrier, and Blue got spooky, to my surprise; I did get the halter on her and let her go so I could do the same with Snowflake. Mistake! Blue headed into the forest, and the farrier couldn’t do her. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get Snowflake. Finally I did catch Blue, and Cam—that’s my wife, who made you the Xanth pillow—took her to the farrier. I discovered I’d been trying to put the wrong halter on Snowflake, so I went back to the barn and fetched the right one, with the lead rope. Snowflake came up to inquire what I was doing, so I put the halter on her. Just like that. We got them both done. Yes, I was three times as lucky as I deserved to be. Getting the horses' hooves trimmed always makes me nervous, because I do have to catch them first. Once the halter is on and I have hold of it, they are no trouble at all, and behave perfectly. So that was my little adventure yesterday. If you ever have a pony, you’ll have similar adventures. Monday we’ll go through the same thing with the vet.

Let’s see, I’m writing this letter in Jewel-Lye, but it will be two days into AwGhost before you hear it. So where is your mother? Well, it’s the two-th of the month, so she’s getting her tooths done. In fact she’s getting the things yanked out. In fact she’s so browned off about not being able to visit you that she looks like a baked potato. Especially in the face. She swears that she’ll see you later in the month, though hell should bar the way. So relax; when she visits, you can lend her your talk-board (I forget what it’s called) so she can wish you well despite not being able to open her mouth.

I have the usual enclosures, plus some oddments. There’s Nothing But Zooms, which you can watch when you get home: that’s the artistic animation of that formula I told you about, the Mandelbrot Set. It starts out looking like a bug, but the edges are amazingly complicated and beautiful, and the closer you look, the more intricate they are. So enjoy it when; this is your video. I’m also enclosing a block of 20 stamps for you or your mother; they were on a package I received, and I just couldn’t throw them out, so here they are, and if you hate them, you can throw them out. And a cartoon about fire ants. And one about Florida politics, with our Governor Martinez as a frog. He’s not a good governor, and this is becoming increasingly apparent. So there’s this princess, kissing the frog—and he just doesn’t turn into a prince. Right: she’s browned off; you can see how brown she is. And a funny excerpt from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten that you should really enjoy. And a cartoon about the rare baby turtles here—a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, one of the ten most endangered species and the rarest turtle known, laid her eggs on the St. Pete beach, so they’re watching to make sure the eggs hatch, and maybe missing something else. Harpy reading!

Movie-review time. Yes, I know you haven’t seen many original movies recently. But when you get home, you can watch video movies, and eventually everything will be available, so you can see it. I’m just giving you a notion what to watch for. You see, I don’t see many movies myself; I’m too busy to get out. I hardly drive, in fact. The other day I had to move our microbus somewhere, and I’d never driven it before, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the windshield wipers or even how to get the key out. There’s a button you have to push, you see, but it just didn’t do it. Right: wrong button; the real one was hidden around the steering wheel. Sigh. But my daughter the journalist—that’s Cheryl, who is 19 now and in college, only she’s working at the local newspaper this summer—no, Alan is not her boyfriend, he belongs to Penny, who is 21 now—yes, it does get complicated keeping track, but somehow they manage it—she has to review movies for the paper. Now I only go out to see a movie about once a year, and the one I saw this year was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is how I know you’d like it. But Cheryl had to review Lethal Weapon II, so we made it a family occasion. I mean, on my own I won’t go out, but for a daughter I will. There’s something about daughters. So Cam and Cheryl and I went to see it. That’s one slam-bang violent motion picture! But it does have some plugs for the environment, and some humor, and one nice sex sequence—oops, Adult Conspiracy! Okay, don’t see that one.

Then Cheryl had to review Dead Poets Society. That’s about boys at a conservative prep school. Yes, I know, it sounds dull as monotony. What? You say boys don’t sound dull? Oh—you turned thirteen. Now you know what boys are. Ah, well. As it happens, I found this to be a profoundly moving picture. You see, it shows the kind of private high school I went to, and the kind at which I taught English. What a horror! Don’t ever go to a school like that! But to this school comes a new teacher, who believes that poetry should be appreciated, not inflicted. I kept whispering the names of the authors to my daughter as lines from poems were quoted: Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—as I said, I went to this type of school—(Oh, my, now there’s a song by Crystal Gayle on the FM. I always think of her hair) only now they were being rendered with feeling and understanding. The boys began to catch on to the spirit of it, and formed their secret group, The Dead Poets Society. They would sneak out at night and smoke cigarettes—that’s the adolescent notion of privilege, which you definitely don’t need to emulate—and look at pictures of bare-breasted women—okay, you can do that if you want to—and recite poems with feeling. But later one of the boys, balked from anything meaningful by his stern father, committed suicide, and the school sort of framed the good teacher as responsible and fired him. So it’s a sad ending, except that at the end the boys finally show their respect for him by standing defiantly on their desks. He had taught them to look at things in new ways, you see, such as from the height of their desks. You think that’s stupid? No it isn’t; that was a really feeling conclusion to the movie. Of course it hit me twice as hard, because I know the horror of the conformist education—my whole life since has been a muted protest to conformity—and I really appreciated it. Yes, I left teaching after one year because of similar frustration, and no, they didn’t want me back anyway. I retired to full time writing and have never stopped. So yes, you should see this movie, because you will be moved by it, and it will help you to understand some of what I am made of, if you’re interested. Good, competent, feeling teachers are a treasure, because the system discourages them. Penny brought home a paper with her teacher’s marking on it, and all I can say is the man comes across like an illiterate ass. He writes “don’t end a sentence with a proposition.” No, that’s not a typo, and yes, you can end a sentence with a preposition. Actually, his advice is good, in an unintended way; I’m trying to get Penny to send that example to Reader’s Digest. But he’s making up rules not to be found in Fowler’s (that’s the ultimate authority) and doesn’t know the distinction between “to” and “too”—I mean, this is the ilk teaching a college course?! And if my daughter protests such ignorance—she happens to have been raised in a literate family—she’ll just get penalized in her grade. So as you can see, I have some emotional involvement here. See that movie, when you get the chance.

Am I boring you yet? Not quite yet, but close? Okay, another movie. We live in a conservative Christian community, so naturally it banned Last Temptation of Christ, as I think I mentioned before. Well, this week Ron Lindahn, the artist in charge of the Xanth Calendar—yes, I’ll send you one, when I get a copy—sent me a copy of it, so I finally got to see it. Actually I’m not terrifically interested in religion, but I keep an open mind. This was fairly dull, as I expected, but worthy; it’s a more realistic picture of Jesus Christ than you generally see. When he is crucified he has a vision of being rescued, and getting married and having children: of being ordinary, in fact. But in the end he realizes that he can only deliver his message by being crucified, and he begs to go back. Then he is back on the cross, and the movie ends. I think it’s a worthy movie, and that those who ban it are bigots.

Last night my wife and daughter were watching reruns—they seem to prefer them to new material—but during commercials Cheryl flicked through other channels. They say you can tell who is the boss of a household by who controls the remote control for the TV. I don’t even know how to use it! One of the things on another channel was a movie about a man who got seduced by his best friend’s sexy daughter. She was in a bikini and brother, did she have the stuff! Naturally that didn’t interest my wife or daughter; they put it back on the reruns, then left the house for ten minutes. So I struggled with the controls and found the channel—which was now running continuous commercials. Finally it got back to the movie—and wife and daughter returned. Sigh. You say you don’t understand why I should want to watch a girl in an overstuffed bikini? Well, naturally not; you’re one of them. But the movie had degenerated into slapstick anyway, no more bikinis. Sigh.

Beautiful flute music on the FM. Life does have some compensations. Okay, next letter I won’t talk about movies. Meanwhile, keep up with your exercises and practice your swallowing. And don’t look at me slantwise through those right-angle-vision glasses! Is Cathy there? I understand you have a therapist named Cathy; how do you expect me to tell them apart? Well, say hit to roommate-Cathy. Did Sue read you “Dead and Breakfast” yet? She sent me a copy. Now she’s in my Jenny Directory too; it’s getting crowded in there with all you people jostling elbows!