I sometimes come across people who I'd like to write about but can't because I'm flying by, and also because basically my book is about someone else.

There is this woman who is kind of parallel to the woman I am writing about. The woman I am writing about, Elizabeth, wqs an elocutionist in Toledo at the turn of the 19th century. She came to Toledo to set up an elocution business (actually she came because she married an insurance agent who had a business there) and she hung on for most of her life until she retired in 1929.

This other woman had to move to Toledo because her husband ran a City Directory project. Her husband's name was Thomas Martin so almost impossible to trace. They moved to Toledo in about 1882, about five years after Elizabeth got there. They moved there from Indianapolis.

But the woman, Lucia Julian Martin, had experience, having run a school for Oratory in Indianapolis. So somehow, when she got to Toledo, she started the Toledo School of Elocution and Oratory. Sounds good, huh? Elizabeth seemed to be involved. They were kind of partners in this enterprise as far as I can tell and both are at some point listed as principal.

Lucia went back to Indianapolis after only three years in Toledo, in about 1885. The City Directory project done, or under way, they didn't have to stay. But Thomas died sometime then in the late 1800's. Maybe he died early or maybe they were both a little older than Elizabeth, who was still only 47 at the turn of the century.

Lucia returned to Toledo in about 1895, but she is listed as a widow. She again gets work at the Toledo School of Elocution and Oratory, a school she probably founded. It changes its name some; at some point it's Elocution and Physical Culture. In any case she is partners with Elizabeth. Elizabeth also is a widow but has two young children. They teach elocution together or at least side by side in the city. Lucia is a little more into the physical culture fad of the age, elocution by knowing how to exercise the body and make lungs stronger.

Lucia eventually moved to Chicago and from there to LA. In LA, in about 1905, she was still teaching elocution, starting her own business again. But she died in November of 1908. In 1909 in LA newspapers lawyers can be found dealing with her estate.

But the best I can figure, she appears to be buried in Toledo. How did they get her back there from LA, or rather, who did? I find no evidence that she had any children, not to mention any who would go to that trouble. It probably had to do with her request. Records of her are lost (or seem to be) - I find no record of where she's from (probably Indiana), when she was born, when she married, etc. The gravesite record is all there is and even it is somewhat incomplete as it calls her Lucia J. What happened to Thomas? Were those lawyers in LA arguing about real money or more likely trying to figure out what to do with old scrapbooks? She seems to be lost to history - google searches come up empty, no information to be had, no idea who she really was.

But she seemed to like Toledo a lot, or at least I can infer that by the way she ended up there. I can't find anything else about the rest of her life, but by apparently being close to Elizabeth, actually a kind of mentor, you could say, since she seemed to start the College and was a bit older than Elizabeth - well, that's her ticket into my book. She won't be forgotten altogether, because she'll be in there.

Ghost

I knew full well when I bought the house that there were ghosts in it, at least one. The sellers were very clear about telling me that a man had killed himself in the house, and they thought he was still around; they could hear him in the closet or in the attic, or going from one to the other. For example they'd hear the stairs, late at night, that led from the second-floor hallway up to the attic or back, and then the door to the master bedroom on the second floor, and then the closet door in that bedroom.

I slept in a small room on that second floor, because I could look out my window and see a charming street corner of the city with relatively steady traffic, which I liked, as idly I could enjoy people coming and going no matter what time or weather. I was not bothered by the ghost. Let him go back and forth as much as he wanted, work out whatever problem he had that had made him kill himself, even wail out at night if he wanted, which was actually rare. I did hear him occasionally, but I was ok with even that, and in an old house you never knew if that was just the rafters of the attic or the wind getting in some place where it shouldn't. 

The house was in a town by the sea; there were cliffs nearby and the fog would often roll in, shrouding it and the town for hours. It was a beautiful old house, though, with bushes and trees all around it and an attic window from which you could see most of the town and the sea.

While I was at that house, I fell in love with a woman, Sarah, and we planned to marry. She would spend a lot of time at my house, most of it downstairs, cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. But when she was upstairs in my room, she heard the ghost and had a different reaction from mine. She was not as eager to just let him be and let him wail in anguish at whatever was bothering him. She heard it as a call for help or a call to intervene in some way, to release him from his misery.

The man that had owned the house, one Alfred Morris III, had inherited the house from his parents, and had killed himself supposedly because his wife had died in the ocean nearby. No one knew much about the wife, Maria, or why she was out there - perhaps she had gone somewhere? She was from a nearby town somewhere, and though the neighbors had seen her, they didn't know her very well; if she had friends, they didn't even know who they would be. Alfred himself had grown up in the house, so knew every hiding place, every nook and cranny, so to speak, and most of the neighbors knew him and remembered him well - some of the older ones remembered him being a young kid, stepping on their flowers, or knocking on their doors selling tickets for the school carnival. They were upset by news of his suicide, which happened maybe a month or two after she had died.

I had accepted the previous owners' story - that they had bought the house from Alfred Morris III's estate after his death, that the ghost disturbed them but wasn't really the reason that they moved, that his suicide was big news in town so the house would always be marked to some degree. Even the neighbors liked to tell the story of all the news cameras parked up and down the street and the body being brought out and put in the police ambulance. There was some confusion about how they knew to look in there and whether they had actually searched the entire house, but the previous owners assured me that they personally had inspected every little closet and hallway and it was what they said it was - the old Morris estate, with all its history, and historical artifacts to be gone through, sold at auction or given to family members, a process that took months. 

But after Sarah moved in she wanted to act on the situation, so we both began asking around among our friends about the deaths, which had both happened about ten years earlier, in a single year. One of Sarah's friends maintained that Alfred III was gay, and that his lover, one John Maxwell, had died in the same year. This, if true, complicated the situation considerably, so finally I went and checked the newspapers and public records, as I hadn't been in the town ten years ago. It turned out that Alfred III had died at the cliffs, a popular place for locals to jump and commit suicide; it happened every few years or so. The wife had died earlier, and it had been at sea, but she was good with boats; why would she even be out there in difficult boating conditions? 

But this meant that the body they had taken out of the house, regardless of what the neighbors thought, was that of John Maxwell. 

Three suicides seemed to be a heavy burden, too much to think about while padding around the kitchen making coffee. I talked to Sarah about it quite a bit. Her friend who had first identified John Maxwell was suspicious, and said that they weren't all necessarily suicides, particularly Alfred's, which had been death from jumping from the cliff. It wasn't impossible, she said, for people to be pushed from up there. And though investigators may have found DNA or some other evidence on the body of Alfred, that wouldn't be enough to do any more than question Maxwell; they had closed the investigation shortly after Maxwell himself had died. 

The noises didn't abate after we had learned all this; on the contrary, they seemed to get worse once we became more familiar with the people involved. But Sarah and I both spontaneously began simply talking to the ghost, and telling him to be quiet or at least quit the wailing. It didn't stop or even change any of the noise, but it at least made us feel better. It was only when we had guests over, especially at the time of the wedding, that it was a little tricky. We knew a little too much, and it was better to just tell people part of the story.

Round Circle Hays

When my older boys were children, we lived in Illinois, and occasionally when driving we'd see a hilly field of round hay bales out there, at which point the youngest would shout out, "round circle hays!" They were visible and dramatic, and he could relate to them somehow as something to point out, like a toy he wanted to play with. And often, with the rolling green fields and wooded forests around them, they were a pretty sight.

I would often think of Monet, the French artist who painted the same field many times, trying tp perfect the light and the shadows from each time of day. He was convinced that mastering the light and the shadows was the key to getting the right impression of the hay bales. When I first heard that story, I was more impressed that he must have spent weeks in the same field with those hay bales, than that he painted the same field over and over again with slightly different colors. When you're an impressionist, you have to master the impressions, and the feeling one field of hay bales might give the viewer.

Last night we set out from far northern New Mexico, down along the eastern border of the state, on remote and partly icy two-lane roads, a day or two after a snowstorm. There were fields of hay bales there, too, first a field of squarish ones (square-rectangle hays?), then a field or two of round ones. At the round ones I spoke out, "round circle hays!", but in my later family, which includes four teens, two dogs, and my second wife, they don't really get the reference. I might have explained a little about Monet to them at some point, but I don't think anyone remembered or cared about impressionism. Besides the New Mexico sun was blazing down on these fields, and they were flat as a pancake, out in the eastern grasslands, without even the purple mountains that so many barren fields in New Mexico offer. I dropped the issue and kept on driving. Later on we would be passing through Roswell, with its UFOs and aliens in front of every storefront, and maybe they could relate to that better.

I always thought you could look at an impressionist painting and see whatever you wanted in it - in other words, just because Monet or someone wanted you to feel a sense of the bucolic countryside, a sense of peace, probably the farmer looked at that same field and said, each of those bales is worth so much money, if I sell it on time, and it doesn't matter so much what the light does when it hits it around dusk. Just when we got past those hay bales my wife got sick, and then when we got to Roswell we missed a turnoff because the blazing sun was in my eyes and I didn't see the exit sign. Because I missed that exit, we missed the aliens at the storefronts, but we still got plenty of that unearthly, empty, wide-open fields that you could land a UFO on; it was a long trip and we were just lucky the roads were as good as they were.

Anywhere around Roswell you can see the mountains to the west, purple in the sunset but even after dark, looming on the horizon. One of our last roads is called the Sagebrush highway, a desolate two-lane through what can be generously called the middle of nowhere. The hot air comes down the east side of the mountains and just dries the place out so completely that I'm surprised you could feed five cattle on a couple hundred thousand acres, but that's what I'm sure someone is trying to do. Having all that hay back up the road would probably help considerably.

The dark set in as we got closer to home, and at the end our luck on the road conditions ran out. We picked up the other two dogs, much larger than the first two, and the six of us people and four dogs headed up over the last mountain to get to our home. This road is half gravel and has cliffs on the side, making it just that much scarier. And it was quite icy, especially on the way down. The oldest dog, a black lab, was jammed between my wife's knees in the front seat. This dog was so glad to be back with her family that she would have jammed herself anywhere, but she also is quite old now, and I could tell she was a little nervous about the trip, even though she was glad her kennel stay was behind her. The other dogs seemed to get along ok and would have protected us a little if we'd run off the side or down into the forest.

But it wasn't necessary; we got home safe and sound to notice that we had power; we had a house waiting for us way out at the end of the road. Everyone was glad to be home. They may not have cared much about Monet, but almost everyone could agree on the idea that home felt good, just about whatever time you landed there. The dogs definitely let us know they agreed with that.