I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but here’s my contribution to this week’s Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge about winners and losers.
I’d been graduated for twenty-five years when an old
classmate climbed up the bleachers to my family’s perch near the top.
“Do you remember me?” he demanded.
Of course, I remembered. My graduating class was only
thirty-one.
“I’m the guy you embarrassed in advanced algebra class.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t been competing. I just enjoyed advanced
math. I loved solving puzzles and math was an especially complex series of puzzles.
Since then, I’ve been asking myself who’s the winner. If he
was the only one competing, then was he the winner? He didn’t seem to feel
victorious.
The gist of this story appears in my novel, See Willy See, to be released tomorrow, November 8, 2019.It will take a while to get to the bookstores and libraries, but it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.
Stationed in Panama, training for combat, Connor dreaded his sister’s letters from Paris where she served in the U.S. Consulate and where they Nazis were poised to take over the city.
“I was just telling Daniel about the time Freckles got to snooping under the woodpile and found that nest of baby rabbits,” she wrote, “remember how we took them out of the dog’s very mouth?”
“I look in the woods here and imagine all the baby
rabbits hidden in them.”
Connor smiled, remembering all their rescue missions—until
he realized she was writing in code.
“Jesus!” he exploded, scrubbing his hands through
already rumpled hair, glancing around at his tent mates, watching him.
“My sister’s French Resistance boyfriend is going to
get her killed rescuing little Jewish bunny rabbits.”
We played their music—Moonlight Serenade, In the Mood, Begin the Beguine, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. Dad liked roses, so we bought some and poked them behind our ears, pinned them in our hair. We sprayed the room with Mom’s favorite, White Shoulders. I broiled big T-bones, shucked oysters, baked lemon meringue pie. We ate by candlelight. Sis made Manhattans and we sipped them between dancing the Latin Walk, and jitterbugging, swinging around the living room like we knew what we were doing. By midnight when we played Sentimental Journey, it almost felt like they were dancing with us.
For thirty
years, Andrew Carroll has collected letters, spanning 225 years of American war
history. “These letters are America’s great undiscovered literature,”
Carroll says. “They give insight
into war and human nature.”
What great
timing for me that this article by April White about Carroll’s letter-gathering
campaign appeared in the November issue of Smithsonian—just
as I’m releasing my book set in the World War II era and focusing on families
and staying connected. Letters play a
central role in my story, keeping Connor Conroy and his sister Nora connected
to each other and their family on the home front.
Nora’s in
Paris at the U.S. Embassy at the beginning of the narrative with the Nazis
poised to overrun the city. Connor feels responsible for her circumstances
because he goaded her into seeking a career. How could he have dreamed she’d
take a job in a war zone? Now he has to decide whether to enlist and maybe get
to Europe where he can protect her.
Back to
Carroll’s hundreds of thousands of letters (so far).Twice he’s asked Dear Abby
to promote his Legacy Project and twice she’s complied. Within four days,
thousands of letters had overrun the local post office station. The letters are now housed in the Center for
American War Letters at Chapman University in California.
These are not
celebrity letters. Soldiers wrote their own stories in these letters, intimate
details of their lives at war and reassurances that “no Jap bullet has my
name on it.” Back home, their friends and families wrote about the price
of wheat and pork bellies, rationing, collecting rubber, and producing food,
uniforms, blankets, socks, and bandages—materiel for the war effort.
I live in the Central Flyway, that magnificent migration
route from the northern reaches of the Canadian wilderness to Central and South
America.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Sandy Griswold, sports
reporter for the Omaha World Herald
wrote of the 1890s crane migration, “. . . they came down like gray and
snowy avalanches from the far north in the blustery days of March.
In my grandmother’s childhood, the ducks and geese came in
clouds that dimmed the sun, flapping and gabbling, lighting in meadows and
cornfields, snapping up grubs and grain to fatten and prepare themselves for
the serious business of breeding and producing a new generation of waterfowl to
darken the sky.
In the Sandhills up north, the shorebirds came to the wet
meadows, lakes formed when the water table extended above the surface of the
sand; striding on stilted legs, they joined the ducks and geese in stirring up
the water and consuming water bugs, water plants, and seeds.
Farther east, in the Mississippi Flyway, came the passenger
pigeons that used to flow through the Great Lakes region at sixty miles per
hour darkening the skies morning to night for several days running, their flocks seeming to expand and contract
like living lungs breathing.
Now they come in lonely skeins, their cries nearly unheard in the empty skies, and the pigeons don’t come at all.
Considered a superior eating duck, the canvasback succumbed to overhunting. Few remain in the flyway.
I’ve been rereading a National Geographic article about rats that I clipped some time ago. Entitled “In The City’s Shadow” and written by Emma Marris, it begins with this sentence. “Rats are our shadow selves.”
Mostly the article focuses on why we hate rats and how we
try to exterminate them, but rats have redeeming social value.One of those
redeeming qualities got my attention right away. Marris quotes a study showing
that rats will free other rats from cages—instead of gorging on chocolate. Now
that’s some sacrifice for a brother!
Marris also quotes New York City rodentologist Bobby
Corrigan, who says that rats clean up after us, surviving and thriving on our
garbage. Like maggots now being used to debreed dead flesh around burns and
wounds, rats eat garbage we leave in our streets and alleyways.
In Tribeca Park, Corrigan says, rats hunt and kill pigeons,
another of our least-favored forms of urban wildlife. “They leap on [the
pigeons’] backs like a leopard on the Serengeti.” On the other hand, they provide
food for urban hawks and owls, like that peregrin falcon that nests somewhere
on a ledge in Chicago.
Rats provide high-protein food that might be important in
our predicted food-starved future. Polynesian explorers took Pacific rats along
for food when they settled various islands in the Pacific. The CEO of a trust
in New Zealand that guards the rats they call kiore says that they’re half the
size of New York rats and they’re “all nice and fluffy and tasty
looking.” They even maintain a rat sanctuary on the North Island.
So let’s hear it for the rats, while most of us hope for a population collapse—except for those tasty Pacific rats and kangaroo rats that stay out everybody’s way.
Here’s a podcast that aired on radio station KZUM a couple of years ago.
Whew! I finally got my new novel See Willy See sent off to the printer and ebook distributor. Seems like there are always new hoops to jump through, especially since I’m using a new print-on-demand organization. I may have to reformat my table of contents, but that’s pretty minor compared to days of saving and resaving in different formats to meet printer requirements. Anyhow, I just read Margie Lukas’s novel River People and I wanted to share my thoughts. I read her first and this is as good as her first. Wow!
River People
River People
Coffins or arks? What will you choose to build?
In her historical novel, River
People, Margaret Lukas harkens back to a time when women and children were
barely more than chattel. It’s an old
story of women’s abuse at the hands of men, but Lukas makes it new by
showing us into the heart and damaged mind of the primary male abuser.
Belonging challenges the characters each in her (or his) own way as they struggle to assert their identities. The central villain, Rev. Jackdaw, struggles with gender identity. Effie tries to think herself better than her neighbors, terrified that her life will become as hard as theirs. Henry, known as Chief, finds himself separate because he’s a half-breed. Bridget suffers from abandonment. Her parents left, her uncle died, she sent her own grandmother back to Ireland so she wouldn’t die, the Reverend calls her Rooster—even her name’s in question.
Bridget is the novel’s main character. Her parents left her behind when they immigrated to the U.S. She and her grandmother try to follow, but in America Bridget becomes, for all purposes, an orphan. But she maintains tenuous hope, unlike many of the other characters. Bridget believes in her mythological warrior heroine Nera, and in her connection to the natural world. “The river, Wilcox [a tree] and all trees, the sky with flying stars, Jake [the ox]. It was all connected and all of it loved her. She was at home in the wide world . . . . when a person fits under heaven, she fits everywhere.”
Throughout the novel, Lukas forces her characters to make excruciating choices. When survival seems impossible, do you acquiesce or do you fight death? When forced to do—or even witness—cruel things, do you come to enjoy cruelty or can you resist? Can one always choose? Are some cruelties so severe that they warp the mind forever? Do fear and pain make cruelty inevitable? How does one small act of cruelty send ripples that expand into more and more lives?
Coffins or arks. In an historical tour de force I couldn’t
put down, Margaret Lukas asks existential questions at the core of our
humanity, and she does it with empathy and understanding.
River People Lukas’s second novel is as good as her first and that’s pretty great.
I’ve been missing in action this week online, but I did format my ebook, download a previously purchased ISBN for it, apply for a Library of Congress Control Number, send out an advance copy of the soon-to-be-released book for review, and find enough proofreading errors that I’ve been reading paperback galleys (again). So late, here’s my Carrot Ranch 99-words on unforgetting . . . I should mention, I stole Lou’s story about the bear.
No chance of unremembering Lou Ell. He was the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission wildlife photographer. A bachelor, he spent most of his time outdoors somewhere fulfilling his role as “photosnappishooter.”
On vacation, he shot a film on the Alaska brown bear. In one
spectacular sequence, he got between a sow and her cub. The momma attacked.
Backed against a cliff, Lou kept shooting. “Somebody will find the
camera,” he thought. Since he survived, he intended to make wildlife
movies.
I visited him once years later. He lived alone in the dark. You see, Lou had lost his sight.
I’ve got a couple of
story ideas for when I finish revising the last novel of my trilogy—the second
is due to release the first week in November. One’s about a woman who drives a
truck (semi-tractor/trailer coast to coast) and another about a woman who checks
herself in to an inpatient mental institution to escape a brutal husband. I’ve
written short stories about both. But as I age, this woman tugs harder and
harder on my thoughts.
So here’s how I’m meeting this week’s GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt. The word is scale.
She stepped on the scale and groaned—she’d just checked the
zero balance and knew it was accurate.
When did her body go to hell?
She’d never needed to diet and she got plenty of exercise in
her job—the camping, swimming, and canoeing didn’t hurt either. But then
sometime in her late fifties and early sixties, her metabolism changed and it
seemed like she could look at a dish of ice cream and gain a pound. Not
spectacular, but annoyingly inexorable, the weight gain joined a host of aging
signs, all of them familiar—graying hair, thin skin (there really is such a
thing), stiff joints—she felt vaguely depressed.
But the symptom that really fried her bacon was the way
people called her honey or patiently explained stuff she already knew rather
than answering her question—and ignored any idea she presented as if she weren’t
even in the room.
The Carrot Ranch Literary Community‘s word prompt this time is Interlude. Since my last six sentences was about war, it was still on my mind.
My grandparents met in an interlude, peacetime between our
nation’s many wars. Yet, turbulence attended their meeting.
My grandfather arrived from Ohio with Uncle Johnny Bivens, my
grandmother’s grandmother’s brother. The men spent a night in the Douglas
Nebraska, train depot, held by the first horizontal snow Grandpa George had
ever seen—a plains blizzard.
Later, the town cop, drawn by light in the station, came to
make sure the escaped murders from the state penitentiary hadn’t holed up
there.
Once the excitement ended, though, Hazel and George had two peaceful years to assemble a grubstake and get acquainted.
Here they are. Hazel at high school graduation and George just arriving from a hunting trip.
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