tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1023412748654788382024-03-05T11:07:07.911-05:00A Big MonstEr BlogReflections on pop culture and other tragi-comedies.Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-63109227858830665442016-02-10T13:41:00.000-05:002016-02-10T13:41:40.398-05:00Social Media and Technology: Whose Hooking You?<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">This post appeared originally on <i>LinkedIn</i> as:</span></h1>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><i>Who’s Really Addicting You to Technology?</i></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">by Nir Eyal </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<b style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Post Date: Feb 9, 2016</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet,” wrote Tony Schwartz in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/addicted-to-distraction.html" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">recent essay</a> in <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The New York Times</em>. It’s a common complaint these days. A steady stream of similar headlines accuse the Net and its offspring apps, social media sites and online games of addicting us to distraction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s little doubt that nearly everyone who comes in contact with the Net has difficulty disconnecting. Just look around. People everywhere are glued to their devices. Many of us, like Schwartz, struggle to stay focused on tasks that require more concentration than it takes to post a status update. As one person ironically put it in the comments section of Schwartz’s online article, “As I was reading this very excellent article, I stopped at least half a dozen times to check my email.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s something different about this technology: it is both pervasive and persuasive. But who’s at fault for its overuse? To find solutions, it’s important to understand what we’re dealing with. There are four parties conspiring to keep you connected and they may not be whom you’d expect.</span></div>
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The Tech</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The technologies themselves, and their makers, are the easiest suspects to blame for our dwindling attention spans. Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” wrote, “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">Online services like </span><i>Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Buzzfeed </i><span style="font-style: inherit;">and the like, are called out as masters of manipulation — making products so good, people can’t stop using them. After studying these products for several years, I wrote </span><a href="http://www.nirandfar.com/gethooked" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">a book</a><span style="font-style: inherit;"> about how they do it. I learned it all starts with the business model.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Since these services rely on advertising revenue, the more frequently you use them, the more money they make. It’s no wonder these companies employ teams of people focused on engineering their services to be as engaging as possible. These products aren’t habit-forming by chance; it’s by design. They have an incentive to keep us hooked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">However, as good as these services are, there are simple steps we can take to keep them at bay. After all, we’re not injecting Instagram intravenously or freebasing Facebook. For example, we can change how often we receive the distracting notifications that trigger our compulsion to check.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to Adam Marchick, CEO of mobile marketing company Kahuna, less than 15 percent of smartphone users ever bother to adjust their notification settings — meaning the remaining 85 percent of us default to the app makers’ every whim and ping. Google and Apple, who make the two dominant mobile operating systems, have made it far too difficult to adjust these settings so it’s up to us to <a href="http://www.nirandfar.com/2016/01/laptop-zen-creating-distraction-free-desktop.html" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">take steps</a> to ensure we set these triggers to suit our own needs, not the needs of the app makers’.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">The Boss</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While companies like Facebook harvest attention to generate revenue from advertisers, other more generic technologies have no such agenda. Take email, for example. No one company “owns” email and the faceless protocol couldn’t care less how often you use it. Yet to many, email is the most habit-forming medium of all. We check email at all hours of the day, whenever we can — before meetings begin, waiting in line for lunch, at red lights, on the toilet — we’re obsessed. But why? Because that’s what the boss wants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Near the top of the list of individuals responsible for your seeming addiction to technology is the person who pays you. For almost all white-collar jobs, email is the primary tool of corporate communication. A slow response to a message could hurt not only your reputation but also your livelihood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unfortunately, being chained to technology can leave little time for higher order thinking. Real work — requiring the kind of creativity and problem solving that only comes from uninterrupted focus — no longer happens in the office, it starts at home after the kids are put to bed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cal Newport, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, calls this sort of work “deep work.” In <a href="http://amzn.to/1SCY4t9" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">his book</a> by the same name, Newport writes, “Deep work is to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, and shallow work describes activities that are more logistical in nature, that don’t require intense concentration.” Playing email Ping-Pong with colleagues is shallow work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Newport recommends people discuss the appropriate ratio of deep and shallow work with their employers. “Get your boss to actually try to commit to a vision like, ‘About 50% of your time should be unbroken and 50% should be doing these shallow tasks.’” Newport continues, “When they’re actually confronted with how much time you’re spending trying to produce real results with your skills, they have to start thinking, ‘Okay, we need to change some things.’”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">
Your Friends</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Think about this familiar scene. People gathered around a table, enjoying food and each other’s company. There’s laughter and a bit of light banter. Then, during a lull in the conversation, someone takes out their phone to check who knows what. Barely anyone notices and no one says a thing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, imagine the same dinner, but instead of checking their phone, the person belches — loudly. Everyone notices. Unless the meal takes place in a fraternity house, the flagrant burp is considered bad manners. The impolite act violates the basic rules of etiquette.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One has to wonder: why don’t we apply the same social norms to checking phones during meals, meetings and conversations as we do to other antisocial behaviors? Somehow, we accept it and say nothing when someone offends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The reality is, taking one’s phone out at the wrong time is worse than belching because, unlike other peccadillos, checking tech is contagious. Once one person looks at their phone, other people feel compelled to do the same, starting a churlish chain reaction. The more people are on their phones, the less people are talking until finally you’re the only one left not reading email or checking Twitter.</span></div>
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<img class="center" data-loading-tracked="true" height="314" src="https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAYaAAAAJGQyZjViZTA5LWFjNWItNDNiZC05MjgwLTA1NWJlYmVjMmQ1Mg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 30px auto; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;" width="439" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From a societal perspective, phone checking is less like burping in public and more like another bad habit. Our phones are like cigarettes — something to do when we’re anxious, bored or when fidgety fingers need something to fiddle with. Seeing others enjoy a puff, or sneak a peek, is too tempting to resist and soon everyone is doing it</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The technology, your boss, and your friends, all influence how often you find yourself using (or overusing) these gadgets. But there’s still someone who deserves scrutiny – the person holding the phone.</span></div>
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You Are</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a confession. Even though I study habit-forming technology for a living, disconnecting is not easy for me. I’m online far more than I’d like. Like Schwartz and so many others, I often find myself distracted and off task. I wanted to know why so I began self-monitoring to try to understand my behavior. That’s when I discovered an uncomfortable truth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I use technology as an escape. When I’m doing something I’d rather not do, or when I am someplace I’d rather not be, I use my phone to port myself elsewhere. I found that this ability to instantly shift my attention was often a good thing, like when passing time on public transportation. But frequently my tech use was not so benign.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I faced difficult work, like thinking through an article idea or editing the same draft for the hundredth time, for example, a more sinister screen would draw me in. I could easily escape discomfort, temporarily, by answering emails or browsing the web under the guise of so-called “research.” Though I desperately wanted to lay blame elsewhere, I finally had to admit that my bad habits had less to do with new-age technology and more to do with old-fashioned procrastination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s easy to blame technology for being so distracting, but distraction is nothing new. Aristotle and Socrates debated the nature of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">akrasia</a>” — our tendency to do things against our interests. If we’re honest with ourselves, tech is just another way to occupy our time and minds. If we weren’t on our devices, we’d likely do something similarly unproductive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Personal technology is indeed more engaging than ever, and there’s no doubt companies are engineering their products and services to be more compelling and attractive. But would we want it any other way? The intended result of making something better is that people use it more. That’s not necessarily a problem, that’s progress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These improvements don’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to control our use of technology. In order to make sure it doesn’t control us, we should come to terms with the fact that it’s more than the technology itself that’s responsible for our habits. Our workplace culture, social norms and individual behaviors all play a part. To put technology in its place, we must be conscious not only of how technology is changing, but also of how it is changing us.</span></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-4151427747331389362016-02-04T17:07:00.001-05:002016-02-04T17:07:38.283-05:00What Does "February" Mean?<br />
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">4 February 2016</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Source: <i>Dictionary.com</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Though February is the shortest month of the year, it often feels like the longest in cold, snowy climates. Why does the month have only 28 days?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">First here’s a little history . . . The original Roman calendar only had ten months, because the winter was not demarcated. Around 700 BC, the second king of Rome,</span> <span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #444444; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Numa+Pompilius" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Numa Pompilius</a>,</span><span style="color: #333333;"> added January and February to the end of the calendar in order to conform to how long it actually takes the Earth to go around the Sun.<span id="more-4041" style="border-color: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-style: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>The two new months were both originally 28 days long. It is lost to history why January acquired more days, though there are various unverifiable hypotheses. At that time, March 1 became New Years’ Day. Later, in 153 BC, the beginning of the year was moved to January 1.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The word<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b> <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/february" style="border: 0px; color: #2f64d2; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease-in-out;">February</a></b> </em>comes from the Roman festival of purification called <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Februa</em> where <i>people were ritually washed.</i> There is a Roman god called <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Februus</em>, but he is named after the festival, not the other way around. Other months, like January, are named after Roman gods. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The interesting linguistic story, though, lies in England. Before we adopted the Latin name for the second month, Old English used much more vibrant names to describe it. The most common Old English name was <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Solmonath,</em>which literally means “mud month.” It is pretty clear what they were describing. A lesser-used term was <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kale-monath</em>, which meant “cabbage month.” We can imagine that the English were eating a lot of cabbage in February in the 1100s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So, what do you think of February?</span></div>
Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-22998556943240531532016-02-04T16:57:00.003-05:002016-02-04T16:57:37.237-05:00The Five, or So, Stages of Disbelief<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOsB1i_tXLAkrA9cI7d0_XAwWnQVixMbfgv5AjV8NwUp07avBAT3uQIoHjZxQkwKj2w1vrKy2h3D_bIcj9WyQ7N4H3uvLDXvVRh8mAB93iDWK9qjjrLgkjVKvx0X7HExcsOZdFa43w1LE/s1600/Horror+Films.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOsB1i_tXLAkrA9cI7d0_XAwWnQVixMbfgv5AjV8NwUp07avBAT3uQIoHjZxQkwKj2w1vrKy2h3D_bIcj9WyQ7N4H3uvLDXvVRh8mAB93iDWK9qjjrLgkjVKvx0X7HExcsOZdFa43w1LE/s1600/Horror+Films.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="color: blue;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1430423863009_11486" style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , "lucida grande" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px;"><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1430943442455_3075" style="font-size: xx-small; font-style: italic;">He who battles monsters should be careful lest he thereby become one. If you gaze </span></span></span><br />
<span class="" style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , "lucida grande" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into thee."</span> </span><br />
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<span class="" style="background-color: white; color: #440062; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , "lucida grande" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px;"> </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><span class="" style="color: #440062; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , "lucida grande" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px;"> </span><span class="" style="color: #440062; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , "lucida grande" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px;">~ </span><a class="" href="https://www.facebook.com/FriedrichNietzscheAuthor" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1430423863009_11494" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: pointer; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.32px; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Friedrich Nietzsche</a></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Below is a breakdown of each of the 5 stages of grief (by E. Kubler-Ross): </span><br />
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<tr><td><strong>1 – Denial</strong></td><td>Denial is a conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, reality, etc., relating to the situation concerned. It’s a defense mechanism and perfectly natural. Some people can become locked in this stage when dealing with a traumatic change that can be ignored. Death of course is not particularly easy to avoid or evade indefinitely.</td></tr>
<tr><td><strong>2 – Anger</strong></td><td>Anger can manifest in different ways. People dealing with emotional upset can be angry with themselves, and/or with others, especially those close to them. Knowing this helps keep detached and non-judgmental when experiencing the anger of someone who is very upset.</td></tr>
<tr><td><strong>3 – Bargaining</strong></td><td>Traditionally the bargaining stage for people facing death can involve attempting to bargain with whatever God the person believes in. People facing less serious trauma can bargain or seek to negotiate a compromise. For example “Can we still be friends?..” when facing a break-up. Bargaining rarely provides a sustainable solution, especially if it’s a matter of life or death.</td></tr>
<tr><td><strong>4 – Depression</strong></td><td>Also referred to as preparatory grieving. In a way it’s the dress rehearsal or the practice run for the ‘aftermath’ although this stage means different things depending on whom it involves. It’s a sort of acceptance with emotional attachment. It’s natural to feel sadness and regret, fear, uncertainty, etc. It shows that the person has at least begun to accept the reality.</td></tr>
<tr><td><strong>5 – Acceptance</strong></td><td>Again this stage definitely varies according to the person’s situation, although broadly it is an indication that there is some emotional detachment and objectivity. People dying can enter this stage a long time before the people they leave behind, who must necessarily pass through their own individual stages of dealing with the grief.</td></tr>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-13385033418955774862015-05-04T12:57:00.000-04:002015-05-07T10:27:30.612-04:00Signs Say the End is Near <br />
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<b style="line-height: 19.6000003814697px;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Will the great, secular bull market end with a whimper, not a bang?</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9FXBpZ0FWN3Z0eUAXjyrCejoYV7gJDANYPFgK49ZGTVBttB4ZgZ9oI-gFS5v27JOGCqYUBknWJGjEx-rgor_IGbnbiiYVFCcUt_EAfwNDTpsJbGaugWBkNQFmgOuCmiufxpzE2H4QKgs/s1600/End+Is+Near.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9FXBpZ0FWN3Z0eUAXjyrCejoYV7gJDANYPFgK49ZGTVBttB4ZgZ9oI-gFS5v27JOGCqYUBknWJGjEx-rgor_IGbnbiiYVFCcUt_EAfwNDTpsJbGaugWBkNQFmgOuCmiufxpzE2H4QKgs/s400/End+Is+Near.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>by William H. Gross</b></div>
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<b>Source:</b> <span style="color: blue;">http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gross-ending-130946669.html;_ylt=A0LEVjVKcEpVMp8At6MPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--</span></div>
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Having turned the corner on my 70th year, like prize winning author Julian Barnes, I have a sense of an ending.<br />
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Death frightens me and causes what Barnes calls great unrest, but for me it is not death but the dying that does so. After all, we each fade into unconsciousness every night, do we not? Where was “I” between 9 and 5 last night? Nowhere that I can remember, with the exception of my infrequent dreams. Where was “I” for the 13 billion years following the Big Bang? I can’t remember, but assume it will be the same after I depart – going back to where I came from, unknown, unremembered, and unconscious after billions of future eons. I’ll miss though, not knowing what becomes of “you” and humanity’s torturous path – how it will all turn out in the end. I’ll miss <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">that</span> sense of an ending, but it seems more of an uneasiness, not a <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">great</span> unrest. What I fear most is the dying – the “Tuesdays with Morrie” that for Morrie became unbearable each and every day in our modern world of medicine and extended living; the suffering that accompanied him and will accompany most of us along that downward sloping glide path filled with cancer, stroke, and associated surgeries which make life less bearable than it was a day, a month, a decade before.</div>
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Turning 70 is something that all of us should <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">hope</span> to do but <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">fear</span> at the same time.<br />
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At 70, parents have died long ago, but now siblings, best friends, even contemporary celebrities and sports heroes pass away, serving as a reminder that any day you could be next. <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">A 70-year-old reads the obituaries with a self-awareness as opposed to an item of interest. Some point out that this heightened intensity should make the moment all the more precious and therein lies the challenge: make it so; make it precious; savor what you have done – family, career, giving back – the “accumulation” that Julian Barnes speaks to.</span> Nevertheless, the “responsibility” for a life’s work grows heavier as we age and the “unrest” less restful by the year. All too soon for each of us, there will be “great unrest” and a journey’s ending from which we came and to where we are going.<br />
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<img alt="A sense of an ending has been frequently mentioned in recent months when applied to asset markets and the great Bull Run that began in 1981" height="62" src="https://17eb94422c7de298ec1b-8601c126654e9663374c173ae837a562.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/Images//umbrella%20redesign/bill%20gross/May_pullQuote01.png" style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="320" /><br />
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A “sense of an ending” has been frequently mentioned in recent months when applied to asset markets and the great Bull Run that began in 1981.<br />
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Then, long term Treasury rates were at 14.50% and the Dow at 900. A “20 banger” followed for stocks as Peter Lynch once described such moves, as well as a similar return for 30 year Treasuries after the extraordinary annual yields are factored into the equation: financial wealth was created as never before. Fully invested investors wound up with 20 times as much money as when they began. But as Julian Barnes expressed it with individual lives, so too does his metaphor seem to apply to financial markets: “Accumulation, responsibility, unrest…and then great unrest.” Many prominent investment managers have been sounding similar alarms, some, perhaps a little too soon as with my Investment Outlooks of a few years past titled, “Man in the Mirror”, “Credit Supernova” and others. But now, successful, neither perma-bearish nor perma-bullish managers have spoken to a “sense of an ending” as well. Stanley Druckenmiller, George Soros, Ray Dalio, Jeremy Grantham, among others warn investors that our 35 year investment supercycle may be exhausted.<br />
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<div style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; background-color: white; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; color: #54575a; font-family: Arial, san-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 19.6000003814697px; padding: 10px 0px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">They don’t necessarily counsel heading for the hills, or liquidating assets for cash, but they do speak to low future returns and the increasingly fat tail possibilities of a “bang” at some future date.</span> To them, (and myself) the current bull market is not 35 years old, but twice that in human terms. </div>
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Surely they and other gurus are looking through their research papers to help predict future financial “obits”, although uncertain of the announcement date. Savor this Bull market moment, they seem to be saying in unison. It will not come again for any of us; unrest lies ahead and low asset returns. Perhaps great unrest, if there is a bubble popping.<br />
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Policymakers and asset market bulls, on the other hand speak to the possibility of normalization – a return to 2% growth and 2% inflation in developed countries which may not initially be bond market friendly, but certainly fortuitous for jobs, profits, and stock markets worldwide.<br />
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<div style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; background-color: white; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; color: #54575a; font-family: Arial, san-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 19.6000003814697px; padding: 10px 0px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Their “New Normal” as I reaffirmed most recently at a Grant’s Interest Rate Observer quarterly conference in NYC, depends on the less than commonsense notion that a global debt crisis can be cured with more and more debt.</span> At that conference I equated such a notion with a similar real life example of pouring lighter fluid onto a barbeque of warm but not red hot charcoal briquettes in order to cook the spareribs a little bit faster. Disaster in the form of burnt ribs was my historical experience. It will likely be the same for monetary policy, with its QE’s and now negative interest rates that bubble all asset markets.<br />
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But for the global economy, which continues to lever as opposed to delever, the path to normalcy seems blocked. Structural elements – the New Normal and secular stagnation, which are the result of aging demographics, high debt/GDP, and technological displacement of labor, are phenomena which appear to have stunted real growth over the past five years and will continue to do so. Even the three strongest developed economies – the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. – have experienced real growth of 2% or less since Lehman. If trillions of dollars of monetary lighter fluid have not succeeded there (and in Japan) these past 5 years, why should we expect Draghi, his ECB, and the Eurozone to fare much differently?<br />
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Because of this stunted growth, zero based interest rates, and our difficulty in escaping an ongoing debt crisis, the “sense of an ending” could not be much clearer for asset markets.<br />
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Where can a negative yielding Euroland bond market go once it reaches (–25) basis points? Minus 50? Perhaps, but then at some point, common sense must acknowledge that savers will no longer be willing to exchange cash Euros for bonds and investment will wither. Funny how bonds were labeled “certificates of confiscation” back in the early 1980’s when yields were 14%. What should we call them now? Likewise, all other financial asset prices are inextricably linked to global yields which discount future cash flows, resulting in an Everest asset price peak which has been successfully scaled, but allows for little additional climbing. Look at it this way: If 3 trillion dollars of negatively yielding Euroland bonds are used as the basis for discounting future earnings streams, then how much higher can Euroland (Japanese, UK, U.S.) P/E’s go? Once an investor has discounted all future cash flows at 0% nominal and perhaps (–2%) real, the only way to climb up a yet undiscovered Everest is for earnings growth to accelerate above historical norms. Get down off this peak, that F. Scott Fitzgerald once described as a “Mountain as big as the Ritz.” Maybe not to sea level, but get down.<br />
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Credit based oxygen is running out.</div>
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At the Grant’s Conference, and in prior Investment Outlooks, I addressed the timing of this “ending” with the following description:<br />
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<span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>“When does our credit based financial system sputter / break down? When investable assets pose too much risk for too little return. Not immediately, but at the margin, credit and stocks begin to be exchanged for figurative and sometimes literal money in a mattress.” </i></span><br />
<span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">We are approaching that point now as bond yields, credit spreads and stock prices have brought financial wealth forward to the point of exhaustion. A rational investor must indeed have a sense of an ending,</span> not another Lehman <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">crash</span>, but a <span style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">crush</span> of perpetual bull market enthusiasm.</div>
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<img alt="asset prices may be past 70 in market years, but savoring the remaining choices in terms of reward risk remains essential" height="125" src="https://17eb94422c7de298ec1b-8601c126654e9663374c173ae837a562.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/Images//umbrella%20redesign/bill%20gross/May_pullQuote02.png" style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="627" /></div>
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But what should this rational investor do? Breathe deeply as the noose is tightened at the top of the gallows? Well no, asset prices may be past 70 in “market years”, but savoring the remaining choices in terms of reward / risk remains essential.<br />
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Yet if yields are too low, credit spreads too tight, and P/E ratios too high, what portfolio or set of ideas can lead to a restful, unconscious evening ‘twixt 9 and 5 AM? That is where an unconstrained portfolio and an unconstrained mindset comes in handy. 35 years of an asset bull market tends to ingrain a certain way of doing things in almost all asset managers. Since capital gains have dominated historical returns, investment managers tend to focus on areas where capital gains seem most probable. They fail to consider that mildly levered income as opposed to capital gains will likely be the favored risk / reward alternative. They forget that Sharpe / information ratios which have long served as the report card for an investor’s alpha generating skills were partially just a function of asset bull markets. Active asset managers as well, conveniently forget that their (my) industry has failed to reduce fees as a percentage of assets which have multiplied by at least a factor of 20 since 1981. They believe therefore, that they and their industry deserve to be 20 times richer because of their skill or better yet, their introduction of confusing and sometimes destructive quantitative technologies and derivatives that led to Lehman and the Great Recession.</div>
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Hogwash. This is all ending. </div>
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The successful portfolio manager for the next 35 years will be one that refocuses on the possibility of periodic negative annual returns and miniscule Sharpe ratios and who employs defensive choices that can be mildly levered to exceed cash returns, if only by 300 to 400 basis points. My recent view of a German Bund short is one such example. At 0%, the cost of carry is just that, and the inevitable return to 1 or 2% yields becomes a high probability, which will lead to a 15% “capital gain” over an uncertain period of time. </div>
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I wish to still be active in say 2020 to see how this ends. As it is, in 2015, <b>I merely have a sense of an ending, a secular bull market ending with a whimper, not a bang.</b><br />
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But if so, like death, only the timing is in doubt. Because of this sense, however, I have unrest, increasingly a great unrest. You should as well.<br />
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<em style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: 0px rgb(210, 212, 215); box-shadow: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">-William H. Gross</em></div>
Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-43781769509680412062015-04-13T09:52:00.002-04:002016-02-04T17:11:56.257-05:00<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One Word That</span></h1>
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Confident People Say</span></h1>
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Apr 13, 2015</div>
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<span style="font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit;">By Brian De Haafd</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><b> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-word-confident-people-always-say-brian-de-haaff</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">It often happens like this. </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">A co-worker comes strolling down the hallway and peers around the corner at you. You look up, annoyed by the interruption. She then quickly asks, "I was not able to finish my report for the boss. Can you finish it for me tonight?"</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I know this happens, because it happened a lot to me earlier in my career. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Time slows after the "ask." You are now thinking about how to respond, but nothing feels quite right. So, as always, you say, "Sure."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">You might say "Sure" because you really should help. But most often, this is not the case. "Sure" often comes from a place of defense -- a need to please and be liked by the right people. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But let me share a secret. We often say "Sure" because we lack confidence to say and do what we know is right. When it comes to confidence, those who have it always seem to shine, while those who are meek and afraid are taken advantage of.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I am referring to the type of confidence that gives us internal fortitude, not the outlandish bravado that some show to mask deep fears. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Confidence is easier said than internalized; it usually develops over time, with practice, patience, and perseverance. But there is no doubt that to succeed in life, it is a must.</span></div>
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<span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So, do you know the one word that confident people say most?<b style="font-weight: inherit;"> </b></span></span><br />
<span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="font-weight: inherit;"><br /></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><span style="color: #4d4f51;">It's obvious when you think about it -- that word is, </span><span style="color: #990000;">"No" </span></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Here are a few reasons that saying, "No" can help you be your best and those around achieve as well. It's also why confident people are not afraid of the word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reaffirms your priorities</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-weight: inherit;">The most confident people plan ahead. They have clearly defined goals and know what it takes to get there. This helps them prioritize what is important in their lives -- and ignore what does not align with their goals. Every "Yes" should align with these goals; if something does not, the answer is "No."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sets clear expectations</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The word "Yes" is often said out of obligation. The problem is that "Yes (wo)men" tend to make promises that they can not always deliver on. Frequently, they fail to get every job done. If you do this, it damages the confidence and trust that your team will start to place in you. And when real chances to shine arise, you will be passed over.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Broadcasts your value</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We all know the stars whom we can count on to produce great work with a positive attitude. We rely on them. Saying, "No" to irrelevant requests reminds people that you are important, have clear priorities, and your work matters. You do not have time to focus on less important efforts.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>The most confident people know who they are and how they add value. They don't need to prove their self worth by saying yes to every request that is made of them.</b></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We all get paid to set boundaries and clearly communicate what we should work on. This is what confident people do best. The next time someone asks you for a favor, do not blindly accept it without questioning its value.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Habits Are Caught, Not Taught</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Over time, this habit will make you more confidentt and increase your professional identity since every day you will be getting better.</span><br />
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So -- has saying, "No" ever boosted your confidence? How? When? </span></strong><br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-69602459843702357252015-03-25T12:11:00.001-04:002015-03-25T12:39:02.241-04:00The Hypocrisy -- Ted Cruz Signs Up for Obamacare<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Senator <b>Ted Cruz</b><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> </strong>on Monday announced his bid for the White House to a live audience in Virginia. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Full of ugly hubris, Cruz (the all-Canadian, Cubano legislator) said, "Imagine in 2017, a new president signing legislation repealing every word of Obamacare."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If successful, that "new president" will be Ted Cruz, and the moment he signs that bill into law, he and his family will have zero health care insurance. <span style="line-height: 21.6000003814697px;">The Tea Party Republican – just 24 hours after once again calling for the repeal of the President's health care plan that has delivered affordable health care to literally millions of Americans, and extended the age students, like those at Liberty, can be under their parents' plan – confessed to CNN's Dana Bash this afternoon he just <b>signed up for Obamacare.</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"We'll be getting new health insurance and we'll presumably do it through my job with the Senate, and so we'll be on the federal exchange with millions of others on the federal exchange," Cruz said. <span style="line-height: 21.6000003814697px;"><b>He called it "transitioning." Hypocritically, he did not call it <i>Obamacare</i> but "the federal exchange."</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cruz's wife, Heidi Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs' Houston office, is taking an unpaid leave of absence from her job, presumably to avoid any appearance of impropriety. The Cruz family has been getting its health care insurance from Mrs. Cruz's employer, but now they are no longer eligible while she is on leave.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So Senator Cruz signed up for Obamacare, and sees absolutely no hypocrisy, or even irony, with taking that action.</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cruz, it should be noted, has every right to buy health care insurance privately, like many Americans do, but chose to sign up for Obamacare and to accept the federal government subsidy that he is entitled to as a sitting U.S. Senator.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I believe we should follow the text of every law, even (a) law I disagree with," Cruz told CNN. "It's one of the real differences -- if you look at President Obama and the lawlessness, if he disagrees with a law he simply refuses to follow it or claims the authority to unilaterally change."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">CNN's Dana Bash<b> was shocked and looked incredulous </b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #4c4c4c; font-family: chaparral-pro, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 21.6000003814697px;">as she asked, "That means you are going to take a government subsidy?" She noted, "The <b>irony</b> is kind of unbelievable."</span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><i>Source Blog: David Badash</i> (3-24-15)</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: chaparral-pro, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px; line-height: 21.6000003814697px;"><b>http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/ted_cruz_sees_absolutely_no_irony_or_hypocrisy_now_that_he_s_signed_up_for_obamacare_video</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: chaparral-pro, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px; line-height: 21.6000003814697px;"><b>XXX XXX XXX</b></span></span></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-2101576767447389082015-03-24T16:20:00.001-04:002015-03-24T16:20:30.350-04:00Cyberloafing, Skiving, and Other Workday Amusements<h1 style="background-color: white; color: #e3120b; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #5b5b5b;">or </span><span style="color: #cc0000;">Thrive at Work with a Minimum of Effort</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #ea9999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Blogger Says: </b>The source here is <u>The Economist (Issue 24 Oct 2014)</u>. This humorous article makes key points about <i>cyber-loafing </i>dodging responsibilities while on the job<i>, </i>among other salient topics. ------ Yours as always, Butch Ekstrom</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">The best way to understand a system is to look at it from the point of view of people who want to <u>subvert</u> it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">Sensible bosses try to view their companies through the eyes of corporate raiders. Serious-minded politicians make a point of putting themselves in opponents’ shoes. The same is true of the world of work in general: the best way to understand a company’s “human resources” is . . . to study the basic principles of <u><span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>skiving</b></span></u>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">(A) The first principle of skiving (or <span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>shirking</b></span>, as Americans call it) is always to appear hard at work. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">This is the ancient jacket-on-the-back-of-the-chair trick: leave a coat permanently on display so that a casual observer — a CEO practising “managing by walking around”, for example — will assume that you are the first to arrive and the last to leave. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>The skill of skiving is subtle: ensure you are somewhere else when the work is being allocated. </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">Successful skivers never visibly shy away from work: confronted with the inevitable they make a point of looking extremely eager. This “theater of enthusiasm” has fooled almost everyone. Policymakers bemoan the epidemic of overwork. But . . . studies suggest that the average worker devotes between one-and-a-half and three hours a day to loafing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">(B) The second principle is that information technology is both the slacker’s best friend and deadliest enemy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">The PC is custom-made for the indolent: you can give every impression of being hard at work when in fact you are shopping, booking a holiday or otherwise frolicking in the cyber-waves. And thanks to mobile technology you can now continue to frolic while putting in face time in meetings. There is also a high-tech version of the jacket trick: program your e-mails to send themselves at half past midnight or 5:30 a.m. to give managers the impression that you are a Stakhanovite.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;"><i>But, wait, there is a dark side to IT</i>: one estimate suggests that 27 million employees around the world have their internet use monitored. Dealing with this threat requires vigilance: do everything you can to hide your browsing history. It may also require something that does not come naturally to skivers: political activism. Make a huge fuss about how even the smallest concessions on the principle of absolute data privacy will create a slippery slope to a totalitarian society. Skiving is like liberty: it can flourish only if Big Brother is kept at bay.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">(C) The third principle is that you should always try to get a job where there is no clear relation between input and output. The public sector is obviously a skiver’s paradise. In 2004 it took two days for anyone to notice that a Finnish tax inspector had died at his desk. In 2009 the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration discovered that some of its employees had spent three-quarters of their working hours watching internet pornography. In 2012 a German civil servant wrote a farewell message to his colleagues, on his retirement, confessing that he had not done a stroke of work for the past 14 years. And it is almost impossible to sack (people like this).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">Big private-sector organisations can be almost as fertile skiving grounds as government ones. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">In “The Living Dead” (2005), his memoir of life as an office worker, David Bolchover says that the amount of work he had to do was inversely related to the size of the company that he worked for. He started his career in a small firm where he had to work hard for no title and low pay. He ended working for a big company where he had a grand title and a fat pay packet but did almost nothing. But millions are perfectly happy to devote their lives to firm-financed leisure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">Hitherto skivers have focused on old-line companies where aging managers can be bamboozled with the claim that it is quite impossible to build an Excel spreadsheet in anything less than two weeks. But . . . the likes of <i>Google</i> and <i>Facebook</i> make the adult equivalent of children’s playgrounds . . . to provide their employees with an opportunity for relaxation between intense bursts of toil. But now that these companies are becoming bloated monopolists there is a perfect opportunity for canny skivers to take advantage of the nap pods without bothering with the frantic work. </span></div>
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<hl2 class="subhead" style="display: block; font-size: 19.7999992370605px; margin: 30px 0px 20px;"><span style="background-color: #999999; color: #cc0000;">Cyber-loaf your way to the top ? </span></hl2></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">(D) The final principle of skiving is that you should not allow your preference for leisure to limit your ambition. Too many skivers are still bewitched by the old myth that there is a connection between effort and reward. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">There are . . . studies of skiving -- it is most prevalent at the very top and bottom of the pay scale. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #999999;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">The trick is to be brimming over with clever ideas for other people to execute!</span> </b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #999999;">And when you become a manager your problems are solved: you can simply delegate all your work to other people while you spend all of your 'busy' days attending international conferences or “cultivating relationships with investors."</span><br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-34538234175291204242015-03-18T12:49:00.000-04:002015-03-18T12:49:18.846-04:00St. Patty's Day -- Hardly Do We Know Ye<br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lift your glasses high and let's share a toast to </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">'getting real' about the yearly Day of the Green.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Source: National Catholic Reporter</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/st-patricks-day-we-hardly-need-ye</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Author: Ken Briggs</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Date: March 18, 2015</span></b><br />
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>It's time for St. Patrick's Day to go<i> private</i>. </b><b style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">As a public <i>hoo-haa</i> it's lost whatever relevance it once had. </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If churches and community groups carry it on, fine. But let's not continue singling it out as the only ethnic veneration day on our broad civic calendar.</b></span></span><br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #274e13; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, a disclaimer. I bow to no one in my gratitude for every bit of worthy character, courage and artistry that has flowed from the riches of Irish culture. Those have been inestimable gifts to me and my society.</span></b><br />
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>However, the practice of celebrating that culture with the customary gusto and chauvinism, at least where those things are manifest, has gone far beyond the need to hail a once downtrodden people who suffered centuries of injustice at the hands of the British. Many other ethnic groups that have suffered similarly and worse have climbed out of their misery to occupy solid places in American life. While there is nothing wrong with extolling the virtues of any group, something untoward has crept into the special attention conferred on St. Patrick's Day.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>We are too torn by race, class and ethnicity to risk inciting tensions further by seeming to play favorites. "Difference" doesn't have to imply "better" but human nature inclines it toward that. Though "better" can have an objective basis, it usually doesn't. So let's let it go to help foster that elusive "sense of community" we talk about. It had its place as a remembrance of liberation and an enactment of genuine Irish camaraderie, but the neighborhood watering holes where much of that emerged are disappearing fast and the parades no longer go through Irish precincts of large cities. For the most part, they're in the suburbs.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>It also seems to me that our Irish friends aren't any longer attached to the dynamics and emotions that once gave the day relevance. The tale of St. Patrick has been sufficiently </b></span><b style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">demystified to render the gallant Christian evangelist something less than a champion of a people mired in paganism. There is indisputably less of the kind of spiritual reverence around these days to shower on any outstanding figure, let alone one blurred by layers of legend. </b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #990000;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> St. Patrick: Pass that Jameson Please</span></b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Neither are the joys of drinking so widely promoted in an age of tragic autobiography and 12 Step programs. And the bank of political grievance, while not empty, is depleted to the point where co-existence has become possible and the flag need not be vigorously waved in defiance.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>My unscientific sampling of Irish people found almost no excitement or meaning attached to the day. Not to say they wouldn't wear green or feel a streak of justifiable pride that it brings along with it. It's more that the socio-economic success of European Catholics, and the Irish in particular, have weakened the kind of bonding that immigrant strivers longed for and the freedom to be Catholic even though anti-Catholicism was still lurking. Meanwhile, waves of Latino Catholics arrive with no such ties.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>What <span style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">would </span>St. Patrick say? <i>A festive day to all of you to whom it is festive.</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><i>St. Patrick's Day, therefore, serves no significant purpose in its present form, except for profits</i>, whether or not gays and lesbians march in the big New York and other parades. </b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><i>Keep it where there is real passion</i> for things Irish, where it may still have meaning as something other than superiority, but let it become an ordinary occasion for leveling the playing field.</b></span><br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-22832978813795851322015-01-23T16:03:00.001-05:002015-03-18T14:45:01.152-04:0010 Life Lessons of Striking Rock Bottom<div dir="ltr">
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>10 Life Lessons of Hitting Rock Bottom! </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Good reminders and some good counsel here. Click the link. -- Butch Ekstrom</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>http://huff.to/1yCZVEA</b></span></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0Hurstbourne Acres, Hurstbourne Acres38.22118 -85.58913tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-28362818717612468512014-10-22T07:30:00.003-04:002014-10-22T07:36:24.751-04:00The Last Progress of Hyrum Craver (In Progress)<br />
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<b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">By Butch Ekstrom</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> During his final and most crazed days, whenever the decrepit Hyrum Craver beheld his grown and beguiled son, Michael, who thought himself resplendent in his once gleaming and pliant, now stained and tacky, white suit, the old man concluded that a spanking bright archangel had come from some dark and foul corner of heaven in a counterfeit plot to deceive him with pity and assuagement. Like many dry drunks and violence-driven men who have aged nigh unto oblivion, Hyrum felt like the world and its hordes of lousy inhabitants owed him, owed him a lot, for his mischances and god-forsaken adversities without end, particularly his marriage to a dastardly, dumbed down, and achromic spouse named Winnie for forty odd years (who passed years back while snoozing in the bony embrace of a sicklied dark force), not to mention his ill-conceived brood of screwball, outright loony, adult children. Immobilized and left wheezing in his disintegrating mind and body, before he subsided in full, old Hyrum schemed to stick it out in <i>his</i> clapboard cabin through the decisive throes and malaise, in the company of his three bachelor boys, through thick and thin, because these children owed him a great debt for their provided-for lives and, being poor, near destitute and illiterate to the core, and no longer durable enough to fist bash his way out of any conundrum, Hyrum acceded that there was no one, and nowhere else, on the planet to which he could turn, not even his obstinate and churlish pair of baby girls, one of them with whom Hy had fathered his elder grandson who seemed to decline in body mass and drift more off base in the head every day.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "The white angel might still save me," Hyrum thought as he wobbled in and out of feeble stages. But he had known little and had not conserved any Faith during his exhausting hard luck and strings of grinding setbacks, mostly the ones he could squarely and violently blame on his insufferable bosses, spouse Winnie, and his laggard offspring. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Agonizing and breath-burgling emphysema attacks wracked the father's aged constitution. Once Hyrum convinced the boys, Allen and Darren, that he would <i>never, never</i> tolerate imprisonment in a money-grubbing hospital or Medicaid pit -- like the relegation of an infirm senior hound dog to those cut-throats in a rescues' kennel -- shadowy and fouled by age old moans and groans, and incessantly smelling of amber, acidic body discharges lying wet in scattered bedpans. Allen and Darren at last ceased their sensible, if not purely affectionate and sacrificial pleadings, with Daddy, while Michael knelt in a corner to pray and contributed little to conversations. The challenged pair of siblings knew that there was a tawdry chunk of life insurance money, not that many dollars, but in vain fantasies it augured like a million bucks glimmering on a threadbare horizon; a paltry Social Security death benefit from the government; and maybe some other valuable pluses, presents under an undernourished and mottled holiday tree, which they could only imagine: perhaps an astonishing inheritance of goods or currency from unknown family straight out of God's mysterious bounty and goodness, or a stash of money long bagged and secreted that only Winnie or Hyrum could reveal and release, or such as eternal relief from the undodgeable burden of parental caretaking, Kentucky albatross-like -- so, life without Daddy anymore. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Daddy, you hold on. You gonna make it, if you hold on," Allen and Darren repeated over Hyrum's sick bed several times a day. They sometimes patted his hands that folded together on top of the soiled, yellowed sheet and odorous ancient military blanket. They sought to sound convincing. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> During early morning and late each afternoon, in the dimness of his emotional state, the father would watch the white-suited archangel rise from his kneeling post, brush particles off the knees of his pants, with a shaky hand straighten the elastic band over the right bicep of his suit jacket, lean over Hyrum, make the sign of the cross on himself, and and then rub a small circle with his pulsing thumb slathered with oil on his father's forehead. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> This felt, each time it happened, like an affront. But would God's messenger, a pure archangel, cause him any harm?, Hyrum wondered.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The earnest but creepy interloper, who invariably needed a close shave, whose otherworldly right hand smeared with the chrism shook with palsy, whose eyeglasses shrouded his dark and inset eyeballs, whispered to Hyrum conspiratorially, "Go be with God, old man."</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b> Hyrum gasped for oxygen. Lord, bring me peace, for I am a dying servant, and I have served you without fail and without complaint, you know that to be the truth, he prayed. Hyrum feared his dying breath, knew it would commence soon, and the old man replayed the inevitable and morose pantomimicry.</b></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></b><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Daddy, you gonna need anything?," Darren would blurt late every evening. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> These were the invariable, last words uttered among the assembly of Cravers just before the final lamp in the clapboard cabin, its mute glow illumining patches of the tamped down dirt under their sock feet and the deteriorated, meager furnishings that had not been dusted or polished since Winnie passed, got extinguished. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> No answer came forth. Hyrum was off to the land of nod once the night's food got picked up and put away in the old icebox. Michael felt his way to his silent, little room, and would remain unassailed in his coveted retreat, even if he had to climb out his cracked window to relieve himself in the yard, during the night. Allen and Darren hastily closeted themselves in their beds so they could talk far into the night amidst their littered roomette, every inch of its coarse space overwhelmed by thick and accreting layers of repellent detritus from their childhood and adolescence and recent acquisitions, or plug in their separate pearl<i> iPods</i> with earplugs, before snorting and snoring in tandem, bodies side by side, faces bent toward each other, until another day in the Commonwealth dawned. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Second thing in the ramshackle cabin every morning -- since Michael, the soundless creeper, the white-bedecked spirit, emerged first from his dark-of-night withdrawal, a spiritual stealth artist still a bit mussed and bleary from a long sleep, or like </span></b><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">a penniless mime roughed up while rectifying sinful street spectacles and do-gooder despairing, in from the shadows of some big city, would pray over his parent, </span></b><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">at whom he would stare with intensity -- two displeasing and unbridled howls sounded inside the main room. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Allen and Darren, resembling two overused and chunky sleeping bags stuffed and bumpy with over-ripe and castoff fruits from local fields, rushed hand in hand into the main cabin space, and disrupted everyone. The mop top boys, in their sick humor rudeness, pretended to be burnished fire trucks -- with their sirens blaring at 10 out of 10 volume settings -- to set the scene for the breaking of another Kentucky morn. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Yet on this occasion Michael who had knelt by Hyrum's pallet looked pale and stricken. Michael had placedhis hands on the edge of his father's bed, a hesitant outreach to check on and perhaps comfort one abrasive parent who had always been there but now was starved for breath, rigid, still as the deepest nighttime, and thus missing. </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To Be Continued </span></b><br />
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<b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I'm still here, but yet I'm gone</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I don't play guitar or sing my songs</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">They never defined who I am</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">The man that loves you 'til the end</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">You're the last person I will love</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">You're the last face I will recall</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">And best of all, I'm not gonna miss you.</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Not gonna miss you.</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I'm never gonna hold you like I did</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Or say I love you to the kids</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">You're never gonna see it in my eyes</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">It's not gonna hurt me when you cry</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I'm never gonna know what you go through</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">All the things I say or do</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">All the hurt and all the pain</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">One thing selfishly remains</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I'm not gonna miss you</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I'm not gonna miss you</span></b><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="color: blue;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> <b>By <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/im-not-gonna-miss-you-lyrics-glen-campbell.html#ixzz3GhhZMxtu" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-sbold, arial, sans-serif; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Glen Campbell, "I'm Not Gonna Miss</a> You"</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span>Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-35243031605191443352014-10-15T11:46:00.001-04:002014-10-21T11:33:36.367-04:00The Elevation of Conscience Over "Authority"<br />
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<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px;">A midpoint report, from this month's headline making Synod of Bishops (in Rome), reveals that Catholic leaders are considering conciliatory language toward gays and lesbians, divorced and remarried Catholics, and couples who live together before getting married.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">. . . Pope Francis has deliberately engineered a lively discussion of issues. It will help shape the pontiff's legacy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Reporters and commentators are producing a flurry of analyses mostly centered on the question of whether the synod portends a change in substance or merely a change in tone. Such is the abiding question of Francis' papacy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="background-color: black;"> The Role of Individual Conscience</b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conscience (versus) authority is the pre-eminent battle underlying the synod's debates. Even the dramatic turn from language such as "living in sin" and "intrinsically disordered" is a tacit nod to conscience over authority.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">. . . Evangelicals have mostly accommodated birth control and divorce, but not premarital or gay sex. Mainline Protestants rarely enforce what weak prohibitions on premarital sex remain, and are more rapidly accepting gays and lesbians in the life and ministry of their churches.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Catholic church, of course, is against all these things . . . But even the church's significant <b>authority</b> (in the sense of teaching, legislating, and ruling) is insufficient to bind its adherents' <b>consciences</b> to the fullness of its teaching.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">. . . even for Catholics (who) put them in a perpetual state of mortal sin, individual conscience and church authority are often in fierce tension. </span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Enforcement of sacramental exclusion tends to fall most frequently and publicly on divorced Catholics who have remarried without seeking an annulment. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">It seems uneven that perpetrators of heinous crimes -- including Catholic inmates on death row -- may receive Communion in prison (so long as they are not divorced and remarried) while civilly remarried Catholics are deemed unworthy to receive Communion for the rest of their lives regardless of how decently and ethically they live.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="background-color: black;">An Elevation of Conscience?</b></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While homosexuality and remarriage are grabbing headlines, it is actually contraception that may be most relevant. Non-acceptance of teachings about contraception was decisive with most Catholics. . . . It largely explains the slow-but-sure Christian <b>elevation of conscience over authority</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a Protestant, I can live in the tensions. . . . </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">The Catholic church is a humane bulwark against a destructively permissive and pornographic culture where everything is commodified and nothing is sacred. To that end, perhaps it would be better if more Catholics submitted to church teaching.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But on some level, <b>I remain grateful that Rome has no authority over my conscience. The trouble for the church is that a lot of Catholics think like I do.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="background-color: black;"><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;">Original article:</b><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<b style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="background-color: black; color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/conscience-vs-authority-pope-francis-synod-family</span></b></div>
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<b style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="background-color: black; color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-family: 'Droid Serif', serif; line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-size: large;">%%%%%%%%%</span></b></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-31603580471509146872014-10-09T17:07:00.000-04:002014-10-20T12:38:03.296-04:00Book -- Table of Contents (10-1-14 Update)<br />
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<em style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><b>Novellas and Stories:</b></span></em><br />
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<strong><em><span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></em></strong><br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's Senior Day -- Let's Go Krogering! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Time I Met the Real P.F. Chang</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">A Dark Star <i> (Novella)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Leaving Normal: A Family Fable <i>(Novella)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nica's Selfie</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The Emperor's Bloody Valentine</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Constant Companions <i>(Novella)</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia;">The Last March of Hiram Craver (In Progress)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Deconstruction of Molly</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Blackwood Timbers (In Progress)</span><br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-1795366458045763192014-10-09T17:05:00.002-04:002014-10-09T17:13:39.247-04:00Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yellow Light
Means Prepare to Stop</span><span style="font-family: Bodoni MT Black, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></strong></div>
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<br /></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #c00000; font-family: "Arial Rounded MT Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">A New Story by Butch Ekstrom<o:p></o:p></span></strong></div>
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<br />
<strong>The grouping of sounds . .
. said something comforting to Inman about the rule of creation. What the
music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life
might not always be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a
powerful argument against the notion that things just happen. </strong><br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
</span></b></em><strong>-- Charles Frazier,<i> </i></strong><em><b>Cold Mountain</b></em><br />
<b><br />
<em><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Hello, hello,
baby -- You called? I can't hear a thing. I have got no service in the club,
you see see. What, what did you say? Oh, you're breaking up on me! Sorry,
I cannot hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy. Kinda busy. Kinda busy. Sorry, I cannot
hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy.<o:p></o:p></span></em></b><br />
<br />
<strong> --
Lady Gaga, <i>"</i></strong><em><b>Telephone”<span style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br /></span></b></em>
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br /></span></b></em>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--> <span style="text-align: center;">Because I try to balance my vulnerable senses and maintain my equilibrium
during difficult times, I have been re-reading a </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack" style="text-align: center;"></a><span style="text-align: center;">book called
</span><em style="text-align: center;">Cold Mountain</em><span style="text-align: center;">. It's about the chaos of battle, panic and loss,
perseverance, and ultimately the hope for redemption in the </span><em style="text-align: center;">old South </em><span style="text-align: center;">during
those bleak, defeating days after the Confederacy fell to the Union. Inman
is the protagonist of the book. Yes, that's right -- </span><em style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Inman.</span></em><br />
<br />
Struggling back up the slopes of <em>Cold Mountain</em> seemed the
right thing to do since lately I have experienced (in my troubled mind),
unwillingly and incessantly, patterns of four -- thoughts, phantoms, memories,
fears, questions, or some combination thereof -- that collide
and become jumbled up in that hidden but conscious part of myself
that I call Me. Each package of four always I experience as a mysterious
and discordant nexus. I know what I imagine is not real. But yesterday I
believe I saw four jagged and stony pieces of meteorites, aimed at me like
brutal, fleeing convicts scarily blowing in from the four corners of
our minimum security galaxy, borne on perpendicular shafts of gray
interstellar winds. Like the raw ingredients of an unholy <em>zia, </em>the
four racing rocks seemed to have emanated from a secretive otherworldly
desert. As yesterday gave way to nightfall, my thoughts became
fixed on a collection of daring, logo-covered stock
cars -- each was coming relentlessly toward me from north, south, east,
west -- grill toward grill, bright and flashy headlights merging into a
blazing white and blinding spotlight, as if a chicken at the crossroads
battle had been green-flagged by an unseen and evil-minded mastermind. Goofy.
Troubling. Unstoppable. As each of these episodes recedes in my imagination, with
the postmodern and symbolic ambiguity of a David Lynch movie, I hear this
song, <em>Into the Great Wide Open,</em> as unseen credits roll,<br />
<br />
<em> They moved into a place they both could afford,</em><i><br />
<em> He found a night club he could work at the door,</em><br />
<em> She had a guitar and she taught him some chords,</em><br />
<em> The sky was the limit -- Into the great wide open,</em><br />
<em> Under them skies of blue. Out in the great wide
open.</em></i><br />
<em> Rebels without a clue.</em><br />
<br />
So what will this day bring? I have a premonition that it might be my last.
But that's probably just my paranoia at work. Why do I say so?
Because here in the darkness before dawn . . .<br />
I am staring transfixed, sensing a hotness in me, at a strangely
alluring piece of photo-art. It is a stylish picture made with
a classy Nikon camera on a sizzling desert day near the Four Corners
of the Southwest. It decorates the front panel of a CD
jewel-case by a local rock 'n roll band. The group is called
Dark-Eyed Juncos<em> --</em> desert-dusty, sharp billed, and relentless
scavenger birds of prey. They (the musicians) remind me of hardened, blue
collar power trios like Cream, Rush, the James Gang, and other music
legends.<br />
<br />
This stylish picture's hues are primarily black, white, gray, and
a color that makes me whisper (to myself) <em>fuchsia, </em>a lush pinkish hue.
It depicts my friend -- and current stylist at a place called <em>Dream in
Color</em> -- named June (who plays a dedicated-to-rock bass
guitar for the <em>Juncos</em> in local clubs) and her two middle-aged male bandmates.
She is perched in the middle. These men have crept close to her and appear
to be whispering secrets into her left ear and the right. (<em>'Here we go
again.</em> <em>I feel the chemicals kickin' in. It's getting heavy and I wanna
run. I wanna run and hide. -- So, what are you waitin' for? Take a bite of
my heart tonight!)</em> One man is dressed in a spotless and
glimmering white linen suit, topped by a tilted white fedora. The other is
clothed in a diabolical black frock coat, with a pirate-style do-rag (all black
with white diamonds) tied over his skull and an equally black gentleman's
stylish top hat over it all. <br />
<br />
June wears a stylish, but reasonably modest, gray dress, an enveloping shawl
with long strands of fringe, and high cut gray-leather boots sharply decorated
by straps and buckles. She sits outdoors whimsically (reminiscent of the
mythical Alice, in a granny rocker, anxiously making her way
back from Wonderland) on a fiery hot, improbably overstuffed easy chair of
fuchsia out in the burning Mesa Arts Center park. June
has a 'curious girl' -- or is it perplexed and frustrated? -- maybe
surprised but heart-aching -- expression on her face. Her finely etched
eyebrows are arched high. For the moment, she seems pinned tight to her
perch, like an avian corpse stuck on the board of a science
experiment. The entire photo backdrop is a mysterious blend of pink
and gray, like an airborne cloud tinted by a flaring sunset. In the middle, at
the top of the photo, is a prominent number 928 (which seems harmless
enough) on a plain black panel. Ambiguity and ambivalence drip like liquid
drugs from this CD cover. What secretive temptations, what salacious
thoughts, which indecent proposals, what hurtful assertions are being
whispered into June's ears? What does she hear? (<em>Does she hear
anything?)</em> Will<em> </em>that<em> </em>linen white or distrusting black
one turn her head? I begin to imagine that June is, what now?,
what?, shaking, rattling like an angry desert snake's tail, now coming
apart while lurching back and forth hard -- a desert bird, a
junco, ensnared, pinned, pulled, then ripped by the wings while
anxiously attempting to take flight. -- I blink and everything goes
white. In my thoughts, I fear that I have gotten lost somehow, not knowing
where, on a vast and sunny expanse of Death Valley desert.<br />
<br />
But somehow and for some clouded reason I suddenly stand erect and gaze
blankly, feeling alone -- there is no searing heat, no numbing
cold, no physical sensations at all -- outside the glass door of the
cramped little hair salon of Cheri Casio (a stylist of mine from another
lifetime -- <em>but not that long ago . . .</em> ), which I visited almost
monthly<em> </em>for twenty years. I am looking through the wide pane of
glass that holds the swinging door-frame and spreads out to effectively
form most of Cheryl's storefront wall. It is a sultry and
cloudy afternoon during the month of June. It is the year
2006. Forgettable days. Summer in the South is really coming on. A sense of
irony wells up in me. The building that holds Cheri's cramped quarters is
growing steadily warmer because the Louisiana humidity (a phenomenon constant
and oppressive in the old South during deep Summer months) is beginning to
build up like a radioactive cloud. Many of the little hair and fingernail
shops surrounding Cheri's are dark and abandoned, haunted by the
irrevocable loss of their lease-holders who fled the tornadic
violence of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then the horrific flooding
aftermaths those troublemaking ladies brought to town. <br />
I notice that my in-glass reflection looks forlorn, I am shaggy and unkempt,
dark half-moon circles of depression underline my eyes, my shirt is
wrinkled. I read the name of Cheri's business painted in green and gold
just above eye-level -- <em>A Cutting Remark</em> -- on the illuminated
pane.<em> </em>I hesitate. I can't bring myself to push inside just
like old times. I am leaving. Soon.<em> It's going to come too soon! Is</em> <em>this
the last time?</em> "Probably," I whisper wistfully, to myself
and gaze down. No one overhears me. <br />
<br />
Cheri has been a kind and loyal (but fundamentally lonely and
husband-hungry) friend, month after month, year after year (for
almost 20 years, over 200 styling trips in, I told you). -- She's a Catholic
girl raised on a Mississippi riverbank across from New Orleans. She
exhibits great pride, precision and perfectionism in her work. Once a
thriving business, she has now lost much of her clientele to the powerful
storms that have come and gone. Cheri would invariably ask for my <em>Dear Abby
</em>opinions, as we waited for her hair-dyes to seep into my roots and
before she would go swinging her scissors around my head, about her
recurring troubles with men both single and married. <br />
<br />
That forlorn aspect I see in my reflection is beginning to feel like an
anvil of guilt pulling down on my neck. <em>Okay, I will not tell her
that this is the last time before I leave. No farewell. No 'thanks a lot,'
my dear.</em> I have decided. Sorrow will rule the day. (Sadly I know
this is the wrong thing to do.) I hold a tattered, paperback copy of the
novel <em>Cold Mountain,</em> which I thought I was going to re-read as we
waited in uncomfortable chairs for the hair color to take effect.<em> --</em>
Why? <em>. . .</em> Seven long months have passed in this damaged and
reeling area, as it struggles back toward wholeness from being hurled into a
barely civilized, medieval state by ferocious winds and deluges,
still reeking with the acrid and messy smells of hurricane floods rising up
from the bayou turfs. Each stressful day (all through 2006) devolved
slowly into a long wake in an unsanitary civic funeral parlor, yes, a
wake that <em>refused</em> to end at sunset, like a nightmare and
unfunny parody the film <em>Groundhog Day.</em> I tell myself:
<em>Not one more</em> <em>painful utterance of 'So-long, pal. Thank you
and goodbye. You've been great.' </em>No more daylong wakes. Not one more
clingy handshakes. No more awkward hugs and teary endings. So I turn my
back wordlessly, regretfully, to <em>A Cutting Remark</em>. I feel sad beyond
words. Walking toward my car, head down, like a preoccupied pall-bearer
carrying a corpse toward a gaping hole that's already been dug. I know this is
wrong, an immoral choice, a sorry turn of the screw. Perspiration drops trace
from my neck down my guilty spine. I wonder if Cheri will forgive me for my
disappearing act. I will try whisper an emotional 'I'm sorry,' ever the conman
at work, into her ear someday.<br />
<br />
<em>Stop thinking this, </em>I command. Then my imagination heats up,
working hard, and I let slip to the ground the worn paperback
of <em>Cold Mountain</em> -- as if I am stroke victim gone
horrifically numb on the left side -- but I am not standing in the raggedy
parking lot anymore. No, I standing upright again in a place far (<em>perhaps
very far?</em>) away, inexplicably, that I have never encountered
before . . . <br />
<br />
but . . . a strong feeling of disbelief overwhelms me. I feel dizzy and
claustrophobic. I have been been lurking motionless -- on a hard,
gray industrial carpet -- in the dim and poorly finished-basement hallway
of an indistinct office building. The walls need to be washed, having
turned iron-gray mixed with urine yellow, an unattractive and cloudy tableau. I
sense anger and disbelief. This basement smells like an ancient library.
Well,<em> in fact, it is an old library</em> I notice. A high-tech
office telephone with a complicated panel of buttons and lights sits
archly on a thin white shelf by my side, a waist-high protrusion on
the bottom half of an old dutch door. The message-waiting light on
the phone flashes red brightly. -- On (red). Off. On (red). Off. On
(red). Flash. Flash. Red. Flash. Off. Red (on) . . . Persistent.
Unflagging. <em>You've got mail</em> are the disembodied words that echo
through the hallway. Tirelessly the blinking continues.<em> </em>Eight
voice messages have been captured in the terminus. <em>Eight lights a
flashin' . . . Seven calls a waitin' . . . Six words unheeded, </em>I hum
spontaneously, stupidly, to myself. The phone flashing <em>red, off,
red, off, red, off </em>has been ignored for six months, perhaps more.
This I somehow know. I judge it to be an evil sign. <br />
<br />
Anger swells anew in my heart. This phone extension apparently
belongs to any staff member. A catchy song -- <em>Hello, hello baby. You
called? I can't hear a thing! --</em> about telephoning<em> </em>pops into my
head. Then, a nameless, faceless aged co-worker stands with me, seemingly
oblivious to the fact that <em>this situation is</em> <em>all</em> <em>wrong</em>. Callous
inattention and disrespect are words that preoccupy me. <br />
<br />
I ask her, why did these calls come in? What did the callers want? Does
anyone care? <br />
In a hushed tone, the old woman worker tells me, ' . . . <em>Well,
you see, sir, the secret</em> <em>password was not retained.</em> No
one has it. <em>Can't do anything about it. Not now.'</em> <br />
<br />
Then, she shrugs. I feel like bursting because I am so mad. Liquid and
toxic disdain floods my body and soul. <br />
<br />
<em>And who's gonna fix this? Who's gonna this mess clean up?,</em>
I demand to know, like a charging bull in small pen. <em>Get I.T. pronto.
No excuses. Fix it.</em> <em>-- Who's in charge here?<o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
I appear to myself like the hollow shell of a court-martialed officer,
clothed disgracefully in a tattered uniform, a failed leader with no
conscripts, bereft of his battalion of Misfit Toys, sent back to
an empty barrack. Big winds issue from empty caves, I remember, as an
old saying goes. <br />
The bland co-worker <span style="background: white;">replies like a
dispassionate junior officer,</span> <em>'Why, you are, sir. You're in
charge."</em> <br />
<br />
I blanch, my hands fly up, and I lean back quickly as if shocked by an
electrical current. Here it comes again, I tell myself. There is a tingle creeping
up my neck, then I get a rush of vertigo and quickly I feel
turned upside down by an unknown force. <br />
<br />
Then rapidly, incongruously, I go slip-sliding down a steep metal chute
that has just opened, straight into the driver's seat of my frigid automobile,
slamming down hard on my butt but seated upright, at the chute's
bottom. I hear a bone-crunching sound. My tailbone area crackles in pain. After
a single nervous breath, immersed in the green glow of my illuminated
dashboard, a strange fantasy swirls to life –<br />
<br />
<em>I am driving my car to the New Orleans airport, block after urban
block in the famed Garden District. It is a wickedly frigid and
deeply dark winter morning. The neighborhood is enveloped by a pure
blackness, an unexplored and underground cave. Silence reigns. Houses are dark
inside and out. Many are abandoned, boarded up, water-scarred; some are
tagged with painted-on graffiti, courtesy of post-Katrina search and
rescue squads. Many tags are shaped like a cross (with a variety
cryptic symbols around it -- these denote clues like 'empty house,' use
caution, or 'abandoned animal on these grounds)' There are still bodies of
people and animals lying, decomposing, in some of these places. But search
teams have gone home and must be sleeping now in warm encampments of their
own. A great many street signs are utterly useless. They lay face
down, their poles flat on the easements by the sidewalks or wedged in
messy gutters, toppled by the ravaging winds and floods those big, hurricane
girls brought by. <o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
<em>My headlights shine like the eyes of a wild beast in this
deep, unnatural darkness. On the deadly day of August 29, 2005, thousands of
streetlights all over the city of New Orleans malfunctioned
catastrophically. Their cycle of lights -- red-green-yellow-red -- disappeared. Traffic
lights began to blink either yellow or red incessantly as the Hurricane
Katrina headwinds at last relented. The maddening and incessant flashing
for months upon months, most of the lights in the Garden District
were yellow, lacked clarity and finality, hurled caution into
the wind. It symbolized a taunting message from the inscrutable gods:
'Heads-up, trouble abounds. There be no safe passage during this
life.' The taunting, like trash talk on the basketball
court, went on month after month unremitting throughout the city
streets. 'Fragile is life, vulnerable is humanity, we hold your fate in </em>our<em>
hands, so vulnerable are you! At times the taunt went: 'Make your own
rules. No more black and white, no more red and green. Nothing clear. Or make a
break for it. Dare you, you loser.' <o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
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<br />
<em><br /></em>
<em>At a very slow speed under the morning darkness, worried about who
or what might be approaching, I roll the car carefully to the storied
intersection of Broadway and Freret, near historic but hurricane-ravaged
Tulane University. On Broadway I am heading toward the airport. A shiny dark red
Suburban emerges oversized, from darkness, to my right. It comes toward
Broadway on Freret Street. It is on a right angle to me. Its brakes whine as it
halts for the yellow light. I look over. The whole scene goes bright
yellow, then dark, then . . . on each of the four street corners sheets of cold
mists -- like an amber cloud of airborne illness -- settle down and seem
to spread like paint over all.</em><br />
<em>I think I see Cheri sitting the Suburban's driver-seat, a thick black
coat with a high collar is pulled up around her neck and dark hair. Her stare
is red-eyed, menacing ungodly. I am very alarmed. The woman looks right through
me. Her lips are closed tight but I sense her angry
sentiment "Get away!" She shakes her head back and forth,
violently, to emphasize her bitter indictment. I spy an animal in the
Suburban with her. Dark-tempered, black, and furry -- a big dog?, a
gorilla?, a black wolf?, a unidentifiable predator from an
untamed wilderness? The beast stalks around the interior of
her SUV with menace, its full furry tail swishing madly. Momentarily I think of
piney, Tennessee forests swaying in stiff winds in the story of </em>Cold
Mountain<em>. A horrific sense of resignation wells up in me. I sigh --
but the whiny sound of my cold breath redounds to me, from the green glow
dashboard, doleful and stale. The cold pinpricks my face like a spray
of ice pellets. Heartbreak takes me. I feel lost. Alone in the dark. Freezing
and lost.<o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
<em>A song springs up on my car radio -- "Animal" </em>(In a
millisecond, I fall into a confused and questioning state. This cannot
be, not in truth! The properties of time, sound, and place bend
precariously right before me. This recording will not be heard by <em>anyone,</em>
<em>anywhere,</em> on any radio, until 2010. -- Yet, here it plays in the
deeply dark winter cloud, an up-tempo departure anthem, much too uptempo for
this deep, misty cold, and soulful pre-dawn –<i><o:p></o:p></i><br />
<br />
<em> Here we go again, I feel the chemicals
kickin' in</em><br />
<em> It's getting heavy, and I wanna run</em><br />
<em> And hide -- I wanna run and hide,</em><br />
<em> I do it every time, you're killin' me now</em><br />
<em> And I won't be denied by you</em><br />
<em> The animal inside of you. Oh oh,</em><br />
<em> I want some more. Oh oh</em><br />
<em> What are you waiting for? </em><br />
<em> Say goodbye to my heart tonight.<o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
I grunt a utter an Ugh.<em> </em>--I whisper more lyrics just
heard: '<em>Hush, hush. It's us that's made this mess. So what are we gonna
do?'<o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
<em>The unbidden song ends with an eerie fade, not a cold, definitive
endstop. No music follows. Radio static buzzes around my ears as if the station
has suddenly signed off. I reach for the FM buttons. I remind myself
reprovingly that the radio in my vehicle no longer works. </em><br />
<em>The scratchy static dies away. Silence prevails. The distressing
yellow lights keep blinking. Momentarily, (like a fool) I worry needlessly that
a runaway Amtrak train, it's exhausted conductor catnapping at the controls, will
come crashing through this intersection to mash me senseless, just as Cheri's
fiery Suburban runs into me. A four-corner, four-direction disaster is what I
imagine, I gasp and look away. I wish it would . . . No . . . I
don't, I don't, I won't. Moments of inaction slip by. No other vehicles
materialize. Silence reigns. This stupid shit is just never going to end,
I shrug. Dejection pricks me. S.S.D.D., I tell myself -- same stuff, different
day. </em><br />
<br />
(Time’s passage brings other prickly and unsuspected changes. Months after,
my mind has cleared somewhat. I become aware that I am in a crowded lecture
hall. I see a professor with a confident bearing standing behind a podium. I
sit on the left hand margin among hushed classmates. She begins in a measured
way to pose questions, matters deep to ponder, about <em>post-traumatic stress
disorder, </em>as if it were a clinical disease. In her smooth and
experienced voice, she develops a thesis. PTSD is a condition wherein someone
victimized by a real life experience, which proves lastingly painful and
horrific, is burdened, perhaps in an unalterable manner, by . .
. <em><o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
<em>What? I say to myself. Confusion nips at my mind. I guess I fell asleep.
Or my pitiful attention must have been wandering again, I surmise
deceptively </em>. . .<br />
<br />
Yet I have undeniably heard certain words by the teacher behind the
polished wood podium. <i>What was it she said?</i> The
professor skims hastily over her prepared text toward a poignant endpoint,
then glances at her wristwatch. Suddenly she seems pressed for time. I am still
stuck on her previous point. <i>She said </i>–
think about a Netflix movie that boots up time after time deep
in someone's unlucky cortex<em> </em><em><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">in washed out colors. Purely there On</span>-Demand,
</em>typically triggered by the pulsation of a hidden command button.<br />
<br />
The lecturer asks them all to listen up. She is about to deliver
her last, key point. <br />
<br />
She peers down through a set of half-moon eyeglasses with shiny black rims,
a very academic look. She holds her note pages steadily. She contends, 'Often
an innocuous moment of sensation can be the tripwire, that hidden command that
reignites the painful and life-changing experience one has had. <em>Post-traumatic</em>
<u>and</u> <em>disordered – </em><em><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">p.t.s.d. to spell it out, </span></em>a re-living of something one has
suffered. It can come from the smoky odor of a house fire that turned a
family's life into fear, despair, and cinders. It can be traced to an innocuous
pinewood smell in a wardrobe or a piece of clothing steeped in dry cleaning
fluid on a hanger deep inside a backroom closet. Or, as you all have no doubt
heard, for many survivors locally of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it could be
the storm-soaked reek -- just a whiff or two of some most
putrid smell -- in a flooded home long abandoned or a motor car’s
once flooded trunk now crammed with junk salvaged from a maelstrom. Finally, it
could issue from sidewalk piles of ruined and discarded personal items:
personal photos, kids' toys, broken knick
knacks, decimated X-Box units, music collections, and stained castoff
clothing, situated on easements in front of former family dwellings during the
heat of a summertime.<br />
<br />
The professor closes her notebook. She looks pale, grim, fretful. She looks
up, lights glare across her half-moon glasses, and scans the lecture hall
briefly. Silently she tucks her precise notes under an arm and strides out of
the room without looking back. I notice one phrase -- author unknown --
scrawled onto a dry erase board behind the wood lecturn. It reads: 'Let
us learn the lesson of the The Great Deluge and its rainbow. God will be with
us. We've come too far to turn back now.'<br />
<br />
<em>I sit, in a dead-stop, at the nexus of Freret and Broadway, a crossroads,
a zia some would think. It seems like time to fly. Gotta go, bro, I tell
myself. </em>Delta<em> is ready when you are! 'We love to fly, and it shows!' --</em>
<em>The amber street</em> <em>lights caution against rash action; they
flash without sentiment: Go. Don't! Go. Don't! Go? Don't! . . . . Sick
stuff. Survival. Just doing their job. It's all too confusing. Prepare to stop,
or prepare to fly?<o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
Like in a poorly plotted horror movie, the false image
of Cheri with the red eyes fades into the deep black mist. On all 4
corners, the absurd yellow blinking will go on for months more. <br />
<br />
I think, ‘Can't anybody in this effing town repair anything? Can't
anybody tell me clearly what I should do? How in the world. . .?’ <br />
<br />
Suddenly, I flinch. My cellphone vibrates somewhere deep
inside an interior pocket in my hefty overcoat. Phone call? Text
message? <br />
<br />
<em> Hello, hello, baby. You called? I can't
hear a thing. </em><br />
<em> What, what did you say? Oh no, you're breaking
up on me, </em><br />
<em> So sorry I cannot hear you, I'm kinda
busy . . . –</em> <br />
<br />
A message at 4 in the morning? <em>No. Impossible.</em> <em>It
couldn’t be . . .</em> My heart thuds. My stomach rolls. I feel that dizzying vertigo
again, deeply spooked. I feel certain that I know who's trying
to reach me. Yes, in fact, I'm sure of it. Here in the depths of darkness,
with the promise of a possible dawn not far away, with my smart<span style="background: white;">phone at my service, this cannot end well.</span> In
my mind I hear the twitchy trill of the future song again: <br />
<br />
<em> Here it comes again</em><br />
<em> I feel the chemicals kicking in</em><br />
<em> And I wanna run and hide </em><br />
<em> I wanna run and hide: </em><br />
<em> Say goodbye to my heart to-night <o:p></o:p></em><br />
<br />
And then -- without warning -- once more I find that I have been
placed transfixed, a hotness rising like a cloudy mist in
me, at a strangely-alluring piece of photo-art on a CD cover. The
number 829 looms at the top of a black-slate panel, as do the ominous
words <em>A Dreamer's Remarks</em>. I recall that this scene at some other time
seemed harmless enough. But now, with alterations, it feels like the foretelling
of a cruel coincidence, or a secret code? I ponder. Is this supposed to be
funny, some kind of<em> joke</em>? I feel anger and resentment. But I
smile in resignation because reality can be stone cold, unforgiving, unyielding.
In my mind I hear the tinny echo of Tom Petty’s tune <em>The Great Wide Open</em>
spark sickly to life. It’s coming from some cavernous space -- an empty house
or deep cave shaft, I wonder -- that seems far away. <br />
<br />
In an entrancing photo on the CD cover (the one which I am studying), there
is an oddly appealing scene of three people, obviously a trio of rock 'n roll
band mates. One man is in spotless linen white, with a spotless white
fedora; one man is cloaked in a black frock coat with a black do-rag
(covered with white diamonds) tied over the top of his head, and the last
figure, a pretty female, named June, dead-centered in the picture, a
Summer girl, wears big silver hoops for earrings, stylish gray clothing and high
boots. She appears to be tight-lipped, perhaps curious, perhaps alarmed or perhaps
grateful, as she heeds the words that one male companion whispers secretly
in her ear. Yes, what is that secret, June? What do you hear? <br />
<br />
I wait anxiously for clues: a whisper, a knowing glance, a receptacle into
which meaning might be poured. But no one says anything. Perhaps things
do just happen. <br />
<br />
<br />
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*** *** *** *** *** ***</div>
<br />
<br />
<strong>Soundtrack. Click to listen:</strong> <strong><i><span style="color: blue;">"Animal,"
by Neon Trees </span></i></strong><em><span style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></em><br />
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<strong>@@@@@@@@@@</strong></div>
Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-4792327327822403622014-10-09T16:59:00.001-04:002016-02-12T12:22:56.265-05:00It's Saturday -- Let's Go Krogering<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">It’s Saturday – Let’s Go
Krogering<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost
in</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">giving, but like morning light it scattered</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the night and made that day worth living.”</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
<b>-- F. Scott
Fitzgerald<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Saturdays I usually welcome. Mostly they are errand and catch-up days, freedom from the mundane
aches of five days at the most unremarkable job in the galaxy. Once I've had a decent Friday night’s sleep, following two or three (okay, sometimes <i>four </i>or <i>five</i>) Shock Top brews and some <i>Netflix, </i>I am ready to roll by<i> </i>10:00 a.m. My ritual odyssey of the Never-Ending Shoulda/Woulda/Coulda List kicks into gear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Things are supposed go like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Pull Scion onto street;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Drive through ATM line at bank -- make deposit, get cash; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Inch up drive-through lane at <i>Starbucks</i>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Acquire <i>veinte </i>green ice tea, 2 straws please;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ponder if gorgeous bank teller on ATM camera screen meant <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> anything by ‘Can I do something
else for you?’; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Visit <i>Kim Can Do</i> dry cleaning shop – leave stuff, pick other stuff up;</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Drop envelopes, old-school postage glued on, into rusty mailbox;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Double-check if squeaky mailbox drop-slot did its job;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Drive to grocery store, go in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> In New Orleans, people identify my next tactical move as “making groceries.” However, in this mid-South haven, the step (based on decades of commercials) is known as 'Kroger-ing,' So, like ‘<i>Let’s go Krogering.’ </i>Even if you were to drop into a Handi-Mart, Publix, or Piggly Wiggly, the effort might be labeled <i>Kroger-ing. </i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15pt;">Grocery Cart Selection: Easy Does It</span></span></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLgm1r6PhZDImuY10A1He8S_AbrQE1CUyDYMzGjb322aFj-u-xpMQF7-rq8n_VpGSz3Y2_63EF3pmSKf9qiBx_EAAAE71v3pKSr1hjX1Y7KSHCGWf_GA2Snt09qjuHaA7Yg8XKRe1ixU/s1600/Kroger+Storefront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"> <img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLgm1r6PhZDImuY10A1He8S_AbrQE1CUyDYMzGjb322aFj-u-xpMQF7-rq8n_VpGSz3Y2_63EF3pmSKf9qiBx_EAAAE71v3pKSr1hjX1Y7KSHCGWf_GA2Snt09qjuHaA7Yg8XKRe1ixU/s200/Kroger+Storefront.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLgm1r6PhZDImuY10A1He8S_AbrQE1CUyDYMzGjb322aFj-u-xpMQF7-rq8n_VpGSz3Y2_63EF3pmSKf9qiBx_EAAAE71v3pKSr1hjX1Y7KSHCGWf_GA2Snt09qjuHaA7Yg8XKRe1ixU/s1600/Kroger+Storefront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: 20px;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLgm1r6PhZDImuY10A1He8S_AbrQE1CUyDYMzGjb322aFj-u-xpMQF7-rq8n_VpGSz3Y2_63EF3pmSKf9qiBx_EAAAE71v3pKSr1hjX1Y7KSHCGWf_GA2Snt09qjuHaA7Yg8XKRe1ixU/s1600/Kroger+Storefront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: 20px;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18px;">Major food stores in America usually offer two basic shopping cart models. So a successful supermarket foray will begin normally on </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the open prairies of a monster-size parking lot. This is where (in my opinion) the best basket options wander, both models, on worn-down wheels, like farm animals aimed in no particular direction. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;">Your selection will prove critical. You will long for a basket that is well-balanced, with a properly aligned chassis, sturdy handlebar, and no annoying wheel wobbles. Secret some anti-bacterial Wet Wipes on your person</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;">. The big moose would be your Traditional -- a grocery industry standard, with four high-sides, a deep-well basket, a low slung horizontal rack right above its four wheels. Old age and uninventive design srob each Traditional of drink cup holders (a sinful omission). But it does supply a mini-basket in which tiny kids can be wedged.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQDH08kq3Z7foHr-INfHuG3TNpin4TIiFGvk6LIAvD94eJCe5BraiqbW8k61NY11Y6iD-WH5lkvuNYjDLkMkheAKuu42dbCe_n9NnaAsCg5gghlcJg2QoRgSVpDlrO0hEe3dnQqWA66TQ/s1600/Grocery+Cart+--+Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQDH08kq3Z7foHr-INfHuG3TNpin4TIiFGvk6LIAvD94eJCe5BraiqbW8k61NY11Y6iD-WH5lkvuNYjDLkMkheAKuu42dbCe_n9NnaAsCg5gghlcJg2QoRgSVpDlrO0hEe3dnQqWA66TQ/s1600/Grocery+Cart+--+Large.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">The Traditional</span></b> </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;">The Traditional normally evinces a horrid dullness in its metalwork, scratched and gashed from wear and tear, with dead tread and wiggly wheels. Like balky John Deeres and old farm horses out in the country, they present themselves for service as long as they benefit from minimum care and shelter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Yet, during a recent burst of spectacular innovation, the g</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">rocery industry began to offer The Small Fry - or The Smart Dart -- sporadically at supermarkets. Of reduced size, with a shallow, no kiddies allowed, collection basket, a reliable handle, and a pair(!) of drink holders to insert walk-around beverages, the spiffy, scatback SF really fits my bill. Bigger: no, sir, it is not always better. </span></div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhh_OBsdcFaowDPu7R6kndCjs0HYZpopZPTEEuyp1qP4g9z9mHeRKyOUCkvOBQ0yfPSyc4ZTQ_wmq8qiTWIMbT6jHdGi1gX9uD2-zgfMWkf4gnHkfeC1Ldl4Xinr2OYrvbsKXhdlKnEzA/s1600/Grocery+Cart+--+Small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhh_OBsdcFaowDPu7R6kndCjs0HYZpopZPTEEuyp1qP4g9z9mHeRKyOUCkvOBQ0yfPSyc4ZTQ_wmq8qiTWIMbT6jHdGi1gX9uD2-zgfMWkf4gnHkfeC1Ldl4Xinr2OYrvbsKXhdlKnEzA/s1600/Grocery+Cart+--+Small.jpg" width="134" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">A Black Smart Dart</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Yes I live alone in a modest place. My requirements seem simple. But the annals of grocery lore teach </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that those whopping-big bascarts tempt wimp-willed, low skilled, and addictive eaters into over-shopping. Even cagey, lonely veterans (as in my humble case) succumb to the 'fill 'er up' mentality. It’s discouraging. W</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;">hat kind of sick human being races over to the Kroger just to snag an improbable sack of </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;">Science Diet</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-align: center;"> (food for Fido), a three-gallon jug of canola oil, and double party-pack of graying pork chops 'on sale?' What a way to deplete the budget and clog family arteries. Truth be told, I have never personally stumbled upon an </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">84-pack of<i> </i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>Fanta Orange</i> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">two liters on sale<i>,</i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or a </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">50 pound supply of breaded catfish nuggets </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">or a 15 </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">pound 'family can' of <i>Heinz Pork & Beans.’</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I wouldn't even know where to search. Something must be wrong I fret.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">On a recent weekend, by pure happenstance, I got schooled on proper cart-care and selection. The strangely meaningful episode has me tiptoeing, still, beside the humming DAIRY case and eyeballing other shoppers as I assay my weekly <i>Kroger Games. </i></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15pt;">Which Way to Check Out?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> At 11:11 a.m. I was later than usual for the <i>Games. </i>Rain pelted my car. Cold winds blew crisscrossing shopping carts around the parking area like a disturbed flock of farm animals or unmoored skiffs atop a black lake. I hoped that the predictable Saturday customer tsunami had not washed into store yet. I eyed an abandoned Small Fry near my Scion. But a whooshing gust and sheet of rain of blew it far from me. I felt disappointment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"</span>Oooh<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> ominous," I whispered with a trace of a smile. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I knew I should chase that little basket. But three teen boys -- one I could make out as Darius, a cool kid -- with Kroger rain slickers and hoods, like wind frenzied yellow ghosts, chased wildly to corral the escapees. One of them pushed a hobbled old Tradtional my way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Slowly we wobbled and wiggled toward the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">fresh greens and produce. I was wet. My calm and composure had been harshed away. I sucked a long drink from the plastic <i>Starbucks </i>cup in my hand, glad that I had it. I took a deep breath.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Bagged</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> yellow onions -- 3 pounds, fresh basil, sliced
mushrooms, a Napa cabbage, bell peppers in a mini-rainbow of colors, and pods of bok
choy were the first staples among my food needs. I</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">mpulse buys followed. They were </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ragu Old World</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> sauce, dry whole wheat pasta, and a hermetically sealed sack of
the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Keebler</span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">elves' finest sugary delights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">My arms, face, and hair stayed damp. I could swear my clothes were visibly shrinking, underwear included. I struggled to Aisle 7 -- CANDY, GUM, SOFT DRINKS, WATER, BEER, WINE COOLERS. I wondered about chugging a couple Neato Mojitos right there in 7. But I noticed up ahead a new arrival from Aisle 6. She was a pretty blond girl
dressed in soft and casual Lacey brand sky blue sportswear and blindingly neon green New Balance jogging shoes, with neon pink trim, and silver accents. Honey, y<i>ou look like Disneyland,</i>
I thought crazily.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">She
rolled her Traditional toward me. This female – apparently a Millennial but not for long – made me think of Jennifer Something or Other, who's from here, and who plays the out there badass, Katniss Everdeen, so lethal, in<i>"The</i> <i>Hunger Games" </i>films.<i> </i>I guessed that </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Lacey was 28 or 29 years old, a competent but disinterested attorney who strains each week through long, billable hours, very
low-profile, amidst a greedy old male law firm. I was sad to note that Lacey had no bow and arrows, but in this open-carry jungle of state that would have
been a thrill.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> When I feel good, even somewhat playful in public, I like to bedevil others in Kroger's with brief eye contact, a wink, maybe just a hint of Charlie Manson homicidal delusion to line my brows. What I get back is unpredictable</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> -- modest smiles, the silent head nod, blank stares, impertinent look asides, crimp-lipped <i>How ya doing?'s, </i>someone's lecture full of grievances about the way this store is run. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Fun. Whee. My snarky principle at work in this is</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Keep
them guessing what you’re up to!</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> </i>This was not one of those feel good forays. The cold rain had been a damper.<i> </i>Yet<i> something </i>that no man can resist attracted me</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to this blonde girl, besides her splendid Katniss locks, racy kicks, and sky-blue Lacey outfit. She was beautiful, disinterested, and she had been </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">diligently piling items -- <i>like I do</i> -- into the child-seat of her Traditional basket. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> On Aisle 7, I sidled up to Katniss. The devil prodded me to embrace her, seek her painted lips. She dropped a fat carton of <i>Tic Tac</i> mints into her cart. I
sought eye contact and produced a
smile. I wished I had drunk those wine coolers. Kat pretended not to notice. Kat raised her shiny
Blackberry. Faking a look of concern, got busy tapping a text
message. Like, I imagined, <i>Marcy -- geezer alert aisle 7. </i>Her long nails ticked on the smartphone. I pushed on. Would I hear the click of the camera on her handheld?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> At the mouth of Aisle
11, I flagged badly. I craved a rest. Surrounded by freezer cases, I hunted
for a <i>Sara Lee </i>red velvet<i> </i>cake. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Katniss appeared at the other end of this row. I rounded toward Aisle 12 –ICE CREAM, NOVELTIES, PIZZA, POTATOES to the left. Lingering on chilled open shelves, to my right, were CHEESES, BISCUITS, YOGURT, CREAM CHEESE, BUTTER, MARGARINE </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">-- PLUS a few random consumables stretching back to a perpendicular wall full of MILK and JUICE compartments. Above this
area, in huge letters, was the message DAIRY. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I sensed a minor surge of god feelings. It surprised me. My
clothes and hair were almost dry. The Never Ending Get Around was coming to an end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 20px;"><b>It Was Right Here</b></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I decided cockily to freelance my way
(<i>sans </i>basket) to secure the last things on my shopping list. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I barely
noticed that the blond, preoccupied with her Blackberry, was still standing up Aisle 12. I parallel parked my
Traditional beside displays of Shredded Cheeses, Greek Yogurt, and Horseradish. I hustled in and around several, high-number aisles. I </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">grabbed a gallon of ice cream (</span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Cherry
Cordial, No Sugar Added</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">),
Hershey dark chocolate syrup, frozen grape juice bars, Klondike mint bricks, microwave popcorn, and Pillsbury breakfast pastry.
I completely overlooked </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Sara Lee. </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Soon my loaded hands and arms were feeling a chill. I slid
toward to my big cart to dump my stuff. I felt happy I could pass through one additional area, BAKERY SHOPPE, before making a zippy escape from <i>Krogering.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> My fingers encircled the chilly metal push bar on my basket. The cart's aged wheels squeaked when they moved.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">But not for long.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Excuse me, sir . . . . Uh, sir?" an
impatient female voice said behind me. I took another step. Couldn’t be for
me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Sir, you are taking my
. . ."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The intrusion made me suddenly testy. I turned
and saw Katniss up close. She was very pretty indeed. And quiet as a stalker in those NB shoes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "What is it? What did you . . . . Oh, <i>hey!</i>” I stammered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"I think you've got my shopping cart there," the lawyer said, cool but puzzled.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I looked down to study the basket. My thought process reeled. Would I throw up? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> 'Geez, . . . crap,' I acknowledged. I did have hers. My most recent pick-up items were lying atop the things in her kiddie carrier seat. I stared at the carton of <i>Tic Tacs.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> 'Geezooey,' I mumbled, dumbfounded as ever</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Katniss and a few assorted bystanders stared at me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Wow. I, I've never done anything
like this. Sorry. And I'll tell you now, Lacey, I’ve been shopping a lot of years. A lot" I
added, drawing close to an aimless ramble.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "<i>Lace</i>-ee. Oh wow, sorry, miss. Stupid," I blushed and slapped my hand on my forehead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> What civil or criminal penalties might a lawyer might slap on for commandeering someone else's Kroger basket? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I explained defensively, "Mine -- my cart -- was right here too.
I parked it right here. See?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I scanned all of
Aisle 12. My basket had vanished. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Now . . . here it is gone. Who in hell would take my groceries?’ </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
Katniss and others smiled. She said that she did not know. Her black and silver
smartphone gleamed, like a gemstone, under the overhead lights.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Well. Thanks a lot. So . . . Ummm,
I’ve gotta go look for it" I said anxiously.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I would hide in a place isolated, near SEAFOOD,
until this all blew over. I would know my basket if I saw it. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"You know, mister, people just up 'n
walk off with stuff nowadays," a middle-aged woman in a tired <i>Virginia Slims </i>tee shirt blurted. "Just like that. Freaks me <i>out.</i>" She cradled a family-size box of <i>Velveeta</i> and a can of <i>Grand </i>butter<i> </i>biscuits in the crook of an arm. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "They'll probably go 'n figure out
what they done 'n just leave it be somewhere,” a man in an oily auto repair-shop jumpsuit said.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Yeah, guess so," I said. I pushed the basket to walk once more.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
A strident female voice called, "Sir! <i>Sir!"</i></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"What? Yeah?" I asked
absentmindedly.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"My cart. <i>My </i>cart. That’s
still my cart. I need it back,” Katniss declared.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Oh yeah," I blushed. "So sorry."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The word discombobulated came to mind. I doubted I could then pronounce it.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Kat grabbed impatiently for her basket. As she did, I noticed that Katniss had
selected raw fruits and vegetables, whole wheat muffins, tilapia strips, <i>Lean
Cuisine </i>and <i>Healthy Choice</i> entrees, a filet of top sirloin, and some
sugar-free candy. This girl was all business. Disciplined without whimsy. No Guy Fieri, <i>Hell's Kitchen, </i>or Food Channel poser nonsense in her grocery life. Then I saw the <i>Tic Tacs </i>once more. Iron Chef would be proud of her.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Yeah, well, I'm sure this
happens. They all, the baskets, look the same if you don't look closely," Kat said graciously. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I made a split-second choice to speak. "Yeah, well, yeah but not if you get one of those great, new little carts. The Small Fry. That's what I call them -- Small Frys. You know 'em -- they've got the drink holders, a central basket, and the wide bottom wire rack for things like cases of<i> Fanta </i>or sacks of<i> Science Diet </i>for big dogs." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I grew scared again. 'What the hell?' In my head, my voice sounded foreign, high-pitched, out of control maniacal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Katniss said, "Hmm. Yeah. Well, I guess
that's right. That's about all." In her hand she clutched her shiny phone.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
“Are you planning to give me your way
cool Blackberry too?," I joked.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
She laughed nervously and said no. Quickly she slipped it into her Coach shoulder bag. I
sensed pity from her. Several more shoppers had slowed to look on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Well then, bye. Sorry." I
turned to flee.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Sir? <i>Sir?</i> These would
be yours. Don't you want your items?" My new friend pointed
down to the pile of Pillsbury breakfast buns and other food selections that I
had dumped into her cart's child-ready bin.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
I turned a deep red. <i>Don’t hurt me, Miss, I thought.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Sure enough," I whispered.
"Good idea. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Thank you and I'm outta
here."</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Perplexed, I held the groceries in my arms. How would I finish this? </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15pt;">Almost The Last Straw<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">After a frantic search, I was discouraged</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. My </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">basket had become </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">invisible. In my mind, it </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">rolled swiftly, under its
own power, groceries flopping and twitching, out Kroger's door and across the parkway. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The managers and security guards should recognize my dilemma, I told myself</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Briefly, </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I angrily blamed an oblivious, fictional octogenarian couple krogering mindlessly through SUGARS, SPICES, SWEETENERS, SYRUPS which had nabbed my basket.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I quick-stepped up and down Aisles 11, 10, 9, 8 . . . </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> My stress level was still going up. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Each time near DAIRY, languid customers and store managers chatting with low-rung
employees to avoid the public's demands burned me up. Then I </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">snapped inside. I scooped up the leaking Cherry Cordial and other stuff to stomp toward the checkout zone. carton of ice cream
and my armsful other stuff toward the checkout zone. It was time to engage.</span></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: large;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> A thick steel pole, floor to ceiling, painted bright yellow, easy to see in theory, stood in the middle of this old
Kroger. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I spied two women leaning
against it. One was African-American. Her bright red vest and nametag identified her as
Melda Plumb. The other red vested lady appeared to be a Latina named Lanita Reyes. They were Kroger floor managers: poised, all-knowing, ready to
help.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_XNyaekH0Qjam9oOxxrTBk5NVdSNLX4zi1zuanKUWMysOXKSLMeU19HG2aDsdSFbb6fR6bF-UV4S_fCDJ6sc1qvc0OYXfA7FagB5lXgXmx6NjZlagLPkuy2eAzG_yi7y2poZd3xwbl4/s1600/Kroger+Employee+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Melda squinted at me over her half-moon reading glasses. Lanita closed her mouth and looked toward the self-check lanes impassively.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Yes?" Melda asked, but her tone had a ‘don't tread on
me’ trace in it. She eyed my softening perishables.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Feeling mildly intimidated, I began, "Well, uh-huh, I mean, ha ha ahhh, you may not
generally hear about this kind of thing. But . . . Or, well, you may think that I'm a bit
unhinged, that I would say this but, but . . . <i>look I can't</i> <i>find</i>
<i>my cart</i> with my stuff in it. Nowhere."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Did you look at where
you left it at?" Melda asked matter of factly. Lanita looked at me with anticipation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Uh. <i>Yeah.</i> I sure did,”
I said. Now I was a defendant in a courtroom. I pleaded my case. “Aisle 12. CHEESES, GREEK YOGURT and you know. So. I was gone over to Aisle 11 and then I came back and my basket was gone. You know?" </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Did you look around some more? Did
you see anybody with it?" Melba asked. Lanita nodded unhelpfully.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Yeah. I did all that.
I looked hard. I even went back twice by MILK and CREAMERS. Look, I don't want
y'all to think I'm crazy. But I don't know what else to do."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Somebody just took it,” Melda stated
without feeling. Then like a veteran TV detective</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, she added, “They'll ditch it. For sure. Just ditch it. We ‘ll find it –
we find 'em all over all the time.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Lanita nodded again with a smile. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"What? Really? Just like that?" I
asked in disbelief.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Look, don't you be worried none.
Just go get you another cart. Those items belong to you?" she nodded toward my full hands.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Yep,” I answered. “But
they're fading on me fast."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"I know. It's a pain. But you go on
and start over. Go on, get going. I'll look for your things. If you
see your basket you come get me right off. If I find your cart I'll tell you once it
shows up. Okay?" </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Melda seemed suddenly balanced and reassuring. Lanita nodded again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "I'll be over There," I said unhelpfully as I pointed at the FRUITS and VEGETABLES sign on a distant wall.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Don't you worry none. Somebody'll
look down, see what they done, and they'll figure THIS all out," Melda
noted. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The two red vested officials walked away </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> After a couple of steps, Melda stopped. She turned quickly. “Just in case, how will I know that it's yours?” she asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "In the little top basket for kids. A big plastic Starbucks cup. Iced tea. Two green straws will be sticking out of it . Can’t miss it. Tucked into the kiddie seat,” like I was testifying to a court reporter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Melda tossed me a strange look. Then she
headed across the <i>Kroger Games</i> turf to where the big bosses hang.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">* * *</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15pt;"> Moments later I</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
commandeered another abandoned cart to re-commence my shopping excursion.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> First I snatched some jasmine rice, that jar of <i>Ragu</i> sauce,
and the dry pasta. Then I stalk-walked, still angry, over to FRESH FRUITS and VEGETABLES.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I snapped -- with a little too
much angry vigor-- three plastic sacks off the bag dispenser next to a pile of Granny Smiths. Take it easy, don’t go postal, I cautioned -- the world is watching.
A big woman, with a doe-eyed, little peanut in her Traditional perch, anxiously assessed the danger I might pose or if I was carrying concealed weaponry. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "For bell peppers and onions," I blurted.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Briefly I turned toward </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a shopper checking out Napa
cabbages. I motioned
to her to extract her white earbuds with the small silver skulls and
crossbones.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"What's the problem?" she
inquired seriously, caressing a Napa lightly.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Just wondering . . .
here," I pointed to the vegetables and flshed a hint of a smile. "What was green, could
really sing the blues, and dance up a storm?," </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Sir? I dunno. Really, I . . . ." She rolled her eyes.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Okay. Okay. You give up? -- <i>Elvis
Parsley, that's what, ha,"</i> I said.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Oh," she said, unmoved. She stuffed the earbuds back in.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Whatcha listening to?" I
asked loudly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "<i>Parsley's Greatest</i>,
dude," the woman retorted. At last she grinned.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Ha. That's funny, now that's fun-nee" I said. But the game was over. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I pushed onto Aisle 4. It was deserted. The words LATIN FOODS, INTERNATIONAL, MARINADES, GRAVY clung to the signage above. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Then before I could say enchilada, my life as a Kroger Valued Customer changed permanently.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
On the overhead announcement system I
heard clearly, "Good afternoon, everyone. Will the Kroger Valued Customer who is <i>missing</i> <i>his shopping cart</i> please
come to the BAKERYLAND department? We got what you're looking
for."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Feeling suddenly hot and furious, I glanced about furtively. I
was alone on 4. No one stared at me. Had Melda really said 'missing his shopping cart' out loud? I listened for derisive
laughter. But a soft, background muzak version of "Fools Rush In" hummed up and down the aisles. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> 'Wait a minute. Nobody knows it’s me!' I said to myself, relieved.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
Then a bit louder Melda declared,
"Attention. <i>Attention, </i><i>will the Valued Customer who </i><u>lost</u><i> his shopping cart</i> please proceed to the Bakery Shoppe? We have a very special <i>surprise</i> here. It's your runaway."<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Lost? Effing lost? I shivered with embarrassment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Lanita emitted a muffled snicker in the background </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">before the microphone went dead.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Geez, ladies, go ahead and announce it to the world," I mumbled.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">* * *</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I worked my way with my replacement cart, like a snail in a crosswind, across the front of the
grocery. Its </span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">wiggly wheels squeaked and complained on the linoleum floor. I felt panicky. Could people be giving me the dreaded sideye as the Loser Man who was so hopeless he lost track of</span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </i><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">his slippery basket? The painfully formidable, Saturday checkout lanes stood to my left. Progress proved difficult. Individuals with overflowing carts slowed me by veering left and right without care or caution. Some haphazardly bolted back out in front of me thus surrendering their spots in numbered aisles. Items clacked and smacked on the floor as random things fell over the top edges of overstuffed Small Frys. Two little kids in a faux, red and yellow BMW attachment (on the front of some man's Traditional) darted at me, daring a head on collision, like NASCAR cutthroats. I stopped abruptly. One child, with a wad of chewing gum and a runny nose, stared at me. The
other, looking dosed by a psychotropic med, flipped me off. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> Beautiful, so charming indeed,</i> I murmured. My immediate thought was to slap the little flipper's hand. Instead, I briefly sized up the gent pushing the faux BMW. Clearly he suffered from more than an irreverent child or two. Let the man and his PTSD pass I decided. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> An old woman, dressed in tacky, seam-stretched Wal-Mart clothes, sporting spiky wild white hair, but with no coat in sight, veered persistently in front of me. She inched forward slowly and leaned, as if drugged and nearly sleepwalking, over her Traditional's push bar. Her head was bent forward and her two bare and wrinkly arms and hands dangled, corpse-like, inside her cart -- like an old feline that had been sucked up into a pick-up's engine with her legs dangling. The old lady's feet were dragging -- each set of toes pointed down on the scuffed linoleum. I pictured her sound asleep but yet guiding a rusting Ford-250 carelessly off the rain-slickened parkway. Near Kroger's main doors, she ditched her truck atop a red <i>No
Parking</i> square of asphalt. The back of the woman's faded shirt looked wet and held an outline of a fragile fetus. It said "Pretend that I'm a
tree. Protect my life. God bless the unborn!"<i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I considered strategies that would allow me to slip around this creeping nuisance without killing someone. But I let it go. I needed to arrive in one piece over in <i>Bakery Land, or Baker's Shoppe </i>or <i>Baskersville, </i></span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">or whatever. Melda was waiting, I hoped. Meanwhile, </span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I felt chastened, impatient, and, wow, thirsty. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b>Doing It Her Way</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
Melda in the red vest and khaki trousers, all skeptical and streetwise in her demeanor, waved pleasantly toward me. She seemed glad to roll my grocery-bearing, Traditional cart toward me. Two green Starbucks
straws were sticking up proudly, like a country's beloved flag, from the kiddie seat area. Melda steered briskly </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">through all the carts around her.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> She has driven this way before, I thought stupidly. The lyric <i>I once was lost but now am
found</i> played, with a big church organ, in my head.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "<i>Bueno suerte.</i> Must be your lucky day, <i>senor</i>. <i>Como
no?</i>," Lanita spoke from the big yellow pole.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Must be," I conceded.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
Melda Plumb rolled up to me. She
actually seemed sympathetic for a second.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "I don't know how to thank you. I
really don't,” I babbled. I felt like a fool. “Thank you. You’re great. I really, really did not want
to do all this over again. But where'd you find it? How?”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
Melda replied, “You know what? You gave me a good clue. I saw them straws clear 'cross the
floor. Two green straws. Yessir. If you hadn't a said somethin' I'd still be looking."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
She handed the drippy cup to
me. "Here. You look like you could use a stiff drink. Been some kinda
mess, ain’t it?"</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I drank two big swallows. It did taste good. Anxiety had turned my mouth bone dry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">“I was like really, truly, worried
when I first came up to you ladies,” I stammered. 'Like you'd think I was
unhinged or whatever. Going mental. Some kinda lunatic . When I first told you it sounded kinda weird
even to me. Wow. Harsh day.”</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Look at this stuff,"
Melda gestured toward my Traditional collection. "Look like yours, sir?"</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
It looked good to me. No mystery
items. A Traditional that wheeled straight ahead. Hastily I grabbed my Aisle 12 acquisitions and
transferred them to my recovered basket. I would switch the melting ice
cream and drippy juice bars with replacements soon.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"So where'd you find it, ma'am?" I asked.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Lanita answered, "Back near DAIRY, by
the milk cases. It be dumped. Ditched. Chillin' all by it's lonesome."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "That's the deal," Melda agreed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
"Well, you’re a lifesaver, I mean it," I flattered her. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Heh, heh, I, I guess
you were pretty what's all this when I told you what my problem was. Right?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Melda scowled. "No
sir. Not at all," she said in a very matter of fact tone. "No-<i>oo-o,</i> sir. Okay, then. That's it. I'll take your second basket, put your second-stab goods away."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Katniss/Lacey rolled into my field of vision behind Melda, bound for a checkout lane. The girl was texting again on her
gleaming Blckberry. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Then without warning she shot a disapproving look my way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I felt something flutter in my heart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Katniss spoke into the phone, "So I was I sayin' -- this older guy starts rolling away with my grocery basket, for real. Crazy shit, huh? So I say ‘<i>Sir, oh Sir?’
</i>. . . Oops, Marcy, I gotta bounce." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A sarcastic smile and a light toss of her lustrous hair came next. But before laying items on the checkout belt, Katniss laid her compact phone aside, tightened her lips, and saluted Melda and me by raising her right arm, extending three fingers, trident style, just like the heroine in the <i>The Hunger Games </i>films.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I was awed. Katniss raised a <i>Super Big Gulp</i> cup that she somehow now had half-hidden in her cart. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "God the amount of sugar in that cup must be sending her into a walking coma," I noted to Melda and Lanita.</span></div>
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"I wouldn't know, mister. What’s blondie's problem anyway? If you axe me, I think she's got a bad attitude," Melda snorted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"No biggie. That was just a
badass gesture to another one. Admiration maybe,” I replied but knew that was not true. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "So, so thanks again and . . . wait a minute!" I said loudly. "You said </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">You</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">were </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><u>not</u></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>surprised</i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> <i>to hear </i>that my basket was lost</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Lanita </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">snickered again.</span></div>
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"No, sir. Not at all," Melda said politely.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Happens a lot. But don't
you worry you-self none. Carts, they get <i>lost</i> (she makes exaggerated air
quotes with her fingers as she declares <i>lost</i>). Seems like every day. DDD. Ditched, dodged, and dumped we call 'em. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18px;">It was pleasure to serve you, sir</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"</span></div>
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"Yeah, I guess Saturdays are bad. Lots of folks, lots of carts needed, everywhere," I complained.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "No again, sir," Melda scowled, but she was just playing me.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> "Now it do be busy at Kroger's on weekends. But with all the old old folks comin' to us on Thursday for Senior Day, I'll tell ya the truth. Just wait till you see Senior
Day – it's a </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nightmare.</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”</span></div>
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Lanita nodded eagerly. She was missing two front teeth. "Night-mare, senor."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> A</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">n old man in a wrinkly red vest came up. His badge read Thurbert Bumfield. World's Oldest and Longest Kroger employee. </span></div>
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"Caught yo'self' another runaway did
ya, Mel?" Thurbert asked with childlike glee. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Melda, Lanita and he laughed strangely. He had touched a nerve of some sort. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_XNyaekH0Qjam9oOxxrTBk5NVdSNLX4zi1zuanKUWMysOXKSLMeU19HG2aDsdSFbb6fR6bF-UV4S_fCDJ6sc1qvc0OYXfA7FagB5lXgXmx6NjZlagLPkuy2eAzG_yi7y2poZd3xwbl4/s1600/Kroger+Employee+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br /></div>
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I went on to the checkout lane. All the self-scan lanes were busy. I would wait in line for a human. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Darius
the SnowBird, as I call him (Darius flies south each year to escape local winters), would be my checkout guy. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18px;">He calls me "My dog, Mister Valued Customer" or and fist-bumps with me after scanning my Kroger discount card. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> A few departure lanes away I
spied the not cool, nosy female with the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Virginia
Slims </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">shirt. She was a caustic specimen: </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">You know people just up and walk'n off
with your stuff -- just like that.</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I searched for her hunk of
Velveeta cheese Grands. No worries. They were gliding down the scan belt.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1oEmNSSHCHzdY8mQiHcN7-WD3_bGmRx_W9nGCnkAgRjJqYw9yHiUJhapiIWkA8hw_rn3PbFcAJQo0YnWAO_HqjdbF7yrYXeQgPaWHbRrCwG2uAMFMwfgbZuRj57qYNZ0diFehkImRVTg/s1600/Lane+Open+--+Grocery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1oEmNSSHCHzdY8mQiHcN7-WD3_bGmRx_W9nGCnkAgRjJqYw9yHiUJhapiIWkA8hw_rn3PbFcAJQo0YnWAO_HqjdbF7yrYXeQgPaWHbRrCwG2uAMFMwfgbZuRj57qYNZ0diFehkImRVTg/s1600/Lane+Open+--+Grocery.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I was so done for now with Krogering. I was open to some different kind of hunt. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Darius got busy scanning my stuff. Over the loudspeaker came a voice with a strange but recognizable feel. The words boomed this time. Ms. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Melda Plumb with the red vest said:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> <i>"Attention, Kroger Valued Customers. Thank you for Kroger-ing today</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> at our superstore</i></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. L</i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">isten up now please. Announcement. Announce-</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> ment! We've got a lost little child, a young boy, at the FRESH MEATS</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> counter</i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. A real </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">handsome and polite little boy he is. He is missing his </i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> family. He say he </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">came with someone named "Mommy," </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and that you, Mommy, are</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">lost.</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> This boy's name is Efraim. So, if Efraim </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">yours </i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> please come </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">now. FRESH MEATS counter. H</i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">e </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">won't make it far </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">on </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">his own."</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> After a moment of reflection, before the electronic <i>beep, beep, boops </i>began again,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I called out for all to hear.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> <i>Members of the Kroger Valued Nation. Listen up! Time to unite! I who </i></span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> have lost much in this life know this truth. We get by when we help </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> each other, seek what each other needs and values. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Another child </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> has gone </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">missing</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> It's our duty, not a game, to </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">help him, Efraim, </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> find his </span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>future </i></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">now. Listen to me! How many more souls must be lost? </i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> How many more must not go missing? </i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></i>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I extended my arm, three fingers pointed upright, trident style. I bowed my head like Katniss in the movies.</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The checkout zone grew hushed. A handful of<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> shoppers looked down. Many pretended nothing had happened and just went on. </span></span></h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-weight: normal;"> I noticed the muzak track was playing a song throughout the store. It was The </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-weight: normal;">Citizen Cope's <i>"Let the Drummer Kick."</i> As in kick that bad habit.</span></h3>
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"Word, my serious white V-I-P and Valued Customer. My dog," Darius the SnowBird whispered. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> We fist-bumped. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I replied, "Truth."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The V</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">elveeta Lady and the curvy barrister in the Lacey outfit continued about their business. Darius finished my bagging.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I rolled my packed-tight Traditional to the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">sliding doors to exit. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 18px;">Shoppers made self-scanning machines go boop, boop, beep. Strangers murmured to each other. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Cellphones chirped, like agitated bluejays, throughout the store. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">'That Melda. What a cut up,' I mused. She aims between the eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Elvis Parsley began to sing his syrupy rendition of <i>"I Did It My Way."</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3yTPUYwcmPsMI0RMk3SAS9MDpH285cLYXJ7KAUfR2sVWxtEwTan_rfnMWkvg0YdlGD-GV9FVYbctGXEQvxs182CH3pvIyO95UjiUl4RBCQo5L2LBQG7Hcx6aOptJuEcD5hjCIvuoqIcY/s1600/Kroger+Store.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3yTPUYwcmPsMI0RMk3SAS9MDpH285cLYXJ7KAUfR2sVWxtEwTan_rfnMWkvg0YdlGD-GV9FVYbctGXEQvxs182CH3pvIyO95UjiUl4RBCQo5L2LBQG7Hcx6aOptJuEcD5hjCIvuoqIcY/s200/Kroger+Store.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b>#############</b></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Soundtrack Cut for this Story:</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b> Citizen Cope, <i>"Let the Drummer Kick"</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><i> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1731186915"> </a></i></b></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: small;"><b><i><u><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4xYNHl08BY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4xYNHl08BY</a></u></i></b></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: medium;"><b><i><u><br /></u></i></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><b> Elvis, <i>"My Way"</i> </b></span></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-56990176307534552342014-10-09T16:20:00.000-04:002016-02-04T16:58:51.681-05:00The Time I Met the Real P.F. Chang<br />
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Time I Met the Real P.F. Chang</span></b></span></span><b><span style="font-size: 18.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>A Story by Butch Ekstrom</b></span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute4"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <b> There's something in the air in
Hollywood,<br />
I tried to leave it but I never
could</b></span></span><b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b><span class="CharAttribute4"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Shine your light now 'cause it's gonna be good,<br />
Get it right now (yeah) 'cause
you're in Hollywood</span></span><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b><span class="CharAttribute6"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 7.5pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute6"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute6"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 7.5pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute6"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute7"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">--</span></span><span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Madonna,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute7"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <i>"Hollywood"</i></span></span><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio_8wvF8SARsEMbvoVVEtcCXsLkkV7vfUSCbMW5dyJxtmzA8nhKcU55yQTOxUKvCTDuJ2eLbcMzEA8yN71_HaScGm3blxEnP2a8LnCAZkqZik8j3KOzUXIWsDaaltFAkmCk9dmct7R6k8/s1600/P.F.+Chang.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> On this madly dizzying planet could there be a more delectable or sexily soothing concept than wok-charred beef with Chinese
vegetables at a <i>P.F. Chang’s</i>? If it exists, I have not encountered it. And I happen to be a well-traveled and longtime Asian cuisine enthusiast.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi2B4LqEQIstazBpnZGUFXgSA_tRjFCzO6Rehs7xxgxZI83kMwCdr8VE3EXq65nmcQjXPzejUBh5Gq7BBPcEabIWpe1RdU6IJwmd97FH5HMNSFW82WI5YGI_zK6ajGmgVoETM-HXahE2Q/s1600/Chang's%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi2B4LqEQIstazBpnZGUFXgSA_tRjFCzO6Rehs7xxgxZI83kMwCdr8VE3EXq65nmcQjXPzejUBh5Gq7BBPcEabIWpe1RdU6IJwmd97FH5HMNSFW82WI5YGI_zK6ajGmgVoETM-HXahE2Q/s1600/Chang's%2B1.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Like a Confucian with lousy timing, I contemplated my question as I strode outside of a <i>P.F. Chang's</i>, like a weighed down supertanker sailing seaward between a tall pair of the restaurant chain’s chalk-white, ominously standstill warrior steeds. Dusk had settled down on everything as I dined at the bar, bearing a bothersome chill from the ocean. I had wrapped my one business meeting for the
day just before 6:00 near the restaurant. Now full of food and a couple of drinks, I was anxious to navigate </span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">up the crowded
freeways to my L.A. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">base of
operations.</span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Cold breezes from the Pacific blew in my face. The emperor's bogus white horses held their ground steadily. But I was rocked back on my heels, disoriented, as if accosted by a sturdy ocean wave. I exclaimed 'Whoa.' My dry and cracked lips were still tingling from my spicy meal. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">I vowed to never to touch</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> that fiery </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">chili sauce, laced with </span><span style="font-size: 17px;">legendary Asian ghost peppers, no matter what -- especially while I'm having a few beers.</span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Ornamental gaslights atop burnished poles came on throughout the mall. Soft lighting bathed strolling shoppers, glowing sidewalks, well-tended flower boxes, dense stone benches, and frilly shops and
eateries in a mellow womb. The <i>P.F. Chang’s</i> intensely crafted interiors came to mind -- lavish floor tiles, rich honey- and
wood-hued colors, shiny tabletops, hints of black, and smoky Chinese red accents all around. A few people
stepping by me in the sudden evening
chill, even those waiting for tables inside, wore the
standard San Diego shopping uniform: short-shorts with bare legs or kneecap-touching cargo khakis, Nike sandals or
pricey running shoes with reflector patches, and bulky long-sleeved fleeces. Like the incongruous walking dead on cable shows I told myself. Though I would have to cruise up the 405 toward
Los Angeles, the traffic tsunamis in each direction would be killer, I hoped for an uneventful ride.</span></span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">* * *</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> My
condo in Glendale is not lavish but I have settled in comfortably. When I get into my place, troubles abate and I sometimes fantasize that I can walk on water. The craziness of the typical day almost always recedes. Alcohol and pills, and ESPN, help. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> I got undressed, then downed an Ambien with a double Courvoisier. I dug in a pants pocket to find a small chip of a tooth that broke off at Chang's.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">I examined the sick, little relic underneath bright bathroom lights. It had sharp-edges and was stained yellow with tartar. It was </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">a sad omen from a fortune cookie. I dropped</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> my sad </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">prize onto a tissue near the sink.
Then I switched </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">the light panels
off. Standing in bedroom darkness, feeling woozy already, I fingered my broken molar. Bad bad time for a dental check-up.</span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I glanced at </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>SportsCenter </i>on the flat screen. I expected to see part of </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">a day-old interview with my player client in San Diego. I laid back, remote control in hand. I thought about an aging friend, Gino. He is slowing
down little by little, color fading from his frame, but a great old guy to hang with who knows the pro sports business from the inside. The day before</span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">, at lunch near
the Galleria, while the two of us talked about dirty money</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">in college sports, Gino said as an afterthought, ‘Oh and remind me some day, scout, to tell ya some time about the Bankman boys. Up in the Bay area.’</span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino does not remember my professional entanglement with the Bankmans that turned personal, I guessed. He sometimes displays signs of forgetfulness. The Bankman situation traced to years ago when I was just getting my start. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> I registered a few bars of
the theme music on the ESPN program. But I was already </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">floating </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">on my back, in a chemical fog, across a vast amber sea</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> of</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> gentle waves. Walking dead zombies passed by. I was wearing cargo
shorts, cross-training footwear, and a</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">billowing
fleece pullover – the perfect look. A cold</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">breeze froze my hands and knees. I held a leftovers sack </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">from Chang’s. A bit of creepy, Confucian wisdom shared once by my father about
marching in a band came to mind.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Son,’ he said
assertively, as he liked to do, ‘Keep your ears on the band. Get your timing
down. <i>Don't get so far out in front you can’t make out the tune.'</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> In my drugged condition that did not make sense. I did not study music. I was never in any band. Soon
everything became silent and dark. My eyes closed. This is what it feels like to fall forever into the Deep, I thought. I never found out if my athlete’s interview
got onto </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Sports Center
</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">while
I slept.</span></span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute16"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*** ***</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Gino and I lounged on overstuffed arm chairs like lethargic cruise ship passengers. We were in a main passageway of the Glendale
Galleria. This mall is near Chavez Ravine, an old school L.A. scene, Dodger Stadium’s
neighborhood, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">your silver-plated mirror image to Sunset, Rodeo, and Beverly Boulevard. Each of us had few things to occupy our time. It was the backwater of a long off-season for Gino. And apparently all my clients did not need me. So, people-watching became a
sane and constructive response to the crumbling cultural and social conditions known as metro So Cal. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> It was close to 100 degrees that morning, a misbegotten kind of torture this time of
year. Any old refuge from the warm is how Gino describes the proper response to this inhumane weather. Retreat into a megamall, the contemporary town square, constituted our game plan during many Summer days. The expensive
and cushioned chairs in the public areas of the Galleria, like lovely siren songs, invite passersby to dive into them for a long stay – way better than the rude boulders in cement benches in San Diego. Which is exactly what we were up to.</span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino and I plopped by t</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">he entry to a </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Neiman-Marcus </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">talking about the pitiful state of Angels </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">baseball. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Gino labels
this store disdainfully as </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Needless Markup</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>,</i> a decadent testimony to America’s inevitable drowning death in materialism. The old man is an outspoken
personality. He is proud of his theories and opinions no matter how indulgent or hard bitten. So, his act can get old and he can be
grating but I do not really mind. I know for a fact that he complains about my quirks too. Our times together lead almost always to a learning
experience of some sort for me.</span></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><i><span style="color: #990000;"> [My career was on an upswing at that moment. The college baseball draft had just surprise gifted me with a trio of eager -- and soon to be ridiculously wealthy -- 20-year old player-clients who might take express voyages to the major leagues. As the sports agent and personal manager for ten pro athletes already, mostly NBA millionaires with personal lives perpetually in crisis and steady consumers of addictive painkillers, black market antidepressants and baggies of weed, to scare off their demons, I was financially (if not personally down deep) comfortable. So three more wealthy but immature guys in need of hand holding, mentoring, a surrogate parent, felt like a lot to take on. Insert added stress here. But I clear several million dollars each year, after expenses as they say, </span></i></span></span><i><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">without constant backbreaking work. So the baseball draft convinced me, against my best judgment, to go for it.]</span></i><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino cautions me not to
feel guilty about what I do. I have good contract and communication skills, have become a hard but not irrational negotiator, have patience with pampered egos, and have decent conflict-resolution abilities. I get a lot of money for this and agree I should not feel guilt as I </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">grow
more financially secure. But just to be frank here, I have few moral and spiritual strengths on the
back slope of midlife. It feels like I am slipping. I don't know what I will draw on should things get much rougher as the parade marches on.</span></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I got to know Gino
while he was the primary trainer, top gun in the locker room, for the NBA’s
Clippers. He was rehabbing a couple of my 7-foot clients who were nagged
by leg injuries. But now Gino was semi-retired. He would soon get busy once preseason workouts for NBA rookies set sail in Inglewood. Gino
famously, and loyally, served for over 40 years as an innovative physical trainer,
off the charts medicine man, chief babysitter, and unofficial life coach for teams at major universities in California,
followed by a couple of heralded NBA jobs including the Clippers. In the
process he made a good living. He helped a lot of people. Gino made smart preparations for an
extended retirement. So now he 'was going to enjoy it dammit.' Gino’s memoir, a ghost-written affair full of basically bogus
sports tales, bore a clever
title: </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>My Life Among Giants:
Confessions from NBA Locker Rooms</i>. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">The book was no </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Tuesdays with</i> <i>Morrie</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> but it was a pretty big
hit</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Between us, we still had a little time, a few tales to tell, and intrusive questions to ask before time was
up.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> Nameless individuals and small groups
drifted by. </span><span style="font-size: 17px;">A tanned and leathery old man, 75 or so, strolled up to Gino.</span><span style="font-size: 17px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">The old
stranger smiled. He stuck out his wrinkled hand before Gino spotted him.</span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Oh-ho-o-h-h-h </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">my great Gawd</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">! Well. Well I'll be damned to hell,' my friend exclaimed. He pushed himself up from his chair, a mighty straining effort. </span></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Dick. My-oh. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">What in hell are
you doing?’ he asked. ‘It's been years ain't it? </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Years. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Christ! How freaking many?’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">The stranger grinned. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> ‘Well, yeah, it has been,' Dick concurred. ‘Let’s call it five or six. At least</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">I'm picking up a little something nice for Claire. My wife. Her
birthday's coming</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">up.’</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> Gino seemed very pleased to
introduce me to the guy.</span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The 70-somethings
launched into old times chitchat. Gino spoke louder and gesticulated more than soft-spoken Dick. They
mentioned the Army, Korea, the old-age aches and pains of warriors past, former wives, life annuities, alimony, and other topics. They smiled about shared memories. </span></span><br />
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I gathered that Dick power walked through the Galleria usually by himself, around dawn, nuch too early for Gino and me.. He wore new Dr. Scholl’s walking shoes and
an elaborate silver pedometer, and he seemed to acquire his clothes at Dillard’s
and Macy stores. The desert tan came from weekending in Palm Springs. He moved with a slight bend forward, like many older gents shuffling about us. Dick made it clear that he did not want to disappoint his wife. I pictured her (spouse number 2, number 3, or was she 4?) as a dangerously thin,
silicone-enhanced blonde, much younger than Dick, who was accustomed to her <i>L’Oreal</i> products and the priciest powders, eyeliners, and lipsticks. An actress from the ABC sitcom
</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Modern
Family </i>came to mind.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Dick was on his way minutes later. Gino lowered carefully into his chair. He is nagged by bursitis and needs
a new left hip. As he plopped into the seat, his cushion exhaled wearily, like a lost
soul descending into deep water.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Man,' Gino said reflectively. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> We sat quietly.
Eventually I observed, 'He seemed like a nice enough guy.' </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Oh, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">hell-l-l</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> yeah! Dick's a winner. Indeed,' Gino said. 'Like a lotta other guys, war vets, hereabouts during the
day. Many of ‘em look as if they an't got two dimes to rub together. But Dick, well, you never know who's loaded and who ain't. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Load-ed, I say! The r</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">eally big bucks.'</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> 'That's Dick?' I inquired. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> Gino’s old eyes flickered, dim pilot lights behind his thick glasses. He shifted toward me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'This was the real deal,
scout. You know those cheap shorts and beach shirt, and everything? That’s just Dick being
his true self. Humble guy, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">real-<i>lee</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> humble, a hero in his time,’ Gino said.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'I did notice that
monster ring, the gold medic alert bracelet, and the like Topsiders for 200 bucks. How do you square that?,' I replied.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">'What? Ho-o yeah. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Yeah-h-h.</i> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">You got a good eye,’
Gino said. ‘You heard of the one percent? Well that’s him. Dick’s a part of the
one percent, in the top one percent of the top one percent. You’d never
know it but he’s the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Lifestyles
of the Rich & Famous</i>,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> lad. But the man’s got a big heart. His wife and
he are totally into charities and causes around L.A.'</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">'Nope.You'd never know it meeting him,’ I said. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino smiled slyly.
‘That’s the deal with lots of folks swimming through here. Craze-<i>ee</i> as the Southern California itself. Glendale,
Santa Ana, West Hollywood, Beverly – it don’t matter, scout. They power walk to get out of the house and
challenge their pacemakers. Just like old Olympians following doctors’ orders. Most get
around pretty well. Up they drive to valet parking, drop their gold key rings, and come on in like they
don’t have an effing penny to their names. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Mega,<i> may-gaa </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">rich these people are.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <i>May-gaa </i>moolah! </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Later they’ll maybe do the backstroke to the food court to grab a
small coffee or a little frozen yogurt. Such big spenders to the man. But that’s how to break the bank, youngblood. The old ladies eye the old dudes in the Dr. Scholl brigades like piranhas. Just looking for company they say, but mainly looking for the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">l-o-v-e</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Each of us took note of several mall patrons as they went by. This had a way of cheering us up. Foot
traffic had been light in L.A. shopping malls because of the
recession It hit our part of Cali hard. Gino and I felt there was nothing more pitiful than a megamall, like a once proud Great White, in death throes -- or a living room filled with Christmas presents and bright decorations but no one to enjoy them. But now the glittery Galleria obviously had a faint pulse after all.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> A tall, Khloe
Kardashian lookalike came our way. Her black hair (Armenian, shiny, and thick) was long and stylish. Her
vacuous face was slightly turned up. She towered in high, red spiky heels over those nearby.</span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I imitated a joker of a sports announcer. ‘It's a sunny day here at Galleria Stadium, not a cloud in the sky. Wait a minute. And there she is coming onto the field. She's racing toward make-up at the <i>Elizabeth Arden</i> boutique at </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Neiman's. Before the halftime break, she'll be driving into </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">a
dress-rehearsal over at the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Keeping Up with the Kardashians</i> souvenir shop.<i> </i>What a lady, what smooth and daring moves she has</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.' </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA8dKKgceJEQr4s0WGzSSwaiD6y6RcsmRoLtpku1xDmCgthtdtyl3BsDE7jcf1_jiD4UVN9jgdq4eOmeXN10x4ZuaV18ka7dnBTVgLhIjrAuA1ahwd3P0GPyTHCKPiutbAtQHLOgJVDr8/s1600/Khloe+K.+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA8dKKgceJEQr4s0WGzSSwaiD6y6RcsmRoLtpku1xDmCgthtdtyl3BsDE7jcf1_jiD4UVN9jgdq4eOmeXN10x4ZuaV18ka7dnBTVgLhIjrAuA1ahwd3P0GPyTHCKPiutbAtQHLOgJVDr8/s1600/Khloe+K.+2.jpg" width="143" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Khloe Kardashian</span></b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> ‘Keeping up with a </span><i style="font-size: 13pt;">what</i><span style="font-size: 13pt;">?’
Gino exclaimed. </span></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> The tall girl strode away gracefully. A professional model for sure. But body language though betrayed her feelings. She held in her right hand a small white clutch purse tightly, too tightly, under right shoulder. </span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'So, you're not watching much <i>E</i></span></span><i><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">!</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Channel</span></span></i><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> nowadays?’ I chided him. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute9">
<span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">*
* *</span></span><b><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="CharAttribute8"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Minutes later, an ancient mall walker,
red-faced and wheezy, slowly ambled by. He wore poorly fitted, broken-backed canvas slip-ons. He was towing a green air tank, its paint chipping off, with a thin plastic tube that ascended into his runaway gray whiskers and
nostrils. A cheap pair of shorts, a food-stained </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Hollywood Squares</i> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">tee shirt, soiled woolen
socks, and a droopy and dusty bleed-em-blue Dodger ball cap pulled down to his bushy eyebrows completed his fashion
selections for the day. The old boy fingered a long, unlighted cigar
like George Burns, a.k.a. the movies' dead God
Almighty, and the quaint ‘50s style of the oddball comic Red Skelton. Every public
space in Los Angeles County forbids lighting up tobacco products, such a good decision. The octogenarian twitched the Havana up and down. He looked over as if he would mumble something to us, or so it seemed. But
he shrugged his rounded, old shoulders, swallowing his insight as he passed by.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Minutes passed without much to look see. But a real celebrity came tripping toward Gino and me, Hollywood style (no kidding here); it was the comedian Richard Lewis. He
seemed as pale and wispy as Casper the cartoon ghost. As are his customs, Lewis wore a black suit
jacket two sizes too big for him, black pegged jeans, a ritzy black
crew-neck tee shirt -- an Armani I figured, expensive black Ray-Ban shades (temporarily hooked to the collar of the tee), and black and white Chuck Taylors, which are vintage canvas basketball
shoes. This bundle of nerves has never launched a Wilson at a regulation hoop, I thought. His dyed, black hair, laced with gray, was puffed up by a
blow dryer, combed back, with a part in the middle, and getting thin. It flounced around his head like a dark gray cloud as he
trudged along. Lewis sported puffy half moons beneath his eyes. Both of his hands were thrust deeply into his jeans’ pockets. His shoulders sagged forward and toward his middle. He came upon our perch with his head bowed. This </span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">crafted look, his longtime stage persona, made him seem like a manic-depressive. </span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Hey-hey-ha</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">y</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">. Look-ee who we have here,
bud. This dude, he makes me laugh,’ Gino whispered once he spotted the comedian. I sat up straighter. But Gino clammed up.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipuZNhSWOnvxbJBOMAAgJj09IVOuEoORDdhcSufaaXMv4UTzxygXxDmUEkYwYUjDmxeMNG0EWwy-JvgX6zrWlM-uumeC3eJpBNMmiNglWKmNmFJzfu87VCTKr_rzXgjwlt0Gp_B3SOEpc/s1600/Richard+Lewis+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipuZNhSWOnvxbJBOMAAgJj09IVOuEoORDdhcSufaaXMv4UTzxygXxDmUEkYwYUjDmxeMNG0EWwy-JvgX6zrWlM-uumeC3eJpBNMmiNglWKmNmFJzfu87VCTKr_rzXgjwlt0Gp_B3SOEpc/s1600/Richard+Lewis+2.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Richard Lewis</b></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The comedian kept his head
down as he passed by. He looked perplexed, a little put out, as if he were reprimanding his neurotic inclinations. Then Lewis glanced at me. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Mr. Lewis, sir’ I said respectfully, emphasizing the <i>sir,</i> while nodding once. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> He paused and glanced at me
suspiciously. The big, black crescent patches under his eyes and his sallow skin tones were prominent. He relaxed.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">‘Hey. How ya doin?’ </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">he said lightly, a bit short of
breath, hands still deep in his pockets. Defensive like Khloe yet humorous to me. I felt like it was a moment of improv from <i>C</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>urb Your Enthusiasm.</i></span></span><br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=102341274865478838" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i> </i>Off went Richard Lewis then. Too bad. No show of his telltale exasperations and poor-me shtick for us today. I had a thousand things to ask him. One of his funny lines nowadays is I'm getting too old. It's like my libido has shrunk down, missing in action. I have balls now that are longer than my career. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Well there ya go,
scout. You got something to tell the grand kids now,’ Gino said with sarcasm dripping from his syllables. </span></span><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Funny, coach,’ I
noted. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino said, ’I kind of thought Richard Lewis was a totally New York guy.'</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I said, 'Yeah, maybe. But let’s go back to your
old friend the soldier. Dick. Okay, chief?’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'No problem,' Gino shrugged.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘You said </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Dick was one of life’s big winners?’ </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">I noted.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘One would never know
it to look at him. You seen the way he dresses,’ Gino said. ‘But Brother Dick
got some </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>see-ree</i>-us-</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">lee</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">rich in real estate after
Korea. Here in the City of Angels and up by the Frisco Bay.’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I thought about Gino's words.
His thick, untrimmed white eyebrows twitched a bit. He did not crack a smile. But I anticipated an imminent cackle of laughter and an offhand
apology ---</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>'Awww crap, that ain't true. Forget that crap. Just pulling your chain, partner.’</i></span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Go on.' In my head I heard a few bars of <i>"I Left My Heart in San Francisco."</i></span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i> </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">‘Yeah he made some big, big </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">bucks in real
estate but then he just switched gears,’ Gino added.
‘Dick and some fellow investors, one of the Bankmans, Phil, got bored rigid counting their money after a couple of years. It was retirement time anyways. They dabbled with ideas for restaurants. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Huge </i>deal that turned out to be.
</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">So . .
. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">’</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘You mean like . . . ,’ I began to say.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Yeah I mean like A-rab, Italian, Greek, Asian
Fusion -- that's what they say, huh, ain't it? </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Few-shun</i>!,’
</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Gino noted. 'They struck gold by minin' that one, new brainstorm. You don’t know yet, rookie, but you
could say that Dick happens to be the <i>real</i> P.F. Chang.’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> That speared my full attention, like a sharp hook in a fish. Was he babbling, having an aneurysm, a stroke, a spot of dementia? That old gentleman soldier, white-haired and tan and casual, not a worry in the world, who had stopped
by was certainly not Asian. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I frowned, 'Dick? That
Dick? I mean your Dick? The Sperry Topsider dude with the ice blue Tommy Bahama beach shirt and expensive watch? Who was
here? He’s like . . . </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Dick <i>Chang</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">?'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Nope nope, and nope! </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>No-ho</i> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">indeed,
scout,' Gino said reprovingly. 'Not his name. Dick was born in effing Oxnard. That whole Chinese thing – </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Chang’s --</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> is marketing a la mode.
Pretty damn clever, am I right? An investor's wet dream. Dick’s real name is Fred-er-<i>rick</i>, but he's always gone by Dick. He puts the <i>F</i> in the
PF. He and Bankman jumped on that idea for a
classy but not expensive place that'd glamour up old school Chinese. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">P.F. Chang's</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">. The <i>P</i> that's Phil Bankman.
Sometimes I tell people that Dick is the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">real</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> P.F. Chang, just for laughs, when the subject comes up.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Real estate you said?,' I asked.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino grew more serious, focused.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <span style="color: #990000;"> <i>[I thought for days about the story the old man related. I saw it as a fable, a big fish story, embellished over years. A quintet of 30-something soldiers, war veterans, dragged home across the windy Pacific battered, bruised, and bone tired -- nearly dead from the Korean hot zone. Like Dick, the
others had ties to California. These five agreed that they were </i>done<i>. Done with Asia, all Asians, Commies, blood and guts, and military double talk. Dick and Bankman grew tight during a hospital stay in Seoul. All five drove up the Coast on a tip like the specious advice 'Plastics' in a later movie, 'The Graduate.' Four went all in to buy a big patch – Gino emphasized, 'We’re talking
a </i></span></span></span><span style="color: #990000;"><span class="CharAttribute14" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">hu-u-u-ge</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> tract, rook' -- of inexpensive land that encircled the
podunk airfield and mail station sleeping soundly by the south end of Frisco Bay, east shore. Gino added, '</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Whoa-o now! Stop the
presses! L</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><i>ike a snap that move turned the area into a sea of good fortune -- </i>San
Francisco International<i> , that's </i>Ess Effing Oh! <i>to you, scout -- and all its </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">surroundings.' </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The post-Korea economic boom with its spike in commercial air travel poured millions, perhaps billions</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">into the pockets of the warriors. Dick soon needed his own bank! </span></span><span style="font-size: 17px; font-style: italic;">The dough keeps washing in still.</span><span style="font-size: 17px; font-style: italic;"> </span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Years later, as a new venture, all five of the guys this time, with Dick and Phil
fronting, went all in on a new thing, a liquid vibe of pre-commie Chinese myths, mysteries, style, and foods. Faux Asian culture in a classy box! Their cuisine consultants
invented a new look, a tempting menu, fake murals, and chalky white Clydesdales that loomed over the whole package. Perfect. This was freaking Hollywood! New waves </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">of riches came ashore.
Franchises went up like fancy beach resorts. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Hi-yoh, Silver and away.]</span></span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14" style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The fable amused me. Warm
mango and ruby red hues, teak and brown woodwork, gleaming tiles, rich
fabrics, sizzling platters of tempting recipes, enthusiastic servers. No chow mein or chop suey in sight. Feelings of envy began to grip me.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> For the first time in months I thought about an old TV commercial. Tomato-bright ketchup from a Heinz
bottle oozed slowly, slowly, down onto a plate like thickened plasma from an IV. The reddish goo inspired Carly Simon to croon 'Anticipation. You're makin' me wait! -- You're keepin' me way-ay-ay-tun!' I felt envy again.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Some people score the
lucky ticket. Others make it big by workin' hard. Big payoffs come either way,' Gino said. 'That there in a nutshell is Dick. Ain't that so?'</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> I smiled, 'And
on the night he was born the angels did sing? Shepherds knelt to adore. Wise men brought gifts. Korea fell, and a shining star rose over the waters in the West?' </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Something like that,
young blood,' Gino played along. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">'But cut the kidding here</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.' </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘How come you never got in on a piece of
the action, Gino? How come?' I asked.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘To tell you the truth,
homeboy, I never believed in war,’ my old friend replied.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘What . . .? What's in hell does that mean?’ I asked confused. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> But Gino and I were done
for the day. – As always it had been a learning experience.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute11">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">*** ***</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Three largely carefree days came next. I benefited from lots of sleep.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> On the third day, just after sunset, an expensive dental crown came loose
without warning (with an ugly, war-torn remnant of the original tooth still
glued inside it). I deplaned sluggishly at LAX. I had just made a day trip
to Reno and back to see the most-promising athlete, and his anxious and protective parents,
among my trio of fresh baseball draftees.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I felt no immediate discomfort in my mouth. So I did not race through traffic to get to my condo.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The father and mother, and the kid himself – with pure intentions and a deep wellspring of greed juicing their dreams – insisted on one demand. If the budding “future all-star”
(this was the parents' assessment) crept under the wings of my agency the ball team that plucked him
up would have to produce an ocean of cash.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> In my experienced
opinion, based on hours of DVDs watching my player playing, and after reading a novel’s worth of notes by senior
scouts, I sensed this kid might make his fam’s fantasy come true, maybe accrue a few
shekels more. Then a brutally efficient computer transaction would flash-deposit a number with many zeroes, like a tsunami washing ashore, into my Chase account, my cut of the boy's hefty signing bonus. Lucrative seasonal transactions would follow. Like the Nike ads say, Just</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> do it a</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">nd show me the money. If he could hit the curve ball and his defensive strengths held up, all would be well.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> These were the lame details of my job. </span></span><span style="font-size: 17px;">I believed that </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Gino rated my abilities too highly. Laziness and self-indulgence (not to
mention an expanding waistline and graying temples) lurked throughout my career backdrop. Big financial rewards for doing little, my own fantasy during college, had materialized. Two or three times a year I had a player-client, or some high profile
coach, to steer through troubled waters – adultery stories that blow-up, domestic abuse, drug or steroid use,
a pesky DUI, or a complicated contract battle. Office assistants and paralegals handled most of the less serious, tedious, work for me. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> Before
I left Reno, I cautioned the young
athlete not to get so far in front of life's parade that he could not hear the marching band play. He replied yeah, whatever. Clueless.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> My return flight from
Reno stopped at SFO for a few minutes. I marveled at the sprawling
operation. The fable of the Korean vets going all rags to riches popped to mind. I pictured acres and acres around my
plane as undeveloped, rolling hillocks with a tiny cargo and mail depot, and a short
runway, on a flat patch of earth next to San Francisco Bay.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I slipped the broken
crown into my side pocket.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Three days later, another
crown came loose from my lower deck. A putrid tooth fragment also was rotting inside. I spit the thing into my palm when no one was looking. Later, at my condo, I took
both dental castoffs from my Hugo Boss sportcoat. I dropped them in a small
plastic baggie. The pair of relics looked like me -- irrelevant, lonely, forlorn. The sad vision troubled me. I hid the package in a drawer by my front
door. I knew I had to call Freddy, my old dentist for help assuming he was still in
the oral hygiene game.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> The next day I foolishly bit
into a Hershey bar with almonds. A small chunk cracked off an upper
eyetooth. In anger, I lost it. I began to
curse God. I punched my palm. I asked, 'Why me?' Missing back teeth I could fake. But a ragged chip
from my front grill was misery and effing unacceptable.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Stupidly I gazed around to see if anyone had noticed. A searing feeling, one I had denied for days, like a black shroud of mourning, came over me. I morbidly contemplated descriptors of my situation: mournful, gloomy, rueful, bleak,
disheartened, dismal, drowning, somber, sick at heart, bereaved, melancholic, dejected, depressed, down in the dumps. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Ch-ch-ch-</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>cheerless</i>. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Again I blamed
heaven for my rotten luck.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Then God whispered a word into my ear. At least I thought it might be God. "</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Dick," was all that was said.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I pushed my face into
my palms. 'This has </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">gotta </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">stop,’ I whined to myself.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: start;">
<span class="CharAttribute13" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> By quick and self-pitying calculation
minutes later, I realized that exuviating teeth would have to end</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I only had about fifteen
left. One only gets so many hairs, so many whiskers, so many days, so many heartbeats, so many toothies for life's hit parade. A
quick exam of the latest tooth shard showed it to be dull yellow and decayed from
within, the pitiable and universal human story. I extracted a tiny paper <i>Starbucks </i>receipt from my pants. Into it I wrapped the broken fragment of me. I stuffed the wad into the iced tea cup
I had just drained. Then I secured the plastic lid onto it. I dropped this
self-consciously, a sad being, into a public trash can. I wondered if God had developed enmity toward me.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> *** ***</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> 'Yo, scout. Hey, you
remember my buddy Dick, right?’ Gino asked without warning.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute11">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> It was the twelfth day
after my dental mishaps got going. We were on the same cushy chairs in the Glendale Galleria,
outside Neiman Marcus as before. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Yeah. Why?' I asked.</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Yep. Sad to say
it but I'm gonna miss the guy. He dies the other day. Gotta go to his funeral tomorrow. Family plot in Oxnard. A damn shame, ain't it huh?’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'For true? Oh man. The
old F of P.F. himself?' I said with surprise. 'He looked pretty good all things being equal -- with it, well-preserved, good health, and all that. That's real bad news. Sorry, coach. What happened?’</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> As I struggled to sympathize, a fantasy of an incense-laced wake of a revered Chinese elder on an imposing burial
mound popped to mind. This struck me as humorous but crude. I fought the urge to smile. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> 'For
a senior war horse his age?</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Yep, yep, your damn right. Well-preserved and the picture of health and wealth and wisdom. Yes </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">in-deed</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">, I'd say’ Gino said.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> T</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">he old trainer looked more gray in the face and strained than usual. His other skin emanated an unusual, sick yellow tint. He admitted he was worn down.
Gino admitted he was sleeping poorly and felt beat up by waves of panic he gets when drifting off
with his Lunesta. Mourning turned Gino tearful and sentimental. As a midwestern
Protestant child, he learned all about the fear of the Lord, the typical backwater fire and brimstone messages.. One evening while we were out
Gino confessed reluctantly, after a trio of Jim Beam shots with beer chasers,
that he was scared that <i>soon</i> a drowsy bedtime drop into the depths would be his
last.</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Yeah, Dick. It happened three days ago,'
Gino noted. ‘Poor guy. Thus ends the story of the Fusion King. But </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">get this, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">genius. Dick, he's found dead
with no clothes, naked as a jaybird, beside his bed. Clare, the second wife, or rather she's number three, found him on the carpet stone cold beside their California
King. He was fixin’ to go on one of their runs on the beach that sun-up. She was
all already Nike’d up, lookin’ to conquer that new running track out by West
Hollywood High that heads up through the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">hills.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Story is she wondered why Dick wasn't stirring around – he was slower than her in the
morning. The boys and I always </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">thought she was like </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">way,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">I mean </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>wa-ay</i>,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">too
young</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></i></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">for him. Clare looked in
on him and saw Dick’s body. It was like he got outta bed, dropped his pj's,
grabbed some running shorts and a jock strap, then flopped to the floor from heart failure.
Actually his upper body went face first right onto the high thread counts, then
ricocheted to the carpet. Clare claims his long, angry scar from Korea across his front imprinted a line in the sheets, like a trench beside a canal. Sad to think about
Dick losing it </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">that kind</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> of way. Pit-ee-<i>ful. </i>Naked, flatlined. Nobody around to break his fall. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Help</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">-less. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Not gonna be the way I check out I
hope.'</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Another legend joins
the mythic creatures on the misty tops of Hollywood Hills,’ I said. 'But seriously tho, G. He
seemed like a nice person. Stand up guy. A past master of the wok 'n roll?’ </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino smiled
momentarily. But he looked dismayed. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Dick was a big
war hero, you know,' Gino said. 'But he never wanted to gab about it. Me, I did my years of duty.
Effing war in effing Korea. All I accomplished was doling out aspirin and typing up
Army forms and orders. Friggin' enemy bombshells banging over top us day and
night. Took away all our chances for shuteye. We was so tired. I slept for two solid months
straight when I got back. You know, it’s not generally gotten around, but I was good, I
mean </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">real</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">-lee </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">good,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">at office work. Had a head
for it. I could type up a million military forms a day. All for your freedom,
buddy. So let’s see some grat-i-tude. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">‘Round
the clock I worked.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Never saw any combat, but Dick, my Gawd, he was the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>real-l-l-l </i>deal-l-l-l,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> brother. He got the
Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor from the President himself at the White
effing House.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> These facts intrigued me. I recalled a detail I overlooked on a cellphone picture that Gino had
shown me. Dick – the venerable, elder P.F., in the flesh –
looking young and hearty, looking slick in full dress uniform, had a big ass
military medal pinned to his chest. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'That medal Dick was
flashing in your photo, in his dress uniform, what was that?,' I asked.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Well, it was <i>the </i>freakin' Medal
of honor from Uncle Sam. You guys that never served a day. I swear,’ Gino said
disdainfully. ‘Who </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">never </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">for a minute put your tender asses on the line.
Geez.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Like in all those firestorms
of typing forms, creating duplicates, filing, making carbon copies at all
hours, dude?' I shot back.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino laughed. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Dick began to hate </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">all</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> the Asians. It was wrong and
he knew it. He worked up a blind rage. The battlefield overwhelmed his good judgment.
The Koreans? Dick continued to shun them especially to this day. He lived
out the insanity of ‘kill or be killed.’ So, he charged his outfit up
hillsides to wipe out snipers. Charged into enemy lines with the men on our side close, but<i> </i>always <i>behind</i>
him. Cuckoo brave. Stuff like that. Then it’s all over. It’s back to the States -- and Dick, Mack, and Jack, and of course Phil Bankman, bought an East Bay airport and then thought up </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Chang's</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></i></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Life -- The Board Game, and things took off. Dick claimed
that he had mellowed as time went by. Others thought so too. But he always grabbed challenges in his new career as a business man. It’s all a war game in the end,
scout, you know? That was what Dick believed. The guy with the most game comes out
the victor, beats the house, gets the medal. But it’s sad, <i>sad, </i>to say it.<i> </i>With family issues and all, it ain’t
Dick who get to enjoy most of Dick’s riches but Clare. She’s in line to get
P.F.'s fortune cookies stuffed with cold cash. Crap.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute13" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Family politics be such a touchy business. But the Medal of Honor, whoa, wait just a minute there, that's big time,’ I whistled.
‘Serious war hero stuff. Epic. Legend fodder. Made for Hollywood and <i>Netflix</i>.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute13" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> * * *</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino and I decided to eat
lunch at the <i>Chang's</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> beside the <i>Galleria</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">. We would share
a toast in Dick's honor -- just iced tea though. The riderless white steeds, door prizes for their mythical ruler, stood stoically by the main entrance. Dick would never ride again.</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLcVixVXMQxNPFYO3Ce9Hch3b61yEsLNKYbOFfaECpQnCDzer_PzrsWKdgTbwSmrCQTfVNK_YUQbSLY_dYfiTad41iOeRGgQ5YH_dClDzw5D3BuD8T6zW6m00CctJRuiFkaD-siTj3ZPI/s1600/PF+Changs+Front+Door.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLcVixVXMQxNPFYO3Ce9Hch3b61yEsLNKYbOFfaECpQnCDzer_PzrsWKdgTbwSmrCQTfVNK_YUQbSLY_dYfiTad41iOeRGgQ5YH_dClDzw5D3BuD8T6zW6m00CctJRuiFkaD-siTj3ZPI/s1600/PF+Changs+Front+Door.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I felt a wave of nauseated in the pit of my stomach and dizzy once we ambled, sweat-stained and parched, into the artsy-slick ambiance of the eatery. My eyes adjusted slowly to the shimmery, cool darkness. It seemed outlandish, but I thought I spied the real Khloe and that <i>Modern
Family </i>actress, Julie Bowen -- the Widow Clare's stage and screen body double?, huddled together while holding hands in a back crescent booth, like intimate galpals. They drank
Dirty Martinis. They were immersed in gossipy conversation. I felt that Colonel
Dick, a.k.a. the War Hero, would stand proudly, would that he could, in full dress uniform with his squared shoulders thrown back, chest puffed out, a genuine warrior's medal
gleaming on his formal jacket, and would have grinned lightly at the girlfriends as their host. Absentmindedly,
I searched for Dick at the main waiters’ station. I rubbed my face with both
palms trying to throw off my shakiness and persistent vertigo. Somewhere inside I sensed that I was about to lose something. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> In a jittery voice I ordered a spicy House Fried Rice plate, with wokked tofu cubes and broccoli-free vegetables, hold
the fried egg. Gino asked for Hunan Glazed Beef and Napa Cabbage with a salty side of lo mein (there was that poetic menu-ese gain). Damn those
talented writers. Real sales, real clever. Their menu was a work
of art.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Tofu! Hey. You got a
problem or what, girlfriend?' Gino asked.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'My dentist told me to
take it easy. Be careful. Go with the soft foods. Less stress on my choppers. Give my freshly screwed in
teeth time to get a grip. Also get the fog of Propofol out of my system. Man that stuff put me out' I replied. I had delighted in the drug's immediate aftereffect. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> On impulse I yanked up
my top lip to show Gino the false front grill that had been implanted, polished, and sculpted into
shape by Dr. Kim Kan Do, the Korean endodontist to the stars. Dr. Freddy -- who reminded me of a character from an Updike novel called <i>Couples -- </i>had recommended him. Kim does all the heavy dental lifting and tugging, and replacing, for L.A.’s pro basketball and hockey teams and some movie people..</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Now, well well<i> well</i>. Who's going Hollywood now?’ Gino chided me.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> We toasted the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">real </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">P.F. Chang, wherever he
might be. The passion fruit tea was a cold blessing.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'You never told me how
you met P.F. did you?,' I said.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Huh. Hmmm, yeah. Well, it's the damnedest
thing I tell you, scout,' Gino said eventually. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Were those actual tears
glinting in his eyes?</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Look, cubster, Dick was the man. He
once saved my effing life, did you know that? He was </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">one, great friend,’ Gino recalled. ‘On the slopes of the Korea mountains is where we met. Damn that God forsaken place.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <span style="color: #990000;">
[Truthfully, as I sat there, feeling weak, not centered enough to eat, </span></span></i></span><span style="color: #990000;"><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>I gathered that Part Two of that legendary fable by Gino had started. The
midrashic tale proceded like this. Dick and his company of soldiers straggled into, just showed up, at the camp like a lost and rippy squadron of dirty urchins wriggling out of a
primitive sea. It had been a loud and smoky dawn at Gino’s base. Rainy earlier too. Dick made
their presence known. Neither Gino nor anyone else there had heard of Dick or
his band mates before. Like ghosts they had materialized. </i><i>The platoon members were caked with mud, wet from a torrent of pre-dawn precip, bayonets still fixed to their rifles, half slaughtered and half
sleepwalking. They'd been awake and moving forever no thanks to the Commie bombs-away
bullshit. The American boys had blood and dirt smeared all over their
fatigues, rubbed raw faces, and grimy skinned up hands. They said they'd just engaged in some fierce firefight, in total darkness, on an unnamed hillside. Dick was an Army NCO – now
leader of his outfit. He came into our office report this unplanned respite in from the
mountains. The whole bunch was starved, hungry for replacement provisions and fresh ammo – and all seemed basically in shock from the carnage so far away from home. Gino’s clueless presiding officer, a
real pencil-neck pain in the butt, and </i>a <i>world class, </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><i>stoo-oo-pid grad from some military academy</i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><i>ordered Dick to have his outfit </i>remove the bayonets from
their guns</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> right now, double time, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">pron-to</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">,</span></i></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> soldier, <i>because
it was protocol and since </i>‘Mister, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">we</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> are not the enemy here!<i>']</i></span></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Wait,’ I interjected after a silent moment.
‘Wait. You were hanging nearby while all of this went on? What? At your tidy toy soldier desk? Being the Army typist
of the year. Regulation shirt tucked perfectly in place? Prince of the office, it all spic
and span. Or what, did you talk to Dick during this?' I asked.</span></span><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute18" style="line-height: 99%; text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 99%;"> 'Never got</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 99%;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 99%;">that far,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 99%;"> genius. So . . . ' Gino seemed testy.
He sniffed hard. He rubbed his eyes roughly. Acrid smoke from the ramshackle Korean
base seemed to sting them again. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute18" style="line-height: 99%; text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 99%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 99%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <span style="color: #990000;">
['So somebody outside the office cabin screamed </span></span></i></span><span style="color: #990000;"><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Incoming,
Incoming. Down, Go</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Down, Now. Go Down!</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <i>Just like that. A bazillion tracer rounds began zipping in like a swarm
of killer bees. Then there was this massive, earsplitting whizz bang concussion. Some huge artillery
shell blew up in the camp. A painful plume of noise washed over everyone, as if a behemoth volcano had erupted from ocean depths. Dust and
boards, lamps, paperwork, some of Gino's best-ever typed forms in triplicate, jagged glass, racing pieces of metal, and everything and everybody that was in there began to fly and and topple and swoon in death's embrace. One </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">big</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <i>flash of fire, like a cruise missile from that underwater volcano, a tameless bloom of blowback violence, lit the place up. Dick
right away jumped atop Gino to cover him on the floor. Gino’s face and front
were mashed onto splintered floorboards and a mud foundation. Lying under Dick, Gino imagined in his achy head he was
typing to this stranger’s folks --</i></span></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘</span></i></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">We
regret to inform you that on this date, blah, blah, died bravely and heroically in the line of duty, blah, blah. Stop.’ </span></span><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> <span style="color: #990000;"><i>But then
the whole damned hacky shack came screaming down. But before the roof came down, the West Point p.o. that Gino so disliked
died ugly. He was sliced in half by a razor sharp bayonet broken
off a non-com's rifle that whirled into him like a crazed copter blade. Clean cut
him through and through. The bottom half of his corpse stood there,
knees locked in place, in his muddy military boots. Gooey, iron scented blood
bubbled up and over his utility</i> <i>belt and side holster like hot lava.</i>
<i>Then the legs bent and collapsed. The
jerk’s final Southern-fried words were still simmering on his sheared off and blistered
lips, ’Have your men lose those bayonets because, </i>mister, </span></span></span><span style="color: #990000;"><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">we</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> are not the enemy here!<i>’]</i></span></span></span><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'What happened then?' I asked impatiently.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Well you see we lived, genius,’ Gino
said sarcastically. 'The crash cost Dick most of his teeth and a big bump on his melon like a bleeding cancer. A sharp wood plank from the
roof had bore down on him like a
javelin, like a trident missile, and smashed into the left side of his face.
Then my new best friend bled all over me. Body fluids and spare parts were spraying everywhere. A metal
rod from a filing cabinet or something tore into Dick like a harpoon thrown by Neptune hisself. It
sliced an incision up from his balls to his collarbone, a damned miracle it didn’t mangle his throat too. Hours of MASH surgery by Hawkeye and Trapper John, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">M. effing D.,</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> put the pieces of Humpty
back together again. Plastic surgery on the mainland pieced his old face back together. Lots of others there died, good men. After the attack the docs didn’t think Dick would
live to see another day. But he pulled through, a stalwart, a <i>real </i>trooper. Since then Uncle Sam has religiously bought Dick the
best dentures on the planet whenever he needed some and pinned a few medals
on his chest for heroism too.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Why is this some big
secret?' I asked.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘He was like that,’
Gino replied. ‘He made me, a total stranger, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">swear</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> an oath that day not to ever breathe a word about the incident.<i> </i></span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>Or-r-r</i> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">he said he would friggin' <i>hunt</i> me down. I decided to go with
his wish. He meant it. He was intense like that. He rattled me. Crap, Dick had just saved my
life. Why not play along with his wish.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> We saluted Dick's
heroics with more tea. Water dripped off our tumblers and pooled, like a landlocked sea, on the table. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Well, here's to old P.F., the real legend behind
the legend,' I said. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute13" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute24"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">
</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">We joked about life’s mystery moments. And how Dick, the philanthropist, did not fit the model for the
Hollywood glitter parade.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute13" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Here’s to Dynasty Dick
-- and all of those doomed Americans of course,' I said.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> We squinted across
the main dining area. The pair of women celebrities stared without restraint at
an Alex Trebek lookalike nearby. I spied Khloe raise her long-stemmed
martini glass to signal the waiter that time for a refill had come. Rumors in
the tabloids hint that she is not a true-blue Kardashian, that her actual
father might be unknown. Hollywood: the tabloids, bullshit, fiction, never say stop, I thought.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Soon, Julie Bowen proposed that the girls
drink a toast to our war hero, Dick, or to Gino, or more likely some chalk white and brittle Hollywood idol. Stemware glasses were raised. They washed down their martinis. Then
Khloe glanced over to wink seductively -- </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">at me</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">! Just me. I felt like I
might be falling in love. I smiled at her. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> That ache of dizziness and bad feeling in my stomach welled up again. I sensed a tingle in my arm. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Slow yourself down, chief. This ain't for real. Listen for the band, my
father warned a youthful me sternly. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">The muzak track began a Madonna tune. I tried to follow the lyrics to calm down. </span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13pt;"> I sounded like, There's something in the air, it’s
Hollywood, I tried to grieve it, but I never could.</span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Gino spoke up. Back to the pending funeral he went. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘At
least a small military band will be there to play and there’ll be a color guard. A 21-gun salute too,' he noted. Clare, the grown kids, Phil Bankman and the other business partners should show up.
There should be a hero’s parade, I tell ya! Proves one thing, youngblood. The biggest and best things in life are the ones you can’t see. So . . . . ‘<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘So. So, God bless
America?’ I asked timidly. My hands were trembling a bit.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> We waited quietly for
food.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Maybe humor might fortify me. I said, feigning a grin, '</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Poet, philosopher,
healer, Army typist of the year. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">You</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> be the total package, coach, good man,
sometimes my Confucius. But just remember -- </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">we are <i>not</i> the frickin' enemy,
you old mother.'</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'That's what they say, bucko,’
Gino played along. ‘Nice last words. But have dessert first as life be uncertain. Hey now. Where in hell is our order?’`</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Last words’ – the nagging phrase echoed
in my head. I hated my disorientation.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Moments later I scooped a large spoonful of the spicy House
Fried Tofu Rice into my mouth. Some grains fell into the tabletop sea because my hands shook. Gino grunted with pleasure over his lunch plate. I
bit down. I felt a crack trace up an incisor like a fault line, a bloody open artery materializing on the ocean floor. This made me mad. I spit out rice-layered scraps of peas, tofu, scallions, carrots,
and a pointy hunk of tooth. It landed by my plate table with a clack. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Gino grew alarmed.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I held up the castoff in the dim light. My hand was shaky. I felt like an
old man in the velvety cocoon of a funeral parlor. My hit parade of adjectives rolled again --
mournful, somber, sad, disdainful, dismal, dreary,
bleak, broken, gloo so <i>gloo-oo</i>-<i>mee</i> -- vulnerable,
dis-heartened, hurting, </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">ch-ch-<i>ch</i></span></span><i><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">-</span></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></i><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>cheerless</i>.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Ho-oh oh</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">. What you got there,
little brother?,' Gino snorted. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">'Another one</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><i><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">?</span></i></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Another one by Gawd? How many
does that make? You be falling </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">a-part</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I sipped some passion fruit tea. My hand shook. Sweet flavor, icy, dizzying, no dental discomfort. Thankfully. No real pain, not so far. </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Then it fell on me as hard as a vengeance bomb. I felt weak. All of it -- dropped in a rush. I cast my head down in surrender. I gasped for air. My fork and napkin slipped to the floor. My arms were lifeless. My face was soaked with sweat. I moaned out loud. Was this a panic attack?</span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> Chang's filled with gunpowdery smog. P</span></span><span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">eople looked toward our table suspiciously.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute17"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">
</span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Gino called to our waiter.</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Well, strike up the </span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">b-b-band. </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">Get a Souza march going.
Bring some cake,' he said in an off-key whack at humor. 'The</span></span><span class="CharAttribute14"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;">scout here is a crack up. Get 911 or get that big white horse. He might need a ride outta here. Hi-oh, Silver.'</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> 'Shut it, dammit. Shut it,' I snapped angrily at my friend's insensitivity. Old frigging creep. </span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> My mouth protested with a horrific silent-scream when I clenched my remaining teeth. My hands were numb. A tightness gripped my chest and a death-dealing pain hit my core like a fastball blazing, booming, into a catcher's mitt. I bent
forward. The room was imploding, like the shack in Gino’s base camp. I reached to grab Gino and instantly realized I would topple in a hard fall. My stressed-out frame thunked onto the flooring. My head on tile echoed like a hollow grenade.</span></span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> What's next, I worried, deep in fear, way too far ahead of the band as usual. Damn that Confucius stuff. My music had faded. Should have listened to the old man. Somewhere I lost track of the right tune -- and in typical fashion my timing was lousy. And just a wee bit <i>tarrr-deee,</i> as my old dog would chide me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> ‘Scout? Hey sport. Sport?’ I
heard Gino call to me, from far above, as through a long and narrow tunnel. ‘What in hell is going on? . . . Oh man.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="ParaAttribute1" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I trembled all over. Go toward the light, I remembered with sick humor. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> But now I feel as if I must put a set of fine points onto this saga.</span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> I lived ('obviously, genius,' as Gino once said) and my old dog has died. He passed due in an awesome but most unlikely accident. While sitting behind the left field fence during the first inning of a Fall Ball game in Palm Desert, while he 'was helping' me by checking up on my haughty, baseball Major League wannabe -- damn that kid's talent and his freaking attitude, and his big money -- Gino croaked. He was in the front seat of his car, first row of the cheap parking lot. He was chowing down on a takeaway carton of Singapore street noodles with chopsticks and a beer sold at the park. Not paying enough attention I suppose. My contract bonus-baby hit a screaming line drive, a wicked bomb, must have traveled at least 400 feet, that just cleared like a bullet over the see through outfield fence. The ball smashed through his windshield and clocked Gino in the face. That was it. </span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13pt;">The internet intoned: Fabled sports
trainer and decorated war hero dies in freak accident at Angels' fall league game. </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br />
My stalwart old friend was way out in left
field once more, a long long way from the patriotic glories of the buntings and the bandstand.
No surprise, G-dog left no last will and testament.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"> About my case of periodontic tragedy. The staff here tell me I am on the mend though I still feel humbled and miserable. That I should get back to regular life and work if I do the right stuff and behave myself from now on. Through all the stress and madcap antics I have learned some lessons. Especially now I get it. There are no silver bullet solutions. Be on your guard. Don't take any wooden nickels -- and pain, loss, and the next hard thing never show up on time.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="CharAttribute13"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt;"><br /></span></span>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>"If I spilled to you what all of this really<br />meant, I would simply have to kill you."</b></span></td></tr>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-35779189350300691202014-10-09T14:30:00.000-04:002014-10-09T13:29:10.131-04:00Nica's Selfie<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>I.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong></div>
He gave in around suppertime as evening colored the sky dark when his female friend, a companion he had unexpectedly hung out with all day, talked him into taking her to a Saturday evening church service. Having endured late morning and afternoon reassurances of <em>'God, it won't be that bad'</em> that led to<em> </em>a rambling<em> </em>tangle of traffic crossovers, hurried stop-bys, rushed pick-ups, bloodhound hunts for premium parking at a steamy mall, texts and tweets, then more texts, cell phone ringtones, unscripted conversations with her home girls (usually marked by impromptu exclamations of <em>no-way, bitch, </em>and<em> not my prob, homes!, </em>and <em>get the fuck out)</em>, and finally close calls with two very ill-tempered, and unleashed snarling canines near a bicycle rack, their teeth bared, hirsute tails swishing ominously, he was quite ready for an uneventful, calming break.<br />
<br />
A quick ride out to a nice place on the Jersey shore, after their mall trek, had sounded like a righteous and relief-studded choice. He could almost taste a stout and foamy ale from a chilly bottle or a double shot of Irish whiskey on the rocks for starters, chased by a German lager or, whatever, all of the above. <br />
<br />
Once they arrived at Cheevers' impressive crash pad, instead of Dani Packer's more modest living quarters, she started to coax him again. <br />
<br />
'If we can just do this one, last thing we'll be totally done. No more stops,' the girl claimed. After a quick round of drinks she began to plead with urgency for Rock to take her to a nearby beachfront chapel in an area called Elysium Village. Dani had inconveniently taken herself out of the designated driver picture. <br />
<br />
'Need you, chief. Now, really, dearest. I <em>gotta</em> be there,' she stated edgily.<br />
<br />
Then she added, 'I swear. We can let it all go after that. Chill the evening away, sweet stuff. For the whole, long evening. You know that I mean it. We can stay out here if you want. Cheevers won't care. He's coked to the gills or drunk like always anyway. The, the <em>whole</em> evening will be ours -- chilling. You know what that could mean, don't ya, baby?'<br />
<br />
He thought about that. He felt annoyed. Her tone was strident, with a dash of demand. Yes, he had trouble telling women no. Indeed he did. He soothed himself with a passing deception -- being apparently the big chief in charge, and apparently <em>a babe </em>too -- that he absolutely indeed got it, or so he parried back to his female companion with feigned understanding. Actually he did not grasp at all the veiled implications of the new girl's offer of a <em>whole --</em> and surely the deal would change after the chapel. A <em>whole</em> lot would change most likely. She was like that. Suddenly he conjured the image of a gleaming red apple in an open, dainty palm enmeshed in lush, green thickets in a garden. Rock reached for it. A slicing sensation, karma to the core, slipped through his abdomen. He was surprised and that he had uncovered, actually, so very little about this exasperating young woman who had so recently slid into his life. Yet he felt something else too, the rule of attraction. <br />
<br />
As they stood on the breezy veranda of the shore house, a third or perhaps fourth United jet in a row glided overhead, engines roaring in its wind churning climb-out from the airport, freeing itself from the bonds of earth, cut from its earthly moorings, a solitary spirit tracing its arc toward ocean darkness. Though a hundred roaring plane engines must have soared over them that day, the young man now noticed the jet age's make or break cry in the smoggy sky for the first time. He longed to be belted securely into a spacious and silky First Class seat up there, a potent drink nestled in his damp palm, heading for some hedonistic retreat on the earth's edge. <br />
<br />
This was the first time he had lingered with another person his age for hours, with no particular agenda, on an off day, for a long time. Somehow he had spent it with<em> this</em> girl. His ambivalence about what to do next made him feel a dull ache all over. Once the last grumbling mall dog and the fourth or fifth nip/tucked, '<em>get out, Rones' </em>bleached blonde homegirl had faded away into a sunbaked parking lot as big as the Sound, he had driven them from the mall swiftly out to Cheevers' big getaway instead of Dani Packer's little one, it being the home of one of the frenetic Jersey Shore partypaloozas that burned bright each Saturday and Sunday, often cranked up to a piercingly high volume, a place much preferred by Rock's co-workers to the boss' weekend retreat over on Long Island. He accepted that Rona had cajoled him into this visit. Once partygoers slipped into, then nuzzled down, in there on Friday night or Saturday, the young decompressing professionals' weekends could literally be seen wafting through the thrown-open windows toward the choppy sea in crazy, gray wind whirls of marijuana smoke, snorted up powdery through thin tubes that scraped across the surfaces of shiny mirrors on coffee tables, or blissfully slept off in quiet oblivion without a twitch or murmur. Then at a certain moment on Sunday about 5, everyone in Pavlovian syncopation began at once to rise like brittle mummies from graves and enact a sudden, Sunday grab, stuff, and hustle process so they could drive hectically down the old shore highway in expensive foreign cars veering toward Manhattan and Brooklyn. <br />
<br />
These beach house marathons were ordinarily packed with slightly geeky young adults -- an info/techy class of newcomers to the City. Many of them partied by passing lonely, button-lipped and Xanaxed weekend hours on the craggy eastern Shore obsessing about fashions in magazines, hairstyles, Facebook likes and dislikes, ceaseless texting and tweeting, re-tweets, cellphone calls, substance supplies, their weight, the latest consumer toys, reality TV programs, more texting, selfie pics, imported autos, hair gels, more texts, tweets, and retweets, and the frantic in's and out's of personal relationships. On occasion, a straggling middle-aged survivor of The Great Recession or some other socio-economic calamity -- aging paloozers in their older 30s, their 40s, 50s, and even the rare silver fox from the <em>Mad Men</em> era, guys clueless about how and when Wi-Fi works and the merits of 4G for smartphones -- wandered text and twitter free about the perfectly furnished rooms, intense green lawns, wading pools, and cabanas in Paloozaville. <br />
<br />
Rock was teetering, falling, a little. He found this both upsetting and disappointing, and invigorating, at times. She had persuaded him to engage in many things, he believed. Mostly the going's on had been innocuous. Yes, he had played along, willingly cooperating in some circumstances just to get along despite her persuasive wiles. Yes, that was correct. That was what had happened, exactly. He told himself this was no biggie since he had had nothing better to do. Yet the price to continue this dance might get costly, he thought. Y<em>a know how it goes, babe? Don't ya? </em><br />
<br />
<em> </em>Once they had parked out at Cheever's impressive shore house, they admired its sturdy hugeness while standing by Rock's vehicle.<br />
<br />
Rock grabbed a button-up plaid vest from the back seat. It made a nice fit over this linen white shirt. The shore was breezy as dusk came on.<br />
<br />
'Do you want your purse or anything before we go in?' Rock asked Rona.<br />
<br />
The large purse was a handsome, alligator leather bag with a finely crafted shoulder strap and a shiny gold buckle. It had cost some guy a large lump of cash, Rock thought. He had noticed right away when the met up that day. The purse had been locked in the trunk of his ride ever since. Even while at the mall, it remained there. She had carted her ID, some plastic credit cards, a comb, and a wad of bills all day in her midnight, tight black pants. She tucked her <em>iPhone</em> into a little pouch pocket on her right hip. Gleaming black and gold Coach sunglasses were clipped to her black long-sleeved blouse, which was accentuated by a high collar.<br />
<br />
'No, just leave it in the trunk. I won't need it now. Sweetie, when we get . . . , ' she stopped abruptly, bit her lower lip painted pink with gloss, and peered up at him quizzically.<br />
<br />
'Whatever you say, <em>babe,' </em>he shot back absentmindedly. 'Wait, when we get what?<br />
<br />
'Nothing. Oh. It can wait,' she replied with a shrug. <br />
<br />
They scanned the outdoor portion of the party scene. The house and the grounds were populated with sluggish people, most of them displaying late afternoon, glazed-over stares. Rock and Rona recognized a few of them from their intense workplaces, but in the waning Saturday light -- fogged by a haze rolling in off the ocean waters -- this casual crowd resembled a lost tribe of avid slackers and Woodstock nomads. Soon they discovered that the one girlfriend that Rona had expected to (and needed to) meet up with here was posed in a tight fetal curl-up, still dressed in her tailored Ann Taylor lawyer clothes, whisps of powdery white clinging to her nostrils, in a profound sleep on an elegant futon atop the villa's windswept veranda. Apparently she had chased her cocaine with a few hastily downed Ambien tabs in a Jack Black tumbler then just dropped. A gray-bearded man -- a stranger to Rona and Rock -- slept facedown on the wood flooring next to her. In one hand he loosely clutched a drained Sam Adams bottle. His other arm laid slackly on the futon. He wore coordinated Tommy Bahama beach clothes and shiny brown topsiders, like the silver foxes often did here, an aging and played out Thanatos to the young woman's Hypnos. Rock had a strange feeling that the old man was just pretending to be asleep.<br />
<br />
Rock walked inside Cheevers' mansion. He search for the pantry. He then sighed with pleasure as he poured, at last, yes indeed, at last, the Irish whiskey double about which he had daydreamed. He tried to hand a cold Rolling Rock beer to his frowning companion. Rona waved it off. She snatched a small bottle of cold water from a cooler with ice. He had never seen her touch an alcoholic drink.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hypnos and Thanatos</span></strong></td></tr>
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<br />
'Damn it. Danielle! How could this happen? Somebody's capped her,' Rona said angrily. <br />
<br />
'What? Capped? C'mon,' Rock replied.<br />
<br />
According to the gameplan, this was to be the point where Rock's part in this play stopped and he dropped Rona. She had been silent about what the girls would then do, though he now sensed there had been an Act 2 that had just gone off the tracks. Not his problem, he reminded himself. Yet he felt a wave of stomach-churning anxiety, like a red flag aflutter on a stormy stretch on a seafront.<br />
<br />
'Crap. She's totally out of it. Damn, Dani. Well I guess I really need to talk with you after all, Mr. Man. Something big here, very hot, so will you listen up?' she asked<br />
<br />
'Did you see our host, Cheevers, out there? Man don't turn your back on that dude today. A total CryptKeeper,' Rock noted. <br />
<br />
Cheevers was the performance and numbers superstar of their finance firm. Once a lowly novice penny stock analyst, he had quickly raced to become, at just under 30, the prince of the derivatives cons in greedy Manhattan. He held the management reins too of a bustling hedge fund with a sketchy rep but a massive money-accumulation strategy. Huge bucks gravitated to Cheevers and his conspirators. Team members grew rich in serving his whims and his ends. This beach house was but one of many opulent signs that signaled Cheevers' career successes and deceptions. Everyone who worked for him benefitted monetarily.<br />
<br />
Yet Cheevers was always dangerous-looking even when suited up -- a skinny, scary ectomorph. His oddly bony skull and sharp and pointed extremities made him seem like a skeleton with sallow skin. He was neither verbally abusive or violent. But he had a long scar down the left side of his thin and hollow cheeks. It seemed that extensive plastic surgery had been required to put him back together. Often Cheevers came across as prideful, arrogant, and rudely jealous when at work in New York. Yet on weekends at times the man seemed pitiable, isolated, and very pleased to have other people around. He knew how to leave behind his ridiculously expensive Armani suits and $1000 shoes for the Shore weekends. Some co-workers gave Cheevers hidden nicknames -- Skeletor, Killer, Lurch. He had earned them all. His behavior was dogged, urgent, and as ruthless as a straight razor when doing his financial deals. Recently, when he caught sight of this Wall Street rock-star, Rock typically imagined the ferryman, Charon, in his mythic boat, silently, morosely rowing doomed riders over the darkened Styx. <br />
<br />
Rona had not replied, so Rock downed half of a Stella Artois. He stared at a unique pennant of gold and blue hung above an expensive woodcarved side table. The fabric featured a dynamic lion brandishing a medieval mace, its head peering backward. The pennant wafted in the sea winds breezing freely into the pantry.<br />
<br />
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'Like I said I need to talk with you. About something important,' Rona repeated.<br />
<br />
'Yeah?,' he replied as he swallowed a gulp of Jameson's. The liquor hit him hard below the belt. Rock was already outlinng his Rona-free options for the evening. But he sensed he'd never get to one of them.<br />
<br />
'It's about tonight. Something Dani and I were gonna do. But, you see, lover, my homegirl's not going anywhere fast, so.' Looking away, she hesitated and laced her finely manicured fingers on both hands into an 'I pray thee' knot. 'Can we just, maybe . . . '<br />
<br />
'Can we <em>what</em>?,' he interrupted, moving to pour another drink.<br />
<br />
'I know we just got here, so,' she said barely above a whisper, eyes cast aside. 'But you're a good guy. You're my kind.'<br />
<br />
An unknown voice shouted 'No effing way, dude. She didn't?' A loud peal of laughter sounded just outside the pantry.<br />
<br />
'It's about going to church,' Rona let on.<br />
<br />
'Get out! No way you just said that,' Rock replied. <br />
<br />
'There's a little beachfront chapel down by Elysium Village. Point Pleasant Beach area. Before 7:00 I need you to drive me down there. It's right on the shore so. Somebody Dani and I know's gonna be there. This is important. Then we could have the <em>whole</em> evening left, hon. Together. I promise you.'<br />
<br />
'Again with the whole, yes, of course,' he thought as he drained his glass. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>II.</strong></div>
<br />
A few minutes later, atop the luxurious carpet of lawn, Rock's memory turned to how he had met Rona. Soon he was distracted by music coming from powerful, boombox speakers around the yard. It was "<em>Kill and Run"</em> in the seductive voice of Sia,<br />
<br />
<em>Interpret the eyes as they die. </em><br />
<em> Should I lie, should I cry?</em><br />
<br />
Cheevers' expansive getaway now seemed more mired in a blanket of haze. The people who were still ambulatory moved more slowly than before, like a slo-mo interactive mural. Scenes and characters from <em>The Great Gatsby</em>, the movie <em>Wall Street,</em> <em>Game of Thrones</em> books, and Bret Ellis' <em>Less Than </em>Zero mingled about. <br />
<br />
Rock looked north. Briefly he imagined a steep rock ledge from which white water rushes poured down to a Lethian sea. Quickly a <em>Catcher in the Rye</em> figure grabbed a little girl from plunging off the ledge. He felt troubled by the imaginary scene.<br />
<br />
The boombox music continued with <em>The Great Gatsby</em> soundtrack. Rock searched the horizon for a pulsing green light.<br />
<br />
<em> Love is blindness. I'm so sick of it, I don't wanna see.</em><br />
<em> Why don't you just take the night, And wrap it all around me?</em><br />
<em> Now, oh my love Blindness,</em><br />
<em> Oh, I'm too numb to feel, Blow out the candle.</em><br />
<em> Blindness.</em> <!-- end of lyrics --><br />
<br />
'If I call over to Rona,<em> Oh Daisy,</em> I wonder what she'd do?' he thought.<br />
<br />
Rock studied a white and shiny, rumbling 777, with the new United livery, push up through the ocean haze. He suffered pangs of envy. Gray exhaust trails from the massive engines twirled in the ozone like a pair of fallen angels. <br />
<br />
A few nights earlier, Rock had taken a calculating, high stakes walk over to the sumptuous and springy L-shaped couch, with the high backing and richly cushioned armrests, at Dani's modest beach hut. Dani Packer was the pretty, young lawyer now curled onto the lush futon on Cheevers' veranda, firmly embraced by dreamy, winged Morpheus. Rock assured himself he just wanted to say hey -- yes, all innocent enough -- to the mysterious new girl, Rona. The newcomer looked like she was from a foreign land. Yes that would be all. No more. He took a pair of cherry vodka jello shots to the big L so they could perhaps do them together. He tried to appear cool, confident, in command of all situations and circumstances. Yet his hands trembled slightly. His eyelids fluttered slightly when Rona first looked deeply into his eyes. Dani introduced them gamely but she slurred some of her words. There were traces of a grainy, white powder on her upper lip. Dani sniffed up hard and wiped her face. Her eyes and nose were glowing red. All of Dani's real friends worried about her drinking and drug habit, stoked by harsh and unforgiving days spent defending felons.<br />
<br />
'Well, who and what do we have here, babe?,' the new girl asked. <br />
<br />
Rock at first thought she looked very serene and sophisticated. Dark eyes, dark brows carefully shaped, and full lips with a ruby gloss. Smooth olive skin tone, like maybe 28 to 30 years old. She was good at extemporaneous conversation. What was that accent? Turkish? Cypriot? Israeli?<br />
<br />
Rona politely said no to the jello shot -- and all alcoholic drinks thereafter. She worked on a bottle of spring water. When Rock asked her where she came from, Rona simply said 'Yerevan' without explanation. <br />
<br />
Cheevers, Dani, and about six or seven others their age milled around. Rock stayed near Rona. Music played moodily. It was a quiet get-together. Rock made a mental note to learn all he could about Yerevan, wherever that was, some day soon. <br />
<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>*** ***</b></span></div>
<div align="center">
</div>
<br />
Two hours later, as they sat in glimmering moonlight on a nearby sand dune, Rock handed Rona Moros a crazily smoking and sweet-scented pot rollup that had jack-hammer crumbled all of the social cool he had imagined he had brought with him. Rock's hand still trembled a little as he passed the blazing weed, sparking and fuming like a tiny blowtorch, to a mildly buzzed Rona. She looked pretty in the moon beams, he thought. Those full, ruby lips tempted him.<br />
<br />
She confessed to Rock that she wished to fit in better with the party people and the good times on The Shore with Killer and all the others. She also wanted to improve and succeed at her job. But Rona, an outsider and a mystery with a strange accent, felt insecure around most Americans. Her chances for acceptance in Dani's New York and New Jersey crowds were not great, she said. With the promise of a low-rung job as a bond analyst, Rona had relocated to Brooklyn a few months back. Rock asked her where she met Dani. Rona told him she got an MBA from Transylvania while Dani was studying criminal law there. She needed more friends, Rona went on. But she often felt hampered by performance anxiety and other stress. She worried it interfered with her social life. Her short history as a financial advisor in her previous workplace, and now her bond analyst job, demonstrated that she did not have that killer instinct for either situation.<br />
<br />
Rock wondered what she thought about him. After another hit of the potent weed, Rona started talking about someone named Bronson. Rock did not want to hear about him. They fired up another joint. She squeezed a bottle of water with a twist cap in her hands. He sipped from a red Solo cup, Irish whiskey and melting ice. She explained that Bronson was an almost 30 shopaholic and internet addict living in Williamsburg, maybe a genuine hipster, definitely a gay person, constantly falling in and out of love with some new boy from LGBT rallies. Bronson was always lamely quitting Facebook, Twitter, and <em>Tumblr </em>and<em> </em>was, yes, forever<em> done </em>posting a string of selfies on <em>Instagram. </em><br />
<br />
<em> </em>'Sounds pretty interesting,' Rock fibbed. <br />
<br />
<em> </em>She explained that Bronson was a basically kind, articulate soul who was very willing to be BFFs with the girls from the Skeletor's outfit and Dani's law firm. He was faithfully there to go with them fairy protector-like wherever, whenever, in Brooklyn or over to Manhattan when a male presence was required, to leap headlong into gossip talk and mani-pedi treatments, and to be available online to text or Skype at 3:00 a.m. with an emotionally wasted female friend, like Rona or Dani with her drugs, who had been let down by or otherwise assaulted by life.<br />
<br />
'You ever been really serious with anybody?' Rock asked.<br />
<br />
She was silent. 'No, no, not really. Well, that's not true. Once I was. In deep. I was like <em>get out</em>. I just made some mistakes with that person. I could've killed. I was so pissed. But revenge, they say it's a sick game. You drive for revenge, maybe it feels good, but you're the one that gets burned more when it's all over. Anyway, I'm glad to be here now. I'm sorry. For going on so, chief,' she said. She glanced back to Dani's beach hut.<br />
<br />
Rock sensed that she was getting toasted by the weed and not accustomed to it. The pot circulating this evening was certainly potent. He wondered how much of her stories he should believe. Rona had made him want to know more, dig more. <br />
<br />
'You and Dani known each other long?' he asked, trying to sound casual.<br />
<br />
"Besties since we began grad school. My blond and beautiful warrior queen, that's her. D's been my fairy godmother and Bron my knight shining on his war horse when times've been really bad. I shouldn't talk about this. But Bronson has a real problem with the American government. His father was murdered in Syria a few years ago. Dani and him are sure that Americans killed him to keep him quiet. She's looked into it with Washington. Bronson's a subversive. He's about taking it all down. He'll be ready when the time comes. So, Bronson's not his real name of course. He's getting to be a legend on the blogosphere and on an underground group's website. Some other sites too here and the Middle East. His father got all tangled up with the CIA or NSA or somebody, the eternal struggle, ya know babe?,' Rona said.<br />
<br />
Rock frowned. "Wow,' he whispered. He could not think of anything else to say. He was feeling high. His mind whirled. Ocean waves slapped onto the beach, then slid away.<br />
<br />
Later, while sitting alone, though he felt loaded, Rock attempted to assess what the cost of a relationship adventure with this strange, pretty, but challenging girl would be. The girl from Yerevan seemed -- he strove for the right label -- seemed designing. He barely knew her. But at times he sensed she was bending and twisting the truth. Hanging with her could be bad for his health. But maybe not, he shrugged. As the time grew late, Rock sidled up against Rona on the L-shaped divan. They sat near a sleepy, pot scented Dani Packer. Pristine shafts of Jersey moonlight and hypnotic shore sounds streamed like musical rhythms into the room. He wondered how deep the connection between Dani and Rona went.<br />
<br />
'Don't get too close, sweet boy. I'm big trouble,' she teased him when he brought her a fresh water bottle. 'Besides I hear I'm maybe getting a big transfer. Not your fairy princess here. Not any way.' Her crimped smile was beguiling. <br />
<br />
Despite the marijuana, he felt arush of agitation, and impatience. He had never like brushback pitches. <br />
<br />
'You're the fresh face around here. Not much going on, right? So how about we get together to just hang out. Meet up or jet around some next Saturday. So, yes . . .?' he asked.<br />
<br />
Rona blinked. Her glossy lips were moist. Once, twice more she blinked, nonplussed. Her mouth opened slowly. The plastic water bottle slipped from her palms. It smacked the tile floor. <br />
<br />
'Uh-h-m,' she said. 'Well, what would <em>you</em> want to do exactly? I have to go with Dani somewhere around 6.'<br />
<br />
He replied gamely, 'Well whatever. But if I told you, I would have to kill you.'<br />
<br />
'Oh, sweetie, that's too funny. Too, too funny. Kill <em>me</em>?' She burst into laughter. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX50BgsQZECLsVB0udW-qP_pX_XwMtl9wV5s7eF3f2BUFqOn0BU4lvK8WxShNTajBtSiYZWOXrSaFCty1jyiJmVGy1ApCC6HkGbtMIJJVb8KTiYI0L0J40Qs4mxXLZ7J1SAwLpeodjzoQ/s1600/Fairy+Malice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" cya="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX50BgsQZECLsVB0udW-qP_pX_XwMtl9wV5s7eF3f2BUFqOn0BU4lvK8WxShNTajBtSiYZWOXrSaFCty1jyiJmVGy1ApCC6HkGbtMIJJVb8KTiYI0L0J40Qs4mxXLZ7J1SAwLpeodjzoQ/s200/Fairy+Malice.jpg" height="200" width="159" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Fairy with Heartfelt Malice </span></strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>III.</strong></div>
<br />
<strong> <em>The moment had come. Nightfall was here. No time to falter. Every second would count. A one-way, roller coaster rush was on. Nicoletta turned away from him. She peered east toward her homeland. No time for feelings. No soft goodbyes. She shouldered herself out the car door. A raging sandstorm of anger seared her heart. It consumed her. A green light switched on in her psyche. It was time to butcher. No time to spare. As soon as she quoted Kanye, the burning need for vengeance had flamed in her. The hour of payback had come. She burst from his vehicle.</em></strong> <strong>'That's it, chief,'</strong> <strong><em>she blurted. Nica pictured her coming manuevers. Race back to the open trunk. Pull open the Coach purse. Slip the freak, onyx morphmask tightly into place. Get the black, backing veil splayed down concealing her hair. Slide her finely manicured hands and supple wrists into tacky, black driving gloves. Snap the glimmering shades off her black blouse. Into the gaping mouth of the 'gator bag they'd go. Slam the disposable phone in there too. Her eyes burned. She tiptoed across a wavering tightrope. A wave of delerium hit. Nicoletta recognized this. A stunning feeling it was. She had suffered it before. A six-inch stiletto gets secreted in her cuffed sleeve. A loaded 9 mm. pistol , a Kel-Tec with an extended magazine, slides into her flexible black boot. The moment draws close. The jacked up trunk lid conceals her. The driver cannot see. He was pleasant cover. But no rock, a colorless chap she had thought. He'd obey her orders. </em>'Wait here, chief' <em>she had spit out hotly.</em> 'I'll be back. So . . . "<em> Then she recited the magical words. No church in the wild lyrics. A hypnotic sensation engulfed her. Nica was all in. No time to dally. The torch had been ignited.</em></strong> <br />
<br />
<strong><em> Cloaked in black, Nicoletta crouches. The fancy bag hangs from her shoulder. She crabwalks low across the beach road. Her journey toward home finally commences. It is 7:10. All churchgoers are inside. A yard sign lights up brightly in the dark. Point Pleasant Beach Chapel it announces. Her slamming heart skips a beat. Is he watching now? Was he confused in the dark, idling car?</em> 'I'll be back.' <em>Nica steals her way to</em> <em>a back pew. Unlucky observers will get daggered. But Nica would </em>not<em> return to him. Disappear in darkness was the plan. A back portal for her escape had been prepped. She wondered when clueless Rock would die. Tonight? Tomorrow? Dani would be punished. She had proved weak, unreliable. Their wet work suffered. Cocaine was cooking her. Dani had let Nica down. She'd be hunted. Dani would be hurt. She should run. </em></strong><br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
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<br />
<strong><em> Head down as in prayer, Nica Levant lingers. The back pews are poorly lit. The scene-scouting had been good. Nicoletta's heart is thumping. The minister sermonizes. Let's go, dude, she twitches. </em></strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Adam slept. Then God took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.</strong> <br />
<strong>Then the rib </strong><strong>the <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Lord</span> had taken He made into a woman, and He </strong><strong>brought her to</strong><br />
<strong> the man. </strong><strong>Adam said: “This is now </strong><strong>bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she </strong><br />
<strong> shall be called Woman because she was </strong><strong>taken out of </strong><strong>Man.” </strong><strong>Therefore a man shall </strong><br />
<strong> leave his father and mother and </strong><strong>be </strong><strong>joined to his wife, and they shall become one </strong><br />
<strong> flesh. </strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em>'There is a great lesson of faith in this,' the minister moralizes tediously.</em></strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> She beckons to Jake then Amala. The traitors beam as they walk toward the sanctuary. 'Ama, you Eve,' Nica fumes. She had played the toothsome betrayer. She had proferred the fruit. She had deserted them. Ama spread the virus. Jake bit into the poison apple. They deceived the pact. </em></strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> Nica creeps aisleward. She is behind everyone. She feels sucked as if by a magnet. Her black shadow sprints. Assembly members lean away. She leaps at Ama. The two merge bodily. Nica pierces Amala. The dagger plunges as deep as it can into her black heart. She twists the blade and viciously slices it sideways. Nica/Rona's clenched hand thunks on Ama's beautiful breastbone. Several of her fingers glide into Amala's center cavity as if compelled by a falcon lure. Blood spurts out violently. Horrifying, Nica thinks. She feels vindication. Shrill cries pierce the church's quietude. She has become like Cain. She has slashed and slain the deserving Abel. Vengeance, justice, </em>jealousy <em>roil her haunted psyche. Tears burn her eyes. Instantly, Nica mourns her once true love. Jake she loved once too. Such morbid folly. All so close, but turnedso wrong. Amala had </em></strong><strong><em>decoupled the iron bonds. She purloined Jake. Scuttled the cell's orders. Grieving but justified, Nicoletta darts away. She spares the weakling male. Obey commands, soldier, she hears in her head. </em></strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> Nica/Magda's dash to Philadelphia begins. The blast of a starter pistol echoes somewhere. Nica has memorized <span id="hotword" name="hotword" style="color: #0055bb; cursor: pointer;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">minutiae</span></span>. Locate the car in the copse. Pry open the trunk. Peel off her dark persona. Drop the stiletto and 9 mm. in. Insert the Coach bag. Get disguised as Magda. Drive the log road. At 195-West, curve south. Book it, Nicoletta! Race them to PHL. As a platinum blonde she will emerge from </em></strong><strong><em>a limo. Ditch the getaway wheels.</em> <em>Park it near </em>Costco<em>.</em> 'What a dumpy stripmall this is,'<em> she had said on first spying it. Secure the new passport. Nica had earlier gazed at her photo on the document . She is a knockout. Rona Moros has played well. But this is now Magda Agiri, power blonde wig and glossy lips. God, she kills. Magda will have thin, flat eyebrows. Hazel contacts float under classy Chanel lenswear. Make-up and wig go on in the limo. Magda will board Lufthansa, in Terminal C, 11 PM. She smiles. Nicoletta will evaporate. Again her handlers prove clever. Agiri. Her fake passport names always hold meaning. Soar to Frankfurt, girl. Imbibe sparkling water. Tilt back and relax. Race on to Istanbul. Savor the wheels up moments. No church in the wild, alright, alright, she muses. Momentarily, Nica is hit by a rush of panic and sorrow. This bloodlust for justice and vengeance surely will undo me! The startling church sign had lit up</em> 'Betrothal Rite Tonite at 7! Amala and Jake -- Gen 2: 21-24.' </strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong><em>Let's book, girlfriend. </em></strong><strong><em>Nica sprinted with abandon.. </em></strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b><i>*** ***</i></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<em><span style="color: #cc0000;"><strong> </strong></span></em>Another thrumming 777 soared over. Nav lights twinkled like fairy's wings. Vectoring left, the plane slipstreamed East. A busy night for travel it was. Jet after jet climbed up. United's new motto echoed in his memory -- 'Forward, Together.' Barlow grew envious again. He longed to globetrot. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
'Open the trunk,' she had commanded. 'I'll come back.'</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
He pondered still her parting words -- a lyric puzzle. Her eyes had gone hypnotic and flat. Yes, transfixed. Searing heat inflamed her complexion.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
"<em>We formed a new religion</em><br />
<em> No sins as long as there’s permission</em><br />
<em> And deception is the felony <br /> So never fuck with nobody without tellin’ me<br /><em> . . . . Cause we were once a fairy tale</em><br /><em> But this nightmare is farewell"</em></em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em> </em>Rona's blast outward, a bird of prey swooping away, rattled him. <em>'Wait here, I'll come back'</em> she had spat. Then she was gone, out the car's door. Her sudden disappearance mystified him. She crept back to the trunk. Barlow craned his neck. Rona moved furtively. Then a black shadow, like a large onyx crab, crawled across the road. The church sign flashed on without warning. This startles him. He catches his breath, then he reads the bumper sticker on the car parked before his:<br />
<br />
<em> He created them Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve!</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong> Barlow is seized by a hunch. He had had such thoughts before. His memory is suffused with the scent of potent weed. No doubt you have a gift, chief, she had once intoned, perhaps trying to con him. <em>'Don't come too close. I'm trouble.' </em>He revs his engine. Her dreamy eyes had searched his while she licked her colored lips. He spins the back wheels while accelerating. Barlow is sure that Rona, or whatever her name is, and he will speak again. This might not be farewell. A part of him feels swindled. He could follow her as if he were tethered. Yes, after all. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>IV.</strong></div>
<br />
The copse of trees was in sight. Nicoletta was flagging. Her lungs and windpipe were burning. She strained to spy the contours of the white car that should be there. Her tiny night vision apparatus helped. The adrenalized sprint left her winded. She paces rapidly. Nica has tossed, here and there, the bloody stiletto, the bloody gloves, the black hood, then the pistol. <em>Where's that effing car?,</em> she worries. A slim landscaper's path led off perpendicular to her route. Two roads diverged in a wood, she panted. Screams from the chapel slice through the air. From the corner of her eye, she senses a sharp, stealthy movement. Close by, a man has stepped from behind a hulking pine. He seems unarmed, dark-haired, in a glowing white shirt and plaid vest. He beckons to Nica.<br />
<br />
'Oh holy shit,' she gasps.<br />
<br />
Barlow calls to her. 'You need to come with me, Rona. C'mon. Now. What's the deal?' He sounds more authoritative, more in charge, than before.<br />
<br />
'Not likely, sweet thing. Not going there.' Her accent was pronounced, from Turkey or Cyprus perhaps.<br />
<br />
'What happened back there, Rona? C'mon. Let's go,' he demands.<br />
<br />
'Amala has met Allah. The cheating bitch,' Nica smirks.<br />
<br />
'And Jake has met Jehovah?' Barlow asks smartly. The question causes them to furtively smile. <br />
<br />
'No games. I took her down. Cut her good. Got it, babe? Now I've <em>gotta</em> <em>run</em>.'<br />
<br />
The horrifying truth sneaks up on him. He blurts out, 'Holy crap. For real? -- Who are you!?'<br />
<br />
'Was exactly gonna be my question for you, Robert Frost,' she frowns. 'How'd you get here?'<br />
<br />
For years, as a teenager, then as a young adult, Barlow found much amusement in the comic drawings of <em>Spy Vs. Spy.</em> In time he saw it was a parody of hardsore, opposing political stances. In time, he began to identify with the Grey Spy, a clever presence, who could outsmart the hapless, rigid Black and White. <em>They don't have the sense to come in out of the cold -- always outwitting each other, </em>the Spys' creator once said.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Barlow majored in philosophy then law at Yale. Once his degrees were secured, he applied to the FBI. He trained successfully at Quantico, Virginia. He was a star at the Academy. Barlow was good with numbers, especially in cases of financial fraud and organized crime. His memory was sharp. He played well under cover. Yet he never went onto the Bureau's payroll. <br />
<br />
Barlow found his calling in corporate espionage. An aged FBI veteran recognized the young man's impressive intuitive thinking. He was recruited by a firm that skirted the margins of multinationals, dog eat dog business, internet innovation, double agents, and spy nests in Brooks Brothers and Armani. Quickly, Barlow was introduced to the cut-throat game of competitive intelligence, a high stakes but deadly contest. Barlow grew wealthy from his income undercover. He enjoyed it, yes. <br />
<br />
One day he accepted a challenge that paid well. He would use his acting skills as a character named Rock. He had to learn what Cheevers, a lawyer named Dani Packer, and their conspiratorial hedge fund colleagues were up to. International currency manipulations were suspected. A Mideast shadow, a bad fairy godparent stage right, was at work too, perhaps lining up the money for a terror hit. It would be an SNA gig -- social network analysis. It would be very complicated. He would have to mess with some very bad people. Relationships, movements, corresponding activities would need to be scrutinized. High levels of intuition would be called for. The top people needed him visualize it all, like examining and mapping the nodes of a hidden cancer. He would accept the challenge. It might get to be too dangerous for him alone. But, yes, ok, he would go for it.<br />
<br />
Exactly as he had predicted, Rona came booking, breathing heavily, up the wider path. He set aside mild-mannered, naïve, hard-drinking Rock. Barlow decided to go all FBI on her. The screaming sounds from the chapel were alarming. Amala and Jake were who? Barlow briefly thought again the mystery gay, Bronson. Until minutes ago, Barlow had not suspected Rona was into something really crazy, just an out-of-place, mediocre bond analyst being used by sharper minds. Barlow had been ordered to work up the SNA. Cluster the coefficients. Give each player a uniform and number. He had simply walked up to her on that L-shaped couch. She seemed cool. Her eyes were dark and clear. She was attractive and alone. She would aid his cover story. The truth sunk in like a hard kick. Rona had just offed her girlfriend in the chapel? <br />
<br />
Barlow saw Rona's comely eyes widen. Then he sensed a heavy footfall behind his back. Two piercing pins dug suddenly into the white shirt on the back of his shoulder. <br />
<br />
Quickly Barlow is incapacitated. He tips forward. His grimace is painful to witness. <br />
<br />
Nica shoulders her wounded suitor as he descends. Slowly she lets him sink down. Another's muscular hands grab Barlow's waist. His face plants directly onto the path.<br />
<br />
'My knight for surprises,' she says. 'I hear there's a gorgeous stretch limo I gotta catch.'<br />
<br />
Bronson holsters his Taser M-26. He is big, burly, and European. "What's with this guy? He's not supposed to be here. Pick this loser up with me. I have the car,' he whispers hotly. 'We've really got to disappear.'<br />
<br />
Nica says, "Since when are you here, B?'<br />
<br />
'Since I got emergency emmed that Tommy Bahama put Dani down,' he huffs. 'I think he's with the same people as Rocky Racoon here.'<br />
<br />
The pair dumps the immobilized Barlow hard onto the cramped back cushion in the Sentra. Barlow's arm is punctured by Bronson with a dripping hypodermic. Haunting sounds and bright lights rise like specters around him. He sees Rona get in the front. <em>'Who are you</em>?,' he begs. To Bronson he calls weakly, 'And who the hell are you? Tell me, yes.'<br />
<br />
"Spies -- and fairies," Rona snorts with a smirk.<br />
<br />
<em>And who are you? </em>A modulated, disembodied computer voice echoes toward him within the car. Barlow feels like he is in a hollow well.<br />
<br />
The loud, sick peal of laughter, like outside of Cheevers' pantry, starts again. Barlow hears an angelic near-whisper. 'Hello, chief.' He stares transfixed into the eyes of the Grey Spy. <br />
<br />
'You're going be ho-kay, homes,' the Grey says serenely but affectless. <br />
<br />
Barlow soars. He dreams of cruising high and free-bird in placid skies. The Grey Spy has reassured him. <br />
<br />
'I think I'm falling. Yes, I am falling, indeed I'm falling in love with -- Rones,' he confesses. <br />
<br />
'Whoa. No way. <em>Get out of town</em>, <em>dude</em>,'<em> </em>Grey is now imitating one of Rona's home girls in the mall. <br />
<br />
Barlow dives into a paralyzing trance, hypnotic and achromatic, with Sia singing background.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>V.</strong><br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<strong> </strong>He awakens, gradually, hours later. The sun is burning brightly. The air is warm and humid. He sits up on the back seat of a Nissan. His dry mouth and throat plead for a drink of something.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
He looks over a rundown strip mall. A big Costco -- with a rambling, empty parking lot -- sits across the street. Apparently it's too early for heavy business traffic. The limo has departed without him, but he does not know that. Bronson and the girl are out of sight. Barlow's android smartphone is plugged in and charging up front. Barlow is hit with a strong and deep sense of emptiness and loss. Then quickly he gets angry. The drugs must be wearing off, he decides. Then he feels hungry and thirsty, a pissed off and abandoned shell. The taser's puncture wounds on the back of his shoulder flare painfully.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
A text alert sounds. Barlow stares at the android. His thinking is foggy and confused. The tune playing is "It Had To Be You," the jazzy Harry Connick Jr. version. Slowly, he reaches for the phone. The timestamp says the text has just been transmitted. What the fuck?, he marvels. She must still be messing with him, even now, he surmises. How did she manage this?, he says to the smartphone. <br />
<br />
'Spies and fairies,' he remembers.<br />
<br />
Barlow scans the text message. <em>G2g. C u l8er.</em> And then there is a verse<br />
<em></em><br />
<em> Tears on the mausoleum floor<br /> Blood stains on coliseum doors<br /> Lies on the lips of a priest<br /> Thanksgiving disguised as a feast</em><em> </em><br />
<em> Human beings in a mob, What’s a mob to a king?</em><br />
<em> What’s a king to a god? What’s a god to a non-believer?<br /> Who don’t believe in anything? We make it out alive<br /> All right, all right, No church in the wild</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em> </em>Barlow will have to figure out what that is and where he needs to go. Then he supposes he'll somehow crawl toward home. He's at least alive. He reviews what little he can he recall about the night before. Yes, alive, alive -- all right, all right. Blow out the candle. Love is blindness! He longs for his Ray-Bans and a handful of Advil. Barlow discovers two grand in $20 bills on the car seat. He is glad that she's left funds to ease his existential plight. He finds a gold, square medal pinned to his plaid vest. It depicts a lion on the march, its head turned back fiercly, a mace or cudgel in its upturned paw.<br />
<br />
Suddenly, he feels cooler, refreshed, and . . . mildly happy. He believes that this might be a planned psycho-chemical sensation going off. Barlow's intuition warns him, like the spooky Grey Spy, where she has probably gone. The medal is her promise ring, an invitation, a token of co-dependent betrothal. <br />
<br />
'Okay, it's on, girl,' Barlow, once a Rock, vows competively in silence.<br />
<br />
A selfie pic is the new screensaver on his cellphone. He figures Rona must have taken it once they all got here. Her face is cutely contorted, a mocking coat of fresh pink lip gloss on her mouth. Her eyes sparkle fiercely. Rona hovers over him. Barlow's torso lies back motionless, tasered, drugged. He starts to grin although he tells himself he should not. <br />
<br />
Barlow is fascinated by the medal with the lion. He thrills to the touch of the burnished surface. His fingers lightly trace the outline of the mighty beast. He senses that there will be meaning in tomorrow. Barlow is like a little kid peeking under his pillow to see if the tooth fairy has left a sweet reward there.<br />
<br />
He clutches the smartphone tighter. The law of attraction pulses in him. Raising his aching right arm, he grabs a selfie of himself. Barlow gazes at this photo. He looks beaten up, sunken-eyed, gray, like a raccoon -- even though he has taken on a mock disapproving-parent look for the game. This picture he will send, a punched-out warrior's response, with a rush of anticipation, to her, the dangerous lady. But first he must figure out how to do so. <br />
<br />
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Soundtrack/Theme: "No Church in the Wild," Kanye West <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDrxqZ5w3I">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDrxqZ5w3I</a><br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-52615099158993410672014-10-09T13:20:00.000-04:002016-02-04T16:55:37.470-05:00A Dark Star<br />
<div align="center">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><strong>A Dark Star</strong></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><strong>Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom <span style="font-size: large;">*</span></strong></span></div>
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: red;">Going home, Without my sorrow<br />Going home, Sometime tomorrow<br />Going home, To where it’s better<br />Than before.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">Going home, Without my burden<br />Going home, Behind the curtain<br />Going home, Without the costume, </span><br />
<span style="color: red;">That I wore.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: red;"> -- Leonard Cohen</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> "<em>Going Home"</em></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Errors lie not in the art </span><span style="color: red;">but in the artificers. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;"> -- Isaac Newton</span><br />
<br />
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<br />
<strong><span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Winter, 1368: Raimondo Seeks Agnese</span></strong><br />
<br />
It was one of the strangest incidents that Raimondo, the revered Dominican friar, had ever encountered. So much to consider within his formidable mind. He leaned his heavy upper frame back in his chair, a clear signal of his reluctance to believe. He was passionately a mendicant. He loved Jesus, the Church, and beyond all the truth. Raimondo wanted to trust everyone, yes, <em>all </em>people, the simple, frayed and damaged children of his God. But he knew that he could not. At the request of Rome, and also the urging of the young gentle lady Caterina of Siena, the gifted Raimondo had long been an investigator and detective who looked into (and sometimes debunked) strange stories emanating from the medieval Church temporal. Regarding the creepy scene described to him that morning, the friar harbored doubts. <br />
<br />
Could this aging peasant woman who was now on the way back to his cottage, who once was a poor young farm girl ensconced in this scenic, wine-producing village called Montepulciano, situated on the peak of a scenic limestone hillock in the province of Siena, be telling the truth? Her tale was eerie and was quite similar to other stark, bizarre graveside premonitions that had been recounted in and around Montepulciano to him by simple citizens alternately confused, frightened, angry, or zealous. Five decades had passed since the earthly demise of the revered Agnese du Segni, at 49 years, the holy Prioress who had long led the Dominican women in the nearby monastery of Gracciano. Raimondo knew that most of the fervent and pious memories that witnesses retained -- about events and happenstances that had mysterious, spiritual, and mythological dimensions -- had a way of changing as first-hand accounts, colored by additional experiences, eroded into imprecise human recollections as years go by. The human mind plays mean tricks. Stories, particularly ones with the golden glow of the miraculous woven into their fabrics, start within a sunburst and then tend to morph audaciously. Verifiable eyewitness accounts about pious but irrational occurrences, which are then succeeded by new generations of storytellers, fade to black and eventually expire. <br />
<br />
The humble woman clothed in rough fabrics, from an Italian sharecropping family, inexplicably coming back toward him, a survivor of scandalous doings and dangerous decades in Montepulciano, claimed she had been present (as a child) for the irregular handling of the interment of the loner Prioress called Mother Agnese -- a woman who might on a future, blessed date be declared Saint Agnes of Montepulciano. That was if Raimondo and his most holy friend and spiritual confidante, Catherina Benincasa, who resided in Siena, had anything to say about the matter. <br />
<br />
'Can I not trust this woman, will I not?,' Raimondo of Capua wondered before he trudged out into the evening cold. Momentarily his alert mind painted and populated colorful, old village scenes with great imagination.<br />
<br />
Earlier that day, the aging peasant farm woman had intimated many things to Raimondo. She confessed she had grown weary through her years of the mysteries regarding Mother. Now the simple and righteous people of the Siena region must have the full truth. <br />
<br />
She had begun with these words, 'There I was, not twenty paces from the deceased Prioress, wordlessly proud but profoundly terrified about what might come next. I stood with my padre, with my mama, and along with my little brother and my older sister. Our whole <em>familia</em> stood silently in grief, struck scrupulous, fearful, and dumb by God's great power that could at any moment be willed down from Heaven to strike us. But the line refused to inch forward ever so slowly. Mama had cautioned me, before we left our rooms, that we would mourn later on this dark afternoon and evening for the holy Mother Prioress, a great saint on earth who had worked many miracles for our people, who had loved us in our simplicity dearly, and who had been visited and nursed through her last bodily afflictions by the most holy angels from on high. We were about to inch forward to kneel and pray next to the Mother Prioress' dead body. I tell you great were the wails and other expressions of grief from the people near us and by the other faithful coming toward us from throughout the village. The most loud and heart-rending cries were issued by those who eventually passed in a single row right beside Mother's corpse. Some clutched her dead hands. Others fell to their knees in sorrow. I should now take out my prayer beads and pray for the Prioress' holy soul, my own mama said.'<br />
<br />
Friar Raimondo prepared to write a few notes. So, you joined the long line then went toward the remains of Mother Agnese in her burial box, in the old piazza?, he asked. <br />
<br />
'Yes, good friar. My father had large tears falling from the reservoirs behind his eyes. Mama cried too. Big streams slid down her bedraggled face. She fingered her prayer beads with fervor,' said Raimondo's visitor.<br />
<br />
Then she added, 'I will not forget this because it disturbed me. There were tall, thick beeswax candles as big as my arm all around Mother's body, flames flickered in the winds and dark, devilish smoke trails went up and were twisted madly by the crossing air currents from the mountains. The trails of black smoke reached toward a big, bright star visible in the early night sky. A few of our companions in hushed voices called it the north star. <br />
<br />
'Very well. What else do you remember seeing?' Raimondo said.<br />
<br />
'Good friar, there were white flowers in large bunches placed on all sides of our poor Mother's body. A big, rough wooden cross had been hammered into the dirt floor of the piazza. The cross leaned and swayed as the breezes played with the smoke trails and blew without comment over the dead one. Townspeople rich and poor waited in the long line to see her, kiss her cheek, touch her hands, for just one last time. As I inched, with my family members, right next to the burial box, I held a tightly folded and scented patch of linen over my nose and mouth as I had been instructed to do. Mama had warned me not to breathe in too boldly or too close since there would be a powerful stench of death awaiting us. This warning frightened me. I was just a little girl. I had never seen at such a close point a dead person before. <br />
<br />
'Mother Agnese of course laid in repose waiting to be borne by the grieving mourners, friends, and admirers loved by her to her crypt. Years later it was rumored that the barren hole that she was supposed tgo occupy for eternity had been lying open, unwatched, unguarded. inside the back room of the village's battered old chapel for days,' the Italian woman added. <br />
<br />
'I was just a devilish little child, I have told you. There was much that I did not understand. But I understood one thing. Rumors swept through the lined up villagers standing immediately before us. They scared my brother, my sister, and me. They whispered mercilessly that the holy Mother Prioress' deep, gray-pocketed eyes remained wide open in death and that the holy woman's body looked and smelled odd. Certain mourners were overcome. If my mama had not held me firmly in place, I believe I would have run away. I shuddered all over.' <br />
<br />
The friar wrote more. What happened then?, he wondered.<br />
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<strong>Agnese Visited by an Angel</strong></div>
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The peasant woman put her head down and spoke softly. <br />
<br />
'Like all the others before us had done, once we got very close to Mother's remains, my padre removed his hat, my mama clutched her fraying shawl tightly to her bosom. I slowly pulled the scented square covering they had given me off my nose and away from my face,' she continued.<br />
<br />
'I sniffed around. At first there were no unpleasant odors that accosted me. The winter breezes felt cool on my chin and lips. Tension had made my body feel rigid. But quietly it relented. I had been told by mama to wait for a smell to come that was more awful than death. I had no previous experience with things such as this. I cautiously . . . sniffed . . . but nothing was there. So I took in a deep breath, expecting the worst. Nothing out of the ordinary did I detect. Then being just a little child and greatly curious, I petulantly gripped the sagging wooden boards on which Mother's burial box was perched unevenly. With my arms up, with my fingers clinging to the gray boards, I hung there like a kitten pulling herself up toward a promising nest of baby birds.'<br />
<br />
'I confess, good Friar, as I was suspended, I urgently sensed some malevolent presence in the box with the body! I could not touch it, or see or smell it. But I feared it was about to leap out onto me! I was terrified. My sister poked my back hard and told me to hurry, pull up, hurry, it was her turn -- yet stubborn, confused, and petrified I refused to climb or drop.'<br />
<br />
My gentle, old padre gripped my waist. He whispered by my ear, <em>'There is nothing here to fear, my little dear. Mother Agnese has gone to be with the benevolent Creator.' </em><br />
<br />
<em> </em>'Yes, go on,' Raimondo prodded her gently. <br />
<br />
'So, despite my confusion, my terror, I inhaled deeply. My heart pounded. I sought to go higher, pulling myself up by my tiny hands, arms, and legs with my padre's assistance. Still this took great effort. For a fleeting moment, I beheld a vision. It was the aged, breathless Prioress with the thin face in her black burial garb, a rosary with bright blood red beads and a wooden cross twined around her bony and discoloring fingers, and her hands crossed piously at her wrists. But horridly she had no eyes for me to behold. No, in fact, she had no face at all. Just a deep black oval pit yawned where her features had rested. I feared the whole village, with me, would be sucked down into it.'<br />
<br />
'Yes,' Raimondo murmured. <br />
<br />
'So boldly I stuck my face down into the burial box,' the woman went on. 'A terrible dizziness overwhelmed me. Crazy thoughts came into my mind. I feared that the great pestilence that had slaughtered so many of our innocent countrymen before my birth would afflict my soul. Then I heard a loud hiss and looked skyward. I envisioned that great star from the north sky had begun to spin wildly and turn black as polished onyx. The heavenly body hurtled like a fireball toward our windblown piazza with indescribable speed. It whooshed down toward our heads then flew by. Black particles, like onyx dust, settled down over everythting. Then the unsteady wooden framework on which I had been dangling made a snapping noise. I was loud and sudden. A painful cracking. The entire burial apparatus shifted sharply below my padre and me. Then it collapsed indecorously to the dusty floor of the village center. <br />
<br />
'That sounds like it was awful for you. Were you injured?' the friar sympathized. <br />
<br />
'I was young and my body was supple. I bounced. I did not suffer. My papa fell on me though. He lost some teeth and harmed a wrist when he hit the piazza face first. But, now good friar, listen to this. All those present were stunned. The decaying remains of the dead Prioress fell out of her nesting place. The awful slap of her corpse striking the piazza floor echoed throughout the surrounding buildings. People leaned back in horror. Many screamed in fear. I began to weep for committing this abomination, this grievous sin. My brother laughed at me. Uniformed guards sprang forward to prevent more disaster. The good friar from the village and the powerful Bishop who was in attendance began to bark orders. They called for order.'<br />
<br />
The woman seemed to beseech Raimondo for sympathy. 'You see, sir, I was just a simple little girl from a secluded farm. Indeed I was impulsive like that.'<br />
<br />
Tears trickled down each side of the peasant woman's weathered face. Echoes of guilt and shame clouded her voice. She wiped tears from her face with a clean rag that Raimondo had handed to her.<br />
<br />
'Good Friar, you must listen to me,' she whispered. 'I confronted a great mystery that day in the palazzo. I am not ashamed to tell you this. As I pulled myself over the rim on Mother's burial box, there was no odor of the dead for me to behold, nothing ugly nor unpleasant. Not at all. What I breathed in was a scent that mimicked a cloying sweetness and fresh flowers. But these garden fragrances were much stronger than any smell to be found in a wealthy Montepulciano citizen's carefully cultivated, Spring garden. I fought bravely the demon that had revealed to me the black pit in Mother's face, the center of the stony but collapsing face of a saint in death. I pushed the troublesome demon away. You see, I did not wish to see or to know anything untoward about the Prioress. But in truth, the aged Mother Agnes within the pall of death looked tormented and pallid, deeply grooved throughout her face, like she had suffered extreme pain and expired in a restless state. Mother did not appear to have suffered a disfiguring disease like smallpox. Except her eyes, once I got a sincere look at them, betrayed deep trouble welling up from her soul -- her dry her eyes were encircled with blackened skin, dry socketed, <em>still thrown wide open</em>, and staring intensely at me and the world. Soon I beheld that a liquid, like a marginally thickened and graying water, with that intense and cloying odor that made me so dizzy, was trickling from underneath each of Mother's hands, which were palms down, and from the flats of her feet, as if it were draining out of small piercings in her wrinkled skin below her fingers and her turned out ankle bones. Pieces of traditional Dominican clothing on Mother's corpse made it impossible to tell any more. The sweet wetness that trickled from her body I simply could not resist. It suffused the immediate area around the corpse like a dense cloud of perfume.' <br />
<br />
'In time you believed someone had devised a ruse?' Raimondo asked. <br />
<br />
'At that time, I believed it was a miracle from Him. As I have told you, I was an impulsive little girl, a curious thing. I reached over despite my mama's warnings and touched the liquid though I knew my parents would disapprove. The mystery of that day then grew much deeper. When I reached across sister poked me in the back again. She cried no! My little brother whispered, Uh-oh. The graying substance warmed my fingers to the bone and stroked my soul like some sweet story told during a hearty meal before a family's roaring winter fire. My world began to spin quickly. I feared that I was about to fall dizzied into a black pit, tormented by hallucinations, and be lost forever. My father held me when I cried out in fear. Even to a young child like me the hypnotic gray liquid testified to stark violation of nature's ways. But I then dipped my right hand into the mysterious substance smeared over the Mother Prioress' hand as she lay mutely by the burial box. I made a sign of the cross on myself, like I had seen everyone around me at this funeral, even my family, do. My right hand grew warm again. My mind began to spin anew and, friar, my hands remained sweetly fragrant with that seductively sweet odor for days and days.'<br />
<br />
The legendary Raimundo, an investigator, a detective for the Church, had heard similar things regarding Prioress Agnese du Segni's death watch and burial. He had stopped taking notes. He felt pity and compassion for this simple farmer's wife.<br />
<br />
'Let's go over this just one more time,' he said gently, intrigued by the story. 'You now believe that foul play perhaps was at work? A soporific and perhaps other magical substances were used to keep her dead body fresh, as fully uncorrupted as possible? A cloying but man-made scent was employed, you suspect, to convince mourners that the Prioress had been taken sweetly into the arms of the Lord and his Mother? Again, how did you say the blessed corpse, our Mother's, had its hands arranged?'<br />
<br />
'Her palms were down. The fingers of her two hands were perfectly straight and crossed over each wrist in the center of her lap. Prayer beads that shone bright red, like the color of fresh blood, were wound around all her fingers,' the woman replied.<br />
<br />
'The trails of sweet elixir came from where? <br />
<br />
She said, 'It came from underneath her hands and from under her ankle bones. People said it was a miracle when they beheld this! But there was no blood mingled in. Mother Agnese already bore the holy wounds in her precious palms. What are those called, sir?'<br />
'Holy stigmata. So is there anything else?'<br />
<br />
The woman looked about his quarters. She added, 'There appeared to be some flecks of something dark red, like rust, in the sweet potion. These made me feel very sad.' She seemed to be on the verge of disclosing something else. But her lips did not move and she lightly shook her head no.<br />
<br />
Raimondo de Capua stood. For this day, his inquiry was complete. He politely thanked the kind peasant woman from Montepulciano. She left his quarters. Then she went through his front yard without turning back to wave and walked away. He kept his eyes on her. She was heading toward the steep road down to the Val di Chiana. On the road the woman had pulled her hooded cloak tight to fend off the cold breezes that still blew, as a constant, across the hilly landscape. <br />
<br />
It would be very dark in one hour or two. In the twilight by the window, the friar pondered this version of Blessed Agnese's pre-burial scene from years ago. It was one of the most graphic that Raimondo had ever come across. He had heard several accounts. But the recollections were very old now. Many imaginative details in this version, he thought to himself. <br />
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<div>
Briefly, the friar also recalled a few things he had learned about the Prioress while he grew up in Capua. Based on all the facts he had discovered, the investigator harbored many concerns regarding the pastiche of detail, myth, and speculation that had surfaced about Agnese's full life and dramatic, but righed, burial since she expired five decades ago. Raimondo believed the mind played tricks as one aged -- as memories became frayed, details became eroded, and firm facts, just like like the iron-willed rule of the mighty Ozymandias, were cracked and crushed to pieces, and left to decay in the dust.</div>
<div>
<br />
The little farm girl, when prodded by her older sibling, had plunged her inquisitive face and nose into Agnese du Segni's burial box of fine chesnut <em>(castanea sativa)</em> during a windy April dusk in 1317. Letting her linen protective down, she cautiously sniffed the air that had wafted in and around the lovely Italian hillsides all day, then over and through the villagers, into and out of the dens of local animals, and finally over the lifeless bones and drying skin of the black-clad sister. The child began to tremble in a panic and imagine terrible things. She gulped cloying perfumed air, and a spray of flowers seemed to bloom around her. She peered into the dead woman's graying eye sockets. Dizziness overcame her. She slumped over. This movement rocked the makeshift wood structure, made of oak and supple chesnut, on which she had leaned. Several of the Cardinal's minions sprang forth nervously to steady the corpse in the box. What had she said?, Raimondo wondered anew. 'On my second breath close to Mother's body, the odor filled my senses, like an intoxicating elixir brewed on the margins of Hell itself.' Then the child was forced down to her knees by some invisible pressure on her bony shoulders, perhaps under her parent's hands. She felt engulfed in some other-worldly cloud. Her head bowed low under the pressure until she almost tasted the earth. The little one shuddered again. She prayed <em>'Lord God, in the Heavenly hosts, oh Mother of Mercies, sweet Angels above, show me pity, save me from the falling star and save me from this troubled spirit</em>.' <br />
<br />
But was it, in truth, just her trusted and teary father or her insistent mother, or her misbehaving sister, who were imploring her, by pushing her toward the earth, to kneel down to pray for Mother's soul? <br />
<br />
That happened five decades ago. Raimondo was now a passionate, grown man and a Dominican himself, a prayerful and attentive mendicant, an upright and loyal son and supporter of Mother Church during these troubled, crusading times. The humble friar was born in the town of Capua. He was revered by Tuscan citizens. Unexpectedly, he had become the spiritual confidante and merciful confessor to blessed Caterina Benincasa from Siena. Caterina was a deeply mystical, but a spiritually troubled young woman. She too was a Dominican sister. Caterina spoke hauntingly to her friar-confessor of a deeply intimate, the world would say forbidden, physical relationship, including sexual contacts, with the Savior of all humankind in her personal cell. She confessed to feeling pricked and bloodied often by jagged scruples and religious fears. And (unknown to Caterina and Raimondo) she was destined to be honored, in time, as the holy patroness of Italy, a saintly and incorruptible <em>mystic</em> enshrined on pedestals across the Christian universe, her preserved head carried tafter her death to Rome to be venerated by throngs of the faithful. <br />
<br />
Raimondo was laboring to produce an authentic biography of Mother Agnese, the storied Dominican Prioress whom the local girl from Siena, Caterina, had loved completely as her spiritual mother and wise mentor. The friar had pledged to Caterina that he would complete Agnese's life story. Raimundo now secretly held doubts that he could do so honestly. His worries about Mother's secrets were kept him on edge b day and had ruined his ability to sleep through the night. His mind wandered when others spoke. In fact Raimondo feared that Agnese, who had laid in repose in that chesnut box in the piazza, outside the storied hillside monastery in Montepulciano, was not the revered Sister and Mother Agnese in deed. The perfumed and dark-eyed corpus in the creepily frangranced box was that of Agnese's victimized and timid sibling, Noldo, lying under decades of cleverly painted-on but tortured disguise. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong>Caterina's Sarcophagus</strong></span></td></tr>
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During recent weeks, Raimondo had worried that he would never be brave enough to inform Caterina, and the world, <em>as a certain fact</em> that Mother Agnese had actually not expired virtuously during April 1317.<br />
<br />
Agnese was dead long before that. Raimondo was not a physicist, like Albertus Magnus, nor was he an alchemist. He was a man of simple faith who was smart, skilled as a listener, and insightful about the dark intricacies of human affairs. An intuitive thinker, and a product of the burgeoning Renaissance, the friar had privately surmised during his sojourn in Montepulciano that the real Agnese had expired during her fourteenth year, during 1281, probably down in a windblown forest grove or nearby on the damp and marshy banks of a local lake. He had learned that Agnese, a twin, had been a beauteous and budding red-haired flower, and a dedicated daydreamer. She loved her roan horse more than any family member or friend, even her emotionally-troubled twin brother, Arnoldo. Yet dark forces stalked her. On a fateful day, some awful power had stifled Agnese until she expired. The girl's remains were never located. The statuesque roan mare, called Castanea, was spied running unabated later, at least once, but outside the village walls.<br />
<br />
Raimondo speculated also that Agnese's demise must have happened just days before a rainy-cold and windswept dawn during which a small group of Dominican postulants, in fresh black and white habits, were whisked to the town of Porceno to outfit a new monastic community. The lovely Agnese du Segni looked to be among them. But, of course, she was not. Someone was impersonating her. Years later then it was not the real Agnese, who was rumored by religious zealots to have been privately and mystically visited by gentle angels and even the Infant Christ in her convent quarters, whose corpse, aged 49 years, was lying in repose within that audaciously scented burial box -- heavily laced with a hypnotic drug that made passers-by feel disoriented by the Spirit's presence -- on that star-struck Montepulciano piazza. That was how, at dusk on a strange evening, a naive and curious little farm girl, made dizzy by the odor from the box, next to her siblings, indeed her entire sharecropping <em>familia</em>, roughly jostled and nearly crashed down the makeshift wooden bier, while tall, thick candles burned brightly and dark smoke trails wound around madly in the mountain winds, smudged the looming oaken cross nearby, and stretched up toward a blinking north star. That was a crucial moment in this mystery, Raimondo thought. A timorous farm girl almost spilled all of the chestnuts about the ruse then and there.<br />
<br />
While he conducted his long research project in Montepulciano, Raimondo longed to see Caterina again. She was intriguing. So full of God-given and youthful life. Barely in the 21st year of her earthly sojourn, Raimondo pictured her in the bustling city of Rome. Caterina had lately confessed to the friar that she had for a time endured a series of nighttime visits received in her personal prayer chamber from holy angels and then <em>Blessed Dominic himself</em>, who of course, as Raimondo knew, had been long been dead and buried. Like the lovely Caterina, Dominic habitually fingered his well-worn prayer beads in the candle-glow of nightfall. He sought her private company whenever he could in the interior comfort of the Dominican house for women. But the anxious detective, Raimondo de Capua, persevered with his assigned task away from Rome. He did not leave to visit Caterina. He interviewed, studied, asked probing questions, tarried on some days, and wrote tirelessly about Agnese -- and he laid awake night after night. The beautiful Caterina was forever on his mind. <br />
<br />
Raimondo prepared to turn back from the twilight-streaked window. He pulled out his loop of prayer beads. But something, a very slight movement, caught the friar's eye. It was a person walking this time up the sloping road from the Val di Chiana. The woman struggled to trudge forward in the steady chill breezes. Her black over-cloak with the full hood was pulled up tight to her breast and around her head to battle the effects of the cold. She must have forgotten to say something to me, Raimondo thought at first. Yet the idea of her returning to his private quarters at this hour made him testy. The woman waved toward him urgently. Was she beckoning him to come out to join her? <br />
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The surprised friar pushed his front door open. He felt reluctant to do so. Yet Raimondo left so instantly that he forgot to put on his warm winter wrap. He prepared to be befuddled by what he would hear. In seconds he was freezing outside. And, as destiny would have it, the aging peasant woman's disclosure delayed significantly Raimondo's return to Rome and his beloved Caterina. His re-entry to the eternal city would not occur for almost two thoughtful and discovery-packed years in Montepulciano and beyond. <br />
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<strong><span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Fall, 1281: Agnese Dreams of an Etruscan Love</span></strong><br />
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Agnese, a fetching young lady, sat proudly astride her beautiful roan horse. They trotted toward the Porta al Prato at the end of town near the steep hillside ledge, a descending limestone formation that took horse and rider on a twisting old road to the Val di Chiana. They rode past the beginnings of thick stone walls that were freshly quarried and would in time grow high enough to envelope the entire Renaissance community of Montepulciano.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><strong>Montepulciano and the Val di Chiana</strong></span></td></tr>
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Agnese loved to gallop Cassi, actually named Castanea, who reminded her of a delicate and imported acacia fragrance, down this ancient, sloping road. She relished the clean, stiff breezes that made her feel vigorous, strong, like she could live forever. Near the bottom, Agnese and her roan would slow slightly and veer suddenly off the winding pathway that hardworking Roman conscripts had carved into the rich earth so long ago. Horse and rider would race toward an expansive grove of oaks and chesnut trees. Beyond this forest lay the crystal blue waters, with tiny waves rippling through it, of Lake Montepulciano. The small lake was nearly surrounded by a valley replete with old vineyards that brought forth the dark and rich Montepulciano grapes year after year. The Segni family owned many of these. They had grown very rich over decades by selling the delicious ruby-red wine that issued from their land. <br />
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The year was 1281. Agnese was a beautiful young woman of fourteen years, but a very lonely one too. The season of autumn had arrived. She spurred the roan forward, aiming for the copse of trees nearby. They would pace slowly now to the placid little lake. Agnese would day dream amidst the pretty trees about her life as the loving and faithful <em>Queen</em> to King Porsena and his Etruscan army, the strong and fierce warriors that had bravely marched through the blooming Val di Chiana to the outer edges of Rome, then laid seige to conquer the legendary Romans almost 1700 years ago. <em>Surely that was a noble and romantic age!,</em> Agnese believed. She pulled Cassi to a standstill. She gazed for long minutes up and down the old valley road. Queen Agnese of the Etruscan region, clothed in rich purple and gold garments, wearing a proper crown, perched regally atop her snorting, spirited warhorse. The Queen imagined her powerful ruler, Porsena the King, leading his sure-footed legions toward the ruthless Roman region. In time, the bold and striking Porsena would return via the limestone roadway to once again join her, a beloved and faithful consort and (at last) a legendary conqueror. <br />
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Agnese broke off this daydream. Feelings of loneliness and abandon immersed her again. Her parents were preoccupied with their emotionally ill son, Arnoldo, her twin brother, who was so devastated by his gender. The Segni parents insisted that Agnese would travel to Proceno in a matter of days with the odd newcomers, the young Dominican women, so as to stay indefinitely in the new monastery. This, they trusted, would make them more apt to aid the struggling Noldo, who was increasingly prone to outbursts of anger, dressing and walking about like Agnese herself, running away for days, and (dare she admit this complicated secret he had confided?) a drive to subsist as a true female. Remarkably, her had shown her his hairless chest and arms, and the small conical breasts, that were somehow blossoming on his upper torso. <br />
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<em>If only I had been born in those noble days of Porsena. This would all fade away, </em>she sighed. <em>Let us go, my sweet Cass.</em> <br />
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Horse and rider slow-gaited toward the thicket of chesnuts. Agnese's gleaming red hair and slim shoulders under her riding cape bounced lightly in the sun. The body of the roan, then the body of the teenaged rider, pierced the curtain of green and gray forest swaying in the breezes. Each step that Cassi took pressed them deeper into that verdant density. Then, with a swish of the roan's tail and another sure-footed step, they were all swallowed into the copse, invisible to all outside of it. Agnese du Segni felt a sudden rush of expectation. Her hands became shaky. Once inside the shaded grove, she sensed something menacing that laid in wait for her. Was that a slight movement from behind that tree?, she wondered with a start. Then, before many minutes had elapsed, Agnese was transported to the unknown forever, a bright star gone dark -- never to be seen or heard again.<br />
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Less than one hour passed. A masked figure in a black riding cloak with a generous black hood rode the roan at full speed out of the forest grove. Quickly, they turned toward a forgotten old trail. A curtain of light auburn hair was splayed across the rider's forehead. The trail way took the horse and its frantic companion toward a field of vines that led around to the backside of hilly Montepulciano. It would prove to be a hard and steep lunge for the horse and rider to go up the ancient trail, until they crested at the mostly unwatched southern side of the classical piazza. The goal was to sneak unseen into a cramped and dimly lit chamber, the crypt area, of the shadowed <em>capella</em> of the Resurrection. There awaited a selfish and greedy little man, a prince of the holy Church, from Orvieto. Arnoldo knew his name of course: Cardinal Casanova Bentivenga. His eminence had relentlessly curried the favor of the sickly Pope Nicholas while still a bishop. Soon he had been appointed the Dean of the College of Cardinals and, as some said in confidence, the ruthless Queen of the Conclave. The new Cardinal had once fallen just a solitary vote short in a bitter political tussle to become the Supreme Pontiff in Roma. It was now likewise a fact that Cardinal Bentivenga, the black prince with the blood-red hat and a madman's evil stare, had just coldly blackmailed the weak Noldo, his eminence's most tender physical prey, into committing a heinous crime against his innocent Agnese, the twin sister who had to disappear utterly, and the whole wealthy Segni clan. As usual, the scheming Cardinal Bentivenga had a devious plan in mind-- and that secret plan would unexpectedly bear varietal fruits for fifty years, like the pertinacious vineyards left behind in Montepulciano soil by Romans.<br />
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Noldo felt frantic and sweat-stained. He burst through the chamber door. He pushed back the black hood. His long auburn hair was damp and stringy. His hands and forearms were concealed inside his large cloak. There was one candle with a small flame lighting the crypt area.<br />
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Bentivenga turned his panther-black eyes toward the teenaged boy who wished to be a girl. His eminence asked, 'She is . . . ?'<br />
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'Yes. Gone . . . forever. And so am I. As you have planned. The corpus will never be discovered. The assassin you dispatched into the woods to help me completed his ruthless work quite easily. At first, he hit her so hard that two of my lovely sister's teeth popped out. There was so much blood. I recovered one of them. ' Arnoldo withdrew his hand and arm from the cloak and displayed the bloody tooth in his palm. He began to cry when he saw it. It was his last piece of her. He gripped it more tightly.<br />
<br />
'Ah, get rid of that, young fool! It ties you directly to your supposed and hasty disappearance.' The evil stare was fixed on the young man. 'Yet I see that you have brought the delicate horse, as I instructed. Good. I will ride her to my villa tonight, then plan to meet you once more in Proceno's gardens soon enough. I have taken an enormous risk to come here <em>for you</em>. You must journey in several days to the convent, we have discussed, with the new postulants. No argument will I hear! Do as I command. No one in the troupe will know you. These Dominican students are newly-arrived in Tuscany.You must go without objection and in proper spirits. Understood? Put on a proper show. Do not let down your disguise. Agnese then will have begun to find her proper calling in the monastic life, as will you, my boy. You will be my charge, happy. You will be costumed perfectly according to our plan, you hear?' Bentivenga said. <br />
<br />
Arnoldo nodded at the irony. <em>For you.</em><br />
<br />
The Dean of the Sacred College stood. The time for the fulfillment of his carnal urges had come. He slowly removed the scarlet galero from his head. His string of polished prayer beads, worn like a decorative belt, clacked loudly on the wood floor. He began fiddling with the equally scarlet fascia wound around his expanding waist, the striking hue symbolizing the very blood he must be willing to shed in defending the holy faith. 'Now turn around. Lean, my little pet. Lean against that,' Bentivenga commanded. The Cardinal reached out for the black cape that covered Noldo's back. The red prince began breathing harder. <br />
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Arnoldo obeyed hastily. He steadied himself with both hands against the propped-up oaken door. He shut his eyes tight. He clenched his hands firmly. Casanova Bentivenga brushed up against him. His unholy hands searched for Noldo's budding chest. The boy instantly felt nauseated. Furiously, he vomited the meager remains of his midday meal into the crypt. Noldo strangely thought about the wooden door in his shaking hands, as he caught his breath. These oak boards would someday be lowered over a fresh corpse entombed in the <em>capella's</em> mud floor. Noldo imagined. The Cardinal roughly pulled the auburn hair on the back of Noldo's head. Noldo jumped, startled. His right hand's grasp on the door gave way. The jagged, bloody tooth of his twin sister slipped from his fingers and plunged down into the rectangular pit. <br />
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As this tragic scene unfolded, Arnoldo, the victim, the victimizer, and the grief-stricken, and the impious and sinful Cardinal Dean could not foresee another scene that would also play out in this blessed room in years hence. For herein the ludricrously-fragrant physical remains of the expired Dominican Prioress -- which were, in truth, the reeking bodily remains that belonged to Arnoldo the brother, not his erstwhile sibling --would be <em>united forever </em>with a ghastly little relic. It was now lying down in the burial hole, a jagged and bloody tooth, donated unwillingly by the dear, departed Agnese: a red-stained incisor that had just been smashed violently from her tender and truthful mouth by a bastard's fist in the semi-darkness of the swaying grove, near the marshy grounds adjacent to Lake Montepulciano. <br />
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<strong><span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia";"> >>>>></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia";">April, 1370: Raimondo the Incorruptible Finds Agnese</span></strong><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Three things cannot long be hidden </span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> -- t</span><span style="color: red; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">he sun, the moon, and the truth.</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "times";"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "times";"> --<em> The Buddha</em></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Raymond of Capua</span></strong></td></tr>
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The Dominican <i>legenda </i>from Capua, Fray Raimondo, had longed for many months to be reunited, far from the hilly terrain of Montepulciano, with Caterina Benincasa of Siena -- the Christian mystic, the philosopher, a gifted writer, a diplomatic peacemaker, and his spiritually vulnerable friend. His sojourn in the Montepulciano region and beyond had been productive but extended. The time for the desired reunion had finally arrived. </div>
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The two Dominican friends sat together on a secluded bench in a beautiful flower garden near the saintly woman's abode and beside the entrance to the legendary cemetery of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva Church. They wore the traditional black and white garb of their religious order and occasionally held hands. Catherine had begun to cry once Friar Raimondo reported all that he had learned, a certain and bitter set of truths, during his extended sojourn in Montepulciano and beyond. He had been afraid that that might happen. In fact, Raimondo felt like crying about the real Agnese 's blighted fate too.<br />
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Upon returning to Caterina's side in this sweet garden, Raimondo felt immediately disturbed by his female friend's apparent condition. Had she truly deteriorated so much mentally and physically? Her moods seemed alternately ecstatic then forlorn. Her thinking seemed unstable. She looked pale and frail from eating too little in her cramped personal quarters and laboring much too hard most of the time, both day and night. At one point Sister Catherine spoke at great length about visits to her private cell at night by the Lord Jesus. Quietly, in mystic flights of fancy, she related to the friar that she had accepted the Savior as her one, true spouse. Caterina even maintained that the couple had physically consummated their spiritual union once again just days before. She showed her confessor a ring that she now wore on her left hand, a gift to her from heaven, she said. (Later, Caterina swore that it was the preserved and gilded, post-circumcision foreskin of the baby Jesus from Nazareth miraculously crafted for her in heaven into a finger ring.) The alarming disclosures that came from Caterina's mouth disturbed her confessor and male companion to the core. <br />
<br />
Caterina had read Raimondo's complete written testimony about the secret, horrible fates of Agnese and Arnoldo du Segni. It had summoned bitter tears to her sad eyes. The sound of her crying bruised Raimondo's heart. The key to solving the squalid mystery had come into focus for the dedicated friar like a twinkling star comes into view suddenly as evening in the north sky grows black. Raimundo's inquisitive but suspicious eye had been riveted by the sight of the humble peasant woman returning so soon up the road from the Val di Chiana to him, her dark cloak and hood clutched tightly around her to fend off the bitter winds. Suddenly, she seemed to beckon the friar to hurry out to her. <br />
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This must not be happening, not now. Perhaps, Raimondo thought, I am the one who is seeing things. He imagined the dizzying smell emanating from Mother's burial bier. The friar rubbed his eyes. Yet, there she was, standing expectantly in the cold. Signalling urgently to him. He passed through his front door without his overcoat intending to hear her out. <br />
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<em>Good friar, I have very little time left. I am in a great rush. And the night is growing harsh with cold. I must return home to my family very soon. I have come back because I have remembered something from long ago that might prove important to you. About a day when my madre was just a little child, like I was on that strange evening in the piazza for Mother Agnese's burial. She related to me once I reached womanhood to remember a certain thing if ever, she repeated firmly the word </em>ever, <em>someone in responsibility ever questioned me about either Agnese, her cherished horse, or the dead Prioress. On an evening shortly after Arnoldo du Segni had disappeared, my mama's father -- my grandfather, he was -- was taking the family wagon full of grapes slowly from our farmland up the road that stretches from the Val di Chiana toward our hilltop town. He planned to drop off the harvest </em><em>at the old winemaker's shop. My mother rode with him that evening as a special treat for her, as did her brother, my favorite uncle. In light , holy friar, of what you have said to me today, w</em><em>hat happened next takes my breath away still. My mother told me about it. As the family wagon wheels ground slowly toward the town, a charging horse, a tall and shapely roan, came bounding over a hillock toward the road. It was approaching dusk at the time, so making things out with one's eyes was becoming difficult. Yet my grandfather instantly recognized the fine roan. It was Castanea -- the beautiful mount that was proudly cherished by Agnese du Segni. The mighty steed ran past our family wagon </em><em>undaunted, then continued downslope toward a large expanse of oak and chesnut trees. When Castanea reached the edge of the copse she pulled up and stamped the ground. For minutes the horse walked back and forth near the tree line. It was, my mama told me, </em><em>as if the young, innocent Agnese had charged her roan to go searching for someone -- or something. My grandfather mumbled and shook his head as he beheld this. Then, seconds later, over a nearby crest, a large male figure with a flowing black riding cloak, topped by a generous black hood, galloped after the</em> <em>runaway</em> <em>roan. The black rider approached the du Segni horse on the margin of the the forest grove. My grandfather sensed that the young Agnese would never allow her wonderful friend Castanea to run free and without a guide. The horse should have been with Agnese or already put down in her stable for the night. But she was certainly not bedded down. How could that be? My grandfather knew that he should not pose questions about what he had seen. Curiosity could lead to great trouble, family anguish perhaps. With the stealthy appearance of the black rider, the old man feared that powerful people were somehow involved in something unsavory. He commanded my mother and her brother, my beloved uncle, to never speak about what they had witnessed from the wagon that evening. But later my mama told me all about the incident. At the time, I could not puzzle out the mystery on my own. I did not grasp what she was trying to tell me in a cloaked way.</em><br />
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Raimondo nodded sagely. Then he shivered from the cold. He grasped the message from the long-dead parent immediately. It had survived, barely, locked away for decades, in the memory of the simple peasant woman.<br />
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The friar thought about key sections of the imposing text that he had placed in Caterina's hands. He had pondered them in solitude on dozens of recent occasions. <br />
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Raimondo told her, 'So my dear Caterina, a great clamor arose throughout the insular village of Montepulciano once the young esquire, Arnoldo, could not be located for days. Rumors and unofficial reports in the village indicated that his parents were immersed in anguish. Castanea the roan was very restless throughout those hours, neighed wildly and kicked the big wooden door to her stall, thus creating a great commotion. Villagers throughout Montepulciano said that the du Segni <em>familia</em> wondered if a plot had been hatched against them by a rival clan.<em> </em>They worried that their remaining children were targeted for harm. Agnese's parents <em>were</em> satisfied that Arnoldo's twin had been ensconced safely and quickly behind secure convent walls at Proceno. They concentrated with associates and employees on following, perhaps recovering, the troubled Noldo. But as weeks passed, it was widely speculated that Noldo's troubled emotional state had led him to willfully disappear. Many townspeople intimated that he had consorted secretly with unsavory characters and that caused the frail and flighty boy, Noldo, to suffer an untimely demise.'<br />
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The earnest friar paused to take a breath. This will be painful to her, he knew. <br />
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'Dearest Caterina, I know deep in my heart that you idolized the saintly Mother Agnese. Many others did so as well. She did much good throughout her many faithful years of service to God's people. She lived a holy existence. She bestowed concern and mercy on all who came to her. Her corporal and spiritual works are legendary. But hear me, please, Caterina, my most dear friend. There are numerous documents throughout all regions of Italy that elucidate stories of persons who have sought, ardently and . . . secretly, to morph, to change over, to become disguised, in all apparent ways into figures of the opposite sex. My investigations indicate, though, that never before has there been a proven tale of a young male who switched places with his redolent and guiltless twin, by arranging or helping with her death, then adopting a most remarkable female disguise to beguile the world. Not until this day. How the benighted scion, Arnoldo, must have missed his parents and his twin, Agnese, during his lengthy seclusion in Proceno and thereafter.'<br />
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Raimondo detected a look of alarm and then great displeasure in the gentle Caterina's eyes. <br />
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'My study has led me to conclude that Arnoldo was probably blackmailed by his vile abuser, the Cardinal, Bentivenga, until the old villain, and his bastard, the black henchman, were assassinated by poison in Orvieto. Cardinal and son were brought to their Maker by a different male sexual victim one would assume. The lives of Noldo's parents hung in the balance for a time as well, I am sure. Noldo was surely threatened that both he and they would die terrible deaths if he ever confessed his criminal victimhood at the crimson hands of the Church. The death of his twin would afford him a way out of his predicament. So, capitulation and hopelessness led him to adopt the feminine identity, the Dominican sisters' traditional garb, a change for which oddly he had <em>hungered</em> in his mysterious and suffering soul. By all accounts Arnoldo was a thin and beautiful boy enthralled for a time by the sinful churchman and his immoral, bastard son. But once he began to deeply experience this nightmare, replete with his unforgiven guilt, he, <em>she,</em> was converted by the Almighty to a life of merciful works, selfless charity, and fervent prayer. But in fact it was a life built upon a long ruse, once his Roman tormentor's physical assaults had abated.'<br />
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Raimondo looked down thoughtfully. 'Good sister, perhaps the gentle young lady, Agnese, never really sensed the atrocious plot at hand -- never grasped the great danger that was creeping into her family's life. Yet perhaps, sadly, on some level, she actually did but she remained powerless to reverse that tainted fortune.'<br />
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That was truth. Having disclosed it to the pious Caterina, the earnest Raimundo immediately sensed that the course of his labor on the biography of the Prioress would soon be altered significantly. The friar was an intuitive, a gifted researcher, and a practiced essayist. Yet, above all, Raimundo the Dominican was a prayerful mendicant who served without fatigue as an upright and <em>loyal</em> son of Mother Church. It seemed clear that the tale of the du Segni twins, and the ugly avarice and murderous frailties that it revealed, had the power to mislead, confuse, and hurt the simple people at all levels of God's holy sheepfold in Italy and beyond. <br />
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Caterina blotted with a woven cloth some tears flowing from her eyes. At last, she whispered hotly: 'Dear sir, the Prioress was my trusted teacher, my treasured heartbeat, my north star shining brightly in the night. Would I have not sensed that something was terribly amiss? <br />
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'Mother Agnese performed great deeds. She bestowed solace and mercy to all who came to her. Foy many years! This is <em>the truth. </em>Mother was even graced by a visit from the Infant Lord in her private cell. You know the faithful will be deeply pained -- no, they will be deeply pained and scandalized -- to learn of this sordid account," she said. "You must <em>re-write</em> it, good friar. Relate the truth'<br />
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Raimundo eased his upper frame back heavily. He did not appreciate Caterina's surly tone. He was reluctant to concur with his beloved. More warm tears ran down her cheeks. He squeezed her hand. <br />
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'The Holy Church will suffer a horrific scandal. You must make changes. Avoid the evil that will befall the Church, good Raimundo,' she added. <br />
<br />
He was stunned that the youthful but stalwart Caterina Benincasa would plead with him. <br />
<br />
But that there would be scandal widespread was not to be argued. The church was full of simple believers. So, the humble friar, a loyal son and servant of the Holy Mother Church, the lady Caterina's sensitive confessor and brilliant confidante, already knew what he would do. <br />
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Raimondo would begin his writing endeavor afresh. Caterina would be appeased. His judicious labor would commence at dawn as the stars faded in the gray sky and as rays of light from the sun began to rise.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDB2h2Fq9MkYDgmdX46xXrqQK2j5eQAp81SPQT9jm2Rh-mt2H8rCDtmK_XAjAbaBUGw2yoC-9WJoJTRbuRPJIi9S8my1QttGLP71TtY1JpadmVt2rO6EsnX1Xt24vq7i_UuXBlku5LtU/s1600/Marriage+of+Caterina+(Torres).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="168" lda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDB2h2Fq9MkYDgmdX46xXrqQK2j5eQAp81SPQT9jm2Rh-mt2H8rCDtmK_XAjAbaBUGw2yoC-9WJoJTRbuRPJIi9S8my1QttGLP71TtY1JpadmVt2rO6EsnX1Xt24vq7i_UuXBlku5LtU/s320/Marriage+of+Caterina+(Torres).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><strong>Caterina Marries the Lord Jesus in Her Cell</strong></span></td></tr>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia";"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The song soundtrack for <em>A Dark Star --</em></span></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia";"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia";"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"Going Home" by Leonard Cohen:</span> <span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlLWnbco_I"><span style="color: red; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlLWnbco_I</span></a></span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia";"></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: large;">*</span><span style="color: red; font-size: large;"> <span style="color: black; font-size: small;">Author's Note --</span></span></strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
Long before Newton, LaPlace, and Cavendish, astronomers and early physicists speculated on the existence of "dark stars" -- stars that actually are invisible. Explained by complicated Newtonian mechanics, light that is emitted at the <em>surface</em> of a dark star is trapped and held within the star’s gravity -- thus rendering it completely dark. Hence the name "dark star." <br />
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Unlike another phenomenon in the universe called the <em>black hole</em>, in the case of a dark star the 'object' behind the horizon is assumed to be stable against collapse. It is reliably there, with mass and stability, but it is unrecognizable (you just cannot see it) due to the implosion of light. <br />
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People have asked what is the meaning? of the story about your Dark Star." This note should provide a little insight with regard to that question.<br />
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<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">*** *** *** *** ***</span></strong></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-34733671963001645612014-10-09T13:15:00.000-04:002014-10-09T13:14:42.251-04:00Note About Dark Stars<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Long before the times of Newton, LaPlace, and Cavendish, astronomers and early physicists were speculating on the existence of "dark stars" -- stars which in fact are invisible. Explained by complicated Newtonian mechanics, light that is emitted at the <em>surface</em> of a dark star is trapped by the star’s gravity -- thus rendering it dark. Hence the name "dark star." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unlike another phenomenon in the universe, the <em>black hole</em>, in the case of a dark star the 'object' behind the horizon is assumed to be stable against collapse. It is right there, with mass and stability, but it is unrecognizable (you just cannot see it) due to the implosion of light. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">People have been asking me 'what is the meaning?' of the recent story "A Dark Star." This note should lend some insight with regard to that question.</span><br />
<br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-88274113966439514322014-10-09T13:12:00.000-04:002015-09-14T15:10:08.469-04:00Constant Companions<br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><b> Constant Companions </b></span><br />
<b><span style="color: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="color: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="color: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="color: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Original Fiction by Butch
Ekstrom<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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</span><span style="color: #c00000; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I to</span><span style="color: red; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ld you about strawberry fields<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> You know the place where
nothing is real<br />
Well here's another place you can go<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Where everything flows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Looking through the bent back tulips
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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To see how the other half lives<br />
Looking through a glass onion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> -- Lennon and McCartney, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <i> "Glass
Onion”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The day was becoming a near-perfect confirmation that their wicked winter
months were at last headed for seclusion and that the welcome Spring, with
all of its budding rebirths and consequent wonders, with the color green
painting the lawns that had survived the snows and bursting out on
the ample oak and maple trees, had made its way to their little township.
The late morning air was crisp, clear, unblemished, uplifting. With each hour
that passed, a brilliant sun ascended peacefully, the neighborhood warmed
steadily, and the catalogued troubles and frigid inconveniences
of a long and bitter cold season, like the persistent ice floes and
graying patches of snow that had imprisoned quarrelsome, pent
up little brothers and sisters indoors for long murky days, began to
melt into puddles and drip away. The ample yards on both sides of the
street were soft and supple from Winter meltoff and muddy patches of
turf made squishing noises as people walked out hopefully in their Summer
weather fabrics and casual slip-ons to bask in the welcome sun shower, shake
off lingering worries, admire the changes in nature that were coming on so
quickly, and wonder if good things, indiscernible but hopeful, were in store
for the days ahead.</span></div>
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As slants of sunlight pierced through tree limbs and dove down onto
oak-lined McFarland Road, near the west margins of the
forest, reborn sounds of birds and bees, periodic and faint
wails of distant sirens, motorized buzz saws rotating deep in the woods,
and the lulling hums of preoccupied cicadas in the bushes and trees made for
subconscious entertainment, at an early hour a lonely, brain hampered
war veteran who lived like a recluse down by the gully where the road dropped
off into a thick woodland, nicknamed the Sarge, had marched companion
free (like he did almost every day) past the rows of McFarland houses
and on toward an aged number 21 city bus that he would ride over
potholed streets amiably for a couple of hours, then dutifully ride right back
again. <br />
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This genial
weekday packed with placid possibilities though would draw two
other people who were reeling in separate orbits -- both parents, opposites
that had failed to attract, neighbors in name only keeping each other at
definable distances, one of them a young and (as churlish neighbors claimed in
hushed tones) delusional and frowny anti-social mother of
three children -- toward a palpitating and breathless
encounter, beside a circular children's pool made of cheap plastic
and glutted with six inches of sparkling water, that would
mark the end of the dank and miserable stretch of wintry weeks
recently endured in the ragged, irrational, fitful McDyer household. <br />
<br />
That day, as was her
unhealthful custom -- ever since middle child Stuart had marched off to school
behind big brother James and six years later Brooke had come along, the only
girl among a trio of offspring, a golden-haired baby
surprise with sparkling shades of hazel in her irises, a daughter
hailing from far outside the McDyers' dreams for the future -- the unlikable
and emotionally disintegrating mother with a sallow chain smoker's
complexion and frequently mismatched clothing, who was typically wary of
eye-contact and predictably negative in her demeanor, had remained mostly
indoors in the graying rooms of their shadow-streaked cottage and had burned
through one cigarette after another since a few minutes before 8 AM. That was
the hour when her pair of boy children, followed closely by her withdrawn
and tight-lipped husband Somerset, daily left her tethered to Brooke
-- who was stubborn, a compact force, unyielding in her demands for
maternal attention -- feeling isolated, anxious for more sleep, worried that
her perceptions of reality at times got distorted like a in trick
mirror in a haunted house, perched out on a raw and
uneven ledge about having to care with watchful eyes at all
hours for a curious toddler. Her boyish sons would begin to reappear
around 3:30, their moods and desires shaped by the school day's occurrences,
and then Somerset would drag in about 5:00 o'clock in his hushed manner,
as if he were stepping warily into a sensory deprivation
chamber, his face a bit redder and his prematurely graying whiskers
heavier than when he had departed, his eyes drooping from chronic boredom as an
average underwriter, his fear growing over his spouse's erratic and unbidden
outbursts, and on certain days stressed to the point of laboring with
concentrated effort just to take in a decent breath of air. The poorly
lit kitchen, in which mother and child now sat at
a small, four-top dinette table, was suffused with acrid tobacco
smoke and a spreading cloudbank of parental acrimony. It would be hours
before any of the other McDyers came back on the scene to the haggard
mother's relief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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God I need to get out for a little while, just a simple break, Juniper
thought for the one hundredth time that week. She lit another unfiltered
cigarette. She felt mildly guilty when she daydreamed like a prisoner in
solitary for an escape from her pitiable plight. The laundry,
the supper, the boys' homework, a brief evening playtime, the baby's messy
bath ritual were all in need of being done somehow today. June
inhaled a considerable puff from her Camel Light too anxiously,
hacked up a dry cough, and blew a drift of smoke that elongated
like a curved scabbard over Brooke's little head. Brooke quickly wiped her
forearm under her runny nose and sneezed. From the old television
that was always on in the family room, Juniper could hear the counterfeit
enthusiasm of "The Price is Right." The invisible announcer called
out gaily with breathless anticipation: <i>You may be the next big winner – Mrs.
. . . June McDyer, come on down.</i> But he sounded like one of the
anomalous voices that Juniper had heard several times, source unknown, while
she was all by herself with Winter pounding with both fists on their
little, one story house. Whenever June was accosted by one of these voices, she
irrationally wanted to slap somebody’s face, usually her ineffectual and
withdrawn husband Somerset, a bored and boring man, but in this instance
it was tiny Brooke who was locked firmly in a kitchen
highchair, drinking warm apple juice from a plastic lidded cup,
ignoring a warm and half-consumed mini-carton of milk, and oblivious to the
discarded and ignored Cheerios, cracked pieces of stale animal
crackers, and bits of canned fruit dotting the heavy duty tray in front of
her.<br />
<br />
June stared at the
rotary phone on the wall. The green wallpaper around it had grown
pale from detergent rinses and withering blasts of exhaled tobacco smoke. Used
dishes and bowls holding dried food residues, sticky drinking glasses, and
tarnished utensils from the morning's breakfast covered the counter by
the sink; others lay uncollected atop the worn dinette table. I
seriously need to get away from here -- just a day or two, June
thought again, trying to deceive herself, for this was her
recurring lunchtime prayer, a self-deception to which she returned
day by day. Her attention shifted from the telephone to three vials of
pills, acquired from Pembroke pharmacy, that sat on the
window sill above the chipped basin that held a little pool of deconstructing
dishwater. June slumped back, doubting that the mute telephone would summon
her with genuine entertainment or an intriguing invitation ever
again. Not without a miracle, she thought. She should have swallowed her daily
allotment of prescriptions by this time. It was the fourth straight day that
she had shunned the powerful meds. Juniper believed that one of the
required drugs, Risperadol, a big brown tablet that was new to her,
designed to keep her socially composed, emotionally even, and reasonably
organized, instead bowled over her precarious inner balance, caused her
mind to wander crazily, distorted and dizzied her perceptions, and
invariably dropped her into a prolonged and isolated funk. <br />
<br />
'Okay, little sugar
plum. Okay Brooksie, break time's gone poof again,' June announced mirthlessly.
'You heard the man -- time to come on down.'<br />
<br />
June mimicked a
compact, invisible explosion with her rounded hands. Her fingers were stained a
sordid yellow from nicotine and were worn rough and red from mops and brooms,
shaggy rags, strong soaps, and stinging bleaches. Juniper sucked
in one last, long puff of smoke, blew it toward the wall phone,
then she tamped down her smoldering half cigarette on a side
plate. Had the TV voice just told her how to get herself out of this trap? June
wondered. She felt a thrill of excitement. Inside
her emotions bounced about<br />
indiscriminately. <br />
<br />
'Let's suck it up, honey
bun. Job One, it's gonna get done today. Here we go now, joined at the hip,'
Juniper said to the toddler.<br />
<br />
She yanked Brooke up
from the highchair but the little girl was greatly annoyed and resisted
with a loud and defensive whine. Brooke swung an arm to
push Juniper away; she screeched hotly, <i>Noo-oo</i>, <i>Maa-mm-ee,
no. </i>Aggravated, June lowered the child, little legs churning and fists
balled up, into a large wicker laundry basket that rested on a
worn sideboard, but she quickly lost her grip and let
the toddler fall backwards down the last few inches with a thump onto
some cold and damp laundry items. Brooke swung her arm up again
to swipe June's rough hands away from her face.<br />
<br />
'Stop it. Now, Brooke!'
June yelled, surging with resentful energy. 'It's time for us to go.' <br />
<br />
Brooke screeched
out <i>No, no-oo </i>once more.<br />
<br />
June glared
at her disdainfully. She had endured many difficult months of one
disruptive challenge after another since this argumentative child had been
born. June jerked the work basket from the sideboard with Brooke, who was
daunted by her mother's angry scream and flagging in her belligerence, positioned
inside. <br />
<br />
June sighed, 'Just never
let it be said that I didn't let on to you, baby. Things happen, sometimes
bad <i>bad</i> things, Brooksie. Terrible things. Stuff you should
never have to see.'<br />
<br />
Juniper glanced
down at her tiny captive and suddenly felt self-conscious about her
outburst. Sometimes the mother irrationally worried worries that
Brooke (who could barely form two words sequentially) might vengefully tell
Somerset and the boys what her mean and overbearing mother had done while
they were away.<br />
<br />
At that second, a glistening
rectangle of early Spring sunlight stretched from corner to corner
across the kitchen's slightly open side window, above the littered sink area,
illuminating the sagging sill that held the potent medicines, spilling sun rays
across the floor. Juniper had suffered severe post-partum depression after
Brooke had come along. That was when these arcane prescriptive drugs had first
been ordered by her doctor, a hardheaded man she considered diffident and
insensitive and whom she wanted to fire. June became transfixed by the lustrous
window. She feared the bright light was pure fantasy. Juniper half-believed the cryptic
voices pouring down from the ceilings, out of the plain walls, from the
guts of the persistently humming
television, had to mean something: <i>This could be your lucky day --
June McD, it's time to come on down.</i> The jovial voice of the disembodied TV
announcer echoed once more throughout the cottage. <br />
<br />
Startled, June realized
she had been entranced by the glowing glass like a person possessed
-- <i>but for how long?</i> she wished she knew the answer. She
straightened her back stiffly. She glanced down. The captive Brooke seemed to
have cooperatively dropped into very deep sleep in the wicker container. June's
arms, shoulders, and backbone ached from the awkward load -- <i>but
for how long? </i>she wondered again.<br />
<br />
'Time to get things done,
hon. Job One,' June whispered to herself once more. June hoped that no one
would drop by to ruin their afternoon. She nudged the laundry
basket against the screen door. It swung open with a loud and prolonged squeak
from its rusty mainspring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Much later, once
night time's sheltering veil had settled down over the township of
Pembroke, on one of the last occasions that she would ever sleep in their
graying family cottage, right before Juniper dropped precipitously into
a soporific dark hallway full of trick mirrors that was induced
by powerful sedatives approved by her personal physician, while their two boys
slumbered fitfully in their rooms, she and Somerset laid in bed hushed and
motionless unable to converse at any length about the terrible afternoon's
mournful developments. The emotionally overwhelmed husband and father, his face
a bit redder and his whiskers a bit grayer a than just a few
hours before, had just returned from a ride
at dangerous speeds inside a wailing ambulance that had taken their
injured baby girl to a children's hospital and eventually away from them for
good. Feeling adrift in a black and bottomless sea,
Somerset searched his troubled mind and heart. Who could wish that their own
child would die? Who commits such a sordid transgression despite
their inner tortures, personal or familial? </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> Somerset wanted to get up to smoke
his cherrywood pipe and calm down more, but he stayed dutifully in
place next to his troubled spouse to ponder silently the nagging questions
that threatened to smother him. During those exhausted moments in
their hushed bedroom, with no moonbeams and no street lamps able
to steal in through their blackout curtains, Juniper insisted again
that the only thing she could recall after she stepped onto the
back porch, as the screen door spring squeaked in complaint, was the sound
of barely audible rock music and then the phone. As she had related
to a small huddle of intent police investigators while the late
afternoon sunlight began to dim in the western sky, including the intimidating
female Detective Malone, while a suspicious Somerset struggled to
stay calm by her side and Rolly, the gentleman who had
arrived to pull Brooke back from the brink in a surprising
rush from next door, listened intently -- her voice was quivery
but pleading for a Camel, her eyes were bloodshot but not very tearful,
her smokers' hands were shaking and worn to a rubbed-raw condition from
household chores --</span><i style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </i><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Juniper said imprecisely </span><i style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">'I think it
was that Sergeant something</i><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">something racket, the music'</i><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">, the kind
of silly modern record that kids like Stuart and James always had on
in their rooms till late, at times punishably late.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Seventy-two hectic hours
later, under skies that had become iron gray and mercilessly chilly, a crime
scene specialist concluded forensically (after searching through some
bystander quotes collected at the crime scene and after looking over a selection
of current Billboard charts) that the suspect, Juniper, had not heard <i>Sergeant
Pepper's</i> at all but likely a recent Beatles' release called
"Magical Mystery Tour." The odd music had seemingly filtered
through the tall, on the mend bushes stretching sunward in the
yard next to the McDyers. <br />
<br />
Throughout these days of
investigation, June stubbornly, passionately, stuck to a single
version of her story. Malone and her team performed their serious
work for tedious hours, though key personages in the
police department -- seasoned professionals who had
seen just about all and heard just about all when it came to
criminal deceptions and lame cover-ups -- doubted much of the
mother's unshakable account from its inception: that this was all
a horrendous mistake, not easily explained but an impossible fluke,
traceable to a harried mother's preoccupations and lack
of focus after the soul-sucking late Winter stretch that had made
managing a busy family household more tortuous than usual. In telling her
version of happened, Juniper maintained that when she stepped
onto the porch and heard faint traces of that rock 'n roll music,
with her toddler Brooke laying back for a midday sleep in the big
laundry basket, she put the load she was carrying down, in a flash,
she said urgently -- <i>It would be just a second, then I'd be
right back </i>-- since she had to pivot back into the graying
house: because at long last the telephone in her kitchen had
actually started to ring.<br />
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<br />
Ambiguity, confusion,
and an eroding ability to perceive reality
clearly are three of the most aggravating prices -- a trifecta of
limitations -- that human beings suffer for a shot at personal immortality.
With regard to philosophizing about the human condition, that was about as
far as a regular guy, named Rolly, cared to venture. Not because he was a
world-wearied older man who lacked the ability to ponder things
deeply. He was in fact a graduate with honors from a historic university, a man
who had labored hard and long to prepare for
a retirement without fanfare, thus he was the kind
of individual that many refer to as a polite, congenial, and unobtrusive gentleman. But Rolly's college
major had been chemistry, not humanism, not metaphysics, and not the
philosophical study of humanity's flawed search for meaning. Actually,
philosophy had been a college subject that he just couldn't get excited
about. Rolly had long ago given up on all formal religious practices
and all church denominations because he was invariably dispirited
by the time that the concluding hymns ended Sunday services. When
picturing his corner of eternity, Rolly preferred a reasonable
and vital image of himself as a man of action, not a particularly
deep or reflective figure, a good person -- with vigorous, natural-born
instincts and a strict upbringing that taught him to always
seek the correct and the good -- yet also an
inconspicuous and drooping man who had lugged big shares of
faults, shortcomings, and missed opportunities unto his present condition, </span><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">what
charitable folks label advanced age. </span></div>
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<br />
Rolly sometimes
regretted, but only to a mild degree, that it was a largely forgotten
incident -- it happened about three decades ago in this
pallid and declining area near the McFarland Woods of Pembroke
Township -- when one prematurely Spring day revived the minds and
spirits of almost everyone who resided in the neighborhood.
Rolly had shifted before breakfast into full relax mode, savoring a
rare weekday away from his tedious workplace, and soon after midday began
a meticulous wash job on his vintage, beautifully chromed Chevy '57
Bel-Air two tone of red and white, just a few steps removed from an unsteady
and rusting wire fence with tall shrubbery beside it, a
demarcation barrier that separated two long driveways. Minutes ticked
by once the calming exercise of washing the car got underway, but then
(when he thought he heard something queer, a succinct and odd plea) Rolly was
gripped without warning by a nauseating sense of foreboding and he climbed unsteadily
over the driveway fence to pound out a haphazard pathway through the
McDyer backyard which in turn changed the rarely noticed Rolly into a
citywide sensation -- at least for a little while. <br />
<br />
"I would have to
say that this was all part of God's plan,' Rolly exclaimed several
times as the sun sunk low during as that Spring afternoon slowly expired, an
unlikely center of attention positioned under bright media lights and
trapped in front of reporters' microphones, his phony piety catching him
by complete surprise.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>While rinsing the
trunk of his Bel-Air, Rolly related, something like a dreadful force sought him
from the neighbors' side of the fence. It summoned him: <i>Ra-Ra, Ra-Ra! </i>Rolly
fought his way over the rickety barrier, breathless and achy all
over, miraculously discovered the wading pool, then frantically worked to
calm the distraught mother, to coddle a little girl desperately frightened,
soaking wet, and gasping for oxygen in his sheltering embrace,
and to toddler to the safety of her house despite the neighbor woman's
piercing, soul-searing pleas that echoed frightfully throughout the
neighborhood. Hours later, Rolly gratefully pulled his weary body
away from the accident scene -- after a no nonsense female detective named
Malone had dismissed him in a slightly condescending manner from
the assembly of McDyer family members, police personnel, TV camera
holders, and eager journalists armed with lead pencils and steel-ringed
notepads who were stumbling through the clutter of kids' toys, laundry
clotheslines, and lawn-grooming tools that were scattered around
the low-slung cottage.<br />
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Shirking all ritual
goodbyes -- and wishing resolutely to avoid all future contact with the
eccentric and traumatized mother and the frowning, tight-lipped, but
grateful Welsh father with his unusual accent -- Rolly now the
unlikely protagonist of fate's wicked matinee declined a last proffer of
medical attention from a pair of earnest paramedics ('There's no
problem, I'm just fine,' he nervously interjected), nodded toward the iron
lady Malone, then noted with astonishment that his casual clothing, a
white v-neck tee and rolled up Levi's, once damp and drippy from splashing in
the cold water of the children's wading pool, were now as dry as a dead
person's bones. As if he had been sucked into a media vortex, Rolly had
sputtered with great self-consciousness a few spur of the moment quotes, into
microphones large and small, to satisfy the newshounds sniffing about
the McDyer property who would shape the curious story for their 6 o'clock
reports. In response to an anticipated question -- 'What was it like
when she took that first breath, sir?' -- the dazed and wobbly target
of the inquiry (Rolly vividly pictured the guttural, primitive exclamation
<i>"Ugh-ck</i>" that the lifeless Brooke had emitted before sharply
sucking in a first exquisite pocket of saving air) had retorted
'Well, I'm not real good at this kind of thing, but I'd reckon that was
just about the most beautiful sound that I ever heard . . .' Later,
while bearing his mantle of momentary fame with a an increased sense
of surety, Rolly blurted the hypocritically reverential words,<i> 'I
would have to say this was all part of God's plan,'</i> to a handful of
straight-faced radio and television professionals with a skeptical
Detective Malone listening intently to this hero's words.<br />
<br />
Rolly resisted an itch
to shift into a breakneck sprint as he withdrew from the backyard
and went down the McDyers' driveway, his rubbery legs faltering at
times, finally secluded with his confused feelings and unresolved
questions. If he could just safely slide his fingers across his Chevy, perhaps
caress a back fin gently,<b> </b>he might sort out what had just taken
place. He arrived at the car quickly but instead of an adrenalized
surge of insight he sensed a spreading cloud of sheer
exhaustion rolling onto his inner shores and then recoiled
in surprise as an imaginary and untamed canyon yawned open, momentous in
its depth and poised to swallow him whole, from the most murky passageways of
his worn out brain. Rolly's cheap plastic wash pail laid on its side, wet
washrags were strewn across the trunk of his Bel-Air, the garden
hose poured out still a steady gush of water over the squishy turf
beneath his car, his doors were yanked wide open, and the Chevy's
AM radio -- he stared at it baffled because it was turned off, he was
certain, when he inched in reverse from the garage -- was blasting loudly one
of the city's popular rock 'n roll stations with which he was unfamiliar,
but was favored listening for his preteen son.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>Rolly sank down
heavily onto the front passenger seat. He was bedeviled about what his
next move should be. Had he truly flung his complaining middle-aged frame
over the flimsy waist-high fence, like a queasy but game
Olympian -- ugly lines of rust still discolored his palms
like dried blood -- or as if he were a desperately committed recipient of an
unanticipated social invitation? At the first hint of distress next door,
as his respiration rate geared up, Rolly had felt compelled to crouch near the
fencing, a boldly brazen and uncharacteristic move for him, to pry apart a
patch of pastel tulips in premature bloom to perhaps behold the who
or the what that was summoning him from across the barrier. It
uttered a thin but urgent signal of life and death risk: <i>Ra!. . . Ra!</i> .
. . Trying to ignore a harsh wave of nausea that suddenly rolled through
his stomach, once he had probed past the fragrant tulips, Rolly
pulled apart a set of limbs that had sprung from a wildly overgrown
and leafy bush and gazed altogether fruitlessly, his modest
expectations dashed hard, at graying bed sheets, a number of a man's blue
dress shirts, and boys' dungarees tossing vigorously on rope clotheslines
like disembodied spirits playing in the breezes. Then up Rolly struggled
and over he went. <br />
<br />
<b> </b>From
the tail of the car, Rolly gazed back at the ragtag collection of
neighborhood acquaintances who stood hushed and stricken around the
front perimeter of the McDyers' shadowy abode and close to the pothole
scarred mouth of his driveway. Rolly scrutinized the collection of human
eyeballs which seemed focused first on each gesture made by the police,
then the traumatized toddler -- who was lying flat like a coral
shell that had washed up on a distant shore, who was now lamentably
pinned under an oversized oxygen mask steadied by a serious paramedic
hovering in the Pembroke ambulance -- and then, at last, to the rest
of the eccentric and besieged McDyer family members themselves. Like
an improvised audience lingering in an alien movie studio, the
bystanders stayed back out of the spotlights, their faces appalled, their lips
parted in disbelief, the occasional whisper shared from one to another,
hesitant in full to venture up to Rolly, the newly minted and about to be
an unassuming neighborhood legend.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>Rolly had surmounted
the wiggling and rusty wire fence, then dropped painfully like a
heavy sack of used mechanical parts onto the property next door.
He raised his head with steely resolve atop a grass free landing pad of
dark mud, while a superhot of potent adrenaline pushed into his
middle-aged arteries, like the uplifting stream of water that pumped from
his garden hose by the Chevy. He was about to race up on the most horrific
scene that he had ever beheld -- the terrifying vision of the tiny Brooke
McDyer's flaccid, blue-lipped, purple-browed, and lifeless body afloat,
arms and legs extended, in the sparkling wader. Penetrating screams by Brooke's
weird parent, a woman who had sharp facial features and had adopted
just weeks before a pair of moderately tinted eyeglass lenses to
conceal dark blue half moons of disappointment, nerves, and
depression that had puffed up below her hazel eyes, who seemed
fully reliant on an endless string of Camel Light cigarettes and
packs of matches to stoke her curt and icy demeanor, and who habitually
dressed in mismatched -- sometimes laughable -- outfits, afforded Rolly a
general sense of direction through crisscrossing lines of wavering laundry.
Juniper tried conspicuously when in the company of others to conceal her
fingertips stained a contemptible yellow from tobacco residues.
Rolly's easygoing spouse had hazarded a couple of strained, small
talk interludes with June while the women's young kids shared play times
on nearby grounds but she had been rebuffed crudely every
time. June's painful screeches felt as if they were cutting a deep
trough into Rolly's hidden soul.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>Without
forewarning, a solitary tear issued from each of the man's eyes. More of
them followed. His usually steady hands began to shake. Somehow, by a little
miracle he thought, Rolly had traced a crazy avenue toward the compact, plastic
children's pool with the oddly clean water in there, zigzagging an improvised path
through a forest of laundry items flapping across his confused and
flushed face. His once young and resilient lungs in mere seconds
burned from his sudden exertions. With his inner
systems pleading for oxygen, his muscles aching and bunching all over, he
questioned his mission -- 'What the hell are you doing here, man?,'
he huffed to himself between strides. Emerging from the tangles of
clean laundry near the end of the McDyer backyard, Rolly sank urgently to
his aging knees with a crack of bones and a loud groan from his mouth,
swiftly fished Brooke's pale and sunken corpse, as expressionless as
a doll, from the bracing water, and laid her breathless frame face
down with immense care, letting Brooke's arms and torso slide tenderly
from his slippery grip, onto the green grasses swaying in the early
Spring sunlight.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>Rolly wiped his
face with both hands and bent his upper body toward the dashboard. Brooke, the
McDyer's third and final child, the sole female offspring in that
struggling family, had been unmistakably dead. She had perished tragically,
Rolly thought, perhaps speedily, probably painfully, terrified by her
suddenly life-threatening and strangling plight, her body and
spirit drowned face down in several inches of water, all circuits
disengaged, all lights and flashers pulled off the grid, her toddler
energies powered down to a reading of a dreadful zero, as limp and breathless
as a knot of Rolly's soaked washrags, her toddler's laughing
zest for all things novel and fascinating, like a backyard wader full of water
on a Summer's day for instance, brutally shorted out. The racket that June was
producing was heady and unnerving, her sharply angled visage ashen with
abject terror, her strained voice crying out to a mum and detached
Creator -- who Rolly sensed had either gone missing for good or was just
not paying attention -- begging heaven for the divine restoration of
her only girl child<b>. </b><br />
<br />
<b> </b>Rolly labored
heatedly to get Brooke to retch up the backwater bay of
discoloring liquid that she had taken in to her tender, immature
lungs. He felt fairly sure about how to proceed -- rigorous medical and
pharmaceutical lessons he had received through training before
wartime, including how to coax drowning combatants back from the brink of
forever, were rising in his memory, yet he struggled to recapture
crucial details. Rolly began to flush out Brooke's bloated lungs. He tried to
concentrate, but Rolly kept recalling vividly certain spots on his illogical
track past wrinkly bed linens, a swinging open sleeping bag that
leaped toward him like a famished snapdragon, and toddler-sized
nightshirt full of kittens tacked up with wooden pins. A grid of clotheslines,
bleached as frighteningly white as old bones, stretched overhead. Pressing on
with his choppy strides, guided by Juniper's ear-piercing alarms, Rolly
reached the pool of water shimmering in the sun a few feet away near the place
where the McDyer property cut off. June looked his way with a
start -- her face pale and frantic, wringing her hands. Rolly sensed
that she had not been expecting anyone to rush to the scene. Then
the woman began to gesticulate to him: <i>Here, here, over here, help her.
My baby. Help her now. </i><br />
<br />
<b><i> </i></b>As he slid
a little lower on the car's front cushion, his beleaguered and exhausted heart
skipping beats once more, Rolly focused on the worst knots of
anxiety -- in his limbs, his shoulders, and the back of his sun
seared neck --that he had ever suffered. Once Brooke had begun to
breathe anew and profusely cry, Rolly became afraid that he might injure
the girl in some other way, so the rescuer gently swept the
dismayed toddler's body up and cradle-carried her as close as he dared
to caress her, the vomit smell from Brooke was as wildly disagreeable as
sour milk and reeking of rotten apples, and he stumbled unsteadily, as quickly
as he could manage, through the dancing fabrics, befuddled to the core about
why behind this insane scenario was happening. Rolly noted with
gratitude that Brooke was inhaling and exhaling raggedly, but the devastated
child seemed to have slipped into a drugged unconsciousness for a second time.
Juniper intersected with them on the back porch, below the
McDyers' sagging roof overhang, back from phoning for emergency aid. June's messy
and uncontrolled nicotine habit had her gasping
anxiously for breath. Brooke's discolored eyes peeked open
again. -- <i>Brooke, Brooksie, come back, baby. Nod or something, baby. Does
anything hurt?,</i> June blurted. Rolly placed the toddler down
gingerly on the porch and as soon as Brooke got a clear look at her mother
immediately the soaked and messy child protested belligerently, glowed bright
pink and blotchy with anger, and squirmed with all of her
might to get away from her parent.<br /><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Rolly steadied Brooke's body against the porch floor. Of course she's
panicked, he thought sympathetically. The child had been in a body bag ready
state seconds before, her infant spirit perhaps hurtling already toward a
profound unknown, having been aimed at the eternal void, a deceased mini soul
screaming out in terror or perhaps a tiny girl's spirit floating
quietly and serenely instead, about to go headfirst into that transcendent and
glowing tunnel of otherworldly light that is reserved for the human dead
and that religiously superstitious often spread rumors about.<br />
<br />
Rolly's stomach
had rolled violently as he knelt -- feeling like a lost soul himself,
one who was about to vomit with all his might -- over Brooke's unmoving body
and as he began to take in the awful odors of the surge and stench of
discolored pool water, then the decaying stuff that followed it: hot and
bitter apple juice churned with pieces of Cheerios, graying sour
milk, fruit shreds of red, purple, and orange, and other ugly residues
from a breakfast meal that he had flushed out of Brooke's pried-open
mouth. Inexorably the thin pool water mingled with the liquefied
mess of foods spread slowly around the toddler's matted hair,
her pinched blue face, and the Bermuda grass she had been laid on, a
viscous and putrefying yellow sea washing slowly across the little
landscape. Come on, Brooke, come on now, honey, breathe for me, he pleaded in
haunted whispers. Rolly leaned down on Brooke's pliant back, gasping
raggedly for his own breath, fretting that he would crack the
child's small ribs and vertebrae, then pushed her down once again, this
time too firmly for immature bones to easily handle. Brooke
rumbled up some horrifying vomit sounds with each compression.
Startled, Rolly's thoughts incongruously turned to his aged
landlady, a gruff and hard-bitten German widow, who refused to be
suckered by some tenant's disingenuous sob story about overdue rent. Rolly
worried that Mrs. Popp -- who was away from home today --
would be furious about the trampled tulip patch lying miserably
in the retreating sun. With one sharp push, his aching knees and
faltering arms enfolding the toddler's tiny torso, Rolly enticed Brooke to
shudder and quake powerfully. She threw up a final sickening
surge of putrid water and unidentifiable muck from her abused
insides. The drowned child gasped out a hard-earned and painful
'Ugh-ck' -- a miraculous utterance -- through her oxygen-starved lips. She took
in a first whiff of warm air through her nose and mouth. Instinct took over.
Brooke whimpered miserably. Her irises with the attractive hazel highlights,
ringed by bruised blue and purple skin, creased open. She started to
sob with abandon. But she had returned to them. <br />
<br />
'She's back, she's
alive. My God. You did it, God, you did it,' June called out in utter disbelief,
plopping down heavily on her knees beside the distraught girl. She bowed her
head and sobbed.<br />
<br />
Rolly stroked Brooke's
back and tried to soothe the terrified, heaving child. A powerful
sense of trepidation, a dreadfulness, which he had carried from his
car to the pool began to ebb. Brooke's terror and tears caused him
to cry too.<br />
<br />
Rolly looked up. He
rubbed his eyes. Then he pointed toward the cottage. 'Come on, woman.
What're you doing here? Go call for help. Get going. Now. Fast, call
somebody,' he ordered. <br />
<br />
June peered at him
eerily, as if she were deciding whether to obey or not, then cast her
tear-streaked face down again. Behind
her shaded glasses her whole complexion appeared to have gone more sallow than
before. <br />
<br />
'Get going. Call for
help! Now! Now!' the man yelled. He pointed toward the cottage again.<br />
<br />
Juniper rose awkwardly.
Without uttering a syllable, she skittered away and then disappeared into the
big bed sheets flapping on the crossed clotheslines behind the McDyer's abode.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Muffled hints from
the active investigation scene next door could be discerned through
the tall bushes by the fence: a hoarse male voice called out to the lead
detective, Malone, as the speaker strode about
like a nameless bit character who had emerged from backstage,
brittle squawks and squeals emanated from police radios clipped to
officers' utility belts and put people's teeth on edge, Somerset the reserved
spouse and the McDyer sons talked sadly while surveying the
accident location from the back porch, the sharp clack of the kitchen's
screen door banged like a gun whenever it slammed shut.<br />
<br />
Rolly figured he should
crawl out of the sheltering Bel-Air before his family members came
back to the apartment. But some things that had been said by the
no-nonsense detective Malone, who had been for years a city beat cop, who came
dressed in finely tailored street clothes, who was the official in charge at
this accident scene, who bore an impressive city badge and a gleaming
pistol in a dark leather shoulder holster, were still on his mind. Over
one hour after the police had arrived, the austere investigator
had approached Rolly for a second time saying evenly that she admired his
quick response on behalf of Brooke and her family and that he would be
free to return to his personal business -- but only <i>for now --</i>
in just a few minutes. Rolly realized that he would require
no additional motivation, because he would be happy to hastily leave
behind the rapt attention of the media and the sticky personal spotlights
under which he withered. He told Malone good luck and he'd maybe see her
again some time. Then without explanation, the detective's eyes intently searching
his, a brief but plotted interrogation, a reality that chilled Rolly like a
cold splash of water onto his soul, began in earnest. Rolly eyed a trio of
police cruisers and a Pembroke ambulance parked haphazardly
as barriers to the mouths of the lengthy driveways, engines
still humming, red flashers alight and rotating, sirens switched off,
poised to roar up the quiet woodsy road, back in service the second
another garbled 'crime in progress' signal blared from their
squawking transmitters.<br />
<br />
'So, just to confirm a
few details again, you heard the screen door slam shut, then some
time later you heard the mother scream?' the detective asked.<br />
<br />
'Yes,' Rolly replied.
'But after the screen door banged shut, I heard something . . . um,
somebody calling out, real strange like, like a kid. <i>Ra . . . Ra. </i>Just
like that, a high-pitched voice, very thin but loud enough. I told myself
that it was all in my head. Then I heard it a second time.'<br />
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</span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Malone said, 'So
that came from the McDyer child upon entering the pool?'<br />
<br />
'I suppose. Who else
could it have been?" Rolly said.<br />
<br />
'The music from your radio
didn't make it hard for you to hear?'<br />
<br />
'I told you before. I didn't
have my car radio on,' Rolly replied. <br />
<br />
'Did you see or hear
anyone else pass who might have witnessed something?' Malone asked.<br />
<br />
Rolly searched his bank
of memories. A droning old prop full of freight had flown slowly across the
blue sky overhead. Rolly had backed his vintage Chevy out of the detached
garage and commenced his car's spring overhaul. The lumbering and
brain-impaired Sarge, an older guy not known well by Rolly, a
military vet who lived without fuss near the ragged end of the road, who caught
an exploding shell in action overseas, sauntered by as
was his lonely manner. The Sarge had waved back silently to Rolly, like
neighbors sometimes do, then headed for home as was his
practice at this time of day. No cars had ventured this far down McFarland
for as long as Rolly had been outside. The air had gotten warmer and bees
had buzzed about, unseen birds announced their presence in the oaks and the
maples, a cicada choir practiced their one song repertoire, but overall a
somber lassitude had lain down like a comforter on a daybed over the
neighborhood as the day proceeded.<br />
<br />
'Nope,' Rolly answered.</span></div>
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'How about the phone?
Did you hear the McDyer telephone ring at any time while working on
your automobile?'<br />
<br />
'No. But look, I might
have missed it,' Rolly felt uncertain. 'I was pretty caught up in
what I was doing.'<br />
<br />
'A ringing phone in the
McDyer kitchen? Anything like that at all?'<br />
<br />
'Sorry.'<br />
<br />
'Did Mrs. McDyer say
anything else before the police came? What about the pool? Anything about the
kids' wading pool?'<br />
<br />
'Did June say
how there was that all that water in there?' Rolly asked back -- but
Malone stared at him with her poker face and did not respond.<br />
<br />
Depleted and
thirsty, Rolly coveted a cold Rolling Rock and a long
and ponderous nap, a black pit into which he would sink down
for a much deserved swoon. He pulled himself up from the front
seat of his Chevrolet then let out an audible sigh. An unspoken thought
conjured a taste in his mouth as bitter as any substance he had ever
consumed -- and it came with a stinging and teary sensation like the
interior peels of a freshly-picked and teary onion -- and that
unbidden thought whispered to him 'so glad you finally made it to the
really deep end of the pool, you dunce.' As he had come up his long
driveway, gingerly checking for sore muscles or bloody skin disruptions on
his sore body that he had not yet accounted for, Rolly reviewed what the
anguished and red-faced, but fundamentally tearless, mother had claimed
while leaning over the huffing, smelly, and dazed baby Brooke on the
porch, a tale similar to the one she vocalized a little later to Malone
and her team. Once they went out to the backyard to finish the laundry chores,
Juniper had lost track of the rambling toddler, a bouncy pack of
adventurousness and relentless energies who had been walking all
by herself for a few weeks only: because of the bottomless batch of
laundry -- some of which was still lying around the house and some that was
hanging up all over the yard, because the boys were due
home from school soon so supper for five hungry eaters had to
get prepared for the oven, because the aloof mother felt
sure Brooke, an unsteady walker but quite adept at crawling, was safely
within a protective cocoon immediately adjacent to the back porch, and
because Somerset and she had some important family matters (she neglected to
say that these were divorce issues) to get resolved before the week came to
an end -- and all of these matters had cluttered her mind. Barely
breathing but clinging tenuously to consciousness, Brooke had squirmed with
quickly-summoned anxiety to get away from her mother, who was tightly
clutching the baby's thin arm, and then sneezed wetly onto the surface of
the messy back porch. June began to puff a cigarette nervously.
Clandestine rumors shared in hushed tones during smoky neighborhood barbecues,
participants' hands chock full of chargrilled burgers, sliced pickles, hot
dogs on buns, and French's yellow mustard, came back to Rolly. They spoke of an
emotionally dislodged and nicotine-addled mother, a buttoned-down and pipe
smoking shadow of a husband, a strained and disintegrating marriage, an
aloof couple who shied away quietly and repeatedly from other
families, shrilly raised voices -- at times bouts of cut loose screaming
-- that seeped through the cottage's paper-thin siding and heavily
curtained windows, and a pair of growing boys who
engaged in crude and mischievous games with smaller
neighborhood kids when they could get away with them.<br />
<br />
Rolly plopped his soapy
washrags into the plastic bucket. His spouse and son should have
arrived home by now. What a shocking scenario they would encounter.
They would watch him answer dramatic queries reticently in the
brilliant bubble of camera lights on their black-and-white television
screen, read about his instinctive escapade in the morning newspaper, hear
him claim a bit self-consciously to the reporters and cameramen 'That
was just about the most beautiful sound that I ever heard.' Rolly twisted
closed the water spigot feeding his hose as the howling black and red
ambulance gunned its engine and speedily bore Brooke,
her disheveled and speechless father, and a duo of uniformed
paramedics down McFarland Road. As Rolly leaned back into his coupe to
silence the turned down AM radio a sharp pain coursed like a long
blade through his left side. He flinched all over (Good grief,
I'm a wreck, he mumbled to himself). Then he became vaguely conscious
of a light sound that had been registered deep in his head for
few seconds. The noise made him feel sick again. Inside the McDyers'
kitchen the telephone was ringing. That he now knew without question. <br />
<br />
Rolly nearly ran
inside before the McDyers' phone quieted down. He deeply regretted
blurting to the news people, giving them what he thought they wanted, the
hypocrisy dripping from his vowels and consonants, 'Well, I would have to say
that this was all part of God's plan.' While June and he had
crouched, still trying to calm themselves, over Brooke's body on the
McDyer porch, Rolly had cautiously monitored the shuddering, messy little
survivor who had come back from the other side. He summoned his remaining
energies to revive her again if necessary. June spread a
frayed and dusty blanket over Brooke's tiny frame after she had stepped
inside to grab dry cigarettes and matches. As she burned through a
first and then a second Camel Light, June stroked the depleted child's drying
hair, removed her tinted lenses and rubbed her drawn face, and in general
came across to Rolly like a 'watched pot' that would not boil. Rolly
listened intently as June twice voiced 'I just don't know, I just
don't . . . ' -- but the pair of adults voiced nothing more
consequential before two cars full of amped up first
responders emptied onto their crisis-control situation.<br />
<br />
Rolly trudged up the stairs grateful for this span of time alone. He
speculated that there had been a cryptic purpose, like a rolled up message in a
bottle washed up on shore, in what the woman detective had asked him
dispassionately just minutes ago. Hearing the ringing phone in the McDyer
kitchen had shaken Rolly to his worn out and testy core. <br />
<br />
That evening after a hurried
supper and the mesmerizing lead in to 6:00 o'clock news program in
which Rolly commanded center stage, the hero for the
moment returned to flop exhausted down by the cramped table in the small
dining nook. There he could drink a third Rolling Rock,
stare out his second floor window toward the one-story cottage,
and rehash without interruption all that had happened so instantly
with the strange McDyers and the hound of heaven named City Detective M.
Malone. The telephone in the hallway rang incessantly. His wife
impatiently screened every call while trying to remain civil. They
would have to disconnect the phone from the wall once it was bedtime and then
seek a new but unlisted number in the morning. Legions of news
reporters, quirky psychics, radio talk shows, friends past and present, and family
members wanted to get at the hero. When the next day dawned Rolly skipped
work and repositioned himself at his sentinel's perch. This
became a habit. Several days later as he sat down, while officially on
leave from his job until the McDyer story blew over, Rolly suddenly
recalled how a high school science teacher from the neighborhood once
proclaimed after drinking too many beers during a backyard picnic that the only
thing irreducibly certain on earth is uncertainty -- a
thought-provoking aphorism, Rolly believed, worthy of the renowned
Heisenberg himself or a well-made Physics 101 lecture. The surprise assertion
about the absolute certainty of uncertainty -- down to the tiniest and most
fragmentary bits of subatomic reality -- from the lips of the tipsy neighborhood authority had
proved true in Rolly's life experience, and even the most subtle
of acknowledgements of it usually stopped him dead in his tracks. <br />
<br />
The more time he spent
at the table in his nook, as he looked listlessly down on the two yards and
watched the comings and goings around the battered McDyer cottage, the more
Rolly thought with clarity that life lacked a genuine sweet spot, that at
its essence it was cold and arbitrary, baffling and ridiculous in
its random cruelty, a package crammed full of resentments, riddles,
dishonor, and ambivalence -- like the intricate puzzle of wet, hand-burning,
and eye-stinging pieces that bunch up when one peels to the
wet pearl of a yellow onion. He wished mightily to forget an
old teaching from his Sunday school days about June's silent Creator:
it said that there was a fixed in stone blueprint and a
decided destiny for everything and everyone that God had already worked
out. Rolly pondered June's behavior for hours. Though her demeanor
was frankly anti-social, though she was the secret target of hushed
and vindictive gossip, even if she was a depressed parent who was markedly
losing touch with the truth of this tempestuous world, was June in fact
relating the truth, at least her perceived but likely confused version of
it? In her distracted and impatient mood, wearied by her
tedious and homebound lifestyle, had Juniper simply, absent-mindedly,
forgetfully -- or because she had overlooked her medicines -- allowed
Brooke to skitter off the radar screen once the phone had distracted
her? Or had the kitchen phone truthfully remained mute, still, at the
crucial moment? June had admitted that Brooke absolutely loved the water
and, across an impressionistic trailway on this airy day, while dodging
laundry and other mundane obstacles that had been thrown around the
yard, had the blond toddler tottered ill-fated, spontaneously, to the
waiting water, a peculiar anachronism hiding on the back end of the McDyer
family’s breeze-rumpled Bermuda grass? Or, Rolly wondered had a
cloaked plot master, all too human and conniving, lacking all moral
equilibrium, a parent poorly steered by a misfiring and deficient
cortex, concocted a clandestine template to commit one of the most awful
of human sins, a repulsive and sickening filicide, thus making Brooke's
tragic immersion in water an inevitability? Unknown to Rolly, Somerset,
the busy news people, and the police, approximately
sixty minutes after Brooke had been revived, while curious and somber
investigators studied the cluttered backyard situation, the despairing mother
-- once more fixated on and in the entrancing grasp
of whispered phantom commands that she alone could hear,
judiciously avoiding contact with the sobering eyeballs of the crisp and
clean uniformed police encircling her menacingly -- had calculated that
the best way to assure her freedom for good was to flee down the
hoary highway of deception -- <i>'I tell you the telephone rang, I
put her down there, I thought she would be fine for a second' </i>-- an ancient
and gloomy journey which inexorably draws all of temptation-prone
human beings toward an ominous and pointed endgame that resembles a great
sea of yellowing sorrows awash in eternal darkness.<br />
<br />
'Did you hear the
telephone ring at any time? Anything like that at all?' Malone wanted to
know.<br />
<br />
'No, ma'am. I did
not,'' Rolly had replied. <br />
<br />
He felt reasonably sure
of his stance. But he stopped for a minute before he pushed open the door
to his apartment. Rolly had never thought before that Juniper
could pose a danger, with malice aforethought, to her trio of
offspring. But his mind entertained the possibility at last.<br />
<br />
'God, no. Don't
let it be like that. Please don't let it be that way,'' Rolly mumbled, his sense of
certitude on the wane.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Twenty-seven years
had somehow drifted by since Juniper (due to Rolly's stern commands)
had skittered away, at last, without comment, from her gasping toddler, Brooke,
into the swaying garments clipped to her drooping rope lines. Still
Rolly could dredge up, with sustained effort, most of his provocative
memories from that day. But his will to do so
had diminished noticeably over time. In his sentimental heart he
still harbored a mellow, yet perpetually disorienting, attraction
to the vulnerable and victimized (and beautiful baby) Brooke, who had
disappeared forever inside a Pembroke ambulance shortly after being yanked
dead from her play pool. It seemed as if the tiny McDyer girl had not been
real. And Rolly didn’t like to ponder the maddeningly ambiguous lack of
resolution to the largely forgotten backyard emergency and the deleterious
changes that the McDyer incident, the so-called <i>miracle</i>, had wrought throughout his trusted neighborhood.<br />
<br />
Once three chilly and
iron gray days had passed -- they seemed like browbeating marathons and proved
to be as physically taxing as Olympian exercises for all involved -- the
focused police investigation team headed by Malone convinced their vigorous
district attorney, a grave and compulsively careful lawyer and an adept
politician, to arraign Juniper during official court
proceedings. The investigators had cheerlessly but efficiently gathered
evidence both circumstantial and empirical, taken statements and repeats of
statements from significant parties, combed diligently through tiny
traces of evidence from what was now judged a crime scene, examined
microscopically the substances that the toddler had thrown up on the Bermuda
grass, studied the plastic wading pool and its liquid contents, conferred multiple
times with Juniper's personal doctor and the state's psychiatric
examiner's department, scrutinized a list of typical outdoor items
(including the children's favorite plaything, a rust red Radio
Flyer wagon with protective wood slats on all four sides) found scattered
around the McDyer grounds, listened to a variety of recent songs by The
Beatles, and then with firm conviction swayed the stern D.A. to
allege audaciously that Juniper McDyer -- who had admittedly failed for at
least several days to ingest prescribed potent, perception-altering drugs,
especially the anti-psychotic Risperadol, that she was supposed
to swallow after breakfast -- was guilty of harmful
neglect, child endangerment, and attempted voluntary manslaughter. The charges were
made public as a brutal tactic during a hushed and sweaty press
conference at City Hall mainly to shove Juniper and Somerset toward
a guilty breakdown, so they might willingly reveal the missing
and highly elusive facts of Brooke's case before nuanced psychiatric reports
and other medical opinions declared how functionally impaired, in
immediate need of psychological help, and unfit for the outside world that
Brooke's maternal parent actually was. The distasteful triad of criminal
allegations, the peculiar manslaughter provision having the
most bitter and sulfurous impact among all of them, a
charge that the legal system and the detective team conspiratorially did
not think they could ultimately make stick, seemed cruel and inconceivable to
many local residents; before night fell on the day the D.A. made
public his intent to prosecute Juniper, the three charges scarily and
visibly sucked the fast depleting reserve of hope and
decorum right out of the McFarland Road residents, as if it were those faithful
denizens' treasured but evaporating blood supply, and flattened
the once-idyllic neighborhood emotionally and financially almost for good.<br />
<br />
<b> </b>After
spending about one hour at his second floor post during a typical late
morning, Rolly turned cautiously for nearly the one hundredth time
to a crackling sheaf of newspaper clippings that he kept sealed in a
manila envelope under his table top in the nook; the brittle
newsprint seemed more insipidly yellow and difficult to make out each
time he handled it. As he held each deteriorating piece of <i>The Daily
Guardian</i> -- the only traditional newspaper that was still struggling to
publish every day for local news and discount coupon patrons -- Rolly
imagined that he could again faintly detect the rancid odor of the glum
contents he had coaxed from Brooke's spasming insides, a lingering trace
of inexpensive but heady cherrywood tobacco for pipe smokers, and a snappy and
wholesome whiff of Turtle Wax polish that he used to rub softly,
affectionately, for hours into the shining metal skin of his Bel Air '57. <br />
<br />
The news stories he
extracted from the envelope had been conceived as a textured, four-part
investigative series and were drafted mostly at night on an
experienced editor's agile typewriter in a dusty corner office seven
years ago -- twenty lightning-quick years since the mostly overlooked <i>Miracle
on McFarland</i> had taken place. The words in the series were generated
by an industrious young reporter who was newly hired at the <i>Guardian</i>,
who was ready and willing to dive into piles of decades old research, who did
not mind extraordinarily long work hours, and who was eager to possibly,
finally, clear up the nagging uncertainties, solve the creepy mysteries and
ugly rumors, and delve down to the real facts, and probably
ugly truths, on which the near deadly Brooke McDyer incident had
turned. He made it a habit as a young but unknown single new to
Pembroke to lay in bed awake each night imagining how it would feel to
win an impressive, career-defining Pulitzer Prize for feature
writing. It was little known that the well-framed, deeply
informative, but ultimately inconclusive and dissatisfying series of crime
articles that ran under the young writer's byline had been suggested,
edited, and then carefully proofed by the meticulous bigwig managing
editor of the <i>The Daily Guardian</i>, who happened to be an ambitious,
hungry, and fame-seeking newsbeat reporter, similar to the newly hired
cub, when he dashed on his roaring Harley motorbike
with breakneck and red light-running speed toward the agitated and
commotion-riddled McFarland Road scene twenty years before once the
emergency drowning situation was sketchily broadcast on the city's
scratchy police calls station. <br />
<br />
The experienced editor
had formed the initial concept for a four- or five-part story in the <i>Guardian</i>,
beginning with a springtime Sunday edition, called <i>Miracle on McFarland</i>
(mainly as a means to sell some extra
papers by enticing dedicated readers to think luridly
and anew about the infamous family incident and introduce a
whole new generation of readers to the deeply curious and irresolvable
McDyer mystery) when just a few weeks before hiring the fresh-faced reporter,
during a below average lunch hour with some associates, he received
an intriguing phone call from a respected news veteran in California. A
serious and investigative professional for thirty years at least who was
nearing retirement, the female friend and editor over the phone
tipped to him without emotion that her paper was soon going to
run a carefully researched and surprising feature on the violent death of
a single white female, obviously a person in young adulthood, who had a street name, Harmony, but who in truth may have been the unlucky girl
once named Brooke by her Welsh father and schizophrenic mother. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> The
caller said the heavily tattooed and bullet-riddled remains of Harmony,
who was judged to be 22 years old by their
experienced medical examiner, had been autopsied thoroughly, plus DNA
tests had been initiated, as was standard in criminal circumstances in
California. It appeared that Harmony had been drug addicted for some time but
was struck down by gunshots during a desperate and grisly strip mall
shootout with local police. This happened after Harmony had apparently
mangled in cold blood her drug dealing and abusive female partner the night
before with a straight-edge razor -- to abscond with their massive of
supply of weed, crack cocaine, and cash -- in a cramped singlewide
trailer out in the desert. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> This shocking set of developments was
bannered boldly in the first installment of the four-piece </span><i style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Daily
Guardian</i><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> series by the able reporter, and the news raced
headlong through the woodsy but fraying McFarland neighborhood like
an uncontrolled blaze across a dried-dead forest. Brooke's tragic story
literally stunned breathless and speechless all who could remember the early Spring day two decades past when a toddler clinging to life, the tiny person named
Brooke, a precious favorite of many in the area, had been placed under an
oxygen mask and received a coldly mechanical intravenous push in an
ambulance after her miraculous revival from the dead by a soft-spoken neighbor
named Rolly. Brooke had disappeared later that afternoon suddenly and
forever -- no tearful farewells were permitted by the severe but polite
police and medical attendants -- in an ear-piercing red and black
ambulance as pensive and dogged authorities gathered evidence that would straightaway implicate her delusional mother, but actually both McDyer parents,
in the little child's near fatal mishap.</span></div>
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<br />
<b> </b>All of
the crinkled newsprint fragments had grid lines creased
into them from years of meticulous folding. Rolly traced his shaky
fingers across an old-fashioned b&w photo of himself in his vee neck
tee and rolled up jeans, an unassuming neighborhood sensation leaning
somewhat casually against his vintage Chevy, returned freshly from helping
from the complicated
McDyer quintet to dodge the ferocious wallop of tragedy. Actually,
Rolly recalled, he was at that precise moment back then pressed up
against his car to steady himself since he was slipping down into a
stomach-churning air pocket as his adrenaline supply waned and trying to
cope with an enfeebling wave of exhaustion. That photo along with
another on the same <i>Guardian </i>page, which was a smaller rectangular
headshot in which Rolly had the wide-eyed look of one caught off-guard by a
harsh camera flash, had been made by the soft-spoken and stealthy <i>Guardian</i>
photographer who had unobtrusively trailed Rolly up his long driveway once
he had been abruptly dismissed, for the time being, by the
uncompromising Detective Malone. The pitch black India ink that
formed the essential words of this <i>Guardian </i>installment and the
varied gray tints of its photos was wearing so thin, as on
ancient parchment scrolls, which it disappeared in certain places.
Below the headshot was Rolly's full name and, in italics, his regretted
quotation 'I would have to say that it was all part of God's plan.'<br />
<br />
<b> <i> </i></b> Rolly
gently unfolded and searched the last items from the sheaf. One held
a long, dramatic, and skillfully constructed section that had made up
almost one whole page of the <i>Daily Guardian</i> -- it delved into
the doleful story and the jumbled interior workings of Juniper McDyer, the
disappointed, emotionally knotted, and dysfunctional mother of three McDyer
progeny who lugged an eerie spectralness like a dark blanket around her on
the family's property and and somehow communicated a barely disguised
scornfulness, some labeled it bizarre and angry behavior, to almost
everyone whom she encountered. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> June had become soured quickly toward life
at age 26 once she married Somerset McDyer, a tranquil and competent but banal
and uninteresting young professional who had recently arrived
in the States from the romantic land of Wales, the
youngest of many sons in a traditional Welsh coal mining clan. A
graying picture of husband and wife, taken right before their first child
James was due, each of them standing a little too stiffly for a newlywed
couple that evidently had a first baby on the way, a couple whose future
included a trio of hyperactive children, the purchase of a deteriorating
one-story house in a nearly idyllic middle class and leafy neighborhood, and a
manslaughter charge (along with other allegations of violence and
neglect) eventually filed against the young wife with a mostly blank
stare, was imprinted on the sickly yellow newsprint. Detective Malone and fellow city police once they had scurried to the scene of the wading pool
focused immediately and exclusively on the profoundly disordered mother -- then
after two days of her defensive and baseless excuses they were granted the
begrudging assistance of her overwhelmed, furious, but plainspoken husband
Somerset. The man had become suspicious a few ticks of the clock after the helpless
Brooke's limp and water-logged body had been claimed by
Rolly from the clutches of eternity that his wife,
who sometimes spoke sharply in heated and argumentative terms to ineffable spirits, and who coveted her personal freedom, had committed a
heinous assault on their baby Brooke (whether Junie in her confused
and maddening condition realized it or not).</span></div>
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<br />
Near the end of this
lengthy portion of the <i>Guardian </i>series the young journalist had
recorded shocked and shocking responses from the surrounding
community when a particularly lucid June, who was again taking her
prescribed medications -- but who could not or inexplicably would
not come up with a satisfying timeline and sensible explanation about what
had happened in the McDyers' cluttered backyard other than: <i>The phone rang, I put Brooke down, I thought she
would be okay, it was </i>just<i> for a second </i>-- was escorted into
heavily secure custody (but mercifully without hand or ankle
cuffs) as many neighbors, Rolly included, looked on with puzzlement and
whispers. This was three days after Brooke had been salvaged from
the sparkling water. Juniper was soon judged officially by legal
authorities as mentally incompetent and thus incapable of battling,
even with the aid of sharp and experienced attorneys, the three
highly disturbing allegations to be brought against her during a courtroom
trial. Once she was pinned for days under tight security
restraints in a sterile examination cell at the Cityside
Psychiatric Clinic like a broken-winged and lonesome -- but perhaps
innately dangerous -- butterfly and scrutinized by a lengthy string of
psychotherapists and internists, it was announced publicly that
the curious young mother, Juniper, suffered from paralyzing
schizophrenic traits, would not or could not describe
what actually had happened between her baby Brooke and her, and thus
as an ongoing threat who could not be returned to her family life would be
incarcerated instead without fanfare deep in the state's criminally decrepit
mental health complex. The journalist concluded from his research
that no one had bothered to visit or had heard anything
about Juniper during her difficult ensuing years, except for her staunchly
comment-averse sons, once Somerset abruptly departed this madly
spinning globe for good in a violent explosion and fire.<br />
<br />
<b><i> </i></b>One last
piece, the briefest essay in the <i>Guardian's </i>four-part series about
the <i>Miracle on McFarland</i> had struck Rolly speechless when he
had first read it long ago. It had tears in places where it had been meticulously folded just a couple of days after
publication. The words still made Rolly sad. They recounted
succinctly the depressing story of Somerset McDyer. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> The reserved and downcast
father with the ruddy face and graying whiskers, a native of a
quaint part of ancient Wales, who was furious about his daughter's
needless scrape with death and begrudgingly had finally cooperated with
persistent police investigators as they tried to prove that his wife,
June, was a child-endangering felon, who compulsively dressed himself
in a mildly fragrant but uninteresting underwriter's uniform each work day
-- it featured a conservative English tweed jacket with narrow
lapels and leather elbow patches, a powder blue button-down shirt, a
skinny necktie, and flat front medium brown pants -- had manifestly
fulfilled, according to the young journalist's research, a private and
undisclosed scheme less than a month after his sick spouse Juniper
had been permanently placed in psychiatric lockdown. A noticeable
fragrance that was indelibly tattooed into his clothing smelled like
a sugary sweet cherry pipe tobacco that Somerset habitually fired up
in one of his beloved pipes during office hours and much later when he was in
the company of his children during evenings at home. </span></div>
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<br />
<b><i> </i></b>Three
weeks after Juniper had been forlornly was walked somberly out
of their one-story household, which was now devoid of all three kids, with
a growing gaggle of surprised and gossipy people milling around the
neighborhood walkways, and into the grasp of the Cityside Clinic staff,
Somerset got dressed in his usual bland but mildly fragrant outfit, knocked some
ashes out of his favorite pipe then put it between his dry lips, and drove
his Volvo until he came upon the unattractive office space of Pembroke's
Eternal Memory burial grounds for his first and final visit there. The
cemetery staff related later that he had given no indication that he had
anything in mind except the acquisition, at a rather good price, of five
consecutive burial plots and a striking gray stone obelisk for all
of those his devolving family situation. The office workers at Eternal Memory
thought the pensive gentleman looked severe, down in the mouth, and
nervous which all seemed quite understandable given Somerset's recent
family upheavals. But Somerset was also noticeably short of breath as work on
the contract preceded, so much so that the cemetery people asked him at one
point if they should call for medical assistance. During
the afternoon that followed, Somerset's bland life came to a climax
when his car veered at great speed off an elevated vehicle path
high on a cliff above hollow at the end of McFarland Road, in the
old-growth forest which was awarded by the philanthropic
Mr. McFarland years before to his grateful fellow citizens.
Somerset nosedived down a steep cliff and died on a sharp outcropping
of granite in a fiery explosion. By chance, within one hundred yards
of that explosive scene, while nearing a welcome nap on an
oversized rocking chair that sat on his dilapidated porch, the
lonesome and permanently disabled bus patron, the old Sarge, who felt
more exhausted than usual from his daily walk and free roundtrip bus ride,
thought he heard a resonant boom in the woods. The unexpected
noise made him curious but the forest in those parts was thick
and difficult to walk around in -- and since the Sarge was a kid
people had cautioned that the woodland beyond the gully was an
unforgiving monster when someone got trapped in its leafy
jaws in the dark.<br />
<br />
An autopsy revealed that
the deceased husband and father had long suffered from chronic rushes
of asthma-- and official spokespersons who wished to remain anonymous noted
that a painful spasm of his airways followed by
a terrifying interruption of his labored breathing were the
likely culprits that caused Somerset's car to veer off the one-lane road,
but privately they felt sure that the depressed Welshman perished
during a thinly disguised suicide. A final note by the talented young
journalist, in a pointed paragraph that capped off the smart series on the
<i>Miracle</i>, a quartet of articles that had set out (but ultimately failed)
to clearly settle who did what to the toddler Brooke and why in the
supposed safety of her own backyard, described wistfully how puzzling
coincidences come up amidst the most improbable of circumstances. The
article declared that Somerset possessed venerable Cambrian bloodlines
when he was born and raised in the south of Wales, his clannish family of
origin inhabited a shire, which is a Welsh township area, called Pembroke.
That coincidentally was likewise the name of his adopted township in Middle
America. The writer's research showed that the term
Pembroke oddly but befittingly translates to <i>'Land's End,'</i>
an intriguing insight on which the rueful McDyer legacy
revolves. To newspaper readers who cared about the engrossing <i>Miracle on
McFarland</i>, with its baroque plot lines and strange
cast of players, it appeared that the troubled husband and
father, a man who dearly loved difficult jigsaw puzzles and quiet hours at home
with his trio of kids, had bequeathed to all in Pembroke USA during the
closing scene of his life, before the curtains were pulled -- perhaps
knowingly, perhaps unknowingly -- one last enigmatic riddle for Rolly, the
authorities, and the buzzing neighborhood gossips to resolve.<br />
<br />
Rolly, the one-time
hero, now grew disconsolate every time his receding physical strength and
decreasing allotment of days came creeping into his awareness. He
slowly placed the newspaper pieces back in the big envelope and set it down on
the tabletop. Rolly's once deft and capable hands and muscled forearms,
as hinted by the old newspaper photo he had just seen with him
leaning against his '57 Bel-Air, now trembled nervously; his
backbone, neck, and shoulders were hardening more like unrefined masonry
with every rotation of the globe. Rolly's doctor had called it Parkinson's
syndrome -- a medical term that had left him stunned and speechless for what
seemed like hours as he sat atop the physician's examining table. As time
ticked by, his inclination to move about his old-fashioned dwelling had
declined to a point that he now shuffle walked infrequently from
one room to another. What Rolly missed most from bygone days were the raw
energies and speedy thrills he experienced while freewheeling in his
spectacular old car.<br />
<br />
A
tiny golden-haired child, a beautiful girl with clear blue eyes,
a pristine porcelain complexion, and the innocent and whispery voice of an
angel, who had become the steady heartbeat of Rolly's extended family
three years ago, who invariably came to his house dressed in feminine shades of
soft pink and baby blue, who was the granddaughter whom Rolly
loved intensely and watched over with careful devotion while her parents
were at work, skipped into the room as if she were gliding on air.<br />
<br />
"Grandpa, I'm
hungry," the pretty girl said.<br />
<br />
"Okay. Let's feed that
belly. What have you been doing?" he turned rigidly to face the child,
smiled a little, and exhaled an arthritic groan. His disease had
diminished his ability to converse with others.<br />
<br />
"Wait here. I'm coming
back," the little girl commanded, her face full of mischief, and she
then hustled back into the old pantry. <br />
<br />
While he watched for her
return, watercolor images like tiles peeled free from a mural reeled
through his spotty memory. A life-deprived Brooke McDyer, who eventually
reclined heavily sedated with a big oxygen mask over her face then disappeared
forever from Pembroke Township inside the wailing black and red
ambulance, who came to be known by the outlandish pseudonym Harmony once
she was immersed in the state's sadly dysfunctional foster care
apparatus, was again floating aimlessly like a chunk
of driftwood, waterlogged and face down, unable to breathe, her thin
baby's blond hair encircling her head like a dull corona, her legs and
arms bobbing without power in the spotless water that had no business being
there. Rolly recalled his frantic lunge at the conclusion of
his race through the laundry toward the shallow pool
to secure Brooke's lifeless body after he sank down on his bony
knees, his cranky lower back and joints crying out in agony, and the way
he placed Brooke down gently in the swaying grass while her
panicky mother's screams echoed loudly throughout the neighborhood. <i>Bring
her back, oh please, God, please bring her back to me,</i> the toddler's
mother<i> </i>June had cried. But later the shaky and regretful looking
woman, who became noticeably withdrawn once the police
had taken her initial statement, her furtive and discolored eyes
flitting here and there, one burning Camel Light after another clutched
in yellowed fingertips and piercing her wan lips, could not lay out a
satisfying story that made clear how mother and child had arrived
at the wading pool for the near-fatal mishap. Rolly believed at that
time that the steely female detective named Malone would not walk
away from her determined probe until June had done so. <br />
<br />
The little girl dashed
back with the energy of a zestful little lioness. She coyly clutched a
glossy magazine that featured a summery Swim at Home theme. She placed it on
his lap. Rolly reached down with painful deliberation to hug her.<br />
<br />
'Mom said I could ask. Can we
get a pool over here this Summer?' his granddaughter asked.<br />
<br />
'We'll see. We'll just see
about that,' he responded and glanced at the slick publication. His heartbeat
quickened when he stared at the little girl with love. <br />
<br />
'Now go tell Ms.
Stella she should fix your lunch,' he said gently.<br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
Rolly, who once on a sparkling
day much like this one, summoned by an unidentifiable power, like a mystic intervention -- one that proclaimed the brief but definitive
monosyllables <i>Ra, Ra! </i>just loud enough<i>,</i> that had somehow
cast this camera-averse man who suffered greatly from stage-fright as
a crucial walk-on in a dramatic tableau, gazed at the abandoned and
gloomy McDyer place from his second-floor dining nook. All the main players
from that side of his life had moved on long ago. The crumbling
cottage looked as if it were about to collapse in a hushed implosion. Once
his retirement from work had been secured Rolly had fallen into a
habit of sitting thoughtfully for hours beside the splintering table, and
on some occasions when he had sufficient eye strength he would get
immersed in reading like a man starved for fresh ideas. It
was warm and toasty in the nook and sufficiently curtained to forestall
Winter's wicked cold snaps -- and the perch afforded him cooling
shade under the timeless and leafy oak tree by the window during pleasant
weather seasons. Rolly had lately begun to remind himself regularly
of an old truth -- that one can never produce certainty from
uncertainties, the aphorism and mantra of a solitary sentinel, as if
he had been during his old age magically made
over into a quirky backroom physicist. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> It is one of creation's invariable
constants Rolly was convinced -- one that bedevils actors good and
bad alike -- that all of the bewitching what's, why's, and
wherefore's to the human story will never be fully grasped. That was one
of the truly valuable lessons that the agitated and disintegrating Juniper
and traumatized toddler Brooke in her drenched and rancid
clothes, her eyes polluted red and puffy from
her appalling immersion, her tiny lungs heaving with pain,
expressions of terror and grief crimping her lovely tear-swollen visage as Rolly took steps to comfort her, had conferred on the confused neighbor-hero once he hurdled
the rickety fence to rendezvous with them. As Rolly pondered the uncertain conclusion for his life story, a man who had contracted the idiopathic and death-dealing
disease of Parkinson's, became aware that his wrinkly head was
nodding reflexively, as it usually, obssessively, did without prodding and
without an endpoint -- like the persistent and rapid half-pecks
of the passerine's beak -- but with profound, survivor's agreement. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: center;"> #####</span></div>
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When forced to confront the inevitable passage of time Somerset, Juniper, Rolly
and even vulnerable Brooke proceeded on their separate ways. Like
mismatched and poorly carved puzzle parts, four idiosyncratic human cardboard
pieces in the complex jigsaw challenge called humanity, the quad
of one-time neighbors eventually repelled at ninety degree
angles, declined entropically into disharmonious orbits like alienated and
outward-bound bodies, and were never observed within earshot of each other
ever again. Brooke was compelled to withstand her hidden childhood
and adolescent years bereft of her extended family and was beset with
personal tragedy throughout tumultuous, frequently abusive,
run-ins with the heedlessly mean people that
populated her state's foster care system. (The name Brooke McDyer in fact became
a lost and mainly forgotten iota of history in Pembroke Township as time
went by and as neighborhood conditions changed. Yet, after nearly a not so
sweet sixteen years had passed, like one
who had been securely harbored in the sheltering wings of a witness protection set-up,
an attractive teenage blond female with hazel-flecked eyes and hair a dark
ash color -- called Harmony -- stepped mysteriously out of a figurative backstage
darkness, through a bank of frayed and musty curtains on an aging
theater stage -- a mysterious doppelganger emerging from some mythology --
and walked amidst the denizens of our chronically turbulent social world
as a stand in for the once little, beleaguered Brooke.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The
journeys of two of these four estranged neighbors ended somberly -- and at
very different times -- on a bleak square of earth toward the
back of a sprawling and largely deserted burial ground adjacent to a swath
of mature forest that was willed to Pembroke Township by a benefactor
named McFarland. The surface surrounding the
square lies severely eroded in spots, pockmarked by small patches of
browning Bermuda grass, and sliced into parts illogically by snaking
dry and narrow rivulets created by the rushes of watery runoffs that
followed coarse torrents of rain. Once one stood atop that disregarded
spot, a visitor could behold a precise rectangle of five burial plots
designated, according to the cracked front panel of a gray stone
obelisk that rises nearby, and also the beleaguered
cemetery's moldy parchment record book, as the McDyers' final resting
places. Years ago Somerset McDyer, a ruddy, pensive, and socially
withdrawn husband and father, looking more grim, resolved, short of
breath, and frankly more nervous than the ordinary customer, had
performed the distasteful but consequential task of securing the grave
sites, as he believed any fastidious and upright Cambrian man should, on
behalf of his estranged and incarcerated wife, his three young children,
including their tender vanished female named Brooke, and himself.
Privately the tight-lipped Somerset, long bored to distraction with his
career as a professional underwriter, disillusioned with the mundane existence he
had adopted in suburban America, his nerves still rubbed raw, sometimes
throbbing hellishly, from the abrupt and forced dissolution of his knotty
marriage to his mentally-twisted spouse Juniper, saw this as a critical
element in a secret plan that he had hatched deep in some vital
passageways coursing through his muddled and overtaxed right brain.
Before his anxieties forced him to curtail his sole visit to
the Eternal Memory site, an uninviting setting for an eternal
sojourn, Somerset experienced a surge of pride as he affixed his crimped and
shaky signature to a personal check within the cluttered bandbox of an
office. For he had finally brought to closure this unpleasant but
requisite purchase. It was done. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Three simple, squared
burial stones secured by the McDyer brothers, James and Stuart, now have
settled down into the tractable sod near the gray obelisk
-- they too were acquired by personal check at an early hour on
the Eternal Memory grounds, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>during a dawn-busting thunderstorm
that assailed all of Pembroke, a ferocious downpour that rode
up on an unseasonable humid front that emanated, like a tsunami wave,
from a low pressure system in Gulf of Mexico. The grown boys had dolefully
ordered the solicitous undertaker's staff to carve essential words and relevant
images into the modest trio of granite blocks. The estranged brothers, James
and Stuart, as young boys had sat together with the introverted Somerset, a
delightful activity on most evenings before their bedtimes, while they sought
as a united front of McDyer males to piece together colorful and
complicated jigsaw puzzles with idyllic depictions of rural life in the
U.K. But they had firmly declined to purchase burial stones for themselves and
they solemnly instructed that the simple burial plots that their father
Somerset had acquired or them should remain unclaimed. The young adult men had
resolved erroneously -- thinking that they were acting like
stolid Cambrian descendants as their parents would have wished -- at the
conclusion of a flinty discussion filled with grief and bitter
resignation like most of their recent conversations had been, that they would
each go their own way in life just as they had been forced to do shortly after
their father had drawn his last, labored breath.<br />
<br />
The
square stone on the left identifies the burial spot of the
departed and largely misunderstood Somerset McDyer, a man eventually broken by
his personal limitations, myriad disappointments, and family tragedy, plus the
dates of his birth in the United Kingdom and his eventual asthmatic demise; it
likewise displays a replica of the Royal Badge of Wales cut into
the granite in ornate detail. To the left of Somerset's plot, an unused
parcel of ground lies with an identically-sized gravestone at its
head. This marker reads simply Juniper A. McDyer, with the year
of her birth but no indication of her demise below it. To the
left of June's intended burial plot lies a third parcel of earth -- its
surface is strangely discolored to excess by mordant brown grass
-- which holds a third chunk of granite in </span><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">mud on which it rests.
The carving on this piece seems notable to the infrequent passers-by
for its conciseness and simplicity. It displays an unusual girl's name in
big letters, Harmony, a mournful inaccuracy that cut to the heart those few on earth who could still recall a precious and instinctively
curious blond toddler running about the McDyer's cluttered and leafy
yard. The unadorned letters stand as a stark meditation
on the dark existence she left behind. The marker
likewise discloses the year of Harmony's birth 1966-, but not
the McDyer name. </span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> Stuart had argued that the outline of a child's
Radio Flyer wagon should
be carved into Brooke's isolated stone so near to their father's ornate
image of the Royal Badge. But his older, less resentful, and
mellowing brother dissuaded him from delivering this caustic
smackdown on their fallible parents. The two burial plots that had
been acquired by the father for his sons are empty and might remain like
that forever. A small stone cross peeks out of the imperfect blanket of
grass that marks each location, twin testimonies to the troubled
lives that the McDyer boys endured both before and after Brooke's drowning and the burdens bequeathed through their
turbulent family legacy.</span></div>
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<br />
Though he had never
admitted it in his adopted homeland, Somerset had wanted one
thing passionately, something he faultily thought he could control, especially
after Brooke had barely clung to desperately and again after his chain
smoking and shattered wife, June, who was full of bloody ragged tantrums,
hopeless rants with invisible people, and constitutionally unable to
nurture, who often came across as a scornfully dissatisfied and
self-pitying shrew, had been judged mentally incompetent to face a
courtroom trial and was quickly plunged into unremitting psychiatric
confinement. He fervently wanted them all to rest blissfully together
at long last a peaceable family unit, even if it had to
be within the insentient embrace of the great beyond, out of the poisonous
reach of the unpredictable and deranged happenstances, lethal chapters in life,
that seem to be commissioned by sinfully hindered human
beings every day. A man greatly misjudged and too easily
dismissed, in his private opinion, a bland person with little that
could excite family members and society, Somerset nevertheless
had wistfully longed for the McDyers of America to be
re-made into constant companions, complex puzzle parts
threaded finely into place just below the earth's crust, their buried
remains and intangible souls bound in a unity for all time, even though
they could never seem to be one harmonious community during their abridged
existence in the cramped, smoky, and shadowy cottage.<br />
<br />
The inert remains of the
reserved father and his displaced and victimized daughter, Harmony --
whose gunshot peppered corpse chronologically looked like a
young adult but who once decades back was Somerset's smilingly
exuberant, at times cranky and petulant, infant daughter Brooke
-- now commune without sound or expression, unable to reach for
one another because of Juniper's empty plot, unable to whisper soft words
of consolation into each other's ears, distinct changes from when this
devoted father-daughter pairing shared many intimate times
on their family sofa or in Somerset's cushioned chair in happy
togetherness while their other contentious family members would
stir up fits of mayhem and madness under their one shingled
roof. At times, when darkness descends on the Eternal Memory
grounds, wild and furry creatures stealthily creep right up to
inspect the McDyers' graves, and on occasion small cadres
of whispering old acquaintances or bent over cemetery workers approach under
the sun to pay their respects. Somerset had trusted in one
particular bit of old folk wisdom as he approached his untimely death. It
taught: anything or anyone that a human being has truly loved and
cherished in the end will never slip fully away. As one rotation of the
earth rolls into another, and then another, while gentle blankets
of star-studded darkness, like the little Brooke's soft nightshirt full of
kittens, and wide-angle planes of bright daylight come and go, as autumnal
storms followed by freezing snowstorms and eventually sun-ripened seasons
pass by, still the under appreciated father and the deceased
daughter maintain a changeless unity -- despite June's futile daydreams
to pull them asunder -- as they navigate that inescapable,
and indescribable passage toward an Absolute that every person will
eventually discover.<br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The human mind and human experience, two subjects endlessly placed under modern
psychological microscopes, will forever lie beyond perfect human understanding.
People say and do things at all times -- during acts of omission and commission
-- by crazy impulse or by shrewd schemes that even the perpetrators
themselves may not fully comprehend much less explain. Impairments in
brain functions and inward shifts in a person's chemical balances
generate costly blind spots, rash and awful consequences, fatally
skewed logic, and painfully irrational miscues. Uncertainty and
ambiguity therefore constitute fundamental elements -- basic
properties and principles -- in a dynamic world that is being
reinvented, millisecond by millisecond, in a concealed manner, deep down in the
stuff of creation. From subatomic strata to the most imposing of life
forms, human needs crash headlong moment by moment into unyielding
barriers. Though it is a confusing and outlandish fact, the most crucial
details of humankind's most life-defining and life-altering experiences
refuse stubbornly to be partially explicable much
less completely understood and, as the revered stories of
creation disclose, they will likely elude all hot pursuits for
encompassing interpretations for all time, like that ephemeral and shifty
Invisible Man who inhabits the movies, no matter what depths of
analysis and single-minded cognition are brought to bear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> At
points during every week, as on this day, the morning or
the afternoon or both would grow tedious, interminable, or at times
too frightening to bear, so she zealously coveted
an escape into an unplanned and lengthy nap with her earnest
young psychiatrist's enthusiastic approval. Just a handful of hours after
Rolly had finally tucked away under his splintered table the manila
envelope that held the seven year-old newspaper articles from <i>The Daily
Guardian,</i> the weary and drugged sexagenarian,
Juniper, awakened with a start while fastened in securely to her
hospital bed in the humiliating and contemptible darkness of her unadorned
room. As usual, she began to cry out miserably as soon as her eyes opened
and she caught sight anew of hoary but threatening faces --
today they belonged to the austere police detective, Malone, and
the ultra-polite but uncompromising uniformed men who had come to take
custody of her, despite her lame husband's angry protestations, as June
cowered in a tight corner behind a twin bed with a growing sense despair in one
of the boys' messy bedrooms. These close-mouthed tormentors, as they often
did, possessed woefully distorted bodies, like bizarre images filtered
through a thick glass decanter, a glass onion as the McDyer family of Wales
would call it, and like dissembling human presences refracted into
terrorizing contours by magic mirrors in a carnival's spook
house.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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'You, you. Get out. Get out I'm telling you!' Juniper bellowed belligerently.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The aging woman who was perilously gray-skinned
and scrawny in a plain white inmate's gown and worn beige slippers,
the standard attire for incarcerated women at night in this state-run
institution, who was foolishly proud of her wildly untrimmed and thinning gray
hair, who rudely comported herself in a perpetually mean and spiteful way
toward all who dared to draw near her any time or any place, who might
literally lash out to kill another person if there was the promise of one last
Camel Light in the proposition, and who was straining her upper torso
painfully to tear herself forward from flexing restraints that pinned her to a
cranked up mattress, shouted her lifetime accumulation of pains and bitter
resentments as loud as she could. Her forceful and violent wrenching
upward kept her withering muscles, snappish tendons, and weakening arms
and shoulders chronically sore. Sadly there was no one in the room, even
though the older woman was thoroughly convinced there was, to which
her habitual screams could legitimately be directed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Juniper drooped back flat, a pause for a breather, a temporary
retreat. Her volatile respiration rate was dangerously elevated, her
heartbeat thudded in her chest cavity, and her reddened, angry face
felt flushed and extremely hot, a loathsome side effect from one of the
powerful modern drug compounds that doctors had prescribed to blunt the
severe mental symptoms from which she had suffered for
years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Without warning, as she initiated the madly ineffectual lunging and
shooing process over again, June tensed her upper frame and with all of her
might attempted to fly forward, like a medieval swordsman thrusting vehemently
to sever his bonds of imprisonment. But she failed to break
through the effective restraints that kept her snugly in
place throughout nighttime hours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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'Get out now. You, get out of here, this is mine. Mine,' she yelled at her
imagined visitors and then quickly shrunk back as if a
retaliatory physical assault, a punch in the face, had been
launched at her. 'And <i>puh-leeze </i>let me have a cigarette. I
need it. Now!'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
June's gray and unbecoming room, a single occupancy cell, so she
would not have to share a space with another closely
watched and deeply disordered female inmate, retains
a gloomy darkness even during daytime hours and it is constantly
on the uncomfortable receiving end of intrusive noises, both soft and
loud, from other places in this cavernous and crowded seclusion bin
for the demented. <br />
<br />
Once each 9:00 p.m. arrives in
this state-funded clinic, like the booming echo of a thunderclap overhead,
three words bounce around her cell -- it is that damnable 'Lights Out,
Ladies' announcement -- sounded forcefully by the lead nurse on the microphone
at the duty desk. Through a potent mixture of neuroleptic tranquilizers
like Zyprexa and Olanzepine, a carefully regulated diet plus exercise, a
properly induced supply of slumber daily, and an
impervious collection of supple leather belt restraints that encircle her
two thin and brittle wrists and her two feet near her ankles
June has been kept in place, sometimes on hospital beds
approaching the utter breakdown stage and during better times on
modern motorized contraptions, forlorn and seemingly forgotten by all,
including Somerset and the boys, but thank God not by her beloved baby Brooke who
comes after midnight, it's just one short hour's drive from Pembroke
township, in this clinically sterile home away from home for month after
miserable month. In addition to the four supple but strong cuff restraints
placed for the night's journey on her extremities, there is a
three inch wide band of impossible to tear polyurethane strapped
across her torso just above her chest that gets belted under the bed,
and a second one that gets pulled snugly across her angrily chapped shins. The
overworked and underpaid staff wants the contentious leading
lady of the defunct neighborhood stage play called the
<i>Miracle on McFarland -- </i>a mad and scornful woman who had been judged by
highly credentialed practitioners to be a chronic danger to herself and others
-- to remain right where she is, snug as a bug in a
rug, throughout the night. Whenever June obstinately battles the soporific
effects of her nightly dose of sleeping powders so she can
persistently and loudly protest her fate, the head of staff and other ladies in
clinic's pastel hospital scrubs stand prepared to gag her with a pair of
standard issue socks without hesitation and without regret.<br />
<br />
Shortly after midnight,
like on countless nights before, the worst moments of torture that Juniper can
imagine begin anew as a wavering malfeasant being emanates mysteriously from a
spreading amber glow then settles down on a simple bedside chair near
her raised bed. The old woman yanks on her leather restraints in a desperate
attempt to escape. She cries out no. <br />
<br />
'But you can't get away.
Stop. Momma, you belong to me now,' Juniper imagines that Brooke,
with sallow and scarred baby's skin on her drawn face, and sporting a
madly distorted body, stares toward her with intensity.<br />
<br />
'Go away. I hate
this. I <i>hate</i> it. Brooksie, my little sugar plum. Leave me be,'
June pleas in misery. She yanks forcefully once more at the restraints
that hold her tightly on the bed. Pains shoot through her lower arms, her
wrists, and skinny legs. 'Get now! Go on."<br />
<br />
'This is torture
for you? Well, then . . . I'll be here with you forever, momma. All yours.
Forever and a day!' Brooke says wickedly. <br />
<br />
Brooke's head tilts back
suddenly and her thin lips fly open so she can bare two rows of decaying
baby teeth. A rush of acrid substances -- a mini tsunami of sour apple
liquid, ruby red rust flakes, gray rancid milk, and a viscous mixture
of undigested toddler foods -- spurts projectile style onto
the rumpled surface of Juniper's bed. For several moments, the mother
fleetingly pictures the shock of Rolly red-faced, with muddy knees, and
urgently curious arriving from next door and sinking to his knees, the
man's white tee shirt heaving from his blind and zigzagging dash
cross her backyard, Rolly shaking his muscled arms and reddened hands to expel
lines of rust he got from somewhere and the water that had been transferred to
them from Brooke's tiny frame, Rolly straddling over and
coaxing the face down toddler -- his pleas for her to return to life
audible in the swaying sea of grass, June turning away to hide
from the revolting contents of Brooke's lungs that had come rushing
out around the baby's head as she gagged reflexively, and then her mad
motherly dash into the flailing bed sheets that swallowed her whole because she
secretly was desperate for a smoke and anxious to locate that kitchen
phone that would never ring. <br />
<br />
Horrified that this
bedtime affront is happening again, Juniper McDyer fights furiously
against her forbidding restraints and tries to lunge away
from the springy mattress, but she is bounced back forcefully by the
chest and shin belts. The old woman maneuvers her wrinkled forehead to
depress an alarm button for ten long seconds on an
electronic pad affixed to the side rail of her prison, then she screams
for salvation loud enough for everyone inmate and staff worker throughout the
cavernous institution to hear her.<br />
<br />
'Get out. You're dead. That
neighbor man told me at the pool. You died. Brooke. Go on now, stop this,' June
moans.<br />
<br />
'Right by your side, momma,
like you used to say: snug as two bugs in a rug,' Brooke produces an evil smile
for June.<br />
<br />
In the ghostly fluorescent
light that glows through her open door, June spies the wagging head of a beefy,
exasperated nurse. <br />
<br />
The brusque staff person
speaks in a cruelly patronizing tone, 'Calm the fuck down already. Lie down and
be quiet. Juniper, old dear, are we being a bad girl again? See? There ain't
nobody here wading in the pool but us, girlfriend. Your little
Brooksie baby? She be long gone. Long gone.'<br />
<br />
In the nurse's right hand,
behind her uniformed back, she tensely jiggles a balled up
pair of white socks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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After another restless and fidgety night, now having endured seven days of
insufficient sleep since he last looked at the newspaper's series about the
ancient <i>Miracle on McFarland</i>,
after Rolly had struggled to dress himself in typically bland garb to
undertake groggily and grumpily his potential probe that day, after
he then sat -- on the edge of slumber for hours -- in his sheltering nook while
mostly cold-shouldering his hardening breakfast eggs and
toast and resisting the day's freshly delivered edition of <i>The
Daily Guardian, </i>pained bodily as he often was by his Parkinson's medicine,
all the while closely but impatiently watching from his big
second-floor window the scant activities on his quiet street, and once he
had accepted about a dozen times that he could no longer honestly consider
himself a stalwart man of action, Rolly the ardently faithful sentinel
spied his man. The object of Rolly’s curiosity trudged laboriously in front of the
crumbling and abandoned McDyer cottage, his seven plus decades of life and
an extra hundred pounds or more of abdominal fat weighing heavily on his
huffing frame, then he went down the beaten-down and potholed pavement toward
his cherished stucco abode where there was a weather battered and listing
mailbox on a crusty wood pike that was labeled <i>Sarge. </i></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> This was adjacent to the end point of the McFarland Road beside a washed out gully and the western perimeter of the scented woods. The aged stranger was
coming back, as he almost always did on weekdays during early
afternoon, from his <i>gratis </i>roundtrip
bus ride, free because he was a military veteran and a senior citizen, on one
of the Pembroke Township’s wheezing old buses. There were never-settled
questions and gritty equivocations about Brooke and the McDyer clan
that had tormented Rolly for years which had grown more
insistent during his recent string of fitful nights. Maybe the Sarge could
help him out even though the two men had never really met.</span></div>
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Rolly placed a brief cell phone call to his son who had already been put
on notice earlier that morning to stand by to assist his ailing
parent. Jobless, inquisitive, craving a cigarette and a couple shots of Kentucky
bourbon, deeply in need of something meaningful to occupy his idle hours,
and famished from skipping breakfast in his chilly sedan near the
mouth of his father's leaf-littered driveway, the young man sat
impatiently. This was precisely, he remembered, the fateful location where
he and his poor mother once had come home after an early Spring day out
and had been startled to behold an imposing trio of thrumming Pembroke police
cruisers, red flashers rotating brightly and silently, their police radios
squawking, that were blocking the adjacent driveways, plus a sleek
and predatory ambulance ready to run in haste like a broken-loose puma in
a post accident departure with his friends' baby sister, Brooke, clinging
to life and her poor luckless dad, respectfully referred to as Mr. McDyer, inside
its cabin. The son had listened earlier, at 7:00 a.m., as his father
on a cell call, using his tired and thinning voice for the first time
that morning, who could now barely walk without a walker or a wheel chair
anymore thanks to with his Parkinson's, informed him that he needed,
really needed, a quick ride to a strange destination near the western edge
of the local forest. </span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The neighborhood enigma,
a dedicated loner called The Sarge, who had always smiled and called out from
street side in a friendly manner to the boy and his friends when they were
kids, had crept by slowly just minutes before without detecting the
preoccupied driver in the sedan; Rolly's son during those
seconds was enjoying a daydream about racing to his small apartment
downtown to slurp a huge bowl of Cheerios with fresh milk and sugar, like
little children in their high chairs do, or perhaps tear
incisors-first into a Double Whopper in the drive-thru lane at B.K.
which would serve as his modest reward for helping Rolly for the one
millionth time. After watching the Sarge trudge at a turtle's pace
way down the sloping road, Rolly's son set aside a difficult book that he was
slowly working through hard page by hard page. Without a warning one week before, after
their Cocaine Anonymous group leader led everyone, all hands clasped, in
the Serenity Prayer, a stranger, an attractive middle-aged woman and apparently
a committed and long sober member of C.A., had thrust
the reading into his hand, saying it was especially suited for
alcoholics, addicts, and divorced people with grief issues and resentments
that were hard to shake. On the red and black book jacket, serious critics
and enthusiastic readers praised the little
book's spiritually uplifting contents. The first words Rolly's son had
noticed by chance when he picked up the book and some coffee, after his
father's call at 7:00, to restart his reading, belonged to a
great thinker that the volume's author liked to quote. The passage --
which reminded him that he had often considered certain things better off
forgotten -- said this:</span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>The great mistake of many people is to imagine that those whom death has
taken leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In the
darkness? Oh, no. It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they
see us.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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As far as he was concerned, he really did not want to think anybody
already dead not about ghosts, vampires, or zombie creepers -- no
matter how benevolent or malicious their intentions might seem -- looking
in on his fractured existence or judging him pitilessly according
to the righteous moral standards that his ethical father often
displayed. </span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Rolly and his son had pleasantly agreed on their cell phones earlier that day that
neither of them could remember a time when one or the
other had ventured so far down McFarland. The father, seeking to
get this mission fully behind him, emerged slowly from his home; his
grown son was immediately appalled by his parent's deteriorating
condition. He conjured a mental image of his much younger dad decked out
in his habitual outside outfit -- a shabby white vee-neck tee shirt,
rolled-cuff Levi jeans, and scuffed slip-on shoes -- vigorously treating
his vintage Bel-Air '57 to a thorough wash and loving coat of Turtle
Wax paste from a flat can under sunny bright skies through a brisk
afternoon long ago. The son momentarily beheld the ghost of old Mrs. Popp,
their original and now dead landlady with the heavy German accent, a
lover all things pertaining to tulips and flowering gardens, her buttoned up
sweater hanging off of one shoulder, her sensible skirt, thick wool socks, and
black laced support shoes getting dusty from the cloud of leaves that was
swelling around her, furiously raking to keep her grass clean. With the
bat of an eye, his ruminations switched to the ambiguous <i>Miracle </i>that
Mrs. Popp had missed<i>. </i>He pictured the grossly slimed clothes, motionless
hands and legs, darkly soiled socks on shoeless feet, and grossly streaked
face (partially concealed by an oxygen pump for the child's small face) of the
sad little Brooke atop the ambulance gurney. The child's respiration rate
and tender heartbeat had not stabilized enough yet for the paramedics to give
their weirdly disinterested driver an urgent get going now signal.
Surely everyone present, whether disinterested or glued to the action, could
hear -- as the toddler laid helplessly beneath the caring attendants'
gloved hands -- the off-putting and mean Mrs. McDyer's achingly shrill, desperate
pleas for another intimate embrace of her daughter but the mother in her strangely
uncoordinated clothes and sallow smoker’s complexion was physically
detained by sure-footed and sure-handed officers. She commanded the authorities
not to rip her precious Brooke away from her motherly protection. Now a grown man
himself, Rolly's son recalled the surge of youthful pride that he initially
experienced in their apartment an hour or two later when he heard the amazing tale on
TV (and then for days read newspaper accounts) about his father, Rolly, under
great duress hurdling the driveway fence and working like a miracle man to
salvage Brooke’s life. It turned out to be one of the most compelling and 'happy
ending' news narratives in Pembroke and throughout the Midwest that year.</span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Like either the nosy or the concerned citizens gathered here and there, the
young boy had then been fascinated to see the industrious cops work that week
in the McDyers' cottage and all around their yard from sunrise till sunset. His
personal favorite, Detective Malone, who always took time to say
hello to him whenever she could through the slanted and rickety wire
fence that bisected the two worn driveways, and one of her best investigators
according to eventual newspaper and TV reports had zeroed in straight away
on shreds of evidence that would enable them to put criminal charges into
place against Juniper: such as the gallons of water, not snow melt nor
polluted rain, which nearly killed Brooke but somehow had dropped into the
scene by magic, the beloved red but rusting play wagon with the wooden
side slats -- something Brooke had adored -- that stood in the
breeze-blown grass well removed from its normal resting place by the
cottage but just a hair or two too close for comfort to the compact
wader, Rolly's matter of fact statements about his mad dash by
which he ran dramatically into the mother, an eyeball to eyeball
collision, coming out from behind a wall of bedding and some of
Somerset's blue shirts, and finally the indecisive (Malone labeled
them evasive) ways that the emotionally-somersaulting mother and
eyewitness -- who had somehow overlooked for days her required
prescriptions -- failed to respond convincingly to the D.A.'s queries
about all that she had said, and done, and heard, or had not said, not
done, or not heard as the frightening incident transpired. As Rolly
approached his son's vehicle, dead leaves of various autumn hues blanketed
the expansive yard, many inches thick in certain patches, and many of
them crunched in protest under Rolly's deliberate steps like
musty multi-colored leftovers from a complex puzzle that had been
painfully cut up by a razor sharp jigsaw blade. The reinforced rubber caps that
bottomed his handsome pair of polished maplewood walking canes, the ones that
came with the smooth and striking chrome-plated eagle's head on each
handle, speared and broke many dried leaves too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> At first Rolly and his son sat in
silence. Both wore light jackets and thick socks to combat the chill in
the air. Then as the car rolled forward mostly under its own power
down the sloping road, the son said, '<i>Abbey Road</i> ok or are you more in a
Nirvana mood?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> His
father responded with a nonchalant shrug. A silver CD disappeared
into the dashboard. The first haunting bass chords of the tune "Come
Together" came through the speakers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Fallen
leaves and twisted twigs covered the weary, potholed pavement. Rolly
felt weak and he regretted that he was making this trip dependent on the
stained wood canes that he clutched with sweaty palms in the
space between his pained and parted kneecaps. He had stubbornly refused to rely
on this day on his wheel chair. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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After going about 1000 yards, the young man steered his car to the
opposite side of McFarland, close to the point where the old
road narrowed into a sandy path and then dead ended at the depressed
and bone dry gully. He gently stopped by the battered, leaning mailbox labeled<i> Sarge.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Rolly struggled to get out. Now more winded and quivery in the hands and
legs than when he had left his comfortable nook, he told his son
that he would call on his cell phone once he needed a pick-up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Rolly
took a few tentative steps with the help of the polished walking canes. But
when he paused to survey the broad panorama before him everything seemed to his
great dismay to be slipping downhill -- the sloping and narrowed
roadway, the root-damaged walkway up to the Sarge's place, the roughed up black
mailbox on the leaning post, the two-story house itself with its front
landing, a porch style expanse, that was protected by a simple but dirty
awning over a badly cracked foundation of granite, and even the tired pieces of
weather-beaten furniture, including The Sarge's rain-spotted old rocking
chair with thick pads, all seemed precariously tipped, ready to plunge
dried and played out, into the patient bottom of the forest
ravine that everybody from the neighborhood simply called the gully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Rolly fought his way across the uneven cement squares that constituted the
Sarge's front walkway. Rolly's son turned his car and drove away.
Rolly recalled the echo from a siren blaring from a
Pembroke ambulance that was racing toward the busy center of the
township. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The military veteran sat still in his rocker as the unexpected visitor
struggled to get to him. The Sarge was clearly the aged of the two.
He wore a tattered and sweat stained Veterans Affairs Department baseball
cap that he had pushed high on his lined forehead and a flannel shirt
whose colors were fading. A ragged U.S. flag was tacked to one window
sill. Rolly said hello and asked for permission to come aboard
the tilted landing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The Sarge smiled. 'Howdy. Don't get many visitors down here nowadays.
Sit yerself down and take a load off.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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His accent was Southern. Rolly pictured an isolated farm in a lazy valley of
Tennessee and detected the tempting smells of bacon grease and fried
eggs wafting through the windows. He leaned his eagle head canes
against a chair, wiped his wet palms on his pants legs, and plopped down
heavily.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Do you recognize me, sir?' Rolly asked while hoping to catch his
breath. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'I reckon I do. From on up this ol' road. You, sir, were big news way back
when. You can just' call me Sarge.'<br />
<br />
Like on previous occasions but
from a much longer distance, the aged Sarge seemed amiable, a bit
puckish even.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'What happened to you in the war? People say you got shot up pretty bad,' Rolly
asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Me and some good, God-fearin’ boys caught an enemy shell on a hillside. It blew
up in our laps. Most of 'em boys died. But I pulled on through. Twas a
real mess I'll tell ya,' the Sarge responded. 'I hadta get operated
on ta patch up the hole in my head and ta fix my hip but I
reckon I been alright for years. Tho' I do get me a sore sacroiliac and
some crazy notions in th' head now and then,' the Sarge cackled. 'But I
weren't allowed to work no more either.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Each of them pondered that. The plentiful choir of cicadas buzzed shrilly
in nearby trees and bushes. Eavesdropping birds chirped all around them. An old
propeller airplane was progressing at a slow pace across the sky overhead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'You have business to do here? Or is this jus' a right friendly little visit?'
the Sarge asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'You remember what happened years ago at the McDyer place when their little
girl almost drowned?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Yessir. Quite a day it twas. You done the world a great service in
savin' that innocent little child.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Rolly suddenly felt free to disclose the underlying purpose
for this visit. He described to the Sarge an intensifying sense of
guilt and anger over the so-called <i>Miracle's </i>upsetting and
ambiguous bottom line. He longed to know why it had to be him
-- a regular self-effacing guy, who had to bring Brooke back her
painful and disrupted life, perhaps from an eternally silent bliss, the
unknowable, the absolute end. To Rolly the Sarge now loomed like a portentous
resort, a last palace guard to engage before Rolly's particular plunge
into eternity would come. <br />
<br />
He asked the stranger, 'So . .
. did you see anything key at the McDyer place on that incredible day? Did the
police ever talk to you about that?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'That's hard to buy when one of the Lord's precious lit’l children
was on the line,' Rolly answered. He fidgeted on the chair. His Parkinson's
shook him all over.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The Sarge said, 'I gotta theory. Me, I think she done it, the mother
-- but she so wuz so messed up she didn't really
know it.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Rolly shrugged quietly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Rolly noted 'She was dead. Brooke was dead, I saved her, and now
she's dead again. She suffered a terrible life. She died a murderer they
say, so . . . I brought her back to what? For what? So
others could die?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The Sarge rocked gently and let his tired eyes slide closed, like
chronically poor sleepers sometimes do. He listened appreciatively to the
cicadas' song.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Every time I get to the graves of her father and her I get a feeling
that Brooke, or is better to call her Harmony, as a grown woman is
already there," Rolly confessed. 'She's ferocious, but stone
cold dead, and she's staring up at me saying <i>death will soon</i> <i>be lookin'</i> <i>for
me.'</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'A whole lotto suffering' and pain, horrible it twas, that poor child had
ta go through. Years without her people, any love, her family. But she turns
out as cold-blooded as maybe her mother was?' the Sarge said. 'Why wuz it
all like that? Don't reckon we'll ever know. People sometimes say that the
apples don't fall fer from their trees.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Rolly and the Sarge looked simultaneously across the gully and into the shadows
cast by the buzzing ridge of forest. People rumored that it harbored mysteries
in the dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'So you po’boy don't wanna hear what else I could maybe tell ya,' the Sarge
said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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'Like what?' Rolly asked. The Parkinson's symptoms were accentuated whenever he
was under this kind of heavy stress. 'Don't tell me you saw something.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Well, yeah,' said the Sarge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'You hopped your bus ride and then you came back home, all real
normal that day. Just after lunchtime. I remember it. We waved to each
other,' Rolly said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'The police ever run a blood test on that little girl?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Surprised,
Rolly said quietly, 'I don't know. Why would they have done that?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The old veteran shrugged. 'Them police never came on down here once axin'
no questions. Like they didn't even know or care that anybody was even livin'
down here. I never got over it. -- Well, sir, about that day. Me an' you had
already waved to and fro like we sometimes do. I had jus' about got to the
front of the ol' McDyer cottage thinkin' what a great thing that a new Spring
is. Then I hear this screen door slam ‘round back. Hard. Like -- <i>Clap!</i>
-- 'round back of th' house. So I look up. That woman that lived there stepped
down onto her driveway. I could see her clear enough but now you 'member
she was pretty far away from me Then I seen she had a big wicker basket that
she set down on th' ground.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Yeah? Then?’ Rolly's insides were suddenly aflutter. He sat forward. He
gripped the silver eagle head on each of his walking canes tightly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Her name was Juniper weren't it? -- She goes ta pushin' her hair
back behind her ears and bends over ta reach way deep into th'
basket. I'll tell ya the next thing she done surprised th' heck outta me.
Surprisin' she pulls out a little child outta the basket, no laundry or
nothin', but a little child. She was limp as a blond rag doll. The
McDyer woman holds the kid out at arm's length and inspec's her up an'
down. And it weren't like th' child was jus' asleep or nuthin'.
It looked ta me like the child coulda been drugged. Flat out,
limp and lifeless, out like a light. Tell me, what kinda human
bein' does a thing like that? But then a ‘gin may well have been the'
the baby wuz jus' sound asleep.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'So she, I mean Juniper ya know -- put the girl down in the kids' red
wagon?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> 'Well
maybe she did and maybe she didn't. Tell ya the truth I really din't see no
kiddie wagon. All the McDyer done was take a step or two like she was
goin' back toward th' laundry lines. She lef' that basket sittin' there. Toted
the child in her arms outta my sight.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'You heard her phone ring?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Nope.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> 'You
heard the screen door clap closed again, loud, clap, after that?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'Nope. Nothin' like that. Either way.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
'There was some rock 'n roll you could hear from near my Chevy?'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> 'Cain't
honestly say to yer face I heard any o' that."<br />
<br />
The Sarge rocked quietly, deep in
thought.<br />
<br />
'There was her mother an' there was
a lit’l child that was at first in the big
basket with her,’ he said. ‘That's all I seen. Then the McDyer woman walks
away with her arms full. It was the kid. It look’d odd, but . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> ‘I say somethin’ to myself like
"Well, the Good Book says that every- thin' under heaven and earth has
some kinda reason. So I jus'
came home, the sun set in the west jus' like it always done. That wuz all.
Din't seem like no big deal. I didn't hear or see nuthin' till
the next morning on my way to my bus. And I din't have no workin' radio or TV here
at th' house back then. Guess them police din't even know that anybody was
down here. Or din’t care.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Both old men fell silent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
That was the moment. Rolly's muscles seemed to relax; he let go
reluctantly. Pulling down on the bottom sides of his jacket, he sat up
straight. Rolly crossed his legs, right over left; his right foot shook
anxiously in the air. He
loosened the death grip he had pressed onto each of the walking
canes. His stomach cramps began to ease. Was that hunger he felt? The metal
eagle molds had forged bright red creases in his palms. He nodded with a
discouraged but sage smile at his hands and then the Sarge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Rolly whispered a polite and
dry-mouthed thank you, then he sighed deeply. He felt exhausted. After
twenty-some open ended years a slightly plausible new theory, a novel
possibility – something that all players long ago, even the astute Malone, had
probably missed -- had poked its head up and looked out, like a little child’s
sleepy, red, and crimped face peering up and over the edge of a sharp wicker precipice.
Instantly, Rolly figured this variable would irritate him for the incalculable remainder
of his days. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Brooke, unconscious in the laundry
basket, helpless? Drugged? Knocked cold? But where did the stuff June had used
come from? And then there would always be this: <i>What the hell kind
of human being pulls something like that?</i> the Sarge had asked -- his
aged voice rising, sounding insulted, incredulous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brooke was out cold before
they got outside? She lay defenseless in
the gruesome clutches of a deluded parent in crazy mismatched
clothing, her <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">sallow and scornful face
and rheumy eyes looming above the child, her mind pried loose from its unsteady
moorings and psychically starved for medication.<br />
<br />
Yeah, I suppose it
could have been like that, Rolly mused to himself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Or, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe no scheme had been involved. Maybe the whole affair happened in a way much
more simple and innocent than some suspected. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Tired, disheartened, Rolly stood up. His long mission, the one that began with the
mysterious syllable <i>Ra! -- </i>had crept to its end. He prepared to summon his ride back home, and he </span>yearned
for the peaceful, modest comforts of his second floor nook.</div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-61146278977944197812014-10-09T11:45:00.000-04:002016-02-16T17:50:04.779-05:00The Emperor's Bloody Valentine<em></em><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em> <span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span></em><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #cc0000;">The Emperor's Bloody Valentine</span> </span><em> </em></div>
<em><br /></em>
<em><br /></em>
<em> <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar"</span></em><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> -- James Butcher, <u>Dead</u> <u>Beat</u></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8j3MjdPI_2KWS3UF4HPMEjDZ5D6Ky_oa5LLINMQUOXKmgDVJH3t0faUpNvvydKp7LnwrfEez9AXzdA0NHEPwu5by1wYvXHebgzwPzQ6Pe3DzDzwIxSkbVA4E8S3N_KtTLbRp1oXQ1IuA/s1600/Valentine%2527s+Hert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8j3MjdPI_2KWS3UF4HPMEjDZ5D6Ky_oa5LLINMQUOXKmgDVJH3t0faUpNvvydKp7LnwrfEez9AXzdA0NHEPwu5by1wYvXHebgzwPzQ6Pe3DzDzwIxSkbVA4E8S3N_KtTLbRp1oXQ1IuA/s200/Valentine%2527s+Hert.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<strong><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Guile in Naissus</span></strong><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> On the first day of 268 c.e., while some historians of the Empire insist it was 269, Claudius Augustus the Emperor yanked on the wood handles at both ends of a razor sharp garotte. The murderous invention sent a twanging hum throughout the Commander's tent. The garotte had long been a beloved killing tool among Roman officers, since the era of the mighty Caesar, one that could slice viciously in and through a grown man's neck, from one ear to the other ear when he was assailed from behind. On other occasions the garrote could be used to suddenly situate a malicious and resplendent pressure on a luckless victim's frontal protrusion of neck cartilage, fierce and focused to a pinpoint, then twisted from behind by the handles without mercy. This tortuous form of attack perfected by many conscripts in the Roman army and one favored, throughout the land, by common thieves and murderers -- was discovered in the ancient, northern province of Gallia and then again in Apppenine mountain territories in Italy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Claudius cherished his boundless zeal for killing one-time friends, errable relatives, and outright enemies, real or imagined. He loved the emotional and psychic release that human execution provided -- jets of red plasma splashing on the ground near his feet, a detractor's final gasping breath, the gloomy scent of iron billowing from fatal gashes, the merciless downward slump of a human frame as the life and strength and spirit drain into the crevasses of the Romans' underworld. Claudius lionized, in his mind, his pedestrian methods and skills for bloodshed because so many treasonous dupes -- a revolting stream of fetid quislings -- plotted endlessly to betray him, his family, the military, the sacred Empire: and thus they deserved just and earnest payback. The improved use of the garotte, to Claudius, was a sporting exercise. He enjoyed swordplay, daggers, and spears too. Perhaps this man, he thought irrationally, I, Claudius the Second, will be revered throughout eternity with the same respect and affection as the mighty but murdered Caesar. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But like so many on whom the velvety, flowing, yet skin-irritating pallium of leadership was placed during the pompous, overbearing, and steadily depraved decades of glorious Rome -- similar to a legion of other Roman Emperors -- Claudius Augustus later to be called, Gothicus (the 'slayer of the Goths') too, was a wanton thug and deviant. As a young person, the boyish and tight-lipped Claudius became ensnared -- a fact most shameful to him -- in an imagined snakes' nest of neurotic worries, paranoid assumptions, physical pains -- as if a cowhide vise had been fitted around his anguished skull and pulled more tight by the minute. Some days his neck and shoulders ached to with a tenacity he never imagined possible. The suffering which Claudius sought to repress, led him to a preposterous sensation that his unsound brain would drag him down into a swirling pool of hot oil, a scorching vortex in which to drown, or on many days convinced him it would be his awful fate would have the young warrior traverse an inexorable road, at the end of which soon would lie more pain and perdition and a most unseemly physical and mental demise. His relentless tribulations tore like talons into the Emperor's pompous facade. They made him detest his counterfeit arrogance, and his feelings of inadequacy, yet he was unable to conquer them. Once he got into his 5th decade of life, the revered Roman captain's aging body felt tender, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">shredded, as savaged</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> as a sapless habitus. As the man on the ultimate throne, Claudius' did what he could to withstand periods of mute panic and wild, daily daydreams about how crippling debility might finish him. In his heart the ruler always sadly knew that he was just one man born into a modest family, in the unremarkable town of Naissus Dardania, north of Rome. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Known widely throughout the capitol city of Rome, and other towns and regions from the year 230 on, among people who willfully did not want to see Claudius' inner flaws and conflicts, physical curses, and emotional vulnerabilities, he was accorded the reputation of being a proud, arrogant and valiant Roman warrior. Galenius and several Roman senators took particular notice. As an Emperor-to-be, General Galenius -- who was </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">a semi-competent army officer and tactician but who came across to influential Roman citizen/powerbrokers as a morally-challenged, bribe-taking, and dictatorial strongman and mass murderer (if need be) -- turned </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Claudius briskly into a special captain of the Empire's elite cavalry force, the <i>hipparchos. </i>Claudius took the chance, at once, to show what he could accomplish among the Roman troops as a successful upper echelon commander and battle-brave army strategist. </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Claudius also dared to morph into an edgy opportunist who took risks in political and social circles with the Senate and other upper class Romans in high places. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Galenius was never as proficient or so fortunate as his mentee -- the future Emperor Claudius II -- and his modest skills for war-making and peace, and political success, greatly deteriorated overtime. His flaws were intolerable. He grew expendable. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> By the beginning of 268, at the age of 58, Claudius seized viciously -- with political and financial backing -- the revered title of Emperor Claudius Gothicus, or Claudius the Second, among his troops and the populace. With a band of loyal conspirators from the elite Roman legion, those angered in particular over Galenius' failure to maintain power and position over the territory of Milan, the heartened opportunist effected a </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">hasty mutiny within the Imperial Army and conducted a devastating swoop -- looking like the spangled image of a proud, wide-winged eagle sporting deadly razor-claws -- that landed Claudius on the lofty Emeror's throne. </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As the new despot in town, a man who sat in judgment above all others, Claudius and a small band of ruthless sentinels had committed the gruesome murder of</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> aging Galenius. The troubled Claudius </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">obtained ascendancy over the vast natural resources, the powerful Roman military, and a loyal people who wished to deify him: these factors would constitute the brief but sturdy backbone of the glorious reign of the Gothicus. Yet that time on the loftiest perch would be brief. Some of Claudius' most terrifying premonitions had veils of truth and irony draped across them. This he would not see until a fateful campaign into Moesia.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Months later, for a few days close to the end of 268, as Claudius the Second and his hand-picked pack of Roman guards were encamped during a hasty sojourn to the village of Naissus (where the Emperor was born and now needed to resolve some family relationship concerns), in order to forget significant new worries cropping up throughout the Empire, the violent and hungry hordes of heathens that threatened a variety of Roman borders without shame or hesitation, the greedy requests by the starving and sick in his people, and the throbbing pains associated with his lack of self-esteem and his tortured cranium, the Emperor had devoted lengthy skeins of words -- exclaimed to civilian insiders and sentinels alike -- that heaped the ugliest scorn and disparagement onto one guilty person. To Claudius, he was a perfidious apostate, a seditious colluder, one who sullied the present and future of the holy empire, who had sinned grievously, though this criminal had been ordered to stop. Now he deserved to die. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But the Emperor exaggerated. The renegade religionist, Valentinius di Terni, was an object of heated hyperbole and criminal arrest but not the wort of offenders. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">He was to be a patsy for the sick ruler's horrible attention and the need to prove that he still had it when it came to upholding Rome's ruthless moral standards. So it would be off with his head. Valentine's extensive criminal guile, his evil misdeeds, were to help shelter underground some -- ten or twenty -- dubious Christians and also preside over at least a few marriages while away from Rome. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> 'Not so bad to be truthful, but more marriages! He will not stop? -- Just when all able-bodied males are needed as perpetual sacrifices on our righteous battlefields,' Claudius thought derisively.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Valentine had been captured by accident, by an Empire scouting party, on a road north of Rome. This was close to Naissus. He had been transported upon Claudius' order to the jail there. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The morning had arrived on which the two would meet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> 'This should be interesting,' Claudius said to himself. It was already getting warm in the bright sunshine around his opulent tent. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Emperor Claudius II</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Known widely throughout the capitol city, Rome, and other regions, among those who did not suspect his inner conflicts and vulnerabilities, Claudius long bore the reputation of being a proud, arrogant and valiant but bloodthirsty Roman warrior. The Emperor Galenius -- </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">a sterotypical but not extremely crafty Roman strongman and mass murderer -- </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">appointed him to be the captain of the Empire's elite cavalry force, the <i>hipparchos. </i>Claudius was at once a successful officer and battle strategist, but Galenius was not so skilled nor so fortunate. Claudius also became an experienced opportunist as his years of military service ticked by. By the beginning of 268, at the age of 58, he appropriated the revered title of Emperor Claudius Gothicus, also Claudius the Second, among his troops. With a band of loyal conspirators from his Roman legion, angered by Galenius' failure to maintain power over the territory of Milan, he effected a </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">hasty mutiny within the Imperial Army and conducted a devastating swoop -- in the spangled image of a proud, wide-winged eagle sporting deadly razor-claws -- that landed him on</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> the Emperor's lofty, unassailable throne. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As the new despot above all others, Claudius and a small band of his ruthless sentinels committed the gruesome murder of</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> bloody Galenius and </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">obtained ascendancy over the vast natural resources, the powerful Roman militia forces spread around the world, and a loyal people who wished to deify him: these factors would constitute the sturdy backbone of his glorious, omnipotent, unending reign. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">into the immortal emperor's chair was a consequence and spoil of the the gruesome, unspeakable murder of his predecessor, a true and sterotypical Roman strongman, named Galenius.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> , the immortal and omnipotent ruler of Rome, had grabbed control of the Roman Empire's almighty vastness -- rich lands, wealth beyond measure, and inlaid natural resources -- just months before. His hasty swoop, like a proud and wide-winged eagle, into the immortal emperor's chair was a consequence and spoil of the the gruesome, unspeakable murder of his predecessor, a true and sterotypical Roman strongman, named Galenius.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius had orchestrated Galenius' demise like a mad music conductor. Many pieces, many players, and many themes were brought to bear in harmony. But like many frighful bullies, Claudius refused to kill Galenius with his own hands. A trio of henchmen supplied the cold and callous script and the muscular emphases to assure the aging Emperor's homicide. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius indulgently and psychotically saw his ascent to Galenius' throne as his divine right. But despite his bullying rages, petty paybacks, bitter recriminations, impetuous plans, and political machinations what the haughty Claudius could not foresee, through an illusory and razor thin sheen of supposed omniscience, was that his personal, volcanic symphony was playing crazily toward an unforetold conclusion too. Claudius Gothicus was marked by fate to </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">die in a strange and hostile manner, as the assassinated Galenius had been, as many of the once-glorified and self-glorying Roman Emperors eventually were. On this morning though, during the dawning of 268 or 269, while gray, streaky clouds and the first red spatters of sunlight arched over the eastern boundaries of his vast temporal holdings, Claudius' birthright, the anxious Roman leader was already terrified that his mighty hold empire might never be fully his own.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> During dark nights, Claudius suffered painful premonitions. In the rust-hued and spackle stained tableau of early morning, he worried as perspiration dampened his clothing and pulled him down onto this bed. Since becoming Emperor, Claudius' focus had been on one man in particular, a particularly annoying Upstart who often centered his work among the rabble in the town of Naissus. And no surprise, the outskirts of Naissus was the place where the Emperor's grand army was presently encamped. The troublemaker pained the great Claudius like a festering burned patch, an aching albeit temporary tattoo from hot food, on the tip of his royal and tender tongue. Claudius marked this man from Naissus, now his prisoner, for execution once the late afternoon hours of this day. Happy new year, dead man, he thought scornfully. He whispered the offender's indecent name, which began with a V.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The Emperor's field surgeon, a lifetime army veteran, who served tactfully also as his personal barber, had just wielded with ease and confidence a sharp and deadly straight razor across Claudius' face and neck. Unwanted whiskers were scaped off and thrown into the nearby camp fire. The skilled razor work had drawn no blood and caused no nicks. Perhaps this charge acts with with too much assurance, Claudius thought in his paranoid manner. His quickly graying beard was now shaped perfectly around his handsome face, long aquiline nose, and pointed chin. As the grooming session came to an end, Claudius stood and his face reddened. He felt perplexed, annoyed, itchy to pick a fight. The Emperor pushed the quiet field surgeon aside. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Hand me that,' he ordered.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius the Second studied his deified face in a reflective glass.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'By the gods almighty, I begin to look old,' the Emperor lamented. 'I am worn thin from too many duties, too many affairs of state. Can't you all see how many demands are made on me? I must respond to them all. It is my duty. The end for me must be nigh. Yes, old face, that's what you tell me.'</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> He examined the long and deepening worry lines that horizontally cut across his forehead. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Though he would never admit it, Claudius dreaded the specter of death. As the powerful Emperor, no man or woman should know, not even Claudius himself, of his ponderous frailties and fears. His infallible<em> </em>will and granite resolved were to be perfect at all times, immutable, a living symbol of his strength and immortality. He was not married at this time. Claudius had condemned each of his wives to dark and mysterious deaths. Rumors of blood-running suicides trickled through each case and caused gossipy whispers. A faithful conscript's blade, a straight razor again, had sliced each woman's arteries once Claudius suspected, then became convinced without evidence, that each had gained insight on his deeply rooted fears of inadequacy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> With each season that passed, Claudius the Roman Warrior, then Gothicus the Omnipotent Ruler, became more obsessive, additionally compulsive, and cruelly impotent. Most of the soldiers, sentries, and servants in his camp, family members, vendors from Rome, even the quiet field surgeon urgently wished he would atch an errant arrow in battle, happen upon an enemy's sword point, or otherwise expire forthwith. When by himself, Claudius often thought about Julius Caesar, so far gone from this realm, so deeply buried. Claudius grunted impatiently. He imaged a large stone, carved to resemble his magnificent warrior's frame, lying supine, without feeling above his mortal remains in Rome. The Emperor rubbed his sleep-starved and rheumy eyes. Let no one see you are having second thoughts, he told himself anxiously. The hour to go to the makeshift, stone jailhouse on the cusp of his army's encampment, little more than a rockpile cabin with a moldy and muddy floor, had arrived all too soon.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius thrust the shard of looking-glass roughly into his field surgeon's right hand. The surgeon accepted the affront without comment and gave it to a young male attendant. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Withdraw, all of you, on my command,' he spoke up boldly, but still much too self-centered, haughty and assertive for this private situation. Adrenaline had rushed into his system. Will I never learn to do things right, like my father, like Galenius and impervious Caesar did?, he wondered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The Emperor's thoughts turned quickly toward The Upstarts. Reports from spies overnight said these troublemakers were at it again. For some reason, their covert operations, their hidden meetings, and their stealthy desire to countermand his efforts, whether magnanimous or modest, were frightening him once more. Clearly these commoners hated him and wanted him dead, though none had ever been constrained to say so, even during the most heinous of tortures. Their obstinacy ignited his premonitions of revolt and conspiracy among townspeople and rural homesteaders everywhere. The Upstarts must bow to the Law of the Empire Amighty, Claudius said to himself over and over. They must, and by the stars they will, accept the Roman divinities and the inerrant Roman ways, <em>or they will pay mightily for their transgressions</em>, he coached himself nervously. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Lately the Emperor had begun to talk very loosely -- sometimes carelessly and maniacally when coaxed on by goblets of wine -- about The Upstarts. He talked to his best officers, his army valets, his very few personal confidantes, and the field surgeon, a lifelong friend from Rome. Each person to whom he spoke during one of his rants could only nod silently and ponder how deeply the disintegrating Emperor Claudius was descending into a personal exile of obsessions and psychotic meanderings. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Just five days before this fateful dawn, on an otherwise uneventful Saturday, Claudius rashly judged that the last moments of The Upstarts should be identified. He had fantasized about this possibility for weeks. Without a warning about the prejudicial strike to come, he would preside over a bloody show-and-tell pummeling, in the districts that Upstarts frequented. Such a hammering would again demonstrate to all that he was supreme. He thought greedily and sentimentally about crashing his implacable sword down, from atop his powerful steed, upon surprised victims as if he were Death incarnate. But when the actual clash of metals, bleating horses, protective shields, leather straps, and bleeding human flesh took place, once the Emperor became trapped amidst the embattled, the brave, and the dying, he would quickly become nauseated, vomit violently from the putridities of open wounds and the iron smells of blood and decay, and bolt crazily, fearsomely, atop his chosen steed to some safer patch of earth adjacent to the killing fields. Only when his men had secured victory and sounded the horns would the emperor feel vindicated, again thrilled in by the ideas of darkening blood, lifeless bodies, and fallen horses -- his immutable proof that Claudius Gothicus alone reigned supreme. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> He thought he knew them, the unwanted and unwashed of Naissus and other towns and villages, the bothersome and crafty Upstarts, who seemed to be popping up from untilled ground, a toxic crop, just about everywhere. But the Emperor was mistaken crucially. Still little pockets of these trouble-causing crazies were digging in in virtually every neighborhood of Naiissus now. Spreading on the wind like bad seeds from the east, worming in their sneaky way, like disease spots, under the epidermis of his princely, gleaming empire they had to be stopped viciously because they were the vicious force, Claudius wrongly believed. An imposing and magnificent army, full of savvy and skilled swordsmen, spear throwers, and other muscular specimens, who propelled well-aimed and deadly arrows from powerful bows, served every moment at his fingertips. The diseased parties, with the Upstart sickness, must not be allowed to affect his loyal charges. That might bring down his rule, his plans to conquer and subdue the known and unknown worlds, thus spreading the peaceable empire of faithful Romans. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius Gothicus suspected that each of the Upstarts wished him dead. He had no rational cause to do so. To his troops in the field and his wise officers these others seemed quite docile and unpretentious, but most of them unwilling to cower before the Empire, even when they were locked into the harsh, accusatory, and at times bludgeoning, grips of Claudius' ubiquitous lieges. The persistent but lowbrow lifestyle and fervor of the Upstarts were rocking the Roman world. To complicate matters, the Emperor was also experiencing major difficulties with the vermin-bearing, hard charging, horn-blowing rebels called Goths on the margins of civilization -- and recently a bloodthirsty, new wolfpack, the hellacious Vandals, had popped up to worry him from the opposite direction. Claudius secretly admired them all for their unabated dedication to slaying and conquering Romans. But he Upstarts, Goths, Vandals -- semi-human, barbaric tribes marauding, raping, pillaging, murdering, conspiring, and worst of all senselessly willing to battle his conscripted legions before succumbing valiantly. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Perhaps we approach a tipping point this afternoon,' Claudius whispered. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> To find and capture the notorious Valentine on the previous Sunday, the Emperor sent a large contingent of soldiers to search several extended-family clans of Upstarts inside various houses. They were easily caught, marched into the town square of Naissus and, then, vigorously cut down by whooshing, deathly-sharp knives, swords, and spears. It was a shocking and wretchedly bloody scene for all to behold, including even the Roman charges. Claudius had thrown up violently while still astride his white horse at the bitter scene. Later, he explained to his muscular bodyguards and closest officers that he his supper had made him feel sick.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> It cheered the Emperor slightly to learn that there was good news emanating from the horrors of the evening of horror. All of the known Upstarts within Naissus had perished ignominiously. Except the crucial one they had sought. Nevertheless, Claudius hoped that this town at last was buttoned-down, safer and more secure, a place from which <em>Marcus Aurelius Valerius Claudius, </em>the most magnificent of all Roman leaders, better than the legendary Julius Caesar, and his battalions of fighting, fearless red-uniformed army goon-squads could soon move on to deal with the Goth barbarians huddled in the north and the unexpected Vandal bands slicing in from somewhere out west. He puzzled about what had happened to the once rapidly advancing, rapacious War-Queen, Zenobia of Palmyra, and her homicidal armies in brown and green from the east. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Where did she go?' Claudius, a very poor tactician, wondered aloud one day to his field surgeon and friend. He wagged his well-barbered head and aquiline features with abject self-pity. 'The ruling Emperor must be vigilant on all sides.' </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius felt sad that he would not live forever. At an opportune moment, someone will step up to do me in, he thought -- one firm, deep, and bloody slice with a well-honed blade that will glide across this holy and esteemed neck. It told his wary onlookers around the ruler's tent that homicidal daydreams and blackened pits of psyhotic need were as ever on his mind. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Let us go, my friends,' the Emperor commanded. He fingered his ruler's sword, then his breastplate of gold absentmindedly. He called impatiently for his royal helmet. It was placed upon his head. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Life's journey is brief. The door is ajar. This is going to be gruesome," Cladius Gothicus counseled them. While this unanticipated prisoner, in serene possession of the unquenchable and valiant heart of a great Upstart, did not know it yet, the murderous villain and Emperor was about to declare this Valentine's Day. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Emperor and His Daughter</span></strong><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> His name was Valentine, patterned after his father's, which was Valerian, a physician and compassionate healer. While pinned under the repressive and cruel hands of the demagogic Emperor, and his hopeless, homicide-happy troops, it was better to have a worthy Roman name. Both Valerian and Valentine were ones that many Romans could accept as normal, unexciting, not subversive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Valentine was a physician like his father. He had a gift. On Sunday while the sun was still rising, he had laid his hands on a beautiful blind girl, the jail warden's daughter, before the army raided the Upstart fraternity's meal. The herbs that Valentine had prescribed for her to take, each day, in hot water, were beginning to take effect. Mysteriously, the bright girl, Jana, who was still blind by all known standards, began to describe some of Valentine's facial features in particular and poetic detail. A healing some began to declare happily, a miracle inspired by God. Fortunately, the girl, Jana, and her Upstart-curious father, the Romans' warden, had crept out of the secret meeting house to the presumed safety of their home just seconds before the bloodthirsty onslaught. As an old Roman tradition went, <em>Miracles are for those who believe in them.</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Valentine surrendered on the day after the raid. He did not want anyone else to suffer as the authorities searched for him. Months before, Valentine (though truly young in years, about age 35) had been identified by the local commune of Upstarts as a presbyter, an elder. He had spent his years trying to live up to his legendary name: strong, worthy, powerful. He felt that he might be succeeding but slowly.Valentine was granted the distinctive honor of presiding at one of the Sunday underground enclaves. The time together always lasted for hours and centered on eating and storytelling and moral support for his world-weary compatriots. Valentine was the sole survivor of the raid by Claudius' men. Somehow he had dodged the flashing swords and outlandish swipes of pointed daggers.Valentine was notorious among some Romans (and of course Claudius) for baptizing converts and witnessing many marriages of army-ready young men and young women who fast became reluctant to give their lives for the Empire. Valentine was now in the clutches of the Roman god-on-earth right and was right where Claudius wanted him to be.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The holding cell he was in was dirty, damp, and the foulest. Valentine tied to be calm. But during the last hour he had started breathing quite nervously. During the morning, Claudius had given him a terrible choice. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Should I cut your head off? Or should I have you pinned to this cell's wall like a butterfly, pierced by hundreds of sharp arrowheads? Perhaps I ought to have you dragged to death behind the teams of wild white steeds who charge before our chariots? Which do you want?'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Valentine, with faltering bravado, chose the arrows. A reluctant but unbowed dead man he would become. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Pierce my heart. Make it bleed like a river. I defy you. I am ready to walk toward my last breath. You cannot extinguish my immortal spirit,' the physician said, his voice a bit shaky. His demeanor to all who looked on seemed firm, unbowed, uplifted.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Claudius believed he detected a flicker of weakness and indecision, in his opponent's response. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'Very well. This afternoon. It is Valentine's Day, everyone. Face justice, traitor' Claudius bellowed with a bitter sneer, again too haughtily for the moment. He turned and left the makeshift stone jail quickly, along with his contingent of bodyguards.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Valentine begged his jailer for something to write a note on. In gratitude for Valentine's valiant and healing care for his blind daughter -- even though he was absolutely petrified by the Emperor's -- the warden granted Valentine's last wish. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Sitting on a small stone bench in the damp darkness, as Roman centurions erected a tall wood wall which would serve as the backdrop to his swift and brutish execution, Valentine wrote his note. He told Jana that all would be well. And he asked her to care faithfully for her careful, Upstart-curious but ailing father. Valentine cautioned Jana, a true beauty, not tell anyone about the hidden cell of rogue upstarts who gathered secretly in some caves during weekends out in the hills.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> As the last minutes of his life ticked away, Valentine finished his secret message. He wrote a portion of a tiny poem he had been made to memorize as a child. Then he added his name. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Valentine silently handed his last little testament, a love note, to Jana's father. His final declaration -- though no human but Jana and her parent ever beheld the prisoner's actual note -- read simply, <em>"With love, from your Valentine."</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><em> </em>When Jana heard the conclusion of this note, she was taken aback. Her heart raced. She lost her breath. She raised her eyebrows in alarm. For it looked, on the parchment, like Valentine had attempted to crudely draw an archer's bow, with a convex line that traced to the bow's top and bottom. She looked bewildered for a time. Then she turned it sideways. A smile creased her saddened face. The one who sketched this for her had depicted a set of lips -- a lasting kiss that could not, would not, ever be erased by villainy or time's travails.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Those were Valentine's last known sentiments. No one knew they might have immortal, legendary, or lasting consequences. Valentine closed his bone-dry lips once he finished writing and drawing. Resigned and regretful, he never parted them again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Amidst the savagely dark and brutal Roman culture of the 3rd Century, Valentine's ravaged body was tossed out of the stone jailhouse. No one there or anywhere had heard of cinnamon hearts, Whitman samplers, Flowers Express, wax Valentine lips, or Hallmark moments. Cupid -- the giddy son of Venus and Mars, or so it was taught -- was to all Roman citizens a spurious little sylph, a goofy and playful presence from Mount Silvanus. Yet things would changewith time. Life is a flowing river. The door was ajar . . . </span><br />
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<br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The Vandals Covet the Empire</span></strong><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgrjTqFe8cuiT29zolnWIUd8v5bF9S1LUICwR80JGUCnNeQ4ms9YJssaVXPbtT-a_guiyfqqwyWZ3Moes6rLCyX8LVvKEt8isQjHvxsDFtfymyd4EgsqzO6-90Sed_46Aens_CPk52r0/s1600/Claudius+II+--+Coin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" h5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgrjTqFe8cuiT29zolnWIUd8v5bF9S1LUICwR80JGUCnNeQ4ms9YJssaVXPbtT-a_guiyfqqwyWZ3Moes6rLCyX8LVvKEt8isQjHvxsDFtfymyd4EgsqzO6-90Sed_46Aens_CPk52r0/s1600/Claudius+II+--+Coin.jpg" /></a><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Coins from the Reign of Claudius the Second</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Before his sudden death, the Emperor Claudius, who envisioned himself as more noble and powerful than the sum of all Caesars, who ruled over the vast Roman Empire for a mere two years, not long before the game-changing <em>Peace of Constantine</em>, commissioned a metal coin in his own honor. It depicted the depicted the regal bearing of the Emperor on front and back. Coins from that time can still be examined. They are valued at $50 to $200 in the United States. Claudius paid a horrific price for his hubris and stupidity, his tainted glory, as did many others. Yet discriminating coin collectors and history mavens covet the ancient Roman tribute pieces to Claudius Gothicus.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> By mid-270, there were frightening rumors circulating among the Emperor's soldiers, their spouses, and their families. These centered on the Emperor's distemper, moral weakness, and paranoia. When the specially-constructed wooden backdrop was finished, the gold-breasted and zealously guarded Ruler crept circumspectly into the cell beside his coveted prisoner, Valentine. The successor to the much villified and imperial Galenius smirked. He stuffed bits of fabric in his royal ears. The screams of the dying victim rocked him back on his heels and made him sick (and now often woke him up in the middle of bloody dreams). So, the great Claudius did not linger. He swung hastily on his paranoid heels and departed as Valentine the Physician and Healer's was still breathing. Valentine had just glared at him contemptuously before any arrows flew. He produced no last statement, or so it seemed. Just outside the stone jail, Claudius haughtily ordered that his bowmen do more: one sharp arrow should pierce the Upstart's left eye, a second should crash through his right. A third should smash with no mercy into his nose, then one to his mouth, and a final one was to cut open his wicked heart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> 'But wait, fools,' the Emperor barked. 'Let the condemned linger a bit. Maybe he will still feel some flicker of life for some time. I swear by all the gods about his heart, <em>Make it bleed</em>.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> As the sun went down, Claudius ordered that Valentine's pierced and dead body should be wrapped in a plain and inexpensive cloth and laid on the ground (not buried) beyond the town's western border. Packs of wild dogs roamed that territory. No foot travelers or stray items left outside of Naissus residences were safe from them. The hungry, homeless canines soon smelled and then feasted voraciously on Valentine's mouldering body and blood. A red-stained metal coin, bearing a clumsy image of the great Claudius, slipped out of each clenched, rigor-hardened palm on Valentine's body. The rounds of metal were soon covered with dust and buried by winds that blew aimlessly back and forth, obscured and lost forever perhaps.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Someone had affixed to the humble shroud of Valentine, in darkness, right after his gruesome death, a little note written in his blood. It read simply, <em>"To my Valentine, with everlasting love."</em> An imperfect shape of a human heart was traced, again in a bloody red hue, below these words. An arrow bisected the crudely formed heart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> * * *</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> During the waning days of his second year over Roman Empire, Claudius Gothicus and his minions rode toward Upper Moesia. The barbaric Goths were swooping toward the Emperor's chair again, like gloom-filled waves on a prehistoric sea, craving an encounter with the better organized Romans. Paranoia and loathing increased by the hour in Claudius' camp. His soldiers all suffered from pangs of worry and self-doubt.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> But other priorities soon pulled Claudius far away, no surprise. The 'sum of all Caesars and more,' as he referred to himself, could still not face full-on war's bloody gushes, mess and mayhem, and death throes. Claudius handed the campaign to subdue the Goth hordes to his general, Aurelius, on the road outside of Upper Moesia. Claudius wheeled his white steed around, ordered his well-polished bodyguards to follow him <em>very </em>closely, and headed post-haste to the sheltered village of Sirinium, his newfound 'strategic defense point' for Roman officers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> A bitter and deadly surprise awaited Claudius around the Sirinium sanctuary. Borne by black-mouthed and ravenous rodents, plague swept overland in the backpacks and food stores of both Vandals and Goths. It lurked, like a hidden avenger behind palace curtains, for the arriving Romans. The disease was quick acting, painful, and merciless. It targeted the rich, the poor, the powerful, and the powerless. Word of this crisis zipped throughout the Empire like a sharpened spear racing through the sky. Then shocking news spread that the terrible sickness had poisoned and struck down the Emperor Claudius, two short years after his ascent to his throne.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> In a vain attempt to acknowledge with respect the passing of the bloodthirsty and cowardly paranoid, commoners, military conscripts, and even the Roman Senate extolled the reign of Claudius the Emperor. His successor dedicated himself to the gods and the challenges faced by the Empire. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong></strong><br /></span>
<strong></strong><br />
<strong> It's <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Not Easy to Be King</span></strong><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Stories about the legendary Valentine were circulated and repeated, and embellished in primitive Upstart communities throughout the Empire. The memory of Claudius the Second faded quickly among the righteous, then disappeared, like the blood-tarnished and buried coins that fell from a corpse's clutches back in 269. The Peace of Constantine during 313 altered the ruthlessness of Roman culture toward Upstart beliefs and practices in significant ways. Tall tales and mythical episodes, and historical accuracies, could be shared openly. Long, consoling household suppers for those attracted to the Upstart way, family style affairs, now in above-ground settings, featured prayers to their deity, ritual. and ever-evolving verbal accounts of great deeds from the past that inspired. Some stories centered on the brave Valentine and the horrible one who had consigned him to a painful death..</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> As new voices and earnest preachers passed on accounts of Valentine's heroism, some were eventually recorded. One mystery Valentine was a promising and valiant physician and was convicted for the crime of sedition at the stern command of Claudius. Another was a courageous priest early in the 4th Century who staunchly refused to stop initiating Upstarts and stop witnessing marriages underground in defiance of strict Roman decrees. He suffered execution. Another legend, largely detail free, taught that a noble and holy bishop named Valentine from the early 400s ran afoul of unfriendly Roman authorities and was hanged when he would not renounce his faith.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> During the year 496, Pope Gelasius recognized religious promise of a particular day of the year: the 14th of February. Long before the ancient Romans had embraced a pagan holiday -- a middle February celebration dedicated to the Roman god Juno. The utilitarian pontiff, Gelasius, opportunistically declared February 14 to be forever and unquestionably the Feast of Saint Valentine, a hero who died with courage in response to pagan persecution.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Perseverance and commitment, and transcendent bravery, were the hallmark spiritual values of the Valentine lesson originally, not romance, not erotic love. Persistent though, among believers in the dark centuries when the distinct Valentine legends were molded, were compelling rumors about a mysterious love note carried secretly by a jailer to a young girl from a dank prison cell long ago. The simple note, a paradigm for modern valentines, declared <em>'With everlasting hope and love, from your Valentine.'</em> The crude and bloody image of the writer's heart, pierced by a soldier's (not Cupid's) arrows, still causes heartbeats to flutter around the world to this day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Of course, the evil and paranoid, most wicked small man, Claudius Gothicus, a vicious coward and murderer, is an historical footnote. He is remembered at times as a monster -- but not as the glorious ruler whom he dreamed that he would be. Sometimes, even for living legends, it is not good to be the king.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Power is a drug. Time is a raging river. Each moment presents a tipping point. The doorways to hope, love, and tomorrow remain ajar.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Soundtrack for this Story:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Gotye, "Somebody That I Used to Know"</span></b></div>
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<b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY</a></b></div>
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<strong>###############</strong></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-46159055105294678672014-10-09T10:37:00.000-04:002014-10-14T16:45:16.123-04:00Leaving Normal: A Family Fable<span style="background-color: #ffe599;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black;"></span></span><em></em><br />
<strong><span style="color: #cc0000;"> And bewildered by the world we see, Why do people hurt us so?<br /> Only those in love would know, What a town without pity can do.<br /> If we stop to gaze upon a star, People talk about how bad we are.<br /> Ours is not an easy age -- We're like tigers in a cage,<br /> What a town without pity can do.</span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000;"> -- Gene Pitney,<em> "A Town Without Pity"</em></span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000;"> Some day this pain you are enduring will seem useful to you.</span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000;"> -- Ovid the Poet, <em>Metamorphoses</em></span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"> A Fugue in</span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> the Backdrop</span></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span></span></strong><br />
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<em>In a moment, as with the swift and urgent clack made by two long fingers suddenly snapping hard on a muscular grown-up's hand, he senses that he can think. His first inclination is wonder and amazement. Then a choking trepidation and ominous fear well up, for he cannot move, cannot see anything clearly, cannot pry open his eyes, cannot speak. Detached from all as it were, he just is. Through a milky cloudbank billowing in his closed eyelids, he can hear some musical strains (a Bach cantata? a classical fugue?), but barely. Someone, no, two people seem to be talking as if in conversation (as if arguing mildly) -- but not with him. To</em><em> everyone moving about in the bleached, white and antiseptic void called The Clinic, he resembles a deflated collection of burned-up and bandaged human remains, breathing ever so regularly but lightly, youthful heart flouncing mildly under latex white patches pasted to his charred chest and abdominal expanse, a human system full of experimental chemical substances that promise a possibly good outcome. A pencil-thin intravenous tube does its work flexibly, silently, sluicing relentlessly a gooey and opaque white substance into his pierced, sutured, and heavy gauze-wrap of a right forearm and wrist. The Patient has been lying motionless in this clinical bed for days and days (though efficient Clinic staff do appear regularly to flip him over mirthlessly and silently several times per day, a spotless sheet is pulled up to and tucked under his chin when The Patient is flattened supine on his scarred back and legs), as if he were a stranger's afterthought tethered by some nonchalant local natives to a starched and thinning linen pier until some mystery Collector can come, at last, to bundle up his remains to dispose of them.</em><br />
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<em>Most of this reality The Patient cannot sense and does not know. He cannot perceive with his senses and he feels no pain. Yet he has returned abruptly, unannounced, without gestures or words or other signals, from somewhere deep and dark and uncharted on any scientist's or daydream believer's maps. He intuits that he has come back in fragments, shattered, a patchwork identity.</em><br />
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<em>As he ponders the meaning of the milky clouds that now enfold him, his girlfriend . . . . Malia, the </em><em>scintillating and unavoidable young transfer student from the exotic lakes region of Nyanja, in the southeast quadrant of a territory once proclaimed British Central Africa. Malia Rupert Bananja -- genuine Malawian, a family princess and multi-racial jewel extracted and molded from the iron ore and mineral rich sediment that underlies the African peoples, with such a beautiful and exotic but level-headed manner, her long-legged gait so slinky and expressive, her slightly darkened, almost </em>cafe au lait<em>, complexion so marvelously silken and untainted, begins to materialize in the haze. But it's not really Mal. He can tell. The framework of this chimera's sheer body seems gauzy, see-through, nearly empty, like a ghost conjured by some tricky wizard. </em><br />
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<em>The Patient observes, bewildered, as a perfectly shaped black cat with three exquisite gray paws and one snowy white one suddenly begins to slink, then pick up the pace to a prance, around Mal's slightly parted and silk-slippered feet (the silk pair of shoes he had proudly helped her pick out at the open-air barter market called</em> Araby <i>amidst</i><em> a transitional</em> <em>Northside Chicago neighborhood), making tight and twitchy figure 8s, crazily, over and over and then over again, rubbing the smooth youthful skin on Malia's shins and foot tops sensuously with its lush mix of onyx fur, sinewy muscle, and curling black tail muscles. The Patient believes momentarily that this cat has caused him some trouble before (and his fragmented mind flashes momentarily on a cheap, wooden dinette table, a thick haze of tobacco smoke wafting through a room and on to a . . . kitchen). The feline's delicate paws leave precise footfalls of source-unknown, sticky blood on the floor. Whose freaking blood is that? The Patient is alarmed!</em><br />
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<em>Malia reaches wide-eyed toward The Patient with her right hand and arm. She frowns balefully as if in mourning. A wrinkled octogenarian, dressed in simple African brown-tint robes from an era long, long ago, sporting a wildly unshaped, wiry, gray and greenish beard on his cocoa colored face, appears without alert and lurks behind Malia, as if the true Elijah or Moses, keepers both of the sacred </em>Law of God<em>, has just been dispatched, chiseled stone tablet in hand, from the flat pages of the</em> Torah<em> in an ancient family bible. The aged, biblical specter wobbles and floats behind the girl Malia. The wrinkly figure then peers over Mal's perfectly rounded shoulder point to direct a stern and disapproving (could that be a</em> hateful<em>?) stare at The Patient. The biblical mirage throws his stone tablet to the floor and it shatters, in a mini-explosion, into microscopic particles. Momentarily, The Patient, quite confused and full of questions, has a flash of recollection?, imagination?, in which a female adult's arm embellished by a tightly closed fist whizzes past his face speedily. As it does this fist plants a solid haymaker of a punch on the former dreamer's cheek and jaw. The rockhard blow spins his face around and a jarring crunch within his neckbones can be heard. </em><br />
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<em>"Of course, you should go," the saddened Mal whispers intimately, lusciously, as if continuing an interchange somehow initiated long ago. Her warm and moist breath and her deeply glowing ruby lips feel like they are brushing very close to his face, stroking and caressing his ear, then lightly seductively biting his lobe </em><em>. . . . .</em> 'Good-bye, my love' <em>echoes in a female voice throughout the cloudiness.</em> <em>Then, without warning, a flood of tears, like soft tracer lines of corrosive red and bright orange paints, begin to drip from her black African eyes. They snake down to her finely-sculpted cheekbones. Soon the colored teardrops are dripping onto the floor and onto the manic cat's back from Mal's wet and quivering chin. </em><em>"Of course you should. Stiff upper lip here, mate, as the Brits say" she echoes again melodically, and it irrationally sounds to The Patient like the notes and lyric of an old pop ballad. "Cuz you never ever </em>know<em> -- no, you never ever </em>know<em> -- what a town without pity</em><em> . . can do."</em><br />
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'Do not stop and gaze. You're like tigers in a cage. For yours is not an easy age,'<em> the cryptic biblical phantasm transmits this musically via mental telepathy or some kind of trickery.</em> <br />
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<em>The slinky black feline stops cold in the midst of her prancing, bloodied figure 8s. She darts back into the milky clouded backdrop. Goodbye, my love. The image of Malia begins to fade backward slowly, steadily, and she vaporizes into the haze, not stepping on her slippered toes but gliding back through the smoky air. Goodbye, she waves. I </em>really <em>ought to go to help them out, he repeats to himself while staring at the slim bands of sticky coloring slicing down her face. 'Go. Of course, you should,' Mal's ghostly arm and hand outstretched dissolve instantaneously into ones that belong to some vaguely familiar old male. With reddened and heavy-lidded eyes ('You need to get some sleep before long, young man!' someone says authoritatively in the cloud bank), the old fellow stares cloyingly, nervously, at The Patient. His shaking and wrinkled right hand reaches desperately for a firm grasp on The Patient. But he has begun to sink away, his trembling old arm, head and stooped shoulders disappear, plunge, horrifically, as if he has just been kicked panic-stricken by cruel Fate through an open skyscraper window up in storm clouds.</em><br />
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Down a double shot for me before you leave, old friend,<em> The Patient thinks without prompting, feeling a twinge of grief.</em> <br />
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"Well, dammit, you know how it was. Always," The Patient lightly strains to take in that familiar but gruff male voice. This stirs him internally. Wiley, he says to himself. Wilton? In another room?<br />
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"You were too hard on him. All of his life, you know that. A rule and a reason for everything, every damn thing<em>.</em> Gotta get it all right. Get it so-oooo perfecto, like you would always demand it. The boy tried to get up to the hilltop but he popped, he got fried you know, under the strain" Some woman had whined this, barely audible, quite near him. "God, I need a goddamed drink." <br />
<br />
The Patient pictures agonizingly her fishing for a pint bottle of Kentucky bourbon from her purse. <br />
<br />
<em>The Patient actually grasps very little about this real-time scene in the medical clinic --he under-stands that he has returned from somewhere in silence. He knows not when, nor where the speakers are, nor where he has been in hiding. In fact he does not even realize that he is The Patient or</em> A Patient, <em>nor who he happens to be nor how old he is, nor what he should be calling himself. He intuits that he has been cracked into little pieces like atoms on the inside. The Clinic sound-system's classical fugue rolls on elegiacally with a hushed thrum through his back channels. He remains fixed in place, perplexed, inanimate, his fears and confusion suffuse him with a tacky warmth, as from a vulnerable and flickering pilot light on some old-timer's iron stove.</em><br />
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<em>"You really must leave now, my love. But it should be a long study night for me and the girls. Can I please get two or three more of your awesome little pills before you go?," Malia whispers softly to him, seductively, her lips again hugging his ear, while laboring to sound reassuring rather than cloying. She caresses in her lovely arms the sensuous black cat with its blood-stained paws hanging down freely. The Patient reflexively gasps for breath when the cat's eyes blink before him for a long quiet second . He fixes on the ruby red polish on Malia's long, glistening fingernails. The Patient struggles to turn quickly (to run off to . . . .</em> where?) <em>but he cannot move at all. This eerie wish unfulfilled hurls him into an unseen and yawning sinkhole of worry and nausea. The male-female conversation he has barely overheard is becoming more fiery.</em> <br />
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"What, I mean what the hell or what, Lulu?" the man says.<br />
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"Yes, alright, <em>I was the one</em> who begged him to help them out. Big deal. How was I to know what awful things would happen? For God's sake? They would have never made it alive driving out there in the county and that weather all by themselves," Lulu exclaims. <br />
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"Funny the way shit do go," the man replies gruffly, mockingly. "He was working to get better. Going to meetings. Studying every day. Not using, as far as I could tell anymore. You know how it was, Lu. But still -- <em>they </em>were deep and deeper into the bottle. After bottle. After damn bottle. Dammit alive, it was like throwing a lit match into a gasoline pit pushing them all together once Wile had had his car crash." <br />
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<em>Loo-loo?, ponders The Patient.</em> ('I gave you life, young man, so don't you ever forget that,' <em>The Patient imagines Lulu sputtering angrily these very words in Myra's dark and smoky dining room long ago, far out in the floating murk. (</em>'Lu, that's enough already! Give him a break,' <em>says Myra, rising slightly, truly alarmed. The young man adds</em> 'But, Mom, you see you can't just all the time . . . '<em>) He grasps afresh, on some barely crafted youthful level, all the the dazed emptiness she has carted through her lifetime of mental abuse, addled thoughts, and alcoholic regrets.</em> <br />
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<em>Then inexplicably-- like the sharp click of snapping fingers on a steady hand, or as if a powerful electrical switch has been abruptly thrown, the nameless and faceless Patient senses that he is being gently caressed, enfolded completely into a generous hug, in the way that Malia stroked the onyx feline. His nausea and worries dissipate. He is carefully lowered to a supine position by some massive velvet Force. He floats on the placid surface of an unfamiliar country lake, like harmlessly swaying flotsam lightly tethered to a decrepit pier, indeed barely hooked up to his tenuous life on earth. Adrift on this placid lake, The Patient peers down innocently toward the water's bottom. Instantaneously he feels drugged massively, hallucinatory, chemically clubbed. He beholds a frightening scene shoot up toward him from the lake's depths, as if it were rising action from Dante's imagined inferno. In a moment his muscular athlete's body, soaked and sputtering in an unrecognizable automobile, is sinking weightlessly down after smacking into the side of a steep cliff. It is soon immersed in a swirling, Styxian pool of white-hot, steaming fluids as it clunks on the bottom. A frigid mix of snow and rainfall lands on his scalp through a collapsed sunroof. Burning white waters cascade down the cliff to crush him like an anvil thrown down by displeased gods. His beefy hands and solid forearms suddenly become deeply seared and burn agonizingly, as an acidic fluid shoots out at him. A driver's steering wheel materializes and then melts like intensely hot liquid metal into his fingers and palms, yet he clutches what's left with passion. Now he is being doused by a noxious fire-spray from all sides. It flash fries his body and soul into a charred saucer full of smoldering coal ash.</em> <em>The Patient yells frantically for assistance. Over and over. And yet again. But sadly, no one can hear him, not even Myra or Wilton. Minutes later, The Patient lies inert, seemingly unperturbed, on the bed in The Clinic. The gentle, rocking velvet Force of protection remains stripped cruelly away. He knows that he has dreamed this way manically many times before while laid out languidly on the hospital bed -- surrounded by concerned and efficient staff members, and some lingering family members on occasion -- but </em>never,<em> </em>ever<em> his dark-eyed girlfriend, Malia -- while everyone longed to do more.</em><br />
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<em>For days and days, all is suspended in darkness, a thought-starved twilight, in The Patient's induced abyss. The few of his major blood vessels that were uncooked are pulsing with platelets and whirring away calmly -- thanks to The Doctor's painkilling, memory-blotting substances, while machines digitally declare him to be alive. The electronic banks peer silently at the hushed Clinic workers like the high-strung black cat that leaped onto Wilton and Myra's abandoned dinette table. But The Patient on one afternoon in the future will -- as his dose of The Doctor's special, experimental IV drug is reduced intentionally, judiciously, as hours go by -- at last pry open his eyes slowly and curiously, try to clear his dry and dusty throat, lick his cracked but salve-coated lips, twist his restrained and aching torso slightly to the left then to the right, then plaintively, hoarsely, </em>beg<em> for a cool drink -- just water, please, just </em>water<em> this time. It will be the moment when he first beholds The Doctor gazing down at him silently, like some speechless biblical patron or god, his dark brow furrowed, his white lab coat pulled over a neatly-collared blue shirt, all garments perfectly starched and buttoned-down, holding his hefty notebook and ink-filled pen in hand, as always more than ready to proudly document whatever would happen next. </em><br />
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<strong><span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"> <span style="color: #cc0000;">And This</span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> Is Normal </span></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span></span></strong><br />
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Normal is a small town that was built on a large bluff, in the center of a middle state, in the heartland of the U.S.A. It stands uphill to the infamous city of Bloomington, Illinois. These village twins are sometimes strangely referred to as <em>Blo-No</em> by locals on the prairies. Among other things, Normal is both the home of Illinois State University (<em>"Go, You Redbirds!"</em>) and the lone Mitsubishi plant in North America, which in a closed dome of throbbing robotic hums and whirs rolls out shiny new Eclipses and Endeavors around the clock every day. The Normal region's steady population stood at 54,321 one Autumn nightfall some time ago -- but it was decreased by a frantic and disastrous flash of events, plus a simple medicinal miscalculation, by exactly four persons, as an icy cold darkness and a freezing, wintry mix began to fall from the sky. Much of this unfolded in and near the graying, rural Ascension Health Care Center, a severely understaffed medical facility, on the rolling Illinois farmlands, just a few miles away from Normal, in old Ascension County and the raggedy old uplands township known to all locals as Icarus Falls.<br />
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A main character in this unlikely fable, The Patient, has been heavily medicated and forced daily to put on scratchy nursing scrubs colored teal or iron gray (thus identifying him as a person in heavy, chemical treatment), feels bereft of all the worldly possessions that he has ever owned, including his memories, his name, and his past. The Patient got his first return look around the town of Normal, and then a glance at the bland and fraying campus of Illinois State, from the smudged window of a crowded college bus carrying the Evansville Purple Aces' wrestling team. He had been absent for two years of hard study and Summer jobs, and lots of drinking. The outskirts of Normal stretched into a patchwork collection of decaying, downscale neighborhoods, including the old one in which he had been born. Before he became The Patient, he had veered, as in a runaway vehicle, to Evansville University in Indiana. At age 20, when this brief road-trip back to a leaf-strewn Normal, buffeted by chilly Fall breezes, The Patient was tall and muscled heavily in all the right places, possessed strong chin and cheek bones, seemed attractive to most of the girls he met, and looked to be a promising athlete -- especially when he suited up in his carefully-fitted Purple Ace sweatsuits and colored uniforms from the <em>New Balance</em> company. At that moment, as the team bus pulled under the arched roof of the creaking ISU fieldhouse, he had no suspicion that he would within nine additional months transfer back, as an intellectually-gifted and strongman junior, thus becoming a varsity wrestling Redbird who had received a generous athletic scholarship. This would occasion his return to his parents' new household and his family members. He would meet Malia. He would accept a first, small glass of whiskey from Wilton and Myra who were scared and trembling, and drunk as usual. He would fish pills out of his blue jeans pocket. Taken all together, these conditions set the stage for a monstrous string of events on one Fall day regarding all things Normal.<br />
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<a class="image" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HortonFieldHouse.jpg"><img alt="" class="thumbimage" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/HortonFieldHouse.jpg/220px-HortonFieldHouse.jpg" height="165" width="220" /></a><br />
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<strong>Athletic Fieldhouse at Illinois State</strong><strong> University</strong><br />
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Elsewhere as the day of the ISU road trip came around a second main character, an immigrant herein to be known as The Doctor, studied with vigor and daydreamed in his cramped office space. The Doctor had crafted a daily uniform that he thought of as peculiarly American -- and he wore it with a fierce pride now that he was licensed in neuropsychology. It included a freshly pressed medium blue shirt with a button-down collar, perfectly-hemmed mocha slacks, shiny brown slip-on shoes, and a starched white lab coat with big pouch pockets. He received his first glance of midtown Normal (and then the university campus) when he came for an interview, with his young wife from Algeria, at the medical institute over on the university's margins. The couple had met in Bloomington. The Doctor was a new resident, from Oman, while she was a promising graduate student in experimental psychology. The Omani doctor dreamed constantly that he would soon be on the verge of a major professional breakthrough, a career-building masterstroke, one that would ensure him the brightest of careers in modern neurology, generous professional journal acknowledgements, and envious whispers of <em>"That would be him, yes, over there" </em>behind his blue-shirted back at high-stakes world congresses full of starstruck admirers. He experienced a humorless irony that he was at last a Ph.D. but stuck on treating hayseeds with common emotional blights and textbook neurological issues in a middle-American zone called Normal.<br />
<br />
These two strangers, the catatonic and scarred survivor of a fiery and remarkably violent night on slippery country roads beyond Normal and the daydreaming but brilliant doctor of science, bounced gently against one another for the first time when the insentient crash survivor was rolled carefully, gently, one morning into a trauma bed in The Clinic near the university. The Omani believed after a few weeks had passed, because the patient's coma proved persistent, that Fate itself had drawn them together. The patient later feared -- once he had been raised out of his long drug-fueled sleep into that fragile awakening -- that the ravenously cruel universe had been stalking him for years, as so many paranoid chemical dependents constantly do, and that it lurked still like a stealthy predator, big panther's teeth razor-sharp and exposed, in the raw chilliness just beyond his frosty bedroom window. Once the two strangers from opposite sides of the globe began to converse haltingly, genuine therapeutic progress remained elusive for weeks. In secret, the doctor began to feel his chance at the big, career-making breakthrough was disintegrating. Perhaps we would not be the lucky and skilled man who was to be revered forever for putting the<em> neuro</em> back into the science. The laggard Patient seemed often to paddle aimlessly around a sea of self-pity, lost in his fragmented identity and confusion -- that is, until the game-changing day of March 25th came along.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-size: small;">Icarus and Daedalus Have a Bad Day</span></strong><br />
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At midday on the 25th of March, about ninety days since his arrival at the medical facility, The Patient sits upright in his chair and startles the Omani man. <br />
<br />
Over a few weeks, he has only said three things (each only one time) to The Doctor. By the time the last of this the trio of exclamations had been made the therapist was beginning to ruminate, unsettled, on the possibility that the accident survivor was making a circumspect effort to run an addict's con on him. Months later, an astute graduate assistant looking over the detailed booklet of Doctor's session notes informed The medical man, who did not watch many films, that each statement was an allusion to a legendary American movie. <br />
<br />
First there was, 'Really. When you talk that way my head spins like that poor girl who was possessed.'<br />
<br />
Second, 'You really want to know the password? Well, sir, it's, it's -- <em>Why so Serious?'</em><br />
<br />
And third came, 'I picture a black-haired girl and a black cat with bloody paws. She said I'm in jail. But hell c'mon let's get going, Jake. It's Chinatown.'<br />
<br />
The Doctor was massively frustrated and concerned. Yet, on March 25th, without preface, as hints of the Spring season announced their presence outdoors, The Patient enunciated a spoken monologue, a veritable bursting of a mental dam. Every syllable that was verbalized (as in all past encounters in these quarters) was recorded by a small, noiseless digital drive strategically situated within the therapy suite. The patient was not aware of this. He would not have been pleased had he known. The promising neurologist had posed a simple question while just trying as usual to get the The Patient to crack open his closed and locked front door. <br />
<br />
'What happened when you went in there?,' The Doctor asked. <br />
<br />
He hopes for a terse little reply at least. Overall, he impatiently accepts this patient's current behavior as a reasonable defense mechanism. He thinks that it will persist until the young man's bodily systems, membrane and cortex and skull included, further adjust, downshifting, via the potent and experimental drugs that he ingests unknowingly intravenously day by day. The flurry of words that ensues is a surprise to The Doctor. He feels flushed and his heart rate quickens. Absentmindedly, he drops his hands, his notebook pad, and his ink-filled pen into his lap. The Doctor's eyes widen, crosses his legs, and listens:<br />
<br />
<em>So you want to know what happened in there? When it all came down? Did you know that George Eliot once said in a book that there are entire continents unmapped inside each and every one of us. So. I, I -- I was pretty smart back then. Everybody said so, for a wrestler, they joked kind about that. Jockdom rules they say. The great philosopher Kant once said there are two things we wrestle with the more we study them: the mysteries of the stars and the moral law. Isn't that just terrific? The moral imperative and all that. I had begun to feel like I should do something big and right with my life, or bring some worthy cause to a righteous resolution. To be great. To be somebody. Groomed for it by my parents I was, especially my dad. In the end. To reach the heights of my "potential." -- My parents were freaking me out over school and my scholarship, even though I was doing great. They just loved the money my school work and scholarship saved them. My sarcastic 'you can do it, son' of a mother, who faded in and out with her bourbon shots and bitching rants all my life, and my mopey father with all the strictness and perfectionism and the 'my way or the highway,' and 'you just can't fail, son' lectures kept trying to con me into thinking I had great things in store. Study harder, make 4-damned-0 grades, thank the Lord for the endowment, son. Always at me about it. I was a case, a nervous wreck, dammit. Jesus Christ, I was about a 4.0 junior. What the crap? I couldn't do much better. I was winning all my matches on the wrestling team. So. I was downing handfuls of Dexies, one after the other, for days. There was a little bit of crank and chronic mixed too when I could get them. Other campus drugs. Players can get 'scrips pretty easy. I had aches and pains all the time from wrestling and the long road trips. I just about stopped eating -- with those lines of speedos in me. But I was studying my butt off too. December exams weren't </em>that<em> far away. So. . . . My hands would tremble. That upset me. Taking some things would calm them down. Then, on day I crossed a river, crossed a line, when I picked up the Adderall and some Effie's. I just took off. I stopped sleeping and most of my eating as well. I dropped some pounds. Coach was barking about that. So I skipped a freakin' practice one day. No biggie, I think That afternoon, my mom asks me if I would help drive my aunt and uncle over to the township because of an accident and emergency. I called Malia then went to see her. She told me I should go. And I don't remember much of anything after. Have you ever gone blank, weirded out, dropped off the grid for a while, Doctor? Sometimes I am so petrified, blackouts, I hate them. I had heard about blackouts, but . . . wham! How much time has really gone by since I drove them? . . . You gotta get this 'cuz you are so smart. The playwright Beckett once said that nothing's more satisfying, more exquisite, than unknowing and unhappiness. Which all brings me to my point of inquiry, why I have told all of this to ya. What's the diff between grief and depression? Is there a difference. 'Cuz they both seem the same. To me. </em><br />
<br />
The Doctor is tempted to sigh politely <em>Ahem</em>. He sips some water from a coffee mug. He is trying to get to a main point of what he has just heard. Momentarily, he wonders if the scarred young patient is together enough, secretly, deceptively, to be trying to con him. <br />
<br />
The neurologist says, 'Yes. Of course there is a psychological distinction. So, you felt that you were on the brink, on the edge, pressured at all times. Talk about the nerves, the angry resentments you were feeling. What finally got to you?'<br />
<br />
<em>Yep, you could say I was on the edge. Well-played, sir. So I had stopped drinking, cold turkey, but I didn't stop the pill parade. For four weeks before. Yeah I was flipping out. Like when someone steps, you know, for the first time to the Grand</em> <em>Canyon's rim, Arizona ledge, just before dawn? That deep black emptiness is just there beyond words. Like an awesome black velvet curtain is pulled across a movie screen. Then the first rays of sun creep up over the eastern horizon. Start bring it all into focus. Truth comes yawning wide. Mystery tells its timeless story, a some poet might say. It plucks the damn breath right out of your lungs. Your heartbeat cranks. Its living on some living thing deep in darkness. So I wasn't sure how not to fall of the ledge. The first drink rang my bell. And I was mad, like let down, by everybody. That's what I felt. </em><br />
<br />
He asks, 'And you saw what as that sun light began to reveal your truth?'<br />
<br />
<em>Really, was I in a coma or did you just put me there? I hear months have gone by or what? Here's the deal. What I remember. I was climbing up on something white and flat but I fell back, yanked by the back of my jersey, and then down I went real hard, cranium first. Panicked me like I was gonna die . I dropped back so quick. Powerless. Something or somebody pulled me back. I finally slammed down after descending forever. Something like a trillion volt electric shock shot through me. Then it all goes to the white noise and everything. I sense I'm being burned alive. Look at these scars, man. I can't look in the mirror. I'm awful. Then. So. I go down and there was just the 'Bee-beee-eeeee-pppp' that drags on and on and on. </em>(The Patient imitates the sound of a flatline reading on a digitized medical machine.)<br />
<br />
The two gaze impassively at each other. The Doctor says, 'You were badly injured. You slipped into a comatose state. Broken skull, deep-degree burns all over, a swollen ravaged cortex, lost fingers and toes resembling cinders. It is a mystery how you actually made it through.'<br />
<br />
The patient smiles. <em>So. O-kay. I went insane in the membrane? Hey, I've got it. I should write this all down. It'll be a heartstopper of a show, man. Broadway stage, bright lights, action. Years of touring company shows and standing ovations. A morality tale about intemperance and human folly. So. You and I will have lead parts naturally, yes we'll be the wisdom chorus. So. That's gonna happen then. For sure.</em><br />
<br />
The neurologist finds that his mind commences to wander. Taped sessions often have this disorienting affect on him. Then in a flash something the patient had disclosed about swinging downward, panicked, from the hospital gurney -- ambition thwarted, head down and flailing toward a stony cold floor -- posed a tentative answer to the riddle he had been contemplating.<br />
<br />
The Omani later wordlessly records notes in black ink. First, he draws the universal symbol for depression -- a capital I stroked through a fat O (a zero). The therapist strains to remember all he has learned about anterograde amnesia. -- He scribbles quickly: <em>College wrestler.</em> <em>Falls back. Psychogenic fugue, dissociative. Brain trauma.Guilty or Bluff? Explore conflicts with father figures! </em><br />
<br />
Then the physician in the starched-crisp lab coat says they are almost finished for the day. 'You start to remember some of these details exactly when?,' he inquires. <br />
<br />
This induces The Patient's look of pain and confusion. Very quietly, hollowly, the patient shrugs and claims, <em>I don't recall. Honestly.</em><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"> </span><span style="background-color: #9fc5e8;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Icarus in the Land of Nod</span> </span></span> </span></strong></span><br />
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Later that day, The Patient writes with a sharpened lead pencil on a legal pad. He shudders when he looks at the extent of the burn scars on his hands and arms. He has taken to avoiding all mirrors. It is now night time. He sits in his scratchy scrub suit in the uninviting lounge reserved for long term in-patients. He concentrates closely on his sentences. A heavy metal tune he has never heard before comes speeding, pumping, thumping rhythmically, ear-piercingly from some wickedly messed-up guy's room down in the darkened labyrinth of The Clinic<br />
<br />
<em> </em> <em>Ex-it light<br /> Enter night</em><br />
<em> Take my hand, Grain of sand<br /> We're off to never, never land.</em><br />
<br />
He has begun to draft his stage play. Here is what he puts down. <br />
<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><strong><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black;">Author's note: Lush black curtains part. The lighting on stage silently adjusts to a muted autumn glow. It discloses a cheerless, middle-class apartment in an aging building. Dark outdated furniture and too many nick-knacks make the space seem overcrowded. A sulphuric odor infuses the area due to decades of cigarette smoke and dust on the heavy curtains. A small, cheap wood dinette table and four chairs rest in a nook near the old kitchen. A quart of Old Crow whiskey sits on the exact center of the tabletop. A purplish spotlight, with heavy bands of tobacco smoke wafting in it, illuminates the bottle. Next to the table, a big carton denoting Old Crow </span><span style="color: black;">holds ten identical quart-size containers, lurking there patient, wordless, and cunning as the militant blackbird stamped onto the shipping box. A lithe midnight black cat with three gray paws and one white one lies on the floor next to carton. Two full shot glasses sit on the table. One belongs to an older man, the husband, Wilton Topper. The other belongs to his wife, Myra. Everything is still. Myra sits motionless, head tilted down. Wilton is on his hands and knees. The cheap <em>brrr-ing-gg</em> of the Toppers' doorbell sounds. Once. Twice. </span></span></strong></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"><strong><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black;">Myra turns her vacuous face to the audience slowly. She seems flushed from steady whiskey-drinking all day. As if on cue, Wilton begins to cry aloud and pounds the floor. He lowers his face close enough to kiss the dusty carpet. The door creaks open slowly, like in a horror film. A tall young adult male, very fit and</span><span style="color: black;"> muscular, steps in gingerly. He is carrying some college textbooks. Myra smiles slightly. The young man's voice sounds nervously thin and high-pitched. He is perspiring from his rush to get there despite that it is a breezy and cool autumn afternoon.</span></span></strong></span><br />
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"Aunt Myra?" the young man asks hesitantly.<br />
<br />
"The liquor man was just here this morning," Myra blurts absently, as if startled awake from a daydream. Wilton rubs his bloodshot eyes and struggles to his feet. He wipes a few tears from his face.<br />
<br />
Kyle dumps his pile of books into a dark, cracked leather recliner chair -- <em>Abnormal Psych, Metamorphoses </em>by Ovid, and a new edition of <em>The Secret Life of Chaos. </em>"Mom said that Wiley was in trouble or something. She wanted me to come down and help you guys. So. How is he doing? What's going on?"<br />
<br />
Wilton begins to weep again. "He's dead, dead and gone. My poor, loving twin, my brother's -- dead! Never did he hurt anybody. I swear. My beloved, gone, a great man to all."<br />
<br />
"Not dead at all, Kyle," Myra says exasperated. "Wile was in some kind of car wreck out by Icarus Falls. Got pretty banged up. But he'll live. Roads really wind around and dip out there."<br />
<br />
"Icarus Falls. Huh. There's a name," Kyle says genially. "So. You need someone to drive you, Mom says. So. Okay, sure. I got it for ya." Kyle looks at the Old Crow bottle with edgy hunger and a deep thirst welling up in him. He has not drunk beers or alcohol, not a drop, for weeks. But he has taken, on this mid-term exam day, three, four -- maybe one or two more of his amphetamine caps since he got up. He cannot clearly recall how many he has swallowed.<br />
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<br />
Wil and Myra note that Kyle is peering weirdly at the whiskey bottle. "You need a drink, old buddy? Well, come on. Let's have it now, for Wiley," Wilton trumpets. He extends his aged arm over Kyle's broad shoulders and hugs him tight from the side. "You know, you're <em>o-kay</em>. I've always said that. Kyle, my boy, you're really <em>okay</em> by me in my book. Old buddy of mine. God love ya."<br />
<br />
"I shouldn't drink. I've been working hard. But I'm not sleeping much."<br />
<br />
"Well, then, you need to get some sleep before long, young man!," Wil replies. "You got a big life to lead. Man you're doing great! But dammit what harm's a little belt or two gonna make in the middle of the day?"<br />
<br />
"I guess I could really use one. I am feeling kinda jumpy today. So," Kyle says nervously. <br />
<br />
For <em>years</em> the young man has hated, seriously detested, Wiley the Twin, the guilty and convicted supreme court justice, ever since his full and sordid story had crept, then bombshelled, into the news. Wiley's fraudulent wrongdoings, perverted abuses, and stonewalling -- and his damned ridiculous slip and slide escape by lying from hard prison time, had led the idealist in Kyle, harboring great resentment over any System that would let a perverted creep walk, to his college focus on human psychology. Kyle thrusts his hand into his jeans pocket, feeling angry that Wiley has survived. He twists around a handful of amphetamine capsules safely tucked away in there with his long fingers. There are some other white tablets down there too, ephedrine or epinephrine or something like that his teammate had offhandedly claimed . Kyle wishes that he had more a stash with him, for a few more jolts of chemical lightning during the long roundtrip drive into the township and for a faux sense of personal reassurance in his gut. But he has just handed reluctantly three or four of the little white wonders in a tiny plastic bag to Malia Batanja so she could alertly do her mid-terms' cramming until late -- with a stiff upper lip, just like my Brit forebears, as she laughingly had mentioned.<br />
<br />
<em>I guess I can handle a shot or two then</em>, re-focusing on the sparkling quart container of Old Crow, he says to no one in particular.<br />
<br />
Wilton creeps into the cramped kitchen. As always, whenever a visitor comes to drink with the Toppers, he gets out a glass tumbler. Then he fills it with precisely four ounces of tap water. Carefully he wipes the whole surface with a paper towel. He takes the tumbler and a shot glass to the table. Then, Wilton finishes this ritual by pouring whiskey slowly into decorative glasses for all who want or need a fill-up. <br />
<br />
"How bad is Wiley then?," Kyle asks. <br />
<br />
"We don't know. Not yet. But, but, he's not dead or anything," Myra responds testily. Wilton starts to weep again. He squeezes his eyes shut and his fists tight. "Oh God," he moans. Exasperated, Myra stares out the dirty kitchen window. Seconds pass. "Too, too bad. Oh well," she says, slurring her syllables slightly.<br />
"He could be dead. My beloved twin lying there in the road. Broken. Dead," Wilton declares loudly.<br />
<br />
"We should get going soon," Kyle notes nervously. "It will get real dark before you know it. So . . . . Where are we going again?"<br />
<br />
"Supposedly he's in the emergency room or somewhere in the Ascension Hospital. Out in the township by the Falls. Can't miss the place they say if you drive the main highway out of town" Myra says. <br />
<br />
Wilton eyes the full shot glasses. He snatches his quickly, then lifts it high. He winks at Kyle directly. "I've been there -- couple o' times, oughtta be pretty easy to find, big sign by the highway . . . . But, now, here's to Wiley, here comes Da Judge, a great man, a great lawyer, and the best damned brother, the best ever, that any man could have! Bottoms up."<br />
<br />
All three drink the inexpensive whiskey in full gulps. Kyle feels the liquid burn like fire burn down his windpipe. It hits his empty, drugged stomach like a muffled grenade explosion. "Wow," he gasps. He catches his breath, his eyes water a little, and his head starts to spin. "Oh, oh <em>yeah."</em> At that, feeling betrayed and guilty, Kyle feels there is big rumble of trouble to come. He petitions for a second shot. He sucks the stuff down with relish. "So. I guess we better go," he then notes reluctantly. <br />
<br />
Once they are outside heading to their sedan, Kyle carts his college texts then squints through the dusty kitchen window. The black cat, Maxwell, leaps onto the dinette set and walks around a while. Then the feline stares menacingly at Kyle with its haunting yellow eyes.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #9fc5e8; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"> <span style="color: #cc0000;"><strong>Slip and Fall </strong> </span><span style="color: blue;"><strong> </strong></span></span></span><br />
<br />
The patient writes again with the pencil on a legal pad. Much time has passed. It is the middle of a morbidly hot August. His early writings from back in March sit in a stack beside him, the edges of papers curling up in the humidity. It has taken a long time to get him back on this task. He sits in the long term patients' lounge in his scrubs, feeling perspiration running down his once-cracked up ribcage under his scrub shirt. He gazes down at the yellowed flooring. Remembering, thinking, choosing words honestly proves hard. It is sweltering and dark outside. The music choice this evening, the closing medley of <em>Abbey Road</em> by The Beatles, as on many other nights, is drifting out some classic rock lover's room down in The Clinic's labyrinth. <br />
<br />
<em>Once there was a way to get back homeward</em><br />
<em> Once there was a way to get back home . . . . </em><br />
<em> Sleep, pretty darling, </em><em>Do not cry</em><br />
<br />
He has begun at last to draft Act 2 of his original drama. Putting some final, pencilled-in brushstrokes on Act 1 an hour earlier has encouraged him. On this night the climax and falling action of his stage play still need to be spelled out. <br />
<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><strong><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black;">(The curtains part. The muted autumn glow has been transformed into a dark and gloomy night filled with cold rain. Three characters ride in a sedan. Kyle Kohl is the driver. His clothes, his forearms, his hands are streaked with tacky smears of blood. He presses a wad of white tissues to his forehead to cover a deep, oozing cut that he has sustained. In the back seat, Myra tries unsuccessfully to pour from a quart bottle of Old Crow into her glass tumbler. She gives up, then drinks a big swig from the bottle. Myra hands the bottle and the tumbler forward to Wilton via shaky hands. The blood on Kyle terrifies her. Wil takes the items and downs another mouthful. A passenger van led by bright headlights whizzes by speedily, going the other way. It's windy wake rocks their speeding car. The tissue wad falls from Kyle's hand. With a shaky grip, Wilton plucks a Kleenex from a box on the front seat. He wipes the open top of the whiskey bottle carefully. Then Wil hands the quart to Kyle, who shakes his head no. Another vehicle, bigger, a rumbling cargo truck, speeds by, its headlights blazing. Their car sways harder this time. Kyle's bloody hands positioned in the 10 and 2 spots on the wheel grip it tighter. He looks over at Wilton. The old man passes him the container of whiskey.)</span></span></strong></span><br />
<br />
"You're okay, old buddy . . . My buddy. You're really okay in my book. I ever . . . ever tell you . . . that?" Wilton slurs his words. He does not seem perturbed by the stinking, wet blood all over Kyle. It looks like he is about to pass out.<br />
<br />
"Let him be and drive or something. Gotta get home now. Ta, to tooo e-eat," Myra says unsteadily. These will be some of the last words she speaks on earth. She lolls her head back on the seat, and appears to have slipped swiftly down into a deep slumber.<br />
<br />
"Wiley, he gon' a be . . . o-kay," Wilton says. He wags an index finger sternly at Kyle. "Not ga-guil-tee. At all. You know, boy."<br />
<br />
"Yeah. The man's gonna be a-okay. Up and around and running like mad again real soon, just like new. Sure looks like it okay. For sure. So," Kyle says this ruefully, a slight but insincere grin creasing his face. He is trying to avoid an argument with his uncle, who seems more than ready for a little fight over Wiley's criminal legacy. Kyle had been shocked when he strode into Wiley's emergency suite at the Ascension Center. The injured man was pierced with IVs and tagged with many patches that monitored his vital signs. Wiley Topper, the former supreme court justice of Illinois, was wrapped up like an alabaster mummy. He was aware of their presence but was heavily drugged. The judge waved weakly with his left forearm when he noticed their hushed arrival. Wiley's shy and quiet wife, Hanna, stood and cried a few feet from the judge's bed. Wiley could seemingly communicate with whispers only. Wilton lightly grasped his twin's bandaged left hand with both of his. He leaned low to hear what the judge was attempting to share. Kyle felt like he was spinning on a carnival ride. He craved another blast of the whiskey all of a sudden. His mouth seemed remarkably dry. He snorts over the twins' reunion and walks into the hallway. He locates a drinking fountain. Alone, he swallows another capsule of dex and to of the ephedrine tabs with the cold water that spouts up. <br />
<br />
"He says he's <em>really really </em>sorry. Sorry ass of a twin brother. Damn. For <em>every-thing</em> he done he's so sorry," Wilton notes drunkenly to Kyle. <br />
<br />
Another sedan, headlights burning bright, goes whooshing past them. Kyle fears he might lose control of the wheel if this keeps up. <br />
<br />
"That's what he said. To me. Ta-night. My, my . . . old buddy. You, a good driver you are. Weather's <em>real-ly</em> bad." -- He pauses. "Don't . . . don't tell anyone. Okay. Just for you, I'll tell you it all. Some day. Soon. So very sorry for all of the. . . it that happened."<br />
<br />
<em>He should be goddamit, Kyle screams to himself in silence</em>. He's about to meet his Maker and His Maker ain't too damn pleased with his final report card. Kyle has felt secretly ashamed for years to have this creep, this felon that everybody knows about, in the family. Wiley had been impeached, at last, while suspended from his seat on the esteemed court. Kyle had heard the whispers and the sticky insults in school, on the team, on the TV news <em>forever</em>. Adept defense lawyering alone had managed to keep Judge Wiley the Topper free from long and gruesome years of debasing prison time.<br />
<br />
"Have another drink with me? A little one at least?," Kyle asks nervously. He wants Wilton to just shut up like Myra had. The uphill slant of the road toward Icarus Falls suddenly goes very curvy and slick. Kyle's head is still spinning wildly -- unsteady, drunk and dopey again.<br />
<br />
"He never did it. Never done any-thing . . . bad," said Wilton. "Never. Ain't that right? My-ra? Not gu-gil-guilty of any of it."<br />
<br />
As the car hydroplaned toward a sharp bend, a truck racing at a thundering speed -- its headlights blinding, its black steel grillwork reflecting the heavy lines of raindrops in the air -- swerved on two wheels into the oncoming lane. Kyle yelped. Wilton never saw it coming. <br />
<br />
Kyle turns hard to the right. The Topper sedan smashes through the flimsy wooden roadside barrier. Now they all fly in the car rapidly, weightlessly, wet and wild, down toward the shallow river that pools in swirls and gurgles at the base of Icarus Falls. Wilton's door flies open suddenly. He grabs for Kyle. But the old man desperately slides feet first out of the car and plunges down quickly, turning to dive head down like a wobbly diver, into the dark water. As the old man's body enters the shallow and roiling pool, the top of Wil's skull finds a soft patch of muck at the bottom. His head slices down in the mud to his wrinkled chin. Wilton's slack, aged frame, lacking all control, curls and twists above the mired head in the foaming waters from the Falls.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the car rips through more blank space. Kyle frantically peers wide-eyed into the flash of his headlights shining back to him from the geared-up waterfall. The wiper blades on the windshield switch back and forth with a ticking sound as time, for Kyle, begins to slow way down. Everything seems to go silent. Kyle feels the eeriness of flying gravity-free (as in a roller coaster's mad descent) until the sedan's front end tips down and smashes jarringly into the rock ledge hidden behind the cascades of water. Kyle feels his back crack into pieces. Passed out cold, Myra's old body, arms spread wide like curled airplane wings, barrels over the front seat like a thick tree trunk propelled by a horrific wind. Her left hand, made into a panic fist, lands a solid punch on Kyle's cheek as it sails by. Then the crown of her head smashes through the windshield and squirts blood in all directions. At an uneasy rest at last, Myra's wrinkled face, now a death mask, tilts toward Kyle. In shock, he beholds the remaining shreds of her facial features and they seem to be grinning. <br />
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Kyle prepares to grudgingly greet his Maker, the One who has unleashed so many evils, pains, and horros on <em>His</em> beloved people. -- <em>Oh well,</em> he imagines insanely that what's left of Myra is speaking to him. The car slams down to the base of the Falls on all four wheels. The tires pop and hiss loudly. Flames jump in a flash up around the crushed-back hood. Instantly, Kyle feels an awful searing sensation and detects the smell of burning flesh. His arms and hands begin to sting and ache deeply, insanely. Some kind of fiery liquid, spurting freely, sears patches of his face and chest off. And then blissfully the suffering lasts not too long. Every sensation begins to meld into a white, insentient cloud bank as he lapses (disappears to himself) like a diver flying off of a high rock mesa into a deeply persistent state of shock. <br />
<br />
<br />
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*** *** *** ***</div>
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The Patient squirms in his chair, then starts to furiously scribble additional stage directions though it is getting perilously close to the <em>Lights Out</em> command in The Clinic. It is still that hot August night. But he has reached a point in his story that confounds, frustrates, and leaves him feeling unmoored. The man in the teal scrubs is trying understand why the driver would be smeared with blood while commandeering, as if he were a drunken NASCAR pretender, Wil and Myra's aging vehicle. He strains to piece the story together. So little there, White light leads to white light leads to what?, he wonders. He writes fast before his time expires for the night.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>New Scene: The stage set blends into an antiseptic hospital suite. Thunder and lightning can be perceived through a back window. Wilton leans down over a heavily bandaged Wiley on the bed. Faithful wife and mannequin, Hanna, stands by her man. She looks stricken and skeptical as the twins huddle. Myra stands next to her. She grips Hanna's hand. Kyle stands stockstill -- then lurches suddenly as if wrested from a long sleep. Hanna turns sadly to be embraced by her in-law.</em></strong><br />
<br /></div>
"So. I'll just wait in the smokers' lounge or something. I have my books. So. I, I guess I can study," Kyle notes. Wiley and Wilton's overt secrecy bother him.<br />
<br />
"We'll be getting back to Normal soon. Before most of the storm. Because we got it now that Wiley's goin' to be okay. Don't go far or whatever," Myra says.<br />
<br />
"Somebody tried to murder the Judge. My God, oh God help us. Again its happened. The long nightmare's back. Won't this bad dream never end?" Hanna cries in her Southern drawl. "They tried to kill him again. Bumping him off the road. A black Ram truck a big one forced him off the township road, the police say."<br />
<br />
Wil's secret conversation with his brother continues. It seems to be heating up. Kyle wants to flee from the awful room. He strides into the neon hallway. The drowsy security guard posted by the door nods solemnly at him. Kyle nods back, trying to appear normal, sober, balanced. He reaches the sour-smelling visitors' lounge. He sits and picks up one of his textbooks. He tries fruitlessly to concentrate. He rests his head on the back of the chair, then closes his eyes. He craves the whiskey bottle in his Aunt Myra's oversize purse. The book slips from Kyle's hands and bangs on the floor. Kyle's chin tilts forward and goes slack. <br />
<br />
<strong><em>(</em>Author's notation:<em> All stage lights go out. Everything settles for a full minute into blackbox darkness and utter silence. Only audience murmurs and the occasional stifled cough can be heard. A hollow, booming finger-snap echoes in surround-sound throughout the theater indicating that something has changed. Playgoers jump in their seats. Then muted, smoky green lights come up once more.)</em></strong><br />
<br />
Kyle races back breathlessly into the hospital suite. There is no security guard around. A commotion of some sort and loud yelling have summoned him. An emergency siren starts to blare loudly, intermittently. Kyle surveys the scene. He feels confused and drunk. Damaged Wiley in his white bandages and IV tubes and digital patches has a choking grip on Wilton's wrinkled neck. Wilton has turned his back on his twin, kicking and screaming for his life. The pudgy security guard is trying to extricate the older twin. He fumbles clumsily to pull his pistol or perhaps a can of pepper spray out of his large utility belt. Hanna and Myra stand near the bed and scream for the brothers to stop. <br />
<br />
"It was this bastard damn you," Wiley yells. "I swear. It was him who planned it, ran the operation and all, all the time. I took the fall. He was weak and scared. I paid everything I had for it. My butt went to the line. Confess, you guilty bastard." He pulls harder around Wilton's squeezed neck. Wilton's eyes are bulging and he is turning a bright and scary red color.<br />
<br />
Kyle has for years loathed Wiley. But he has admitted that he was young at the most crucial times of the family crises and not certain about all the details regarding the criminality and scandals. He rejoiced, wildly hooting, in his house when the judge fell from his ill-deserved jurisprudent grace. Kyle looks around the suite. He is unsure about what to do. The blaring siren shouts are killed by someone. <em>'Stop it, you guys, now! I mean it.'</em> he yells stupidly. <br />
<br />
Old Wilton makes frightening, gurgling, choking noises. A strong urge to save his Uncle from his malicious brother comes to the fore. <span style="color: black;">As if from a mirage, a shiny and compact Emerson switchblade slides down from a pocket hole in Wilton's pants, where Myra had secreted it back at the Toppers' place. The Emerson clacks to the green floor by Wilton's flailing feet. Kyle stares in horror and disbelief. He looks at Myra and silently mouths <em>'What?'</em>. His aunt turns her vacuous gaze toward Hanna. Kyle can almost hear her weary <em>Oh well</em> sigh of resignation. Moving hastily, Kyle slides a few feet on his scrubs-covered shins and knees while leaning slightly back, as in a rock singer's big and bold finish to some concert, then grabs the deadly instrument. Kyle presses the spring button on the handle as he raises his arm high. The blade swings out and gleams like an icy terror in stop-action for a moment, an overhead pinhead purple spotlight fixed on it. The women gasp and shriek. The three older men wrestle for control.</span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black;">'Let him loose, Wiley. This is it dammit. I'm not kidding. So. This warning is the last damn one you'll ever get,' Kyle spits heatedly. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">However Kyle's angry scream has no effect. The young man takes a deep gulp of air. Emerson knife thrust out he leaps heartily to break up the squirming knot of aging male flesh. Soon hot rust red blood squirts up and spatters across the beige wall behind the bed. Moans and groans pierce the air. Greenish smoke pumps thickly onto the stage from all sides and from high and low. In a flash, the entire set is obscured by clouds and the audience is left to wonder why. </span><br />
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<strong><span style="background-color: #9fc5e8; color: blue; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"> <span style="color: #cc0000;">The Endgame Played </span></span></span></strong><br />
<br />
The patient decides to give it one more try with the pencil and pad. The window by his side is frosty. It is snowing lightly outside. He has been trying to finish the climax and denouement of his Act 2 for nine months, but no plausible idea has captured his attention. Most of his memories of the fateful trip to the Ascension Center elude him. It is Christmas Eve. One would expect the music choice in the labyrinth hallways would be obvious. But his classic rock-loving neighbor is gliding high with <em>The Eagles.</em><br />
<br />
<span _yuid="yui_3_1_1_2_1309620847317151"><em> But I know a place where we can go, And wash away this sin.<br /> We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by, And the tall grass wave in the wind.<br /> Just lay your head back on the ground, And let your hair spill all around me,<br /> Offer up your best defense, 'cuz this is the end, This is the end, of the innocence.</em></span><br />
<br />
<div _yuid="yui_3_1_1_9_1309620847317242" class="yiv1842003096MsoNormal">
The pencil tip skips and scrapes across the legal papers once again.<br />
<br />
<strong><em>(Final Scene: Kyle emerges like the guilty Macbeth from a billowy, green-tint smokescreen. He wrings his bloody hands and presses tissues on the oozing gash freshly carved into his reddened forehead. He twists his face anxiously toward a sudden clack in the hallway like some fallen Prince ready to flee his family's disintegrating kingdom. Hanna is groaning while slumped in a side chair. Soon she commences to weep uncontrollably. Myra shakes her head in disbelief as she walks unsteadily with her oversize clutch bag with quart bottle of the Old Crow concealed from the opaque green.)</em></strong><br />
<br />
"We've got to be scooting back now, honey," Myra says to Kyle in a tone that is otherworldly plaintive. "Easy now, you're a good, good boy. It's over. You finished it. For us you done it. Like we wanted you too. You . . . you've taken care of our last real big problem. Won't talk 'bout it to no one and Wiley, he won't tell, Wiles will go to his gr-ga-rave without talking. Men are gone. All. Thank you, Kyle. You're a big love. Look at them lying there. The Falls I tell you . . . it's not a good place for us to be right now. Let's scoot back. You got to be hungry. Gotta feed the cat too. But the long headache's gone. And dead and gonearoo. Oh well.'</div>
<br />
Kyle looks at his tired, old aunt seeking a sign of understanding or sympathy. <br />
<br />
"Aunt Myra. Look at this mess. What is all this? What the hell? Damn . . . . I'm all flipped over. I'm lost, I'm so <em>completely</em> <em>lost</em> here. What really brought us here? I don't know who I am or what I should do. I don't know where I'm at or why. I feel caught in somebody's web. So. Tell me. Please," he blurts. Then he bows his head and tears up.<br />
<br />
Myra hugs Kyle gently and pats his back. <em>You'll come back. You'll be o-</em><em>kay. Don't ask me. I jus' know it, </em>she whispers.<br />
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*** *** *** *** ***</div>
<br />
The Patient puts down his pencil. <em>Have a hap-hap-happy Christmas, it's such a hap-hap-happee hol-a-day, </em>he hums to himself. Stinging tears bedevil him. The Patient briefly has a flash of memory -- thin streaks, tears, but whose?, of corrosive dark red and bright orange drip down female cheeks. He wipes his wet, scarred palms on the scratchy scrub suit. The Patient wipes his nose furtively with a his finger stubs on his left hand then again with his long teal sleeve. At midday on December 24 he resolves that he will talk about that hellish night in the township. Walking down to the therapy room, The Patient hums a tune again.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><em> <span style="color: #990000;"> <strong>If we stop to gaze upon a star, </strong></span></em></span><br />
<em><strong><span style="color: #990000;"> People talk about how bad we are.</span></strong></em><br />
<em><strong><span style="color: #990000;"> Ours is not an easy age -- We're like panthers in their cage,</span></strong></em><br />
<em><strong><span style="color: #990000;"> What a town without pity can do.</span></strong></em><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
Fully into a bit upbeat, he gets into the song he imagines. In midstep, The Patient abruptly slides on his knees across the polished floor, a make-believe microphone in his right claw, and he gives the lyric a big loud finish. <em>Caaaa-nnnn dooooooo! </em>Nurses at the nearby station look up with alarm and prepare to sprint. Sheepishly, he rises slowly from the tile. <em>No worries,</em> he reports to the Clinic staff with a blush<em>. Elijah once taught me that golden oldie.</em><br />
<br />
The Patient ambles into the suite of mildly holiday-cheery 'giant' of neuroscience. It is time. <br />
<br />
"What was all that in the hallway?" he inquires.<br />
<br />
"A song. Just an old song or two. I've got a stack of papers. I've been putting that ballyhooed stage play together. Big stackof legal papers. Maybe I'll show you them some day. So,"<br />
<br />
"You're singing <em>and </em>writing now. I have heard some reports of this from the Clinic staff. In good time you are starting to come around, I believe. The drug therapy apparently agrees with you. You display a set of signs sign that I would daresay is encouraging. Good," the Doctor says.<br />
<br />
The scarred young in-patient on the spur of an intuition takes a risk. "So. Sir. Tell me, have you always been such a obnoxious and ambitious pretender and jerk since you got your wall full of degrees?"<br />
<br />
The Omani recoils in surprise. He feels anger but tries to hide it.<br />
<br />
So, it is time the physician decides having given this potential, probable, confrontation much rumination. The Patient has been reacquiring stray memories, like uninvited carpetbaggers, that materialize in the darkness of his bedroom. All words will be recorded by the little digital drive concealed strategically, as they have been for nine sobering and sullen months. The ambitious Doctor feels he will experience no difficulty in paying attention as this standard 50-minute hour will race by. He hopes his patient may kick the doors open, a lasting stroke, on his convoluted story.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">"When we left off we were talking about your probable blackout on the evening of the accident," The Doctor notes. "I sense it started when you went to the lounge to let the others talk, if that actually did indeed occur. You concurred with that possibility. Records show you had consumed a large quantity of uppers for days on end, even some ephedrine, epinephrine, and diazepam, wracking your bodily and emotional systems. There was no food in your stomach. You must have been a nervous wreck and dangerously low on blood sugars. Very, very dangerous this was. Potentially deadly. Butg your well-toned physique kept you on your feet and pumping away one thing following another. But the sharp and no doubt stunning blow you sustained to your cranium caused by the security guard pulling you down induced a close to lethal brain trauma. Yet on you went. Adrenaline buzzed until you gave up fighting near the auto wreckage. Medical personnel eventually lapsed you into an induced coma and in time sent you to our clinicians."</span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>
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<br />
<br />
"I thought I would be strong, heroic, for real for once," the patient said. "I was a so freaked back in those days, I told ya. So."<br />
<br />
"You feel guilty. Good!," the doctor says emphatically. "You were in a prison then most different from the one you experience now. Make no mistake. This is a way to start the journey outward -- feelings of guilt."<br />
<br />
"I guess," he acknowledges. "But I look, I look . . . God-awful. Purely hideous. I am . what did I do? What I have I done? I can't stand to feel this way anymore . . . . So,"<br />
<br />
The Omani speaks. "You almost lost your right eye and left hand right away that night. Most of your hair was burned off. You've seen all the scarring over your scalp, hands, arms, your torso. Your lips, your ears. Quite extensive are the losses. Horrible business. The deep slit where you fractured open the back of your head. When they resuscitated you . . ."<br />
<br />
"I have no one who cares. No one comes. Where are they? My parents? What about my friend Malia? Where's she? She won't come to see me here? I'm so bad? She can't or what?," he feels suddenly undrugged and desperate.<br />
<br />
"Your parents may not come anymore now that you are conscious. Not at least until you recover more. Their tone and their presence would roil you as before," The Doctor notes. "They came at certain times while you were under. They were generally very disruptive to you and our staff. Once we had to expel them for their blatant testiness. At present, your father and mother do not do so well. They are in separate facilities. The unfortunate Ms. Hanna Topper is also institutionalized for her many psychological issues and the loss of her esteemed husband. I see her regularly each week here, sometimes more frequently, for therapeutic purposes."<br />
<br />
The Patient feels little sense of loss and brushes off the retort. He decides he does not want to hear anymore about Lulu, the Old Man and their generation for a while. "But Malia. She's missing. She hasn't been to see me. I think . . . Where would . . .?," he whines lowly.<br />
<br />
"Ah yes, the girlfriend Malia. I have seen her picture. She was most beautiful." <br />
<br />
The interchange stops. The Patient gulps reflexively.<br />
<br />
"I am afraid I must inform you and it pains me greatly to do so that your Malia has expired," the physician appears contrite.<br />
<br />
"Died? Dead? She's not dead," the survivor surges with fear and anger.<br />
<br />
"Yes, I am sad to be the one to say so. She is certainly expired. I think this is a bad day for you to find out this truth. But it would have to be done later. Sit back a little. Try to breathe evenly like we have practiced often. Now. You must do this,"<br />
<br />
The Doctor nods gravely. He speaks --<br />
<br />
"Malia Bananja expired in an unexpected rush on the very night of your persnal tragedy. The official police report remarks that she was found dead shortly after midnight with a psychology textbook in her hands on her dorm room couch. She was clothed in red pajamas decorated with black cats. No foul play or intruders were suspected. A terrible and depressing scene I am sure. Her female study-mates had gone out for a renewed supply of beer, it is said. Malia had consumed some beer recently. Her blood alcohol reading was point-oh-six. Not risky or life threatening on its own. Yet she soon died suddenly all alone with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray because she had apparently swallowed a quantity of Ephedrine pills just before. As with ingesting cocaine an initial foray for so many, records show that her heart muscle in her likely fatigued condition could not withstand the chemical assault. A necessary valve exploded. The ephedrine killed her like a poison would as it mixed with the alcohol in her cardiac system. Her heart had a virtual blow out like a flawed tire that pops with a suddenness. Medical records show that she had a residue quantity of amphetamine in her blood that horrible night as well. Perhaps you would know something about this matter? In fact no one else involved in Malia's case seems to. She did not seem to have a chronic drug problem. The authorities and many others gravely suspect that you were her drug supplier this once or perhaps on another occasion. Your tox report post accident at Ascension Hospital authored by the very emergency room doctor you had insulted on your previous visit that night certainly showed a scary, sizable cocktail of lethal substances mixing in your body."<br />
<br />
Aghast at these disclosures, The Patient whispers the painful truth and his words come out as from a haunted shellwork, "I gave her those pills, the white little F's and two hits of Dex. She begged me to do it. She said she needed it for the midterm prep. Because I was going out with Myra and Wil and she'd be alone. So . . . Oh my God." <br />
<br />
"A grave a very grave mistake in judgment as you are sensing in its fullness. The work of a confused and self-defeating addict on the loose indeed. It will take time to process this experience," The Doctor says without pity. He senses that he is finally getting somewhere with this hardshell survivor. <br />
<br />
"It all went blank to a glowing white, I was way off the grid, <em>Don Juan Goes to Hell</em> time." The Patient protests. "I didn't know. After my mother asked me to drive to the township."<br />
<br />
"So yes indeed sadness and remorse can lead toward healing. I tell you this for your well-being. Not to punish. But there must not be one more word of blaming of your parents. No more blaming Malia or the quartet of Toppers or anybody else. This will get you nowhere. You will be caught continually in the maze of your life-threatening habituation. No surrender now to self-pity and powerlessness. Accept. It's work you must do. Pain endured is often useful and it will be useful to you I believe as time goes by. Use it. It took us a significant time to stabilize your vitals, let you rest in our twilight coma, and begin to heal your fractured and fire-seared body. Yes the coma was prolonged intentionally. Now do not fight any more. You are sensing what addictive substances do to you. Allow the rest of your recovery to occur. It will take time."<br />
<br />
The stern and unlikable doctor has come across smarter and more compassionate than ever before. "You downed that first drink again with your relatives before you left. Then another. A perilous and dangerous game. Yet, <em>here </em>you are -- sober. Drug-free. Scarred. Frightened. Bereft of your best friend and your parents and the Toppers. No one will be permitted to interrupt your recovery for a time. But you are <em>alive</em>. Some would call you a lucky young man. It will be a significant question whether you choose to go on to want on your own to live as we move forward. You will not leave here soon either. I have the power over that. It's the law. And also it's in my judgment what's best for you."<br />
<br />
The Patient wants to scream. He prepares to slap the neurologist then bolt from the room. But for a moment -- like a snapshot from an oldtime camera -- a grainy image of a scriptural Moses or Elijah lookalike flashes before his eyes with a stone tablet in hand. Instead of screaming, The Patient slumps and shrugs limply. The battle must end he knows. He feels something relent deep within. <br />
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The Doctor looks down as he reads from a transcript style document. He is perturbed at himself because he worries that he may have hit The Patient too hard, too quickly, with his revelations.<br />
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"Apparently you ushered your aunt and uncle into their vehicle after they had assessed Judge Topper's medical situation with the house doctor, which was extensive by the way but was not grave at all. The Judge of course is expired too from a swift blade attack to his throat. The police report that it was was raining hard with a nearly freezing temperature as you proceeded during the night. It seems according to detectives' puzzling over events that you got the old folks to wait for you. I'll bet that you drank additional spirits while at the vehicle to fortify your faltering resolve. A blackened empty whiskey bottle was found in the remnants of your aunt's incinerated purse. Even though at that point you were likely well into your blackout. Then detectives think you stole back into the hospital somehow -- only you will ever be able to say <em>why</em> and <em>how </em>exactly <em>--</em> tricked the security guard at the door of the Topper suite, and you went in to start carving the Justice up on his bed without known comment. His wife's whereabouts at that second are not known or she won't say. Medical authorities surmise that you took aim first at this vulnerable throat artery. The old man's temporary screeches brought medical staff and security. The black-uniformed security guard you tricked into going out to check on Myra and Wilton in the car caught you to yank you down headfirst hard onto the tile floor. Like a drunken Rasputin though, eyewitnesses say you rose up, sliced the guard fatally with a mighty swish of the switchblade, as if your adrenaline had propelled you into superhuman strength. Then you ran away. Apparently you slid into Wilton's car and then you all sped like a trio of escaped prison inmates away in the rain. Your adrenaline flow and emotions must have been off the charts in those moments, or off 'the grid' as you have recounted. Your traumatized and probably dying brain was apparently swelling enormously and achingly hemorrhaging blood, your head hurting and throbbing painfully. You also were bleeding from an unexplained deep puncture on your forehead that was sustained before the guard pounced on your back. During the car chase in the rain, you carelessly or forcibly -- was it on purpose do you suppose? -- wildly rolled the Topper car off the slickened road and it caught on fire in a terrible scene. Many accidents by auto are thinly veiled suicide attempts. But I think this was not the case for you."<br />
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"Sorry," the patient whispers feeling at a lost and abandoned. He has nowhere to turn. He wants to stand and run. He hugs himself tightly, then he sits forward and rocks to and fro.<br />
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"Ah, chemically-impaired vehicle operators," the Omani notes. "What a lot such persons are. But you know. Always the nail-biting adventures. A drama that plays out in many chapters if the chemically-poisoned is lucky enough not kill himself or herself or others. It's a dangerous game of chance as you have found gthe absolute hard way. By the way, I have been curious. Have you ever run across the male name of Phaeton? Or perhaps Euripides by chance?" <br />
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The Patient hears the name as Fay Don. "No, I don't believe so. The other's a famous old Greek playwright. So . . . what is it?" he asks as he suddenly feels a big push of physical and emotional exhaustion.<br />
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The Doctor notes his patient's mood altering. "Ah, too bad. We'll explore it later to be sure" is the reply. "The signs are that it is just the time for your medication and we must draw this to a conclusion for the day."<br />
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In fact, as this is voiced, the medical man was secretly, already, excitedly drafting mentally his long-desired, reputation-building scholarly treatise about this most unusual of addiction and recovery cases. In fact as the snowflakes fell a few hours later, he became even more gleeful with each sanguine recollection. His proud and long-term prospects for a famous career and notoriety were looking up. A living example of a fabulist's myth, a Nobel worthy epic if he did say so, before him each day. The Doctor decided that he would not go public with any of these developments until he had examined rigorously all the details yet unrecovered and the resulting implications so he could write with confidence his got-to-be brilliant fame-confirming paper.<br />
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"By the way your aunt, Myra, was barely clinging to life when she was rolled back into the hospital. She was heavily drugged to alleviate her pain of course and she was choked heavily on the, um, <em>noxious</em> smoke she had inhaled. The notes from the attending physician say she had him lift up her oxygen mask slightly so she could mumble a few hushed words. <br />
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"Good God," the patient moans. "Cut it out."<br />
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Staring at his neat white coat, the ambitious physician feels a wicked temptation to violate his medical oath. He gives in for a moment as a payback to the sick man's insulting remark some time ago.<br />
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"<em>No.</em> Not that. Not that at all," The Doctor says with a deadpan comic's look. "But this <em>is</em> most interesting. You'll see as we go! Aunt Myra beckoned the attending to lean in close. He notes that she clawed his hand with her failing strength. She whispered with a trace of a smile: <em>'Oh well. Time to get back to Normal'."</em><br />
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The Omani pauses for effect. "The attending physician was never convinced that she had grinned. He did report the distinct odor of alcohol on her dying breath."<br />
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An extended silence ensues. The Patient squirms and sighs. All the drugs that protected him for so long seem to have vaporized. He feels raw. The Omani knows he has just jolted the scarred man hard, way too hard, almost for sure, egged on by an experimental neuro-magician's drive to induce a headlong emotional dive by his patient into unexplored and free-fall canyons. The doctor feels worry. He is <em>very </em>worried. The patient grows extremely pale. He is breathing oxygen in gulps, his eyes roll back, and he says he might throw up. He leans forward on crossed arms and rocks to and fro again. He strains to keep his meager stomach contents clenched down.<br />
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More precious seconds slip by.<br />
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"Will I ever get to see my parents or anybody else?" he asks. "I've been here for a while?"<br />
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The doctor writes a note,<br />
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"As I have disclosed, your parents came around to see you numerous times since your spur of the moment trip to Icarus Falls. Do you remember times they stood by your bed briefly at least -- here or in the first facility in which you were treated?" he inquires.<br />
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"They talked to you at times. Many people have spoken to you in your long reverie. Encouraging you to get well. Stroking and clutching your hands. I believe you will never truly recall all of your experiences since your coma was profound. Traumatized patients can forget then later wake to discover a daunting, blank mural to fill. I must remind you that <em>everyone</em> in this situation -- not just you -- has permanently lost one or more persons to harsh human fate. Significant memories may come forth."<br />
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'Like I said, will I? My parents?' the wounded one says timidly.<br />
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The doctor subconsciously smooths the ridges in the sleeve of his coat. He leans forward toward the patient who seems suddenly accosted, like in the fiery wreck and roll.<br />
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"Well, I must ask you to listen carefully to what I say," the neuro specialist intones sternly. "About your relatives. I am afraid I have some quite bad news. Your father is rehabbing in part from a potent cardiac infarction. His strength now wanes. He has trouble speaking and moving about. Your mother, another story that tugs at the heartstrings, is recovering in a unit for alcoholics. Your mishap, the loss of her relatives, her husband's medical complications seem have scared her straight. You <i>must</i> be done for-ever with the pills and the drinking. No fudging! Her too!" <br />
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The Patient thinks. The nausea subsides mildly. He hears fingers snap on some unseen hand. A question pops into his mind, but he feels too weak to pursue it. He gets ready to leave. <br />
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"Merry Christmas I guess," he says in surrender.<br />
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"Merry Christmas to you," The Doctor replies. "Stop by the nursing station to take your medications. You must. Eat a good supper. <i>Get some sleep,</i> young man. I will see you here tomorrow. At the same time."<br />
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"So. Okay," The Patient intones. "I wasn't really gonna go here. But . . . But one thing you haven't talked about yet. It's got me thinking."<br />
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"Yes?" the medical man inquires.<br />
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The Patient exhales. "You called me a survivor. Am I the <i>one</i> and only that's skimmed alive through this round of playoffs? What about Myra and Wil's cat?"<br />
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"Yes, there's the cat," the Omani concedes.<br />
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The Patient wonders, "Does your massive notebook of nightmares there say what became of Max, the itty bitty creepy black kitty? Max-a-Million. With the damned bloody paws? Or was he the lucky face-off contestant that got away scott free?"<br />
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<strong>Sung by Gene Pitney -- 1962</strong></div>
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<strong>Listen Here: </strong><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAyitZPcMo"><strong>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAyitZPcMo</strong></a> </div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><em>Ovid's Moral and Epitaph:</em> </span></span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Here Phaëton lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared. </span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared."</span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> -- Ovid the Fabulist</span></strong></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0Louisville, Kentucky37.09024 -95.71289130.614089 -105.820313 43.566391 -85.605469tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-53061377028892990202014-10-09T10:00:00.000-04:002016-02-04T16:52:30.833-05:00The Deconstruction of Molly <br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Deconstruction of Molly</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><strong>An amiable and resourceful pair of </strong></span><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia";">sociopaths -- an aging widower and his young</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia";">adult daughter -- risk it all to fulfill the last</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia";">wishes of their deceased wife and mother, Molly.</span></strong> </div>
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<i> “You may remember on earth -- though of course we never confessed it</i><br />
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<i> -- the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always </i></div>
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<i> mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.” </i></div>
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-- George Bernard Shaw, "Don Juan in Hell" </div>
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Lowe Landry glanced into the rear-view mirror as his car rolled northward on the highway toward the airport, which was always busy during these late afternoon hours. All day it had been abnormally frigid, the air soaked by an encompassing haze of winter mist and humidity -- a discomforting condition that overtakes the Gulf South during the most glum weeks in a new year. Dark gray clouds, signs of some troublemaking rain storm, were bunching toward the aeronautical path which she, Kayla, who sat without speaking in the back seat, one arm wrapped protectively around a travelling case, a barely detectable look of smug satisfaction spread across her lips and full cheeks, would travel in a few hours. Lowe yanked the shivery sides of his unzipped leather jacket closer to his ribcage. Despite the cold, his two overweight passengers had asked him to keep the heater turned down in his car. </div>
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'What a strange pair, what an insane moment' Lowe thought, as he had many times before. <br />
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Kayla would be flying soon into the greedy maw of a snarling storm -- bearer of the mythic deities of wind, rain, thunder, lightning -- made by a sweeping Canadian cold front clashing viciously with a northeasterly surge of warm wetness below a low-dipping jet stream. The prospect for turbulence in flight did not bother Lowe's backseat passenger one bit. A generally tense flyer throughout his life, he found Kayla's lack of concern more than a little strange. Given the exoteric expedition Kayla had before her, one that might take a while to complete, to a Mideast and Muslim culture and an ancient land being overwhelmed by destructive impulses, Lowe imagined that that ominous bank of clouds up ahead would easily serve as his excuse to bail out forthwith if he were travelling with her.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><u><span style="color: #0066cc;"></span></u><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqLBsTdxmqLt4NQzAKqFdDwj_JHZ-1_ewlNxIhrPNNmZzrPXC_yZYQgPlRLVIjVm_Eru4ITd9t-fHpgC1g_uNCU9x-oty5wa7wo8tQCeTVLT2UZ8_1Go6zt3WSCB3XJ1LUwg81p5bDs-8/s1600/Tale-Tell+Heart.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqLBsTdxmqLt4NQzAKqFdDwj_JHZ-1_ewlNxIhrPNNmZzrPXC_yZYQgPlRLVIjVm_Eru4ITd9t-fHpgC1g_uNCU9x-oty5wa7wo8tQCeTVLT2UZ8_1Go6zt3WSCB3XJ1LUwg81p5bDs-8/s200/Tale-Tell+Heart.bmp" width="155" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><br /></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A Tell-Tale Heart</span></strong></td></tr>
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"Ahhh, well, everything is gonna work out fine, just fine. Isn't it, Kayl?,' Melvin said. His odd walking stick sat between his short legs. The top of this cane leaned against the passenger door.<br />
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'Everything's gonna work out fine, dad. No worries. Just fine,'' Kayla leaned forward. She patted the back of her father's left arm. <br />
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'So, Kayl, as I was saying, about your mom. She's here? Where? I mean, is she <em>here </em>with us?' Lowe felt unsure about how to broach the subject.<br />
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'Oh yes. She is. She is indeed. Like dad said, she's just fine,' Kayla replied. <br />
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She had a round face, straight natural blond hair, big blue eyes, long lashes with dark liner. Clearly, by her father's outgoing demeanor and both parents' rounded body type, Kayla was the offspring of Melvin and Molly but she did not resemble them in other ways. Kayla was about 30 years old and 30 pounds overweight with alabaster skin and a few freckles, a subtle mix of fairy princess and Pillsbury Doughgirl. Her wardrobe was high quality, well-fitted, and professional. Her fashion was more upscale than a modern computer oriented job usually demanded. She was a graphic arts designer. Her parents had idealistically named their one child Kayla in hope that she would become an artisan of some sort with a pure heart's regard for the beauty and ethics of artistic creation. As a young adult, Kayla smiled easily, developed eccentric quirks like each of her parents, displayed a tender heart when it came to helping other people and cats, and liked to laugh, but like many only children she kept to herself a lot. <br />
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'Molly's here?' Lowe tried to keep his eyes trained on the highway. 'Really? Where?'<br />
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'Well, no worries. She's right here. Safe and sound. Just fine,' Kayla patted the carry-on case within her protective embrace. <br />
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'Ahhh, good. Very good. Just like we planned it," Melvin said. <br />
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Kayla's father, Molly's still aching widower, sounded uncertain. Though he liked Melvin, a next-door neighbor for years, a sincere lover of friendships, cats, and music of many kinds, and a genuine character in every true sense of that term, Lowe sometimes privately referred to Mel as The Minimizer. <br />
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Lowe glanced back at Kayla again. The heavy traffic on this highway worried him. There were cars, especially a coupe of daredevil taxi cabs, darting in and out of lanes. Lowe kept his car in a middle lane.<br />
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'Okay. But where ?, Lowe repeated.<br />
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'Well, Mol's back there in an empty shampoo tube,' Melvin noted. 'Nice job with that, Kayl."<br />
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'Yep. Not to worry. She's right here.' Kayla's smile, more wistful than before, was back. She tapped a pointy, polished fingernail on the case. Three sharp clacks filled the space inside the auto.<br />
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'Oh God,' Lowe blurted in disbelief.<br />
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***</div>
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Ten days before this, as Lowe walked toward his car in semi-darkness, Melvin had called out to him, which caught Lowe my surprise. <br />
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'Hey, neighbor. Can you come over for a few minutes?' the man in the shadows of his front porch, feigning joviality, asked. <br />
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Lowe sat next to Mel on the porch as usual. Strong odors of cat dander, rotting kitty foods, the smell of swampy mud mixed with decaying leaves, and the anguished residue of second-hand tobacco smoke suffused the atmosphere. A browned and dirty screen door which was forever locked kept the kitties, and everyone, out of the dimly lit living room. Lowe noticed that the ghostly lights in Molly's home office were turned on too. Several felines of various ages and sizes stalked around his seat, with their tales swishing like silent cutting blades, which kept Lowe unsettled.<br />
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'Ahhh, well. Good to see ya, old man. Unseasonably warm for an evening, isn't it,' Mel said. <br />
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'Yup. I thought you'd be inside by this time. Your yard looks good,' Lowe responded.<br />
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In fact, Melvin obsessed over keeping his grass, bushes, and easements tidily cut and trimmed perfectly all year round. A team of gardeners had labored around his place for hours that day. The orderly yard was a strange mirror image to the interior of Melvin and Molly's house, which had always smelled rancid, seemed messy and mysterious, and which was (by some unstated edict) completely off limits to visitors. Molly rarely was seen out of doors, came across as unaccountably shy, became discomforted by conversation gambits, and spent almost every hour of her life in the house, more precisely in her office and bedroom. She was slightly taller than Mel, pulled her medium brown hair invariably into a severe bun, carried about 200 extra pounds on her sedentary frame, and smoked dozens of her cigarettes each day. Still Molly was a local legend as a graphics artist and desktop publishing whiz. She apparently ruled the roost on the inside of the home. Melvin always seemed more outgoing and jovial than his wife and daughter. He cherished humorous print cartoons and all suggestive jokes. His perfectly sonorous voice had afforded him many good years in radio and television announcing. He had also had limited parts in dinner theater productions and for a while appeared in locally-produced TV spots. Mel was very short and egregiously overweight, like his spouse, hence this increased reliance lately on a quirky walking stick. Melvin was known to passersby on the city streets by the names of certain characters that he had once played on kids' shows and local TV commercials -- Biggie, The Big One, and Big Mal the Kiddie's Pal. He generally seemed glad to experience chance encounters with fans on city streets.<br />
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One thing that Lowe had surmised soon after meeting Melvin was that he was completely devoted to Molly. Love is blind, the younger man reminded himself. It seemed to be his primary, perhaps only, life mission to keep things shipshape (the guy had served in an undistinguished manner in the Navy) and ready for snap inspections on the symbolic outside of their relationship, like the carefully manicured lawn, the perfectly molded bushes, and the trim but overhanging oaks and willows. It also appeared that Melvin could do just about anything at any old time -- drive off to the local AFTRA office for an unannounced weekday visit, take a brief job creating resonant voiceovers at some local station, read a book, focus on a football game, or enjoy one of his thousands of warping vinyl records by Diana Krall and traditional jazz artists, very old school material, on his dusty music turntable. He would arrange things in a low-key manner so that Molly, the chain smoking and introverted artisan whom Mel insisted was 'brilliant, just brilliant,' could take care of business on the proverbial inside, while neglecting the most rudimentary housekeeping and personal care issues. Lowe translated Mel's term brilliant as 'coolly competent,' which is enough in typical Southern labor contexts to rate a superlative about one's work. Then the Minimizer's elusive all's well that ends well scenario crashed (and almost actually burned their house down) while Melvin was on one of his weekly field trips to the A&P. Molly's sudden death, she suffered a fatal heart attack in her office sanctuary, a burning cigarette stuck between two fingers -- about her sixtieth of that day -- was stabbed into the chocolate hued shag carpet, totally devastated her spouse. Within days, subtle signs of deterioration in and around Melvin's once-controllable existence became noticeable. The process of disintegration mentally, emotionally, and physically would take a long time to play itself out which would not be pretty. <br />
<br />
'You know how we were talking about where to go with Mol's ashes?' Melvin asked without a preface.<br />
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'I do,' Lowe Landry replied slowly. 'You've thought of something?'<br />
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"Ahhh, yes. Well, Kayl and I have decided what we want to do,' Mel added.<br />
<br />
Lowe was amazed. He considered this a minor miracle. He had figured that nothing would be done on the subject for at least weeks, if not months. It was true that Molly was not about to wander off anywhere, like one of the come and go family felines. Soon after her demise she had been reduced to a gleaming and decorative box of cremains. The power trio of Melvin, Molly, and Kayla were avowed atheists. There was no wake and no religious acknowledgment of the woman's death. In her reduced state, Mol's ashes had made only one brief, public appearance at a party with several hundred, mixed emotion professional colleagues and Mel and Kayla's few personal friends in a big hotel ballroom, a fete which went from frosty to festive as the evening ensued. Lowe and his girlfriend enjoyed the party once enough alcohol and hand rolled ganja, <em>Maui Wowee</em> and <em>Coasta </em>Roasta, had been consumed by the notable TV and radio personalities, plus others, in attendance. Mirroring her personal standoffishness when it came to neighborhood parties, the container of Molly's cremains appeared for about 30 minutes on a front table, with a simple vase of yellow flowers next to it, but then the shiny box disappeared, as if she had repaired to her cozy but unhealthy office. Lowe wondered if Melvin (or perhaps Kayla?) had orchestrated this as a nonconformist, postmodern message to those who had truly known the missus.<br />
<br />
Lowe often thought of Melvin as <em>The Minimizer</em>, yet he also privately dubbed him The Grand Procrastinator. It invariably took Melvin months to take a step or get around to doing something, even regarding important matters. There was a decrepit Buick in the family driveway. This was Molly's modest ride to putter back and forth to a print shop at all hours, to make breathless runs for cigarettes at a discount tobacco shop, and almost nowhere else. This junk Buick was now largely covered by dead leaves, dried tree branches, cats' paw marks, and several inches of accumulated grime from Fall and Winter rains. Six weeks before Molly's death, a tire on the car went flat one night in the driveway. Instead of getting it fixed, M & M just let the pitiful thing linger. Now there were three flat tires on the paralyzed Buick. Melvin also had a declining car -- it was a small, once sleek and silver Oldsmobile station wagon. It was sufficient for once-a-week runs to the A&P and for basic transportation to short notice, announcing jobs downtown. On the day after Molly's heart attack, the Olds' engine would not fire up. It had expired. Currently, on this unseasonably warm Winter evening, the wagon also displayed one flat. Several mature tabby cats languished on its roof and hood, which did not seem to concern Melvin at all. <br />
<br />
To Lowe, Melvin's precarious hold on responsible adulthood was obviously unraveling. His sense of loss and daily structure were causing him to crumble, even though a largely absent Kayla tried her best to help him. As far as Lowe could tell, Mel had recently concluded like a crazy person that he really did not require a car for his personal business. He would get others to take him to the limited number of places each week where he needed to go. This raw assumption came to Lowe after the non-wake as he pondered the swimming pool behind M&M's back bedroom. The small pool was completely overwhelmed by wild tree limbs bending down, painted over by inches of black and deadly liquid moss, and waiting patiently for someone to take a misstep, which theoretically could happen any day. The pool reeked like a Louisiana swampland. Only a few persons on earth knew this poison pit existed. Lowe called it <em>The</em> <em>Secret Lagoon</em>. Melvin was also a man who had once possessed a working cell phone but it had been out of service for weeks, perhaps months. Likewise, during the past Spring, Mel's e-mail, cable television, and internet service had strangely died all at once too. No one ever came to repair his losses. M&M had apparently withdrawn from the digital culture without comment. Lowe was confused about how Molly could maintain her graphic arts business and the connections required in her other work, which seemed steady. But he did not ask about the matter on principle.<br />
<br />
'Well, you know, Molly was from West Virginia. Strong family ties she had there growing up. She said that when she went, well, ahhh, if I was still around I should get her to two places. She was a really good woman, the top. People loved her. She did just great work, the best,' Mel said looking down.<br />
<br />
Lowe nodded as if deep in thought. <br />
<br />
"Where are we going with this, Mel?" Lowe asked.<br />
<br />
'Well, one of the places he wanted to get back to was her home state. West Virginia. Her family was from Beckley,' Mel said.<br />
<br />
'West Virginia,' Lowe repeated perplexed. Was this a lead in to one of Mel's funny tales?<br />
<br />
'She wanted to get back there,' Melvin replied earnestly.<br />
<br />
'You want me to help you get Molly to West Virginia?' Lowe asked.<br />
<br />
'Ahh, now you see, things, well, this is touching right on the heart of the matter. Mol said we should to get her back to West Virginia. That was the deal. But we can do that, Kayl and me,' Mel tried to convince Lowe he meant it. 'But, you see, there was one place that Mol always, <em>always, </em>wanted to see. That's the part that's gonna be, uhhh, a little harder for Kayl and me to get to.'<br />
<br />
<div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*** </div>
<br />
A speeding taxi honked rudely and cut in front of Lowe's vehicle. He pictured poor Molly's post-cremation ashes stuffed down in a pink <em>L'Oreal</em> tube. Then he felt slightly sick. He did not think that Melvin and Kayla, a quirky father-daughter team of sociopaths tearing a wide path through their dark, grief-ridden and difficult days, had thought for a moment that there was anything unusual about their crazy plan.<br />
<br />
'Ahh, yes, well, we figured they won't look for anything in a hair conditioner tube in a perfectly innocent bag. That's how we're gonna get Molly over there,' Mel added.<br />
<br />
'But what if you get caught? Customs is gonna frown on your transporting . . ., um, Molly in her condition into their sovereign territory,' Lowe said.<br />
<br />
Kayla shook her head. She smiled, then loudly tapped her fingernail atop the case once more. 'We won't. Get caught. Not at all.'<br />
<br />
'Ahh, what are they gonna do anyway? We're fulfilling a dying woman's wishes. We have a plan. Grieving daughter, lost and desperate widower, trying to fulfill a woman's last wish here on earth,' Mel noted. To voice these words, he had adopted his resonant, on the-air professional voice. This made Lowe smile.<br />
<br />
Kayla would fly across the ocean overnight by herself. It would be getting light in the east when her plane entered the airspace over the Mediterannean. Mel was afraid to get into an airplane large or small any more. The family team wished to get to the busy airport so they both could get pleasantly buzzed on bourbon and water, for a few hours, at a gate-side bar before Kayla's plane went wheels up. Lowe's role would end when he dropped them off by the sleek terminal entrance. Mel and Kayla wanted to keep the upcoming hours private -- just for family, which meant parent and partial parent and child, the threesome's last time in one place on earth, reserved for their tears, memories, stories, and dashed dreams, set aside for last minute conspiratorial whispers. Just in case, Kayla had brought her cell phone fully charged. Also she had secreted in her warm jacket a phone number for a pricey attorney, a specialist in international contraband and transport law, just in case of emergency. Mel had known this lawyer while he appeared during the best years of his professional life on radio and television in Detroit. <br />
<br />
As his car reached the peak of a rounded overpass, Lowe spotted the metallic airport terminals. The dark gray weather front had crept coldly over the edge of the expansive airfield. A frigid drizzle had started to fall on the car. Mel and Kayla helped Lowe navigate to the proper terminal entrance by interpreting the hieroglyphics on the road signs.<br />
<br />
'Alright then, good luck. God, be careful, Kay. All that time in a strange place. It's weird. I know, I've been over there. When will you get back if all goes well?,' Lowe said this as Kayla's big bag was extracted from the trunk. <br />
<br />
A few droplets of freezing rain pelted them. Lowe pictured this blond, outgoing girl by herself perhaps for an extended period in the strangeness of a Muslim culture. Why didn't Mel seem more concerned? The Minimizer, Lowe remembered. Blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned females, with a tendency to apply seductive Cleopatra eyeliner and ruby lipstick, could find all kinds of trouble without even breaking a sweat.<br />
<br />
'I don't know yet. No worries though. As long as it takes. Dude, I'm about getting the job done,' Kayl replied.<br />
<br />
Lowe slammed his trunk shut. The hazard lights on his car blinked brightly. 'True to your mom all the way I see. Mel, you sure you don't want me to wait with you? I could drive you back home,' Lowe asked.<br />
<br />
'No, no. We'll get along fine. Just fine. You'll see. I'll see you at home,' Mel assured him. <br />
<br />
The overweight duo, father and daughter, pulling two travel bags with wheels and handles, moved slowly through power-driven glass doors. Mel also toted his carved walking stick and a thick scrapbook with many items pasted into it. Ahhh, memories, what might have been. If only . . . Then the dark doors slid closed.</div>
<div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMHWNVjMA4_scjkLBAfFN8a1G1to7DrcC4iLvQUsmSkePvSZK9Qdm84C8loXCgT2O3it3YU4uj9ZwI50Aa2KV0k87NQ37zZWuULp98-5SVI5jmT8dG6NZhRTJyf5bmp9Ky_keA2gaMiJU/s1600/Walking+Cane+Face+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMHWNVjMA4_scjkLBAfFN8a1G1to7DrcC4iLvQUsmSkePvSZK9Qdm84C8loXCgT2O3it3YU4uj9ZwI50Aa2KV0k87NQ37zZWuULp98-5SVI5jmT8dG6NZhRTJyf5bmp9Ky_keA2gaMiJU/s200/Walking+Cane+Face+1.jpg" width="95" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><br /></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Melvin's Walking Stick</span></strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Lowe stared at the smoked glass facade. He had lost sight of his friends once they were behind it. That made him feel sad. He worried that Kayla was undertaking a gallantly wacky but huge blunder. A few seconds passed. People on foot clutching boarding passes, passports, and shoulder pouches scurried by. Car horns honked randomly. The steady roar of a massive jet plane's departure trembled the pavement under Lowe's feet and reverberated on the walls of sturdy airport buildings.<br />
<br />
The glass double-door entry to the terminal slid open again, a rush of warm air, like a big bear hug, puffed out to greet him. Then suddenly the terrifying, earsplitting clatter of a powerful helicopter bore down on him from the unseen interior into which Melvin and Kayla had just disappeared. A wide flying machine jetted toward Lowe at eye level. He ducked as the gleaming chopper, its massive rotor spinning madly, impossibly cleared the open doors, like a bolt of unseasonal lightning, pointed its nose ever so slightly down at him, and then whooshed up with a frightening roar over his rain-dampened head.<br />
<br />
The copter climbed rapidly, laboring with all its might to clear all layers of the tall parking garage in front of it. The din as Lowe stood in the helicopter's wake was deafening. Lowe clapped his hands tightly over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.<br />
<br />
'No! No! Owww, God, owww!' Lowe cried out. <br />
<br />
He tracked the chopper's flight path. As the powerful copter had rocketed toward him, Lowe thought he had briefly seen words painted on its side: Albatross Air. Also, he had beheld three people through the front window of the chopper. One was a pilot in a khaki jumpsuit, a khaki ball cap, an unsmiling face with a dark 5 o'clock shadow, and dark wire-rimmed aviator glasses.<br />
<br />
The two other figures spied in the helicopter made no sense either. Next to the khaki pilot was Melvin, looking grim too, leaning forward on his carved walking cane, which had been a gift from Molly, with the strange, red bearded face whittled into it long ago. Kayla sat next to her father. Both wore khaki desert attire and gold wire-rimmed aviator shades with very dark lenses. Melvin's daughter wore a dark <em>hijab </em>that covered he head and her neck. Lowe had surmised as they flashed by that the two were sad and grieving. Kayla held protectively under her right arm an ancient and ornate urn, cream-colored and dusty, with complicated gray Egyptian hieroglyphs all over it. With her left hand extended, saying nothing, she pointed steadily toward the eastern horizon, a place far away from the bustling airport and gathering storm.<br />
<br />
Lowe shook his head as if he were coming out of a deep sleep. Rain fell harder. His car was illegally parked by the drop-off curb, his hazard lights were blinking brightly. A security guard was grimly marching his way. Momentarily, Lowe thought about going inside to find Melvin and Kayla. He would drink with them. Toasts would be offered -- to Molly and her untimely demise. Kayla would try to conceal her justifiable nerves. Lowe would tell them all about the unsettling fantasy that had just raced through his head. <br />
<br />
'What a strange pair. What a strange moment,' Lowe remembered.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0EkavhsEh4lfCfUtzPJ0qK8gdqj-3Gv21jJS5BqjXfkTpaCI7bSCRR6NSlNhEfjRme0jH7_Wf02d8YH6eOHGapwpKUSBMvmI4tmHYqVVmHkMhwM8RpDbi0q5W07hq52_ARl9Om9ldjaI/s1600/Egyptian+Urn+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0EkavhsEh4lfCfUtzPJ0qK8gdqj-3Gv21jJS5BqjXfkTpaCI7bSCRR6NSlNhEfjRme0jH7_Wf02d8YH6eOHGapwpKUSBMvmI4tmHYqVVmHkMhwM8RpDbi0q5W07hq52_ARl9Om9ldjaI/s200/Egyptian+Urn+3.JPG" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><br /></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ancient Urn</span></strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
He looked again at the eastern horizon. He could almost hear the faint clatter of the helicopter's engine as it ascended through the overcast and then faded. <br />
<br />
'Pure craziness,' he whispered. <br />
<br />
<div align="center">
***** ***** *****</div>
<div align="center">
<br /></div>
Lowe Landry rubbed his sleepy eyes. It was dark outside and, at this early hour, Lowe had not yet made coffee. He studied the screen on the laptop. If only this e-mail from his grieving friend, Melvin, would simply go away. The cover on the electronic message, posted thirty minutes before, undulated like the telltale heart that the mystery writer Poe gruesomely imagined. Damn, I'm seeing things again, Lowe despaired. He recalled the imaginary helicopter. What had Kayla held protectively in that fancy urn? He grew morbidly curious to see what the e-message might hold.<br />
<br />
Had the audacious artisans, father and daughter, pulled off their unlikely crime?, Lowe asked himself.<br />
<br />
Lowe looked at his girlfriend. She was still asleep. Impulsively he had asked her to marry him last night as their mountain vacation drew to an end. She replied that she would think about it. Sherry did not want a church wedding, but Lowe did. Their long trek home would start today. Lowe could feel his elevated heartbeat thumping in his chest. His pulse, usually steady, was racing. <br />
<br />
Ever since Melvin had spoken in the dim half light on the porch about the iconoclastic plot, in two movements, to dispose of Molly's meager remains, Lowe had suffered sincere misgivings. Later these became feelings of guilt over getting involved. Smiling ruefully and having a sentimental laugh together over Molly's secretive neuroses and demonstrated idiosyncrasies was one thing. Being irreverently careless about death and its consequences was another. Disrespect for and desecration of the dead were foolhardy things. Poe certainly taught about that, Lowe thought.<br />
<br />
Kayla had disappeared for months. Mel assured Lowe that she had arrived safely and on time at their intended destination, which was Cairo. Lowe asked how she was doing. Good, just fine, Melvin assured him blithely. That did not seem plausible to Lowe. Melvin claimed that Kayl had met some friendly people. She had been taken under their sheltering wings. Always the Great Minimizer, a skeptical Lowe thought. Exactly what Melvin would want if he were over there. What else, guy -- has she gotten anything else done about you know what . . .?, Lowe inquired haltingly. Ahhh, yes, it's gonna take her a little while longer to get things done than we have planned. But look, Kayl's got a good head on her shoulders. She'll know what to do when the time arrives, the older man replied. Lowe looked away in impatient disbelief.<br />
<dl>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKubFGNXjp4Az4uNMKEK9INvg68zRL0HRsw4E6b7CIaaJplu5PnO2Ki8JKYSDXSRrO2dH0H4PYGxdc3ZhYb9-fnzvOxZ19lW1All9O2DWKPP6VbmFTL6jCh8QTGHbJHdogyBsUX9VcYO8/s1600/Giza+Pyramids.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKubFGNXjp4Az4uNMKEK9INvg68zRL0HRsw4E6b7CIaaJplu5PnO2Ki8JKYSDXSRrO2dH0H4PYGxdc3ZhYb9-fnzvOxZ19lW1All9O2DWKPP6VbmFTL6jCh8QTGHbJHdogyBsUX9VcYO8/s200/Giza+Pyramids.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Pyramids of Giza --</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ancient Wonders of the World</span></strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<dt> </dt>
<dt> Lowe focused on his laptop. The e-mail had been sent under Mel's nickname via <em>BellSouth.com</em>, which suggested he was using a library computer, or one at a Kinko's shop, to stay abreast of Kayla's adventures.</dt>
<dt> </dt>
<dt> Sherry began to stir in bed. She lifted her head slowly to peer over the notebook screen at Lowe, like a groggy groundhog sneaking a misty morning peek from its burrow. </dt>
<dt> </dt>
<dt> 'Sher, you've gotta see this! We've finally heard from Melvin. After all this time. It's about Kayla. Sounds purely crazy,' he said. </dt>
<dt> </dt>
<dt> His sense of guilt had kept Lowe from telling Sherry the whole plan regarding his dead neighbor's ashes.</dt>
<dt> </dt>
<dt> 'What's going on?' Sherry asked vacuously.</dt>
</dl>
Lowe felt his tell-tale heart pounding away. He answered, 'Well, the e-mail title says <em>Greetings from the Tomb of the Pharaoh Khufu.</em> Damn. How 'bout that?'<br />
<br />
Sherry flopped back on the bed. 'Koo-Foo? Yeah. How about that?' she echoed listlessly.<br />
<br />
'Mel says <i>Our girl Kayla has met with great success. Molly now rests forever in the royal Khufu,</i>' Lowe Landry read aloud. ' -- But hey there's nothing else here.'<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSUwPxWZQcn__WkBqaqiz6VWnNZC1WxvOIhAMw93lFIKfZ2Pq7ol63U1bGKWGCTVciqYMOsnc2bdXE2LBQGx941dqfF4INdYV9QRmTKDivRM49qlazEKy5jA7qRdUdNRDrx27RBMq8Dms/s1600/Hieroglyphs+of+Ani.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSUwPxWZQcn__WkBqaqiz6VWnNZC1WxvOIhAMw93lFIKfZ2Pq7ol63U1bGKWGCTVciqYMOsnc2bdXE2LBQGx941dqfF4INdYV9QRmTKDivRM49qlazEKy5jA7qRdUdNRDrx27RBMq8Dms/s200/Hieroglyphs+of+Ani.jpg" width="170" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ancient Hieroglyphs</span></strong><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<dl>
<dt><div style="text-align: center;">
***** ***** ***** </div>
</dt>
</dl>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1dNXSLdTDd5ElFnbHoT2KA2TNIqe3YAamttR4HxuiBt3i8nA0oAnI4JyjpANE4ZWrLLj48ZkrkEUzMjN2XHu6uCz6eCQAyNiZYQLNcMCfJbFze-zFdqVfzzMjvH1hNEGMMaPIbFOhqo/s1600/Khufu+%2528Cheops%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" gua="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1dNXSLdTDd5ElFnbHoT2KA2TNIqe3YAamttR4HxuiBt3i8nA0oAnI4JyjpANE4ZWrLLj48ZkrkEUzMjN2XHu6uCz6eCQAyNiZYQLNcMCfJbFze-zFdqVfzzMjvH1hNEGMMaPIbFOhqo/s200/Khufu+%2528Cheops%2529.jpg" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Pharaoh Khufu (c.</span></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> 2550 BC</span></strong><strong><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> )</span></strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The West Virginia chapter of the plot to deconstruct Molly seemed innocent enough, even somewhat touching and humorous, to Lowe and Sherry. Kayla and Melvin described it sentimentally, their individual voices bubbling with great emotion, a fitting tribute to a fine upstanding woman.<br />
<br />
Molly was born into a fiery English-Scottish immigrant family of alcoholics in the town of Beckley, which remains a languid Appalachian town with a mountain temperate climate and is the unremarkable gateway to the south central region of the state. As she grew up, Kayla knew little about West Virginia, hilly little Beckley, or her mother's Anglian relatives. Her mother, who was also an only child, had left her fundamentalist parents and drinkers' lifestyle behind as a high school dropout and runaway. No one came after her. While hitchhiking west, she took a ride with a pleasant retired couple to Detroit. On the way north, Molly took her first drink of alcohol and smoked her first cigarette, from which a lifelong love affair with nicotine -- until Molly's chest-crushing and dying breath -- sprung. Throughout her childhood, Kayla believed naively that Molly was shipped for some purpose (Molly confessed to being a rebellious hellion) by her pious parents to a convent in a heavily Catholic section of Detroit, thus escaping a desperately poor and illiterate prison. Melvin, Molly, and Kayla rarely talked about Molly's family and her birthplace. Kayla learned the hard way, as a child, not to bring up the subject. Later, the daughter learned the truth while she was in her 20s and it made her furious. Kayla stormed out of the house and leased her own apartment. But, after several years, Kayla finally gave in to Melvin's plea to forgive their deception.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
After a few minutes of travel time from the Beckley-Raleigh County Airport, Kayla stepped into the disheveled office of Baron Jack, the main pilot in the employ of Albatross Air Service. Kayla carried a pouch full of cash, which would keep all records to a minimum. Jack mildly objected to Kayla's proposal for a 30 minute twirl over Beckley, mainly because just about everything that the young woman desired -- particularly the part where she would unburden the contents of a silver cremains box over some forested hillside outside of Beckley proper -- could cause him to draw the attention of Homeland Security agents or, worse, cause him to surrender his pilot's license. </div>
<br />
On the other hand, there were not many pleasingly plump young girl blonds, with piercing blue eyes, glossy lips, and sharply crafted eyeliner, who just dropped in with untraceable cash at the old Albatross. The stranger with the box had already agreed that the charter price the flyer had quoted would work. Pausing for a moment, Kayla then slapped a crisp, newly printed $100 bonus onto the counter. Baron Jack greedily pocketed the money, then pulled on a khaki colored cap to match his jumpsuit. He maneuvered a pair of gold, wire-rim aviator glasses onto his face. He asked Kayla to wait inside while he fired up the chopper, which had Albatross Air painted on its side, and then be very careful.<br />
<br />
Twenty minutes later, 2000 feet up, the pilot banked his ear-splitting copter to the north. Through a headset, Baron Jack pointed to a hillside outside of downtown Beckley and said to his passenger, 'There. There's your spot. Go on now. Let her go now.'<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla nodded grimly. "Got it,' she whispered.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> She was going to cry. The contents of the small box poured out a window and fluttered over the rolling terrain. The helicopter raced away, dripping tears. To Kayla a bottomless cache of family burdens, desire for mercy, and sad indebtedness made her feel like she was going to drop.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> The troubled daughter decided not to hunt for any of Molly’s relatives. Baron Jack said he wanted her to stay on for a few days since his wife and he had split up recently. He pointed out a lowbrow Super 8 motel that was now his abode. Kayla did not believe his hard luck story. She instructed him to drive straight to the Beckley Airport. She tersely claimed she had better places to go. </span><br />
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This proved to be the least complicated aspect of her overall mission with her mother.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weeks later Kayla (just a day or two after she flew home from the Mideast) bumped literally into Lowe Landry while she was emerging from Melvin's front door. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>'True," Kayla yelled heatedly back at her father, who stayed inside. "Too true. But I'm not a bit sorry. Okay?'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> There was no reply.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Lowe found Kayla's sudden outburst</span></span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">insensitive, cold, disturbing.</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">She was angry, defensive, not her most pleasant and endearing traits. Her reunion with Melvin seemed to have hit a wall. Lowe wondered what might have happened overseas to bring this up, if anything, if she even went over there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Kayla huffily dragged Lowe to a porch seat. It looked like she had gained 10 or more pounds around the middle. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> He stammered, 'You're back, you're done! That was some kind of feat, girl. Your dad said. You snuck into a pyramid? <em>Giza beeza! </em>Was that totally awesome or what? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla said impatiently, ‘Please be quiet. I have something to tell you. It’s big. I don’t need a critic. I need a buddy. Be that still?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This made Lowe wary. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just one night before, Melvin and Lowe had sat in the same spot for a serious conversation. The old man talked about Molly’s demise as sheets of rain poured earthward.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Melvin would not admit to having problems with Kayla's dark adventure with Molly’s last remains. As avowed atheists, and as a team, the trio approached death as an insensate and bloodless consignment, an airless black box, a splashdown in some deep and darkened pit without a pendulum, or whatever heartless image, such as a plunge into a backyard lagoon, that you could chalk up to a timeless eternity. Disregard for burial matters and the uselessness of the dead body was not a big deal in their playbooks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> After reading the abrupt e-mail message Melvin had sent, Lowe felt certain that he could not fully trust what his two friends would claim about Egypt. Kayla's trip to West Virginia he chose to believe in. Her mercurial mission with mama Molly to the Appalachian Trail seemed real enough. Lowe had perused the evidence with morbid delight -- a few photographs taken by Kayla's cell phone, grease-smeared food receipts, her taxi cab driver's hand-scrawled signature and date, a trio of postcards with chirping birds on hillside trees, '<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Welcome to Beckley, Y'all' </i>greetings, and the crab-like map of the coal state, West Virginia. Frankly though, her imaginative story about a backwoods flyboy named Baron Jack recklessly captaining a rusting helicopter, property of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albatross Air Service</i>, his pants pockets flush with Melvin's cash, tucking a walk-in named Kayla into a four-point seatbelt, stretched Lowe's sense of credulity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> (Lowe’s private, eerie fantasy of the helicopter jetting from the airport still weighed most days on Lowe's mind. When Kayla, still freshly returned from West Virginia, showed him an picture of the Baron standing next to his rusting time machine, Lowe took a step back in shock and instantly felt faint. He gasped, his face went white. He pulled the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> iPhone</i> from Kayla’s hand. He groped around unsteadily for a chair, as if some weight yanked him earthward.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Albatross? Albatross Air? Where’d you get this picture?’ he mumbled densely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Umm. Duh. What’s your problem, dude? When I went to Beckley. That’s the fly guy Jack I told you about. His copter. His ride. Hey, man, what’s the matter?’ Kayla asked. She rubbed Lowe’s bony shoulder as he sat, afraid that his heart was about to give out.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Melvin confessed said that he felt guilty about his wife’s life force suddenly giving out. On Molly’s last afternoon, he felt secure about leaving the house. Mel contended -- likely it was only a delusion -- that he had felt the last echo of her ravaged heartbeat when he dropped his bag of groceries and fetched Molly’s flattened torso from the offensive office carpeting. I should have, could’ve, brought her back, Mel claimed tipsily, if only things, the timing, had been a little different.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Maybe you could have prevented some part of it, but I doubt it,' Lowe retorted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Melvin was working on his fourth or fifth glass of cheap wine since Lowe had joined him. According to Mel’s comically twisted worldview, he had never really gotten drunk. ‘With all due respect, I have merely been over-served,’ he invariably contended. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As she neared death, Molly had become deeply captivated by stories of ancient Egypt. This was because Molly had been introduced, smoldering cigarette after cigarette in hand, a stained coffee mug that said Boss beside her, a cheap ink pen tucked into her pinned up and slightly graying hair, to the delightful anarchy of internet surfing, at all hours of the day and night, in that musty killing zone of a home office. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Molly could drive home a point, Melvin likewise admitted. She let Kayl and me know if she could not travel to Egypt on her own, we needed to get her there once she passed. Then Mol lit another cigarette, puffed out a huge cloud of smoke, and demanded, no kidding, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Did y’all hear that?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Rain sheeted noisily off the slanted overhang. Humidity made the men feel sticky. Stray cats again were sheltering on the porch. Water was seeping into the rusted and rickety cars and, around back, torrents were accumulating in the blackness of the hidden lagoon. Melvin poured more wine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Maybe you should have stopped her,' Lowe said to Melvin, who seemed to be drooping.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Ahhh . . . . I know it. But she was dead set on what Molly wanted,' Melvin said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ''This field trip overseas was your idea, big guy. Don’t kid yourself,’ Lowe noted. ‘Not about that. Kayla still might get into serious trouble. The heck with the <i>no worries </i>nonsense. She could have gotten into major trouble or killed dammit. What about pregnant? Grabbed into captivity? Looking at prison time? Hell, she has been in real trouble since she got there in my opinion. But <i>our girl</i> will manage to skate free luckily in the end. Somebody somewhere has to be watching over her,'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Ahhh, so it was. So be it. Kayl did what it took, for Molly's sake. It didn't turn out so bad. The soldiers on Sphinx duty would have prob’ly frowned on a young, American tourist, a lowly female no less, squeezing out human remains on a national treasure from a shampoo tube.' Melvin, on a slight rebound, laughed a little.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Was that genuine repentance?' Lowe smiled at The Minimizer. 'You put Kayl in a compromising situation, you know. Then she sails into the heart of darkness and, typical of an invincible young adult, she decides to take it up a notch or two. 'Nothing bad’s gonna happen to me. No worries. I've got this. -- That better have been a repentant note, big guy.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Melvin stared vacantly into the stormy darkness. A big cat jumped into Mel’s lap, curled up, and purred. The old guy was truly lost without Molly. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Melvin took a long sip of wine. He brough forth his perfectly sonorous on-air voice.</span></span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">'Deep </span></span><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edgarallan393723.html" title="view quote"><span class="bqquotelink1"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">into that darkness peering long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming. Seeing dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.</span></span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> "Well, okay, before we call it a day,' Lowe said. ‘Tell me a little more about how Kayla got Molly all cozied up with the immortal Khufu?'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kayla’s letter surprise was composed on Museum of Egypt stationery. The official envelope bore the museum Director's seal, impressively, plus a smudged postmark from Cairo. It looked beaten up -- as if it had been circling the globe tucked in postal sacks for eons. The careful handwriting on the envelope belonged to Kayla. Melvin felt faint when the postman handed the paper to him. His hands quivered. His pulse rate quickened and a red flush crossed his pale and whiskery cheeks. He had barely heard from Kayla by e-mail at the neighborhood library during her absence. Kayla had not disclosed much. But why the snail mail, he puzzled nervously.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Mel had stopped paying heed to broadcast news. He jumped every time a phone rang. He gave his fears pithy scripts -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Armored guards in Egypt, serious as heart attacks at the Six Pyramids Over Cairo Resort, announced today they nabbed a lovely, American tourist squeezing human ashes on King Tut from a L’Oreal tube. </i>Melvin reached anew for his wine glass. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> He pried open the letter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Dearest Father:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Love you muchly. Just as Mother predicted, this place has the most magnificent sights on earth. The trip over here was very long but a real thrill ride. Baron Jack could not have done a better job of flying us through turbulent weather. LOL. Muah, muah. There are literally hundreds of things to do and see here in Egypt every day. I wish you could share this with Mom and me. If I know you, you have been worried about how I am. Well, I am glad to say that everything is just fine. I realize I have been gone for quite a while. Actually it’s much longer than we expected. The Egyptian desert holds many hidden mysteries and secrets. It’s going to take time to uncover them all. Ha! Ha! I decided to rent an apartment in Cairo near the awesome Museum of Egypt. I have learned so much and feel like I am becoming a better person because of all this. Mom would have eaten it up. I also have come up with a great place to put Mom so she can stay here forever like she wanted, well here and West Virginia that is. So I hope to get the important thing we have talked about, like lose the albatross, done soon in a marvelous manner. Dad, I do not want you to worry in any way. Everything is going to work out just fine. No worries. But I have met a great man. He is a marvelous Curator at the Museum. Can you believe it? His name is Akbar Aziz Hassan, the son of one of the most famous Egyptologists ever. Originally he was a history teacher before getting a doctorate and going to work collecting and verifying stuff for the museum. I just call him Zahi like everybody does. He fell for me, says I’m unlike any woman he’s ever known, in a good way Ha! Ha! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Zahi has pledged to help me with my mission. But, you need to know this infatuation may be about love. Crazy isn’t it? Yes, yes I know I have to bounce, I must break it off. I cannot stay here forever. So I will head home. One little sticking point perhaps ithough s that Zahi is married with two children and has one on the way. No worries. I had no clue at first. Yet love is the strangest tongue, like you have always said. One bonus is that Zahi as a Senior Curator can get me into almost anywhere related to his museum all the time. I've got access now to most of Egypt’s most protected historic treasures. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> So, that’s the deal for now. I need to wrap this. Being here has taught me that the lines between life and death are pretty shadowy. Who can say for sure where one ends and the next begins? See now, all of this has really gotten to me. Mom is safe and sitting right next to me now. Can you hear me sniffling? Hugs and kisses. Muah, muah! </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In just a few days Zahi and I will head to the Red Sea and then the city of Giza for a special occasion. Mom's coming along too. When I finally tell you about it, you will never forget it. How's that for a tease?</span><br />
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Love, xxooxxoo Kayla<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘Dissembler! Villain! Mendacity and deception! Curse her hideous and false heart,’ Zahi fumed. A hothead accustomed to having his way with females, underlings, and other dependents, he slammed his palms hard on a desktop. The American girl had vanished one week after their trip to Giza. Zahi proudly thought he was wise enough to spot a con in his field of Egyptology and likewise in affairs of the heart. She had duped him and those around him on the museum staff. But why? Destiny (was that not her real name?) provided a tantalizing romance in secret but was to him just one of several temporary dalliances. He assumed a bogus passport and faked credentials had been worth the investment. The paranoid Zahi searched the girl’s abandoned apartment, the one he had long paid for, angrily. He searched for her up and down Cairo streets and in the tunnels of the Metro. He tried to trace her on the internet to the States and Canada. He even hotly considered a quick trip to America. But Zahi, the great intellect, banged sharply into impediments and encumbrances at each turn. All references, data, photos of Destiny had been scrubbed off Google and other search engines. His careful and cloaked blond mistress had pulled a hideous disappearing act, as if she had been summoned to a spirit world by Allah. Zahi grew paranoid that Kayla had purloined something of value from the museum’s collection. He tore the cruel deceiver’s apartment to pieces. Zahi also searched through museum pieces compulsively. Curses, the Curator fumed again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Late one night they had left the hotel in Giza. They headed, arms entwined, toward the glowing and cosmopolitan Giza Square. Front desk personnel did not take special notice. This couple had resided without fuss here on Pyramid Street for days. They left the hotel and later returned at all hours of day and night. Alighting on the cracked sidewalk, Zahi and Kayla were dressed in dark clothing, and despite the lateness both wore gold-rimmed aviator glasses with tinted lenses. She bore a black <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hijab,</i> bright red lipstick, and clutched a small, decorative silver box. It gleamed in moonlight rays. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“No words must pass between us once we enter,” Zahi had cautioned her before. “I will use my credentials. I will claim that I neglected something, left behind, for my research. No words, no suspicions, my dearest. Alright?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Zahi the Curator was respected, intellectual, handsome and virile, but often an overbearing bore. Still personnel of many ranks and stations employed by the Museum seemed to love him. He could come and go freely at Giza monuments thanks to his position.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The night was unseasonably hot and breathless. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Spring had arrived on the broiling winds of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">khamsein</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, which some Europeans romantically call the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sirocco. </i>Daytimes became unusually warm and humid, the air bleached light yellow by blowing desert sands and the malaise of auto pollution. Egyptian summer was approaching fast. Kayla missed the north wind and icy raindrops at her home airport.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">As they hurried, her dupe of a boyfriend cautioned Kayla again, exasperating her: ‘There will be others in or very near the king’s gallery and inner chambers. Studious researchers and forbidding guards work day and night in these timeless troves. Once we enter the Great Pyramid we will proceed to the innermost sanctuary with the sarcophagus of Khufu. Cause no one to be suspicious. Conceal your precious box well.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘Got it, dude. No prob. Such a sweet talkin’ guy you are,’ Kayla snorted. She enjoyed needling Mr. Serious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Pyramid Street was bustling with activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Giza was an electrifying night-life town. </span>Kayla was breathing hard after just a few steps. Her palms were clammy. They could see the apex of the Pyramid of Khafre towering at the end of the street. The sight made Kayla nervous. Khafre was the human model for the Sphinx, a despicably cruel ruler just like his father, the notorious Pharaoh Khufu – a king sometimes called Cheops, who erected the Great Pyramid of Giza, still standing as an ancient wonder of the world. Zahi had arranged a ride to take them the rest of the way to Khufu.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They stooped through a makeshift entry, known as the Robbers Gate, at the impossibly massive pyramid. Hand in hand, Zahi and Kayla took a step inside. Then they took another. <o:p></o:p></div>
Kayla remained breathless. Her usual snark and barely disguised smugness had evaporated. She was sweating. I can’t do this -- too weird, too dark, overwhelming , she thought. Kayla had often envisioned this moment, bearing her mother's remains across the threshold, as an international caprice, a lark, a crazy moment she would someday tell her kids and grandkids about. But the reality felt gravely serious, creepy, sobering. She imagined the faint beat of an old heart, out of sight, the veins that fed it severed, leaking sticky blood, carefully concealed. Kayla squeezed Molly's cremains container tight. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘No, do not falter,’ the Curator cautioned bossily. ‘Know that the steps are dark but we must take the first, then the second, to progress. Come along, dear Destiny.’<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They paced in silence, hands clasped tightly, for thirty meters more. They reached the imposing Grand Gallery of King Khufu, a long and narrow passageway that darkly ascends toward a black void at a precise 26 degree angle. Inwardly, Kayla screamed no. Her big eyes got larger.<br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Museum security officers in tan and crisply starched uniforms nodded at them.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Grand Gallery in 1900<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> U</span>p the couple went through the stifling gallery. Kayla felt smothered; she ached for release -- her head spun, her stomach churned. The portentous heartbeat thumped faintly somewhere up ahead.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>'You must come now. Do not turn about. No words, no undue attention. Courage. Conceal your box well,’ Zahi whispered passionately. 'In this rand Gallery of Cheops, about 150 feet more, there will be tunnels left and right to the burial chambers of two great queens, Hetepheres and Melistities I, the mother of King Khafre. Then the gallery will narrow as we reach our apex, just outside the sarcophagus chamber of Khufu.'<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> At the peak of the Grand Gallery, the visitors passed two silent and uniformed sentries, standing at attention, each with a surgical mask in place. Their expressionless eyes studied the man and woman. Zahi wore a Curator badge. Kayla displayed an official Visitor credential. No words were exchanged. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla huffed noisily from the exertion. She unbuttoned her overcoat, straightened her crimson dress, and tucked some stray blond hairs back under her hijab. Zahi in his tweed jacket and white shirt was perspiring too. They were forced to turn sideways to wedge through the opening that led toward the ancient Pharaoh.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Pure craziness,' Kayla thought. She felt she had made an incalculable mistake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Look, I'm ready to bounce, Doctor Z. Let's get out. This is just too scary, Let's go while we can' she whispered.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Another masked guard stood silently inside the sepulchral chamber.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Terrible. This is the worst,' Kayla nearly gagged as she inhaled. She clapped a gloved hand over her nose. The smell all over the pyramid, oppressively earthy and vulgar, seemed most perverse within the burial vault.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Zahi gripped her left hand hard. 'Magnificent,' he said. 'Kingly Khufu's sarcophagus sits in the exact center, the pinnacle of that island mound built up on this sloped and shallow lake. His royal eminence coveted everlasting leisure on water, an eternity of sailing.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> The limestone burial box looked mysteriously plain to Kayla. It was marred by small chisel marks and one corner was cracked off. Zahi said recent digs within the Great Pyramid had uncovered a sailing boat over 150 feet long hidden away for the late Khufu's amusement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Anxious and frightened, Kayla felt like she was about to fall into a bottomless pit. She mentally pictured a helicopter bigger, stronger, than Baron Jack's powering up from a huge limestone quarry in remote Egyptian mountains. It towed a dark limestone mass, heavy and heart shaped, on a swaying cable. The flying machine screamed eastward, destined for this crude-smelling chamber with the Pharaoh’s decaying body waiting inside.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Pull up the top of the casket. Pull it free,' Kayla hissed as the image faded. She was surprised. 'I need to see. I need to see him.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Zahi was appalled. Was she about to hyperventilate? 'Impossible, my dear, be quiet' he protested. 'Grave robbers did their work millennia ago. The sarcophagus is empty, a void. Hold onto your senses.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Please. Don't deny me this,' Kayla whispered hotly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'Step down with me into the lake bed. Very carefully, down the slope. Quiet now. Do not draw attention. Pour your mother's mortal remains slowly, gently, down where you stand,' Zahi instructed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla closed her eyes as she went down into the ancient trough. She started to cry. She sought to steady herself on her companion's arm. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 'This is it Mother. Thank you. Goodbye. What else is there to say?' she choked out quietly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Zahi glanced toward Destiny. Instantly he sensed relief. Molly ashes were sifting silently onto the dusty bottom of tyrannical Khufu's hidden lagoon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> At last, Kayla felt a weight rapidly drop from her. Her duty was done, a satisfaction, but a pain beyond physical sensation remained. Ready to run, she concealed the tiny box in her coat. She shook her gloved hand over the slope. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> A muffled groan welled up inside the chamber, a sound of deep disturbance. What's that, Kayla quizzed Zahi. But she was not about to linger to find out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> One masked guard took particular note and bowed gravely as the visitors passed. Zahi saluted. What a strange pair they are, the guard thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">*** ***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> If one ignores history one knows next to nothing. Like the unseeing finger that is grafted to the hand, one cannot detect intuitively that one is part of a living body. Shaw's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don Juan</i> had to descend into Hell to discover that life, without context and historical perspective, is a tempting fiction, a dream, an illusion, and death is its painful only point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> As time passed, Kayla regretted her brashness and self-sacrifice as the finger of Destiny. She resented the Curator for years but eventually saw things differently. Kayla felt guilty for many years. But her mother, Molly, could not be moved now and would never know what her promiscuous daughter had done. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla judged that Melvin should not be told about the Pharaoh’s real story. Her father’s physical health was deteriorating, as were his mental functions. Her detached and minimizing parent loved his old and warped records that spun round and round, his random cats, and creaky sentimental musings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla began to read a big book about Giza as she flew homeward. Manetho the Egyptian wrote the haughty and cruel heretic named Khufu ruled the Old Kingdom of Nubia for six hard decades, forty-five hundred years ago. Manetho's contemporary Herodotus, a Greek scholar, recorded how the king strangled all prosperity and vainly subjected his people to terrible hardships to enrich his accounts and pamper his family. At times the Greek wrote the sociopath pharaoh's name as Cheops. The people detested this vile ruler. Thousands perished like slaves in his vast limestone quarries or starved while the Great Pyramid went up. Building it took three decades. Khufu's depraved son, Pharaoh Khafre, followed his father and was equally hated during his reign. Father and son abused the Old Kingdom for over 100 years, an evil duo like no other.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Khufu lusted for money during his long period of unrelenting debauchery and prideful construction. His greed and hubris eventually undid him. Late in life, the Pharaoh forced a beautiful and sprightly though oft molested daughter Melistities II, filled with gumption like her mother before marriage, to work as a concubine in her parents' finest brothel. Her nefarious father needed to pay for more stones for Giza. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The desirable daughter, Melistities, named after her mother, proved enterprising and of worthy, a future Nubian queen. She met her father's price resentfully. Yet secretly Melisities collected a premium payment from each man who came to her, including the vile Khafre, her incestuous brother. She coveted her own pyramid. Each day's labor at her father's command paid for one of her pyramid stones. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla was staggered as she consumed the old story. A daughter exploited, craven reprobates for parents, it felt too close for Kayla's comfort. In the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza, there lie some smaller edifices rising from the desert floor, one of them a royal prostitute's pyramid as a memorial to herself, she who was only her horrid father's second most-prized product. Herodotus' stark account crushed Kayla's spirit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> History unread and ignored conceals awful truths.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Kayla was still shaken when she got to her father's house. He would be giddy of course, unaware that she had become chastened profoundly and depressed from her travel education. She had much to tell Melvin. But this was the night, post-Egypt, when she sadly but fortuitously bumped into Lowe on Melvin's displeasing porch. The first stage of the family reunion had apparently ended badly. Kayla came storming out of the screen door. Melvin remained inside in shadows.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">'True,' Kayla barked back haughtily. 'Too true. </span></span><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">But I'm not a bit sorry.</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">No regrets for any of it! </span><span style="color: #f1c232;">Hear me on that?'</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> From Mel's shadowy interior there was no response.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Kayla wheeled around and bumped foreheads with Lowe. </span></span><span style="color: #f1c232;">'So okay?' Kayla demanded hotly.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Lowe blinked with surprise. '</span><span style="color: #f1c232;">O-<em>kay. </em>Whatever?' he replied tentatively.</span> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Angry prattling was not one of his female friend’s more attractive traits.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Kayla seemed heavier by 10 pounds or more.</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">She impatiently dragged Lowe by a shirt sleeve to a seat.</span> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘So you’re done<span style="color: #f1c232;">, finally?</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">'</span><span style="color: #f1c232;">What a relief,' Lowe noted.</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">'That was some kind of awesome, girl. </span><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">You snuck into</span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">a real pyramid? <em>Geeza beeza!</em></span> <span style="color: #f1c232;">Was it totally awesome or what?</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘Sit still. I have something to tell you. I don’t need a critic. I need a buddy. Be that for me?’ Kayla asked, impatient and vulnerable.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘Anything,’ he fibbed. He felt wary of the father and daughter team again. ‘I got your back, girlfriend. What’s the deal?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘My father’s not happy. Like that unholy Museum douche that I left my mom behind with. Un-happy,’ she said irritably.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘What? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What</i>? Are we talking about your Curator dude now, Kayl?’ -- Lowe asked.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘It’s crazy how it all happened,’ she added. ‘Like Khufu’s obedient daughter, I came home with a little bit more than I expected.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What? </i>What’s that about? You’re losing me. I know some of your story. You only did what you had to do. Right?’ Lowe tried to sound convincing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘True!’ she repeated. ‘But look.’ Kayla anxiously rolled up the rounded tails of her red shirt. Lowe looked at a patch of her layered, Doughgirl abdomen.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘Hmm, pretty,’ Lowe mumbled. He was lost again. ‘Where’s this going, Kayl?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘It’s like this, bro. I came home with more than frequent flyer miles and a few Egyptian souvenirs. -- I myself . . . I am pregnant, Total baby on board, totally unplanned. The baby belongs to Zahi. Can you imagine?’ she laughed nervously.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Frankly, Lowe could not. ‘Whoa indeed,’ he whispered. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘Hence I’ve got a daddy problem that is in full bloom, as they say. Want to know an even juicier secret, Lowe?’ Kayla asked<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘I don’t really know. Do I?’ he asked. He had not yet learned about young Melistities, the conspiring prostitute princess, nor her twisted regal family.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘Well, bro, it’s a girl. My baby is gonna be a girl,’ Kayla laughed scornfully. ‘How perfect is that, dude?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Lowe worried that Melvin might not ever emerge from hiding. Clearly he was becoming unhinged. Was Kayla now following him into some early stage of dementia? Her biting words and disdainful laughter unsettled him.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> ‘Here’s the way I see it, bro. I could call it Melanie, or Melania, if I wanted. So like, you know, the male version of Melvin. Or then maybe I won’t need a name because I won’t have it at all. My trouble is that I need someone who’s a buddy and not a critic right now, someone to give me a helping hand, like I told you,’ Kayla continued. ‘So I’ve been thinking, dude, you know, sketching a little plan in my head. You think you could give this girlfriend a little boost? Sometime soon?’ <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Lowe realized that this was his golden opportunity to dredge up some excuse and bounce quickly back to his place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; tab-stops: 357.75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Kayla said, ‘Tell you the truth, Lowe, I wouldn’t require all that much.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> '</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Giza bazeeza</i>! Another plan?’ Lowe exhaled to himself wearily: in no way would this be acceptable. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">But against his better judgment, Lowe relented, ‘Well, alright, let’s hear it. No promises. But what exactly do you have in mind?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A stray tabby cat scurried past his shins, rubbed his skin, and startled him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Without warning, the sound of Melvin’s voice purring -- a long ‘Ahhhh . . .’ – filtered resonantly from the barely lit living room.</span></span></div>
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*****<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*****<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>****<br />
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February, 23, 2014<br />
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-40253256776920127652014-10-09T09:53:00.000-04:002014-11-18T16:35:26.390-05:00Blackwood Timbers -- In Progress (10-5-14)<br />
<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> This story is in PROGRESS. Material below is very partial and in notes stage.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<i><b> </b></i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #990000; font-size: x-large;"> Blackwood Timbers </span></b></div>
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b> Before you can stand in the light, you must deal with your darkness.</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<b><i> -- </i>A<i> </i>Proverb</b><br />
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<em> <b>. . . in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the </b></em><br />
<em><b> order in </b></em><em><b>creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string </b></em><br />
<em><b> through a maze, so that </b></em><em><b>you </b></em><em><b>shall not lose your way. </b></em><br />
<em><b><br /></b></em>
<i> <b> </b></i> -- <b>Cormac McCarthy</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">A Message from Beyond</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Sunrise: The Report </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> The gloom of night beyond their kitchen windows diminished with each silver glint of </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Winter sunup. Sunday was sneaking into view. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> At their equally crimped </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">breakfast-nook </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">tables, with miles between them</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">, each </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">weighed down by personal foibles and random inexplicables that go with police </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">work, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Buckler </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">and </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Rayles at the </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">same </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">time </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">pored coincidentally </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">over page 2 , above the </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">fold, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">of</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">East </i><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ludlow Times </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>-- </i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Sunrise </i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Edition. </i>A </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">journalistically straightforward but </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">subdued news piece </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">chronicled a </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">secret </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">disclosure</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">: the </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">vaporization </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of an almost </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">prominent, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">local, scholarly </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">m.p. named </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dunn. Each investigator puzzled in silence </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">over a </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">startling </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">headline, 'Science </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Prof from </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kingston Tech AWOL Since Thursday.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Pallid wafts of steam rose from two cups of strong coffee, then twisted and faded from </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">sight. Rayles again hunched over a pair of photos on her <i>iPhone </i>texted to her around</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Saturday twilight by two cruiser cops who conducted, on orders,</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> a cheerless walk-through </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dunn's hollow house. She was tempted to call Buckler, whom she playfully or </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">cuttingly at times labeled </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Shield depending on their situation, but held back since the old </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">man obviously disdained impetuous behavior. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">EAST LUDLOW – The East Ludlow Police Department (ELPD) is currently investigating the disappearance of Doctor Thomas Dunn, an East Ludlow resident who went missing from his neighborhood on Saturday night,</span></i></b></span><b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> in the 1300 block of Sherlock Place. </span></i></b><br />
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> Dr. Dunn is a renowned physicist and long-time faculty member at Kingston Technical College. He was last seen on Saturday morning on the Kingston campus and early on Saturday evening while walking with his dog in the neighborhood. </span></i></b><br />
<b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #555555; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;">He has had no contact with anyone known since that time. Based on his bank and cell phone signals, the ELPD believes that Dunn was still in East Ludlow after the dinner hour.</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"> Police are deeply concerned about the Kingston professor's welfare. They are asking all residents in Blackwood Timbers to report the presence of anyone matches his description. Dunn is a 60-year-old white male with dark eyes, probably wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, and short-cropped gray hair. He is approximately 5', 9" and weighs approximately 200 lbs.</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"> The ELPD has issued a 'disappeared person' notice statewide to all police agencies. They will be continue their search in the local area. </span></span></i></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> Individuals with information on Dunn's whereabouts are urged to call the ELPD at (517) 399-9999 or e-mail: Police@elpd.org</span></i></b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><b>Before You Stand in the Light</b></span>Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-14254486735087720022014-10-02T15:04:00.006-04:002014-10-02T15:07:02.984-04:00What's in a Last Name? Like Yours for Example<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Sorry. But I have mislaid the online source of this entertaining piece. I am pretty sure that it came out of <span style="color: blue;"> <b>Ancestry.com</b></span> -- a prominent, commercial website.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> So, I'll keep looking to properly source it. You go ahead and enjoy</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Butch </span><br />
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There are perhaps 45,000 different <strong><a href="http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts" style="color: #445708;">English surnames</a></strong>, but most had their origins as one of these seven types.</div>
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<strong>Occupational</strong></div>
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Occupational names identified people based on their job or position in society. Calling a man “Thomas Carpenter” indicated that he worked with wood for a living, while someone named Knight bore a sword. Other occupational names include Archer, Baker, Brewer, Butcher, Carter, Clark, Cooper, Cook, Dyer, Farmer, Faulkner, Fisher, Fuller, Gardener, Glover, Head, Hunt or Hunter, Judge, Mason, Page, Parker, Potter, Sawyer, Slater, Smith, Taylor, Thatcher, Turner, Weaver, Woodman, and Wright (or variations such as Cartwright and Wainwright) — and there are many more.</div>
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This kind of name also gave a clue about whom a servant worked for. Someone named Vickers might have been a servant to Mr. Vicker, and someone named Williams might either have served a William or been adopted by him.</div>
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From the obscure fact department: In medieval England, before the time of professional theater, craft guilds put on “mystery plays” (“mystery” meaning “miracle”), which told Bible stories and had a call-and-response style of singing. A participant’s surname — such as King, Lord, Virgin, or Death — may have reflected his or her role, which some people played for life and passed down to their eldest son.</div>
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<strong>Describing a personal characteristic</strong></div>
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Some names, often adjectives, were based on nicknames that described a person. They may have described a person’s size (Short, Long, Little), coloring (Black, White, Green, or Red, which could have evolved into “Reed”), or another character trait (Stern, Strong, Swift). Someone named Peacock might have been considered vain.</div>
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<strong>From an </strong><a href="http://search.ancestry.com/search/rectype/reference/maps/" style="color: #445708;"><b>place name</b></a></div>
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A last name may have pointed to where a person was born, lived, worked, or owned land. It might be from the name of a house, farm, hamlet, town, or county. Some examples: Bedford, Burton, Hamilton, Hampshire, Sutton. Writer Jack London’s stepfather may have hailed from London.</div>
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<strong>From the name of an estate</strong></div>
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Those descended from landowners may have taken as their surname the name of their holdings, castle, manor, or estate, such as Ernle or Staunton. Windsor is a famous example — it was the surname George V adopted for the British royal family.</div>
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<strong>From a geographical feature of the landscape</strong></div>
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<strong></strong>Some examples are Bridge, Brooks, Bush, Camp, Fields, Forest, Greenwood, Grove, Hill, Knolles, Lake, Moore, Perry, Stone, Wold, Wood, and Woodruff. Author Margaret Atwood is probably descended from someone who lived “at the wood.”</div>
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<strong>Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral</strong></div>
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Patronymic surnames (those that come from a male given name) include Benson (“the son of Ben”), Davis, Dawson, Evans, Harris, Harrison, Jackson, Jones (Welsh for John), Nicholson, Richardson, Robinson, Rogers, Simpson, Stephenson, Thompson, Watson, and Wilson.</div>
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Matronymic ones, surnames derived from a female given name, include Molson (from Moll, for Mary), Madison (from Maud), Emmott (from Emma), and Marriott (from Mary).</div>
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Scottish clan names make up one set of ancestral surnames. These include Armstrong, Cameron, Campbell, Crawford, Douglas, Forbes, Grant, Henderson, Hunter, MacDonald, and Stewart.</div>
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<strong>Signifying patronage</strong></div>
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Some surnames honored a patron. Hickman was Hick’s man (Hick being a nickname for Richard). Kilpatrick was a follower of Patrick.</div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Wow. That was so cool. Btw, my surname is of Scandinavian (Swedish/Danish origin) <i><u>Ek</u> = "oak" </i>and <i><u>Strom</u> = "river" and/or "river current" </i></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Sincerely yours -- Butch Oak River Current</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>#######</b></span></div>
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Big MonstEr Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03400903457104140757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102341274865478838.post-68692837896671351612014-09-24T10:41:00.000-04:002014-09-24T10:41:35.220-04:00Smartphones in the Big Meeting -- Yes or No? <h1 class="article-title" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 40px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> A big thank you to the website <i>LinkedIn </i>for running this piece today.</span></h1>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> <b>-- Butch Ekstrom, 24 September 2014</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Successful People Do Not </span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Brandish Smartphones </span></h1>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;"> Source: LinkedIn</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><b> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922000612-50578967-why- </b></span></span><b style="color: #990000; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">successful-people-never-bring-smartphones-into-meetings</b></div>
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<span style="font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You are annoying your boss and colleagues any time you take your phone out during meetings, says new research from USC's Marshall School of Business, and if you work with women and people over forty they're even more perturbed by it than everyone else.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The researchers conducted a nationwide survey of 554 full-time working professionals earning above $30K and working in companies with at least 50 employees. They asked a variety of questions about smartphone use during meetings and found:</span></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>86% think it’s inappropriate to answer phone calls during meetings</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>84% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails during meetings</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>66% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails even during lunches offsite</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The more money people make the less they approve of smartphone use.</span></strong></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The study also found that Millennials are three times more likely than those over 40 to think that smartphone use during meetings is okay, which is ironic considering Millennials are highly dependent upon the opinions of their older colleagues for career advancement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">TalentSmart</a> has tested the emotional intelligence of more than a million people worldwide and found that Millennials have the lowest self-awareness in the workplace, making them unlikely to see that their smartphone use in meetings is harming their careers.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj-IBRe9z9V10MjyvFbKuuaIJzMMh4bjRXswSnjvXPWdFauqBr5RoJOoVzjVD_GWW5J4toMJ0gzlz28qO1eW6pWNzNzW_uuTj7y6oNNXmXdLp6DxOlfH7ZO4-LzFM6sELoCsDGqESRB48/s1600/Cell+SmartPhones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj-IBRe9z9V10MjyvFbKuuaIJzMMh4bjRXswSnjvXPWdFauqBr5RoJOoVzjVD_GWW5J4toMJ0gzlz28qO1eW6pWNzNzW_uuTj7y6oNNXmXdLp6DxOlfH7ZO4-LzFM6sELoCsDGqESRB48/s1600/Cell+SmartPhones.jpg" height="116" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Why do so many people—especially successful people—find smartphone use in meetings to be inappropriate? When you take out your phone it shows a:</span></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of respect</span>. You consider the information on your phone to be more important than the conversation at hand, and you view people outside of the meeting to be more important than those sitting right in front of you.</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of attention</span>. You are unable to stay focused on one thing at a time.</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of listening</span>. You aren’t practicing <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">active</em> listening, so no one around you feels heard.</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of power</span>. You are like a modern-day Pavlovian dog who responds to the whims of others through the buzz of your phone.</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of self-awareness: </span>You don't understand how ridiculous your behavior looks to other people.</b></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lack of social awareness: </span>You don't understand how your behavior affects those around you.</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can't say I'm surprised by USC's findings. My company <a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/services/coaching.php" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">coaches leaders using </a><a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/products/360-refined.php" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">360<span class="reviews-quote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">°</span> assessments</a> that compare their self-perception to how everyone else sees them. Smartphone use in meetings is one of the most common coworker complaints.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s important to be clear with what you expect of others. If sharing this article with your team doesn't end smartphone use in meetings, take a page out of the Old West and put a basket by the conference room door with an image of a smart phone and the message, "Leave your guns at the door."</span></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT THE AUTHORS:</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=140248&authType=OPENLINK&authToken=bBGH&locale=en_US&srchid=505789671411326879842&srchindex=1&srchtotal=95&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A505789671411326879842%2CVSRPtargetId%3A140248%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Kevin Kruse</a> </strong>is a NYT bestselling author, accomplished speaker, and expert in employee engagement and leadership. Download free articles at his website <a href="http://kevinkruse.com/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">KevinKruse.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dr. Travis Bradberry </strong>is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book,<a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/products/emotional-intelligence-2.0/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Emotional Intelligence 2.0</a><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">,</em> and the cofounder of <a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">TalentSmart</a>, the world's leading provider of <a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/products/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">emotional intelligence tests</a>, <a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/services/onsite-training.php" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">emotional intelligence training</a>, and <a href="http://www.talentsmart.com/services/train-the-trainer-certification.php" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">emotional intelligence certification</a>, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post</em>, and <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Harvard Business Review</em>.</span></div>
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