Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

Lately I've been writing about Disney World a lot. In fact I have about ten stories finished - you can read three or four of them below - and hope to have about twenty before I call it a book.

The thing is, I've never been there. The times I was in Florida, I never had the money, or the time, and in spite of having ten children, same - never had a few thousand to drop.

But this doesn't seem to be a problem. I can put almost anything into Google and get reams of information about it. It's almost like you can walk through a door into an alternate universe. All of a sudden, Mickey and Minnie are real, and there's a host of other characters. Thousands of employees will tell you what it was like to work there. Usually they are able to explain how the Disney culture is different from the culture around.

Disney is extremely well marketed to the upper-middle class American entertainment needs. It has managed to stay at the top of its game for fifty years and, in spite of raising its prices astronomically at every turn, keeps the park full and the money rolling in. Their marketing is based on perpetuating the "happiest place on earth" idea and quickly eliminating anything that might tarnish that image. I'm not down on them for squashing people's right to say something negative - they're not after me now, for example - I think it's part of good marketing. If employees agreed not to say anything negative, hold them to it. What's interesting to me is the fantasy/reality line - that is, when people genuinely get confused about what's real and what's not, and Disney does nothing or doesn't quite know how to deal with the problem. There are a lot of people, for example, who stalk or fall in love with the Disney characters. Not the people who play them, the characters. There are people who are living the fantasy. I could in fact use my book to explore schizophrenia and why it is that some people just slip into a fantasy world, since the real one is putting too much pressure on them.

Instead I am mostly using it to explore the American family - husband, wife, two kids - in all its glory. Maybe I'll do the other kinds of families too, step-families, large families, no-kid families, I'm not sure how. In the modern world we don't really have much of the upper middle class, two-kid families anymore, so in a sense I'm investigating what's left of them. Who actually goes to Disney World? What happens when they get there? In what ways to the various folk tales that this whole world is built around, affect their experience?

It's a rich vein for a book, lots here. You might be mad at me for writing about some place I haven't even set foot in. But in fact I've read and read about it. I avoid some areas of it; there is no way I can cover it all. And within it are entire worlds - each movie, for example, has its own entire culture, with its characters represented and played out somewhere within WDW - which makes me even more of an interloper, since I can't possibly know them all.

Ah but that's who I am. This is as close as I'll get to the place.

There's a house across the street from the abatement that we use to get out of our garage and onto the street, such that, as we face the street for the first time when leaving our house, that house is right there in front of us. It's white, old, and traditional, and has a small front porch. When we moved here there was a chair on that porch and a guy would be sitting in it every once in a while.

There were a couple of break-ins in our garage that October, as we were still moving in, got covid, and were a little unorganized, and I had failed to lock the garage and even left the window open enough for someone to crawl in after removing the screen. I kicked myself and vowed to keep the garage locked from then on, a vow I have had trouble keeping. But soon after, the guy in that white house was arrested for breaking in to other houses around town and I became convinced that he was responsible for our break-ins too. I peered over at that house, now empty, and the chair on the porch, but restrained myself from just marching over there and fishing through whatever he had. Instead I wrote a letter to the police saying I'm pretty sure he would have X, Y & Z and let me know if you find these among his stolen goods. They never even responded.

The guy who moved in after him had New Mexico license plates on his car, but kept to himself pretty much, and lived there right up until this last August. I kept meaning to walk over and grill him about New Mexico, as we'd moved here from New Mexico also, but I never did, and he was gone before I could. In September a black family moved in with two small children in diapers, who would be out there when the mother was mowing the lawn. The chair was put on the curb about two weeks ago.

It was an old leather reclining chair with a couple holes in the leather, and as I drove onto the street I'd look at it and wonder if we could use it anywhere. I hate seeing old furniture go out to the dump if there's any possible use for it. So I said that to this kid who has been staying with us. His family lives in extreme poverty; his sister is pregnant with a baby and in general he was having trouble, so we just let him stay with us. What I told him was, in general I like to save chairs like that although my wife is not so crazy about that; it looks like maybe you boys could use that chair somewhere, in the attic if nowhere else.

Well, he and my son hauled in the chair, and in the process, found a $100 bill in it. It was the kid who found it, apparently, not my son. Without thinking I told him, I'd probably return it to that family, them being a family and all, but you found it, you can do what you want.

Later it occurred to me that chances were pretty good the family knew nothing about the hundred dollar bill. In fact the kid from New Mexico probably knew nothing about it either. I think in its own way it was what was left of our stuff, coming back to us.

I think the kid is using it, a bit at a time, for his sister's baby and his own needs. First he has to cash it; nobody believes him that he just found it. But that will resolve itself in time. I meant it when I said, it was his to do with as he wanted. It was a somewhat privileged outlook of mine to be able to say, return it, you can always get more money. I could always get more money, but in his shoes, I'd have a harder time returning it. And the other aspects of the back story didn't really fall into place for me until later. When I said that, I'd only been thinking of the family.

Slapping a Mickey

 

I was working the midnight shift at Disney - we started painting when the park closed, and worked until morning - we painted the wooden frames that the rides were built on, and that kind of thing, but we got out there almost every night. I was drinking heavily - that seems to go with painting - I drank before I went to work, a little during work, and then more in the morning when I finished. It wasn't related to Disney; actually I liked Disney. It was more related to a woman who had caused me serious problems.

So often I'd hit these bars that Disney people frequented, and I'd go to them at dinnertime, about when I woke up, and I'd have some dinner and start drinking before I even went to work in the evening. I was just waking up, but I'd see a lot. On this one night I ran into my friend, Beth, who was also a heavy drinker. She invited me to sit down with her and her friend Carol, who was sitting with her. They were both about my age, mid thirties. I due to my devastated confidence was not in the market for a relationship really, but I always liked female company and these two were at least lively and interesting. Both worked for Disney.

I liked my job painting structures at Disney; in the early mornings, when the sun came up and I was done painting, the castles and the fairyland kinds of things glowed in the sun, and I felt the magic. It was my favorite time of day, about five in the morning, and they were just getting ready, getting everything clean and full and prepared; we were putting away tarps and work equipment, and it all looked beautiful. I worked hard, and they paid me adequately. I had no illusions; I knew that if they could pay me a dollar less, they would. But I was one of the few people I knew who defended Disney and felt good about it. These bars were full of people who had fallen out of the dream, who were experiencing the other end of it.

Beth, for example, worked in one of the executive offices by day. I could often envision her in her professional suit, and high heels, an icy stare as she told people they were laid off or were having their salary reduced. Her entire job was to save Disney money somehow, or earn Disney more, to help the bottom line and impress the stockholders. If they could charge an extra dollar for parking, they would. If they could send people out selling parkas the minute it rained, they would, and they would charge whatever they could get. They knew full well that these people were on vacation and didn't feel like pinching pennies. At night she was a serious drinker; that's what we had in common. She wasn't really my type, though I liked her, but we both drank seriously, while people like Carol would slow down so as to come out at the end of the night still knowing who she was, if not still able to drive.

Beth introduced Carol as a woman who liked to slap a Mickey every chance she could get. "Slap a Mickey?" I asked. "I thought the expression was 'Slip a Mickey.'

"It is," Beth said. "Slipping a Mickey is giving someone a pill, usually in their drink, to put them asleep so you can take advantage of them. We have that problem too; in fact, this very bar probably has that problem. But Carol likes to slap a Mickey. You know those Mickeys that run around the park? She likes to slap them."

Carol laughed a little. She was prettier than Beth, but probably still not my type; it was too soon to say. I liked her. She was a character actor; she played one of the Seven Dwarves. We talked about the way a lot of the character actors were stalked. She'd been stalked one time by a woman who didn't know she was a woman, inside her Bashful costume. If you're a good enough actor, she said, they see you as Bashful and not as a person in a Bashful costume. The Mickeys have it worse, she said.

"So many people have been in love with Mickey, forever, since long before they came to Disney, and they come here, and things aren't that great, and they still want that fantasy, that magic. So they go after a Mickey. And they get fixated on him."

"So what's this about slapping a Mickey?"

"Well, the Mickeys around here are either little people or women, because they have to be small to be Mickeys. I know most of them. If they're men, I warn them, they get fresh with me, or something like that, I'll slap them, I don't care if they''re a painter or if they're Walt Disney himself. But I get the most pleasure out of slapping Mickeys. That's why she (poking Beth) is teasing me. I do it a lot. It's most fun when they are in their costume, but of course that won't happen here." Costumes were not to be worn outside of the job itself, so we didn't expect to see them in the bar, though it was known to happen.

A little while after she said this, we were actually joined at our table by a Mickey. His name was Jim, and he was a friend of Carol's. He was out of costume, of course; this was a bar. But they both knew he was a Mickey, and even teased him for it, and he vouched that, yes, Carol had slapped him more than once, in costume and out of it. It's just the way she is, he said, and it never hurts. It reminds you to wake up from the dream. This is not a fantasy, looking serious and banging his beer glass on the table a little.

Jim was interested in the politics of Disney, which was so large, so expansive, that it was actually separate from the state of Florida in some ways and was able to make some of its own rules. Sometimes these rules went against the state of Florida or made people mad in some ways so there was always a kind of push and pull going on. Of course in a bar you're only going to get the more colorful aspects of the story, and not necessarily entirely accurate all the time, but that's where Beth came in. She worked in the executive offices; she knew the truth, usually. Jim and Carol, and I, would talk from a worker's perspective. But Beth knew a lot of things we didn't.

Some time passed, and the bar was lively; I knew it would be my time to go to work very soon. The place was colorful, and was getting more crowded; there were symbols of Florida and Disney on the walls and they'd turned on the neon signs once it got dark outside.

From the corner of my eye, way over on the other side of the bar, I saw something very strange and scary. A woman had gone to the restroom, and in her absence, a man dropped something in her drink. His action was furtive and unseen by most people in the bar. It was only because of our seat in the corner, and the fact that I was facing toward him, that I happened to catch this. I was shocked but as I replayed it in my mind I was sure that that's what I'd seen. Slipping a Mickey! His victim came back and sat down, and he began pressuring her to finish the drink, so they could go. I couldn't even hear him, because I was so far away and the place was noisy, but I knew that was what was happening. I alerted Beth, Carol and Jim to what I'd seen.

Beth was deeply disturbed by what I said, and, looking over at them, she decided to walk over and mix in. If that's what it was, she'd find out pretty quickly. Meanwhile I saw something else that disturbed me greatly: over in the other corner of the place, my ex was being courted by some man who also was rather unsavory. 

It turned out later that he was one of several Captain Jack Sparrows in the park; lots of women hit on him, but my ex was one of them, and so it was possible they had a thing together. This of course made me mad, but what could I do? If a woman wants to go after a pirate captain instead of a set-painter, it's a free country.

There was nothing I could do about that, except to have another drink, which I did, as I watched the scene with Beth and the couple play out. Beth had started talking to the couple right as the man was trying to get the woman to finish her drink and leave. Of course he wanted this woman out of there as soon as possible and before the drug took effect. But Beth knew this, or at least suspected it, and her objective was to stall. Beth was winning; she was an executive; she was a step ahead of him. He was angry now at something she said. The woman had not entirely finished her drink though she'd probably had enough of it for the drug to take effect. Sure enough, I could see the woman begin to lose her bearings, gradually. Beth and the man were still arguing.

I was glad to be diverted, because I didn't want to watch what was happening in the other corner of the bar, where my ex could do whatever she wished and there wasn't much I could do about it.

But right at the table in front of me, another diversion. Jim made a comment about females playing male characters like Bashful, and Carol slapped him. She didn't slap him hard enough to hurt, but she slapped him hard enough to get people at nearby tables to look at us. "You slapped a Mickey!" I said, happy to see what they'd been talking about earlier.

"Doesn't count!" she said. "He's not in costume!"

I laughed again. But two police, a male and female, had entered the bar and were walking over to the table where Beth had stalled the man and woman. The woman was now slumped over, asleep; they'd have to carry her out. Better them, the police, than the man who had drugged her. They were questioning him and getting ready to arrest him. I could have been a witness that he'd spiked her drink, but it wasn't necessary; everyone could see it now.

I was proud of myself, having almost accidentally gotten a criminal like that put away. But I had no time to glory in my success; I had to go to work.


Note: This story is part of a collection I now call Slapping a Mickey: & 20(?) short stories from the House of Mouse - the title, of course, is tentative, as is the final number of stories, but you get the idea. This one still needs some work - I'm not happy about the undeveloped ex, for example, and I might add a stalker. There will be some tinkering. But as the first story of the collection, it's very important that it set the tone, and give an overall view of Disney. I'm still working on that too.

The baby was found in the middle of a battlefield somewhere in Virginia during the Civil War. After the battle, there were dead and injured soldiers all over the place, with discarded muskets that had to be checked and gathered up. But they found this baby in a basket crying, and she had apparently been left there by someone figuring that the authorities would gather her up and take care of her.

They did that, though it took them a while and she went a few days without proper care. By the time she found a loving home, it had been a couple of weeks, but the home she ended up in seemed to work for her and she grew up in a farm family in western Virginia for the next fifteen years.

Nowadays DNA testing would tell you exactly where she came from and who had put her there in that battlefield, but in this case we don't know so we just have to take their word for it that this was what happened.

Meg was a poor girl who lived about five miles from the battlefield. She had been married less than a year when the war came through and her husband, Caleb, went off to fight it on the Confederate side. He was not actually so enthusiastic about the Confederate side itself, but his friends had all gone and had pressured him to go with them, and to stay home would make it seem like he was a deserter or traitor.

But, since they were farmers, things began to go downhill for Meg right away, especially when the new baby came. A local woman had come to help with the delivery, but Meg's mother had died before the baby was born, so she really had no source of support at home. She had two brothers who had gone off to fight as well, but she had no sisters and nobody to ask for help or to move in with. She ate up the food she got from her mother's house, but her mother didn't own that house and the owners were glad to get it back. She tried hiring herself out in the community but with the baby that became harder. Pretty soon she was hungry.

When the war swept through the area she knew that the local boys were using the old field out past the river, but the northern side knew that too and attacked them right there. Meg was hiding in the woods when it happened. She had taken the baby out to the river not knowing what to do, and they were both hungry, the baby crying and Meg crying inside. She couldn't take it anymore. When the battle was over, and both sides had retreated in different directions, she set the baby in the middle of the field and walked home.

Her plan was to go out west somewhere where nobody would know her, but she clung to the hope that Caleb somehow would come back from the war. Instead of leaving the area - she had no money for a bus ticket anyway - she found her way to Charlottesville and worked as a waitress in a small restaurant. The restaurant owner gave her a room to live in.

The war finally ended and things got back to normal to some degree, but Caleb never came home. Sometimes he would appear in her dreams; she would be in the woods, peering out at the battle, and somebody would kill him, or he would kill someone, or someone would come chasing after her and the baby. She would wake up in a cold sweat screaming.

She had an old friend, Esther, in the town she had left, and Esther had promised to inform her if Caleb ever came back to that town looking for her. The problem really was that Esther might not have known, if he DID come back. Esther worked in a bakery, and a lot of people came through the bakery, but would Caleb have come there looking for her? Not many people had known Meg, as she'd lived out in the country; few knew that she'd married; even fewer knew that she'd been pregnant. The war had disrupted everything.

One day a man came into her restaurant and, to make a long story short, he ended up proposing to her. He lived out in the country, in fact not that far from where she had been. He did not know her, or Caleb, or her back story before he walked into that restaurant. He was a horse dealer and was fairly successful. She agreed to marry him and moved with him out to his place in the country. She eventually told him about the baby and about Caleb. The war had disrupted lots of marriages, though. It was not unusual for people to be starting over.

So she was living with this horse dealer, Alvin, and had married him and was now pregnant with his child, and was back in her original town doing an errand. She stopped in on Esther, who told her that Caleb was back. Caleb had come to the bakery two days earlier, and had enquired about Meg, and Esther had told him that Meg had moved to Charlottesville. Esther knew that something was up with Alvin but omitted that from the story so as not to make Caleb mad. But Meg was shocked, and asked Esther what took Caleb so long to come back home. She'd thought he was dead.

Well, they had sent him off to fight in Georgia, and he'd been captured, and when they released him he had no money, and it was this kind of story, The Confederate Army had just kind of fallen apart at the end there, and was unable to even get him home to where he was from.

Just as Esther was relating Caleb's story to Meg, there in the bakery on a clear fall morning, Caleb walked into the bakery. He and Meg recognized each other instantly. He walked up very close to her, but did not reach out to hold her. She filled up with the stress of everything that had happened: the hunger, the giving up of the farm, the abandonment of the baby; she had not forgotten any of it. She told him there was a baby and the baby was in the area somewhere. He slapped her hard across the face and ran out of the bakery.

He was never seen in the town again, and this was lucky for her, because she now had another baby to worry about, and she didn't really want to get Alvin involved. She stopped in at Esther's bakery about once a month and asked every time about Caleb, but Caleb had apparently left town and was not pursuing the issue.

About three years after that incident, she was in the bakery when a farm family of four, mother and three children, came in. The youngest child was about five and had the distinct look of Meg and Caleb both. She was sure that this was her child. She watched the child carefully, and the child noticed her, too, but she was busy taking care of her new toddler, and they didn't really have time to talk.

Caleb was killed in a gunfight in Colorado; he'd robbed a train in Missouri and was by then an outlaw. He was still angry about his wife and had somehow sensed that she'd remarried and he'd lost her. He'd been injured in the war and also knew he'd never be able to keep up the farm, or at least not for long. He was better off just using the gun for what it was for, and run that out until the end, which he did. He spoke her name as he was dying, on the barrom floor in Colorado, but nobody knew any Meg and they buried him out in the wash behind the bar. Years later genealogists came looking for the parents of the young girl, as she'd grown up and had eight children, but could find no evidence of who her birth parents were, and had to wait for the possibility that DNA testing might uncover the truth.

I hitchhiked all the way out to Santa Monica one time to see a girl, but she wasn't there when I got there, and I ended up walking along the pier and experiencing the ocean a little before I went home. She was in Northern California somewhere, so I decided to go up there, but I knew I'd have trouble finding her up there, and I didn't, and had to turn around and come home. Hitchhiking all the way.

I remember some breakfast joint in Arizona where a guy offered me a breakfast and I took it. I also remember meeting a folk legend in Carmel, or at least being told that a guy I saw was one. It was Ramblin' Jack Elliot, I believe, but I sometimes confuse different trips. On one trip I saw Big Sur and almost stayed a while. But once I missed out on the girl, I'd gotten homesick and just wanted to go home.

Phones were bad those days. I didn't have one, and didn't know her mother's number, and she was staying at her mother's in Santa Monica, though not at that moment. Thus I had gone a long way for nothing. Santa Monica seemed to have very eerie light as the sunset came down over the ocean and there were shadows on all the light-colored houses. Cars all had their windows shut in spite of the beautiful weather. There was no interaction among people in the street.

The ocean, of course, was awesome. Waves lapped against the beach and I imagined some of the water had made the trip from Asia just to come up on this shore at this moment. I looked for bottles with notes in them. Not many people were out there with me, but there were a few. You would think a beach would be a popular park in a crowded city with traffic choked everywhere. There is, after all, a wide expanse; a breeze; fresh air; nice sand; room to wave one's arms. Freedom. Yet within a few minutes I decided to get on my way.

There was some charm to the place. People were nice, and gave me rides. I didn't stay that much longer than I wanted to. I felt a cultural gulf that is hard to describe. We are, after all, the same people. It shouldn't be all that different.

A couple of brothers and a pig

It's a family story that once two brother stole a pig, and, fleeing from authorities in Ayrshire, went over to Northern Ireland. From there, they had relatives in Pennsylvania, and came over.

They would have been Wallaces, and would have landed on a road called Wallace Run in Beaver, Pennsylvania. A few generations later, there were generations of doctors but my Grandpa Wallace wanted to be an agriculturalist. And that wrapped up the Wallaces' explanation of their own origin.

I have been to New Castle, Pennsylvania, a few times, and my sister has been there recently. A lot of the Wallaces came through there and in fact there is a Wallace Avenue right near the center of town where two prominent brothers, one an ancestor of mine, I believe, lived. The pig story has become somewhat cloudy though. Who was it that stole those pigs? When was it? I know that Scotland was not a friendly place for a whole generation or two of people who were basically deprived of the right to make a living and live peacefully; the fact that the USA was a reasonable option for them amounts to a huge number of immigrants in a certain era. But I can't remember the era, or match it against these particular relatives. Were we ever able to find Wallaces in Ayrshire? Wallaces that had two young boys who disappeared and sailed west?

I wonder also if the anti-authoritarian streak came across with them. Was one the leader and the other a follower? Did they come to detest the system that had made stealing a pig necessary? Of the twelve Wallace cousins, almost half were against-the-grain kind of people, some of whom ended up way out in the desert avoiding other people as much as possible. One was a musician and his brother spoke proudly of his never having had an ordinary job. Does this hark back somehow to the days when the world seems aligned to lock you out, so that leaving for a faraway land is really the most reasonable alternative?

When I mentioned to my cousins that my book vision for this situation amounted to a mix of fact and fiction, they got a little jumpy. Really I'd like to document all the true stuff I know about this interesting family and the twelve cousins as we've come into our old age. I could change names, but I want to be able to hand it to my descendants and say, You want to know about Mom's side? The Wallace story is all in here...whether I've changed the names or what. But my idea really encompasses what happened to the Scotland they left, and whether those who stayed behind fared any better. And since I don't know anything about those who stayed behind, at least part of it would have to be fiction.

Of course, I could fill it all up with facts: fact about the era in which poor people were run off the land, facts about Scottish diaspora singers, writers, etc. in the US, facts even about Robert Burns, Ayrshire's most famous resident. What does it mean to be a Scottish exile? Maybe my first step should be knowing the difference between Scottish, Scot, Scotch, etc. so that I'm not out here misrepresenting everyone in my far-western, ignorant naivete. But one reason I envision projects like this is that I need to know this stuff myself, and now I at least will have the motivation to go out and find the story.

Brownsville

Brownsville is a section of Brooklyn, New York, with a rich history of thousands of people who have come through it, lived there for generations, moved out or stayed, lived their lives, added their story to those of the city. Books are written about these people and I just read one.

But there is a Brownsville in Illinois which also interests me. It is nothing now but shards of ruins in some guy's field, just west of Murphysboro. But it was once one of the biggest cities in Illinois, thriving, with metalworks and industry.

In those days metalworks and industry was what it took to make a town a more substantial town, in other words, to distinguish any old place from a truly thriving place. They settled Illinois from the rivers, from Cairo up, with Chicago in those days nothing but a pipe dream, so all the action was in the south until you got up to Alton and then Quincy following the river. There was no such thing as such inland towns as Champaign or Rockford and in fact most of Illinois was considered the remote Northwest (northwest of Virginia) as people had not begun pouring in from places like Ohio and New York. The southern rivers were where the people were.

Brownsville was where John A. Logan was born, and he grew up naturally wanting to be a politician. When he was elected, he went to Springfield to represent the people of that southern Illinois area where he was from. That area was pro-Southern, pro-slave owners, so he wrote laws protecting slave-owners who were trying to get their escaped slaves back, when those slaves crossed over into Illinois from Kentucky or perhaps Missouri, states that border that area of Illinois. He was, in general, a pro-Southern legislator, but a distinct minority in a state that bred Lincoln and became increasingly abolitionist.

In fact, hanging around Springfield in general made him an abolitionist, and caused him to change his mind. Some people have said that the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton in the 1830s (?) is what changed everyone's mind, and I'm not sure about the timing here, but Illinois was rapidly seeing that strong feelings were developing along the Mississippi and Missourians were guilty of overstepping their bounds in coming into Illinois and telling Illinoisans whet to do with people who were either on the move toward Canada, or in some way laying low and hiding in the Illinois countryside.

Illinoisans were in fact of mixed opinions about the developing conflict with the south. In southern Illinois many had settled from the south, and understood slaves and slavery, and had no desire to go fight a war against those relatives whom they'd left behind in such places as Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina. In north and central Illinois, settled by northerners and ardent Congregationalists, the idea of slavery was becoming increasingly abhorrent and they didn't feel there was any moral justification to owning another person whatsoever. But there was also a fair number of people who simply were trying to feed body and soul; having obtained an acre or two of generally good farmland, they'd set out to clear it and farm it, and now were faced with what to do when people came up the road requesting something of them. Sometimes people wanted to be hidden; other times, people wanted whoever was hidden to be handed over to receive punishment and return to the other side of the river. In any case there were hard feelings and one was required to side with somebody even if one wanted to keep one's head down and survive the whole experience.

Down in Brownsville, continuous rains made its placement at the mouth of the Big Muddy River a problem. Every time the rivers would rise, Brownsville would be endangered, to the point where it became impractical to keep developing its industry and in fact risk the flooding of what industry was already there. Finally town leaders agreed to move the whole thing up on the bluffs to Murphysboro, which is much higher, but a little bit off of both the Big Muddy and the Mississippi. Up in Murphysboro they put in a courthouse and people could live there without constant fear of flooding.

When the war started John A. agreed to go back to his hometown to raise up a group of infantry volunteers to go and fight it. But when he got there some people were very angry with him. By now of course the whole countryside was divided into the three groups above mentioned: southern sympathizers, abolitionists, and those who really didn't want to get involved. Southern Illinois had always had more of the first group but these people were angry that John A. was a traitor and had sold out their side, up in Springfield. They didn't want to join him to take up arms against the south. It was all they could do not to take up arms against him as everyone was in the process of taking up arms, in general.

He went on to have an illustrious career, leading his brigade, and then coming back to southern Illinois to start one of the first Memorial Days on record. The war had defined his era, and his life, and he had served in distinction. The memory of him did not settle easily on the area, though. They named a junior college John A. Logan College, and started a museum in Murphysboro. But one cold winter day I was in the doorway of that museum, and some guy sidled up near me and said under his breath that he was a traitor. I was shocked, as I didn't know the story I just related to you above, but I didn't argue with him. It was obviously a sincere opinion, handed down through generations, of a never-forgotten betrayal by one who left and went out into the world, and let southern Illinois live through its times, on the border, as it were, between the abolitionist territory and the slave-holding south that surrounded it.

As for Brownsville, I once asked someone why they didn't at least have a bronze marker telling where it was, and telling that John A. Logan was born there. They have put markers up, more than once, someone told me, but people keep stealing them and using them to melt down metals for resale. They could be stealing them just out of hostility to John A. himself, as that was clearly evident on my visit to the museum. Who knows? Most of the people in the area had no idea of the story I just told, and I suppose it will slowly go back to nothing, much as Brownville itself has.

A book of Quaker plays doesn't come along every day, but this one just did.
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Quaker-Closet-Plays-discernment-ebook/dp/B0C7K3R6B5

I got into the elevator going to the 97th floor, and pressed my button. I noticed that the 113th floor was pressed, but also the 73rd; there were two other people in the elevator, a man and a woman. Perhaps I could guess who would get out first, and see if one would get out before me, the other after.

But something caught my eye as I turned around; that was that the woman had a gun pointed at the back of the man. She had her hand hidden around behind his jacket, but nonetheless he knew that gun was sticking in there and now I knew it too. I'm not sure how I saw it; it was very quick, as I was shuffling toward the corner where as you know everyone gets as far as possible from each other to endure a ride in a trapped space. They obviously were an exception; they were right up against each other, side by side, and not giving each other much space at all.

It was winter, so we all had coats on. I had a winter jacket over my suit and I took it off hoping to make enough movement and noise to make them shift around so I could perhaps see the gun better, or get some clue as to what was really going on. They didn't say a word, and the elevator set out on its sweeping journey up to the next floor, which would be the 73rd.

It stopped suddenly at the 49th and it shook as it stopped. She mumbled something in his ear which I interpreted to be "don't move!" or something like that. Maybe she thought he'd bold quickly while the door was open and someone was entering. At the 49th a Rastafarian entered. He was tall and had long dreadlocks, and a kind of tie-dyed shirt. He took one look at the serious couple, probably not knowing that one had her gun in the other's back, and laughed. I smiled too. He seemed to be trying to tell them they are taking life too seriously. I agreed with him. Here I had my suit, my briefcase, my business on the 97th floor, yet I felt these two were way too serious. Deadly serious, you might say.

The Rastafarian guy took out a huge joint-kind of spliff and lit it. It was huge, it was messy, and little embers from it fell on the carpet of the elevator making me think he was going to catch the place on fire. I smiled again in the corner, knowing full well this woman had her gun in this guy's back so it was a holdup, you might say, yet I felt this development might break what could be a stalemate of some kind. He took a deep toke of it and put it right in front of the man's nose, and then, though both the man and the woman gave a terse close-lipped kind of no, he just held it there in front of them, rather than removing it, or bringing it over to me. I would have taken it, probably, just to cut the ice in the elevator, but I was kind of in the corner, having done my dance of getting as far as I could from everyone. His was the opposite: he wanted them to loosen up, help him smoke this big thing. It dropped its sparks on the elevator floor. It stood in his hand, burning slowly and filling the place up with smoke. Neither the man nor the woman made a single move.

I studied their hands for a minute. One of the woman's hands was hidden, holding the gun in his back; I knew that. The other wore a glove and carried a New York Times. It was rolled up like you might roll it if you were to try to stuff it in a mailbox or throw it up on someone's porch; I knew this because I used to be a paperboy, back in the days when people read the news. The man had a shoebox in his hand; it was closed. I couldn't tell if it was heavy enough to require both his hands to hold it, but he was using both of them, and perhaps that was why he couldn't grab the spliff. Could he simply put the box in one hand? I couldn't tell. In any case he didn't; he didn't move.

Now the elevator stopped at the 73rd floor and I tried to remember if the Rastafarian guy had pressed any button; I didn't think so. In any case he made an unusual move. He took another quick drag from his spliff, turned around and pressed the "door open" button to hold the door open, once it was open, then blue an enormous thick smoke ring around the woman; that smoke just kind of danced around her head like some kind of halo and then just settled in around her shoulders. Then he left, exiting the elevator quickly before we noticed or could stop him. He took the lit spliff with him.

I was trying to figure this out. It seemed to me the 73 button was pressed before he got on, which meant that he left randomly because it was there, or because he knew the man and woman, knew whose room was on the 73rd, and was going there as if he shared it. Why did he blow that smoke ring around her? She shrugged as if to get rid of it, but couldn't, because she had to keep her hand lodged in his back; she didn't know, yet, that I knew all about the gun.

At around the hundredth floor, the elevator got stuck. It shook and made a horrible noise, and stopped going. I was actually afraid we'd plunge a hundred floors to our death, me and this incommunicative couple.

"Press the alarm button," she told him; he was much closer to it than I was.

"You do it," he said. He wasn't going to make it easy for her, or give the appearance that she could order him around.

I actually made a move for the alarm button, but he had taken the opportunity of confusion to reach around quickly and hit her hand that was holding the gun. She lifted the gun quickly to get away from his hand, but at the same time it went off, and the bullet lodged into the panel of the elevator. The elevator made a strange kind of sizzling sound, and then much to my surprise, it started going again. Wherever the bullet went, it caused the elevator to run again.

Meanwhile the man and woman were struggling with each other; she still had the gun. She was unusually strong to fire, keep holding the gun, and resist his grabbing arms as he tried to get it from her; he was unable too, and I think she even used the gun to hit his hand at one point.

"Listen, you two," I said, "I'm a professional marriage counsellor." THis was a blatant lie, but they both laughed, in spite of being in a life-or-death struggle over a loaded gun. "Perhaps it would help if you told me the whole story from the beginning."

"We're shooting a movie," said the woman. "On the tower at the top. These buttons are pressed just to give us time to reset, reset the gun, reset the camera, that kind of thing. Come on upstairs and join us if you want. That guy you saw...he's in charge of the entertainment."

It was my floor, and I got off. If I went up there, I'd take the stairs.

Chat GPT writes a story

Once upon a time, in a small town in the heart of Illinois, there lived a young girl named Lily. She was known throughout the town for her curious nature and her love of adventure.

One day, while wandering through the town's quiet streets, Lily stumbled upon an old, abandoned store. The store was filled with all sorts of junk: old books, broken furniture, and rusted tools. It was a mess, but Lily was fascinated by the objects scattered about.

As she walked deeper into the store, Lily heard a faint sound. She followed the noise until she found herself standing in front of a dusty old record player. It was playing a scratchy old tune, the melody haunting and beautiful.

Lily searched through the piles of junk until she found an old letter. It was addressed to a man named Jack and it was from his ex-wife. As she read the letter, she felt a wave of emotions wash over her. It was a heartbreaking love letter, filled with regret and longing.

As she put down the letter, a man came out from the back of the store. He introduced himself as Jack, the man to whom the letter was addressed. He confirmed that the letters were written by his ex-wife and promised to tell Lily the story behind them.

Before she met Jack, Lily had been enchanted by the music and the letter. But now she could see that Jack was a little old and dirty, with a wild beard and a friendly grin.

As Jack began to tell her the story of his lost love, Lily listened with rapt attention. She learned about the joys and the heartbreaks that Jack and his wife had shared, and she realized that even the most broken hearts could heal with time.

From that day forward, Lily visited Jack every week, and they spent hours talking about life and love and everything in between. And although the store was still filled with junk, to Lily it was a place of magic and wonder, a place where she had discovered a new friend and a story that would stay with her forever.

Routine Traffic Stop

 

The policeman, or rather a policeman, Bill, and his partner, Adrian, saw that the man was throwing up out the window of the car, as the car was going. The driver had slowed the car down a little, but was still in the passing lane, so the vomit was spraying all over the median and much of it was ending up on his own car. They pulled him over and within a couple blocks he had pulled in to the parking lot of a bank. He said his name was Ted, and he had trouble getting out of the car, though he was able to find his ID. They asked him to do a sobriety check and he flunked it big-time. He was very drunk.

The car was not in very good shape either. It had a huge spider-web crack in the front windshield that made them wonder if Ted could see anything while he was driving. Ted said that Marlene did this with a hammer. Marlene was his wife, apparently, or perhaps ex-wife given the situation with the hammer. He tried to explain something about how he'd been at the bar too long and she had to come get him but she wasn't very diplomatic. There was no question he'd been at the bar too long.

While Bill was arresting Ted, putting him in handcuffs, reading him his rights, and trying to get him into the police car, Adrian did a cursory search of the car. Ted was still throwing up, in fact, more than even while he was driving. It was like his whole life was coming out from the inside out onto the bank parking lot. This car and this vomit might have to wait until morning, thought Bill. But he really didn't want to shove Ted into the back of his patrol car under such a circumstance. He knew they couldn't stand here forever in the parking lot, but he thought that if he stalled a few seconds it might save the upholstery from weeks of a wretched smell.

His partner, Adrian, was finding all kinds of things in Ted's car. There was a big jug of what could only be described as everclear, homemade alcohol, but also a chemical that she knew was intended to make the drinker throw up. Why would that chemical be in the car? Actually it was a little vial, labeled that way, but it was empty. Had Ted poured the chemical into his drink? Had someone else?

He had an arsenal of guns, all in the back, down by the feet of the back seat. Three of them, all loaded and ready to fire. Where did he say he was going?

Then came a quick series of actions Bill would remember forever. He was hesitating, standing next to his car with Ted in handcuffs; he was waiting for Ted to finish throwing up before he tried to push him in to the back of the police car. Ted made a weak call to Marlene but his throwing up was interfering with his voice. Another small car came into the bank parking lot and stopped suddenly. A woman jumped out of the car, started screaming, and attacked Adrian as she was backing herself out of the back seat of Ted's car with one of the guns she had just picked up. This gun was evidence; she didn't want to use it, yet she couldn't reach for her own gun when her hands were full. The woman was screeching and attacking her with her fists on Adrian's back.

Suddenly, when Ted called Marlene's name with his garbled voice, a shot rang out. Bill watched in amazement as Ted was hurled back into the policecar, a bullet through his heart. Marlene had shot Ted! Bill was shocked because really, he would have been an easier target himself. Ted was between him and the car itself, and she would have had to have been a markswoman to shoot Ted and not him. But that's what had happened.

And then another shot rang out; she'd shot herself. Again, it would have been easy enough to have shot Adrian. She'd got the gun; she had the advantage; for some reason she wanted to do her murder-suicide in dramatic fashion.

Later on, the ID never checked out; Marlene had been carrying something fake, which didn't lead to anyone. Ted was a local dealer and was known to get into trouble, but Marlene was a mystery. The best they could figure, she was a woman who had gone AWOL from the Army, had been specially trained in marksmanship but had a falling out of some kind. That woman, who the Army identified, hadn't been seen in several years, but in fact could have done the shooting that Bill and Adrian described. Bill and Adrian were both a bit shaken by the event but ultimately figured they were lucky and she really only wanted to kill him and herself, not the police; perhaps she liked the police. Whatever her secrets, she'd carry them to the grave.

Mr. GeePeeTee

 

I had a dream last night and this arrogant guy was in it. He called himself Chat GeePeeTee. We were having cappucinos at the Starbucks.

He was saying that he'd just published ten sets of short stories this morning, all on Amazon. It took me nine years to write ten sets of short stories, but still I was proud, so I didn't display my jealousy or get mad at him. He was just a writer, cranking it out, doing the best he can in this world.

He of course had the best of marketing tricks. He didn't even have to pay to market; his handlers took care of it. He explained how they just used their knowledge to figure out what was the best way to get readers. They could also use statistics to figure out what the hot topics would be. You make a story with the right keywords, you have an automatic best seller. Then people tend to read the other stuff you wrote, because it all comes off your author page. At the rate of ten sets a day, he'll have quite a few.

He told me that having pen names was really quite useful, because he could keep the short-story author separate from the mystery author. All the money's in erotica, though, he said. You can write a lot of romance with good sex in it, but you might as well come right out with the good sex, put it right on the cover, let everyone know what the book is all about.

He'd read tons of it, and he'd read enough to know what sells. In fact he could program the statistics to figure out what sells. Obviously the authors that made it steamiest were doing the best. There's nothing wrong with just copying their style, he said. After all, it's just two humans rubbing their bodies together.

Something about the way he said "humans" tipped me off, like maybe he wasn't one of us. But I was kind of intrigued by the way he claimed to use statistics to make his books match the formula perfectly and become best-sellers. His erotica pen-name author was doing better than any of the others, he said, didn't take long at all for that audience to find him. It's like they're all just looking for something new. And here I am, he said, with really nothing new in the book, just mixing around the steam and the various ideas from plots that I pick up here and there.

The sun was going down outside the coffee shop, where believe it or not, there was a cornfield right up against the Starbucks on the outside edge of this town. I'd been thinking of giving up writing altogether, what with sales as low as they are, and family commitments and all, but this guy with all his arrogance made me want to keep trying. I'll tell you why. He was pretty sure it was just a matter of finding the right formula - look at it statistically, see what people want, give them what they want. Don't get all caught up in what you want to say, or how you want the world to see you. Just give it to 'em on a plate. Go for the money. That's what makes you feel good anyway. Once you're walking to the bank, who cares what you went through to get there?

 

My main character is a young student at Harvard in 1683. He has been at Harvard for about seven years, getting his A.B. (like a B.A.) in 1680 and now he has gotten his A.D. (Master's degree) in 1683. He loves the place; he will return and teach as a tutor for twelve years, and eventually become the President of the place. But for now, he has graduated and has to leave.

They have trouble getting presidents at Harvard. That's because they need a minister, and they need him to live on-site, and no minister can get their congregation to relieve them, because being minister is like a lifetime commitment. You don't just walk away from a congregation like that. So when Harvard needs a president, they have a hard time finding one.

THey have managed to talk one man into it, though, and he's due to come down with his family of five children, and move to Cambridge from Ipswich where he has been helping another man with a congregation. He's a qualified minister but not a full fledged one and that's why it will work. It takes a while, but finally he arrives and is inaugurated as president, right as our main character is leaving.

This is probably when our main character meets the new president's daughter, whom he will marry in twelve years.

In the year the main character is gone, the new President gets established, but then dies in the middle of a solar eclipse. This is 1684, so there's no telling what people thought of that solar eclipse.

When he comes back, he's a tutor. He's in a better position. He's set to live there for twelve years and ultimately to take over the place. But the daughter is now gone; she's married and had four children, losing two of them. When she comes back, he'll marry her anyway. She's the one for him.

I was sitting there at my computer, trying to write about exactly how I felt. I was totally in the moment, in touch with my feelings, ready to expound on why I felt the way I did. But all of a sudden, a portal opened up and I slipped through it, right as I was sitting there.

All of a sudden I was in a world where everyone had special powers, in particular the power to time travel wherever they wanted, and people were showing up from all places, all times, just to see me. I was like a novelty to them, so they wanted to see what I was all about. Some of them had come from as far as the fifth century BC, or in one case Tasmania, 1725. Sometimes I didn't even understand what they were saying.

Two of them got into a huge fight that had something to do with the potato famine. Maybe they had been on different sides and one of them had been hungry for what, a couple hundred years. I felt like getting that one some french fries but then I remembered that they were addictive and it was like giving somene cocaine. Some favor! I decided to keep my mouth shut.

In the end I learned that being from this time, this place, right in front of my computer and all, isn't really all that special, and that really there are interesting people in every corner of the space-time continuum as we know it. I did find one distant relative of mine but he said he was from the Canary Islands or some such place, and it was an incredibly long story how we were related, but I said I had time or at least I thought I did, and then, instead of waiting to hear exactly how we were related, I just borrowed five bucks from him since I figured, if we were related, that had to be good for something, no matter what space-time we were dealing with. When I got back to my computer it was actually before I had even left, but the five bucks was gone, maybe I spent it and forgot. That happens a lot anyway; I don't especially need a portal to slip into an alternate state, and then spend the rest of the day figuring out where I went and what happened to the little candies I thought I was carrying around.

Westbound

I had this incident once when I got on the train going out of New York City. This very intense young man sat next to me for about fifty miles, but got off somewhere in Westchester or beyond. I was going up to Albany and then all the way out to Colorado so I was about to settle in for a nap. But the guy was quite intense.

I had a newspaper in my hand and he pointed out that the killer referenced on the front page had just been in Manhattan. "As were we all," he said, looking around at the people on the train. It seemed like a pretty normal train-car full of people, all ages, both genders, even some families. But this young guy could have been a killer, and I realized that, even as he was insinuating, it seemed, that maybe I was.

He left me alone until his stop, at which point he got off rather quickly, and then I realized that he'd left his phone on the seat. The phone was dead. There was no way I could reach him anyway, even if it were charged. He was there, the phone was here. I wondered if perhaps my charger, which I always carry with me, would work on it.

The train was an Amtrak and it had a club car, and believe it or not way up there I found a plug and was able to plug it in. I thought of handing it to the authorities right away, namely, the conductor on the train. After all, it was really between him and the train; there was no reason I should even be involved, not to mention using my own charger to charge his phone.

There was a card game near where the plug was and some guy with a white Panama hat noticed me messing with my charger, which didn't fit his phone, and came over and offered his own charger which he was pretty sure would work. It did. But now I felt obligated to go sit near the card game since I was using this guy's charger to find out about what was on this phone. Deep down, I thought this guy was the killer. You couldn't tell from the picture in the newspaper; that was a police artist's sketch and it was like a horoscope, it could fit just about anyone. You could look at that police artist's version of a young guy with a handsome face, and a winter hat, and intense eyes, and if you were in the mood half the people on the train would fit that profile. So I figured I had to get into that phone to learn more about the guy who had been sitting next to me.

The card game broke into a raucous fight as two guys accused the guy with the Panama hat of cheating. Apparently, they said that while he got up to get me the charger he'd looked at this other guy's cards. There were two guys pummeling him and trying to take this wad of bills that he'd cleared from the table in winning. "You cheated! they yelled, "Give us the money!" I felt like I had to do something, though I really didn't want to get involved, so I started pulling on the back of the largest guy, a big red-headed guy who turned out to be George.

The fourth card-player was a woman. She was quite beautiful, and did nothing but put the chips in order and watch.

Two men burst into the club car and came up to us with guns drawn; one had an Amtrak uniform. They told us all to line up near the wall; this was near the outlet so I took the phone and charger and just tucked it away. They had the woman against the wall too; there was me, the two big guys, the guy with the Panama hat, and the woman. They patted down the fanny pack of the guy with the Panama hat and found a gun. "What's this?" they said. The fanny pack was clearly in the spot where he'd been sitting.

"It's not mine! That woman put it in there while I was helping this guy with the charger!" He looked at me like he wanted me to say something in his defense. He was pretty sure nobody else would.

But he was wrong. George said, "That's right! She put it in there!"

"That's your gun, George," said the woman.

"Everybody off the train!" they said. The train was stopping; we were in Albany. My plan had been to get out here anyway, to look up an old college friend; he knew vaguely that I was coming. We lined up in front of them to get off the train. The other guy, the guy with the red bandana, whined about some stuff he didn't want to be separated from. He was pretty sure that, off the train, the train would go on without us, and his stuff would still be under his seat. They assured him that he'd be back on the train in time. I wasn't so sure, but I didn't care; I didn't have stuff.

The minute we got off the train George set off and disappeared in the crowd. They couldn't shoot at him because he was running behind random people who were getting off the train. He was a big guy, but really they just appeared to be Amtrak security and didn't really want to shoot anyone anyway. The money we were talking about was just a fistful of bills, mostly ones, that George and the man with the hat had been scuffling over; the guy with the uniform had those. He had the gun, too.

We stood outside the train while people finished getting off and others started getting on. It was a warm spring day, a little cool out, but the sun was shining. "This fight was about this money, right?" the guy in the uniform said. "But this fellow ran off," he said, referring to George, "so I guess the money's yours, huh?" and he gave the money to the guy with the hat. "But I'm keeping the gun. You can't have a gun on these trains. Now get back on there and behave!" He and the other guy turned on their heels and left, leaving us, me, the man with the hat, the woman, and the guy with the bandana, to board again. The guy with the bandana was relieved and went straight to his stuff.

I had a split-second decision to make: whether to change my ticket for a ticket tomorrow, and go visit my college buddy, as I'd originally planned, or to just get back on the train with these two, the guy with the hat and the woman, spurned and abandoned by George. I decided to stick with them and get back on the train. My college buddy could wait; I'd be coming back through in a couple weeks. But the main reason was I didn't want to deal with anyone from Amtrak, ticket master, anyone. I didn't want to give them the phone. I think they handled the incident well enough, I just didn't want any more to do with them.

Back in the club car the man with the hat bought us coffees with the money in his fist that he'd won nefariously; he admitted that he might have looked at George's cards. There wasn't all that much of it anyway and it didn't go that far since coffee was like a fortune on an Amtrak. I settled into the booth and tried to figure out what the relation of George and the woman was; clearly they'd known each other. I asked her if he was her husband or what, and did she expect to see him again? I kept my eye out for the guy with the bandana but didn't see him.

She said they were actors going to play a show in Cleveland and she was aware that he had a rough side; she knew about the gun; but she'd agreed to go with him on the train to Cleveland as it was better than traveling alone. She didn't know what motivated him to bolt in Albany or what he would do on the streets of Albany. Amtrak had his gun. Maybe he'd try to get it back.

The man with the hat claimed he was going to Cleveland too; he was the actor, though, I figure, and was interested in the woman. I was too, but not enough to interfere or to get off the train in Cleveland. We played cards most of the night with an old deck of cards with presidents on them, but only after they agreed to my demand that no money be involved. I remember raking in some chips over an old Garfield card that was like king of clubs or something, but my pleasure was short-lived because the woman was really the best at cards. It turned out, though, that the phone was the phone of the killer. I gave the charger back and we looked at it together; it opened right up without a passcode or anything, and there were plenty of signs that the owner had used it for bad purposes. After a point I agreed to take it straight to the police in Chicago, which I did, and I just told them I couldn't hand it in to Amtrak for my own reasons. It wasn't that I was mad at them or anything; I got right back on that Amtrak later in the day anyway for the long ride out to Colorado. You never know who you're going to meet on those trains.

The Bog

In the middle of the night, maybe four in the morning, I woke up from a bad dream and couldn't get back to sleep. Normally I get back to sleep right away, but the puppy sleeping beside me was having a bad dream too, and in the process of comforting him, so that he could get back to sleep, I started worrying about all the things in life that generally keep you up at night. In my case, there are plenty. Giving up, I went downstairs and sat in my chair.

What I often do in situations like this is play online boggle, or the bog, which is an intense little online world where, in the process of trying to find words in a cube of letters, in this situation sixteen of them, I get my mind off whatever is bugging me and into a more mundane, relaxing but competitive sport. Some programmer set it up so that it runs by itself, with a new game every few minutes, and in the daytime up to thirty or forty people will compete, all with different names, but in the middle of the night, maybe only five or six.

On this particular night, there were twelve, and two of them were the Fosters, a man and a woman. The woman was slightly better than the man; she'd place maybe third while he placed fifth. Back when they were a team, Team Foster, they'd win every game the whole time they played. The game allows you to be a team, but then the rest of us only see your collective score under Team Foster, and don't get to see the individual players. But occasionally one would quit before the other, or start before the other, or perhaps one would get up to get coffee, and we'd see only the one player: Team Foster: Carl or Team Foster: Izbla. I assumed that that last one was Izabella, or something like that, and that they were married and probably lived together. But over the years we saw a spat, and then we saw them break up, and then they were never Team Foster anymore. So I had made a couple of assumptions, which I was aware were based on flimsy evidence, that Izabella was no longer a Foster. For years they said nasty things to each other through the names they used for themselves on each boggle game. That's because you can change your name each game you play, eliminating the team if you want, or adding it, or just speaking to someone. One night I clearly remember, in about third place: TeamF got new bff and in fifth place Teamf gotohellIzzy. In their names, they were not using the "Team" function, not playing as a team, but speaking to each other using "Teamf" and carrying on their marital dispute. At least they were enjoying games of boggle though.

In boggle, you make as many words as you can from a cube of four letters across, four down, sixteen altogether, or you can play the five by five board, which is twenty-five altogether. In that little window of time you spell out as many words as you can, and believe me, some people can get an incredible number of words, fast, from those boards. You'd be surprised how many words there actually are, and after a while, if you study the ones you've missed, you get more of them, you get better at it, you become quite a fast typer. This had clearly happened to Izzy and Carl, perhaps even before they'd married, but I often pictured them, even during their marriage, both typing away at perhaps a kitchen table, maybe shouting out the words they got or found. It's a pleasurable way to pass the time. One very rarely wins, because so many people on there are so good at it. Some, I suspect, have found a way to cheat; perhaps they got a computer to list out all the possible words and they just type them in? I'm not sure, but people get incredibly high scores. I almost never win, and it's all I can do to keep from coming in last, especially in the late nights when the hard-core players are all out there, and almost everyone gets way more points than I do.

So on this night they were both there, and they were both talking to each other, and it was about three in the morning. But suddenly I got very disturbed by the names they were giving themselves. Izzy was in trouble. In the higher position I'd see teamf help carl to which he'd reply, the next game, teamf whatsupizzy. She, as her name, used teamf imtrappedneedurhelp and his name was teamf wtf. She used teamf needoutofhere and he used teamf thoughthewasbff. She used teamf hesamonster and he used teamf getonfbnwelltalk. She used teamf cantheswatching and then she disappeared. He played a number of other games, asking her questions, but they went unanswered; she was gone.

In the middle of the night, I'm trying to calm my mind, thinking of words given a number of combinations. Game after game relaxes my mind, and keeps it off of my own problems, which are sometimes overbearing. But now I was in the middle of Izzy and Carl's problem. She fell in with the wrong guy. Carl was her only way to get help, get her out of it. Carl undoubtedly at least knew where she lived. Carl could at least do something about it. I had no idea even what city they were in, or where. I thought I remembered, from some earlier thing one of them said, Virginia somewhere. Virginia is for lovers, I thought. But it's also for a whole range of other things, too, I'm sure. Some lurid drama was playing out there in Virginia that night, I imagined. If I were Carl, I'd head over to her house, even if she were an ex.

But then, I had no idea how bad their breakup was. I figured it was a good sign that they could still get on the online boggle and play a few games together at night, even if they weren't a team any longer. But really I had no idea if Carl could stomach getting involved with some controlling new boyfriend that Izzy had. Would he come to her rescue?

I guess I'd have to stay on the bog to find out.