I read nooks, it's what I do. Actually I'm a writer but have long periods of writer's block when all I can do from the moment I wake up is read others' indie novels. At the moment there are six. Don't know how I got signed up for all six when my plate is obviously full, but I did.

First one, guy's kind of like me, makes great pop-art covers but the writing isn't pointed, doesn't have clear story lines. In this one he's falling into whiskey. He starts noticing flavors and taking tours in the distilleries and his wife apparently drives him around to go visit them, when you can always get a free sip or two as long as you can get there. Autobiographical! Buut it's good to know what a fellow author is sinking into.

Around here it quickly rises to over ninety and I don't feel like working on the garden, or the yard, or the garage, or even going anywhere though there are many things to do. Kids need rides, one our foster-son's girlfriend needs to get to work. Ninety-two? I stay in my chair, puppy on lap, air-con blasting, try to stay calm and breathe. Yes I'll do it. My life is patience of stopping at stop signs, waiting for teens to come for their ride, sitting in the sun either with car running or car not. time to read? Only a couple minutes at a time.

So that book, a little disjointed, moving from the author himself (I imagine) sipping whiskey to the downfall of a young local girl, but the next is unsettling too. It's about the downfall of an academic, an unraveling of a psychology professor who has psychological issues herself. A little too close to home> I think so, but I plowed right through it. It's my day, my life, retirement = ability to read.

Another ride, this one in the hot sun, it's ninety-two but sometimes I can use the newer car which, though it too has a horizontal front windshield, at least has the aircon to fight the greenhouse. Same Galesburg streets, same quiet downtown. My mind is on the previous book which I will now review. But here's what else.

A writer interviews a serial killer; he's killed his brother, his father, and a number of his lovers. Everyone thinks he's a monster. We soon learn that not only is he lovable but the writer is in love with him. Huh? No red flags here, are there? I laugh thinking about this one. You have feelings for someone, but he's murdered everyone who ever got close to him. Is there a word for that?

The "heat dome" intensifies and gets worse around here though the garden is liking it very much. I'm having fantastic luck with cucumbers and tomatoes and am living on cucumber sandwiches. But I'm still hot and it irritates me every time I go outside to find my eyes itching until I can get in the car and blast the a/c. I don't like that blasting, don't like the heat either...

In the fourth one almost every word describes the feelings of two people who, made for each other, somehow didn't get together five years ago when they had the chance. They are still. made for each other. If you totally wanted romantic nostalgia and perfect romance, you could read it over and over again. No steamy porn scenes but that's ok with me. The roomance pushes me though - how much is too much?

It turns out I'm reading translated versions in some cases, maybe in all cases. Why am I not translating my own? Curious, and wondering if English to Hindi is as good as Hindi to English. Sure is steamy around here.

fam-uber

I don't use my own family for novels or stories, because I want to protect their privacy. In this case though I couldn't resist. An image from the other day stuck in my mind and it was perfect for a story or novel.

Two sisters decided to go to the fair. There were the usual rides, carnival-type things and one of the sisters took a lot of hard-earned money out to set out and do them. But within a couple of hours they called me to give them a ride home.

The minute they got in the car they started screaming. I mean screaming too. It hurt my ears. The windows were closed on the Honda; it's a very small car.

Our route was very simple and went through downtown, past the coffee shop, past the one street of fine fancy shops, past the Children's Museum and Railroad Museum - all had people because it had been Railroad Days. They screamed loudly the whole way. At the Railroad Museum there was a train crossing, and you never know about this train. It's often three or four miles long; it often slows down or stops. I didn't want to take a chance so I backed up and went under the bridge. They didn't even slow down. They kept screaming all the way home.

The fight was over something trivial. One had perhaps made a rude comment and the other had requested she not do that. But somehow a lot of pent-up frustration and hard feeling, perhaps jealousy or stress from everyday life, being a minority in a small Illinois town - it was all coming out. They were hauling off at each other.

When we got to the place they both jumped out of the car and I realized: they hadn't said hello, or thank you, or anything like that; neither had. In a sense it was a reflection of the fact that they totally take me as background, giving them a ride when they need it, not jumping in and asserting some kind of basic civility. They both apologized later. But at the time I remember thinking, that was one of the wildest rides I ever gave, as a family uber driver. My ears are still ringing.

cul-de-sac

I live on a cul-de-sac in a suburb and as we suburban residents know, cul-de-sacs are valued because they don't go anywhere except to the houses that are on them, so they're not supposed to have random traffic - strangers driving through at all hours, for example. Only the people who live on them have any business being on them, except for people who visit them, so you generally have a good peaceful experience and your kids can go ride their bikes on them, for example, without you worrying about somebody coming along too fast not watching where they're going.

But the last couple of nights we've had this problem on our cul-de-sac - dozens of waymos have come and lined up on our street in the middle of the night. I didn't even know what a waymo was, but I looked out my window a couple of times in the middle of the night, and there they were, little white cars, apparently self-driving, lined up out there, running but not going anywhere. What the heck? Why would they all come to our cul-de-sac and just get stuck in the middle of the night? This happened a couple of nights in a row and pretty soon I was beginning to worry that it was a problem. What if I wanted to go somewhere and the street was all clogged with these little white cars? I didn't know quite what to do.

I'm a writer and I do my best thinking in the middle of the night, around two or three a.m., and if I'm in the middle of something I sometimes come out into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee so I can keep going a couple more hours on whatever I'm doing. So I was out there in the kitchen this one night and I look out the window and there they are, a half-dozen waymos, little white cars, all lined up in the street outside our house, with one of them almost directly in my line of sight like he's just hovering in front of our house. And none of them was going anywhere, they were all stuck, just hovering. For some reason I got mad, like we were all being stalked or something. I should have been able to reason my way out of it. They were driverless, it's not like any one of them had any intent whatsoever. The company just made some kind of mistake and they all ended up down here, I'm sure somebody somewhere could fix this mistake. In fact I'd mentioned it to a neighbor yesterday and he said he was going to call in and see if they couldn't fix it, but obviously if he'd called, they hadn't fixed it and here they were again, the following night, six or seven of them, all lined up, clogging the street, not going anywhere, making me feel like they were stalking me and breaking my train of thought, keeping me from finishing my novel.

My coffee was done so I put my half-and-half in it and prepared to go back to writing, but now I couldn't write because I was too steamed up about these stalking waymos out on our cul-de-sac. So I went and grabbed a hammer. One side of me was going to just take that hammer and do some damage to one of the waymos that was directly outside of our house. Now I'm not actually a violent guy so it's possible I just wanted to brandish it and threaten it, and hope that maybe they'd get the idea and just get out of there. What would be the point of actually smashing it? As I was walking out there I was thinking, this is actually a little absurd, having a violent confrontation with a waymo, but that's what was about to happen, and I'm stumbling out of my house in my pajamas at three in the morning, with my coffee in one hand and my hammer in the other, and walking right up to the waymo that's directly outside of my house. Maybe I should just offer it the cup of coffee, I thought to myself, and spare it the damage that I would cause by smashing it. And I also thought, if I got a big enough swing on the hammer, I would spill the coffee, and that would be bad too, what would be the point of that? But the hammer was there because I was mad. What was he doing stalking me at three in the morning? I wanted him to know this was completely inappropriate.

I got out there and got directly in front of the driver's side window, and sure enough, it was driverless. There wasn't a soul in the car. It was just a car, and it was running, and it wasn't going anywhere. All of a sudden I felt some kind of sympathy for it. It didn't know why it was here, what it was doing, who I was, what was going to happen. It was like we were both in the same space at the same time, totally confused, on a street that didn't go anywhere, wide awake in the middle of the night. I decided not to smash it in with the hammer, but I didn't offer it any coffee either. I figured I'd just drink that coffee myself, and I did, although I didn't do any more writing that night.

They had another bizarre problem with those waymos in our city: they kept driving into floods. We had a lot of rain in the following days, and there were places where anyone with any sense would just turn around and go the other way. It seems to me that was something my parents taught me: if you don't know how deep the water is, don't try to go through it. But the waymos had no clue about that and would drive straight into the water, even at this one place where the water was carrying them away. It was tragic and I wondered if that one waymo, that I was acquainted with, was one of the ones that had done that. There was no way of knowing, and besides, it was just a car, there was no use mourning its death even if that was true. But I often mourned the death of my own cars, which somehow I thought always did have a soul and which were loyal to me personally. When they died or got totaled in an accident I kind of wished them well in the next life, whether that life would be as a streetlight or some other inanimate object. If these things have any awareness at all, they should know better than to come down and stalk me in my cul-de-sac in the middle of the night. And if they don't know, somebody should teach them.

Beasts of Ayutthaya

Beasts of Ayutthaya

Three retellings of Beauty and the Beast

On Amazon:
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$2.99 on Kindle
free on kindle unlimited

A beautiful young woman falls in love with a beast - what could possibly go wrong? These three tales explore that question, in the light of Disney's classic animation and the original 1740 tale, along with a few other variations. It seems it's more common than you think. Beasts can be charming, handsome in their own way, intelligent, loyal, fiercely protective....yet they can kill without hesitation or guilt. They may of course turn into a prince - but is that so great? Visit 18th century Siam (Thailand) for these variations. Be Our Guest, White Elephant, and The Halberd give you some idea of the importance of elephants and tigers in ancient Thai culture, and tell tales that are worth comparing to the tales we know.

Memories of Nebraska Territory

I am pretty sure a conversation like this happened, but I don't have exact proof.

My great grandfather was a man of his times, born right after the Civil War, lived an urban life in Council Bluffs, and around the turn of the century (1900) was participating in a physical education fad by buying and riding a bicycle among other things. His father, my great-great grandfather, said that he'd spent his life working and was ready to relax, and wasn't about to ride a bicycle.

But their differences became more pronounced when it came to camping. My great grandfather Will said that the new thing was automobiles, and he had a friend who actually had one, and who proposed coming out West, picking up Will, and driving all the way to Colorado and seeing the great Rocky Mountains. Where would they spend the night? Camping, he said. They'd bring a tent, and sleep out under the stars. Will was actually excited about it, though he wasn't sure it would actually come to pass. It was a long way out there, and they'd have to check that there were enough gas stations, for example. But the camping part sounded good to him. Imagine that, sleeping out under the stars on a clear night, getting away from the city and all.

Great-great grandfather, James Walker, scoffed. "The last time I camped," he said, "I didn't want to. We were pioneers down in southeastern Nebraska, Richardson County. The Civil War was coming though we didn't know it yet. We wanted to do whatever we could to help Lincoln, and what would help Lincoln was making Nebraska a state by having a Constitutional Convention, which they did, in Omaha, and they wanted people to represent Richardson County, so that was me."

"It was a long horse ride," he continued, "but my horse was up to it, and that wasn't a problem. There were even a few inns and such, but we didn't have money, or to put it better, what little money we had went for salt and such things that were necessary, and I wasn't about to splurge on an inn and the alcohol that generally was expected to come with it. I had dried nuts and fruit and things to eat, and blankets, and I slept out under the stars even though it was a bit cold. And I wasn't especially happy about it. I spent my life cutting down trees, building little cabins, plastering up between the boards to keep the bitter winter wind out, trying to get out of that weather, so the critters wouldn't get at my food supply. Why would I want to go out there, and leave my food supply on my horse or some such thing, hoping the critters wouldn't get at it? No, if I could, I'd get in a cabin in a minute, just to sleep better."

"That's why, when I hear your idea, I just wonder. Doesn't a gasoline engine make the whole thing more complicated? In my day it was just me and my horse. I had food for the horse and food for me, which wasn't great, wasn't like a home-cooked meal, but at least it was food. If I could boil water I could cook it and I could even make some chicory or something to drink and that was it."

"I must say though, we got up to Omaha and they closed that convention almost the minute it started. Statehood actually had a lot of enemies. First there were the southerners who settled in Nebraska, like some of our neighbors, who didn't feel like doing anything to help Lincoln. Second was the people in Omaha who were convinced that if Nebraska became a state they'd move the capital, which as we now know, they did. But finally was just a whole bunch of pioneers just like us, hard working but not prosperous because the land isn't so great out there, and they just thought statehood would cost them money they didn't have. All those votes they had, where statehood lost by a small margin, it was mostly because people were too cheap to want to pay any more taxes than they already did. So the whole trip was for nothing. Those guys won and we didn't make a constitution, and Nebraska didn't become a state until years later when it would finally become ready. And by then I was long gone.

But I'll never forget, me and my horse, camping on that prairie, not far from the Missouri of course, we weren't really in the middle of nowhere, but we had to just make camp, make a little fire, just brave the cold, and get up and go the next morning. Why would I want to do that for a whole week, especially out there in the mountains, which they say get pretty cold at night? I wouldn't. I've had enough of that. I want a fire that actually makes my whole room or whole cabin warm. So it'll stay warm until I wake up."

The Halberd

The Halberd A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

On Kindle $2.99
In paperback $6.99 + shipping

The Halberd is the third in a series of retellings of Beauty and the Beast; along with Be Our Guest and White Elephant, it is part of Beasts of Ayutthaya: Three retellings of Beauty and the Beast. Phang is in love with an elephant, Naresuan, in 18th century Thailand. She is a mahout, an elephant trainer, while he is a white or albino elephant, the most royal of the royal. It is a turbulent time in Thailand, with King Taksin the Great reuniting the Siamese yet losing his mental stability. Enemies conspire to keep them apart. In modern Ayutthaya, a young boy finds a halberd, an ancient weapon used by people who fought on elephants. Relics of the ancient capital stir up everyone's imagination.

Neon Pig

Neon Pig

I was coming through Northern California and decided to stop in on an old friend Charley who I’d known maybe fifty years ago. He told me how to get to his cabin and I set out in my rental car for a day out in the woods.

It was a long way going around and back into the forest to the east of Big Sur, where we used to hang out together with a group of hippies in the woods out there. He had basically said he was never going back to the “civilized” world, San Jose, San Francisco, wherever, and he’d meant it. He lived in the forest on his own for a while, then got a small inheritance and bought this place, this small cabin, and had been here ever since.

It was tiny, but had a garden, and he had everything he needed. You’d only find it if you knew exactly where it was, and that’s how he liked it. He was living off the grid, lived off hunting, growing food and finding it, and getting what energy he needed from a little solar setup. He wanted for nothing, he said, and didn’t miss people at all. He was friendly with his neighbors, but most of them were miles away and he liked it that way. He offered to take me hunting and I agreed; he grabbed a bow and arrows and off we walked down a forest path.

We had to go a ways, he said, because he didn’t want anyone seeing, and because civilization was bad for the kind of meat he lived on. “Maybe we’ll find a neon pig,” he said. “Reminds me of our old days on Big Sur.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I remembered well the days at Big Sur, watching the sunset as the waves crashed up against us. We shared stories of those days and the way we’d talk about our experiences. He wanted someone to talk about it with as much as I did, he said, because he had some bizarre experiences that reminded him of those days.

The forest was deep and impenetrable, but it seemed that the sounds of the forest got a little louder, perhaps because way back in there they didn’t know to be quiet when we walked by, or because there was just absolutely no other sounds. To me it seemed that if it was California, it had to have lots of people around somewhere, but to him, he said this was as isolated as it got, but it wasn’t quite good enough and he wasn’t able to hunt the way he used to.

He got the chance to show me what he meant when a wild pig attacked us on the trail. It was the size of a very large dog but fierce and clearly not something to tangle with. I was unarmed, but he was prepared, and killed it with one shot of the arrow. I was shocked but admired his dexterity and skill; I said that I hadn’t learned anything as useful in fifty years out in the civilized world.

“Useful?” he said. “The problem is, these feral pigs have a wide range, and it’s very likely they’ve been in civilization.” With one strong gouge with a hunter’s knife, he cut the pig open. Lo and behold, it was a neon blue color, deep blue like a blueberry.

“A neon pig? How did that happen?” I asked. It seemed like a twisted variation of our psychedelic days, come back to haunt us. But it was real: neon blue, all through his insides.

“Rat poison, most likely,” he said. “They eat it, and then, if we eat them, it poisons us too. I was lucky I heard about it before I tried one.”

It shot the good part of an afternoon, but eventually he’d gouged out a pit where he could bury it reliably enough so that other animals couldn’t get to it. I mostly watched, having very little in the way of digging implements or skill at finding soft earth. Eventually we buried it and headed home. He had plenty for dinner, he said, and he didn’t need any neon pig to ruin my experience.

We ate a dinner of squirrel, venison, and homegrown vegetables; I was surprised a guy on his own could eat so well. “Usually I don’t,” he said, “but it’s good to see someone from those old days.” The neon pig experience kind of stuck in my craw, but he told me to forget it. “It’s a product of how far they range, and whether they get into civilization. I go way back there so that animals back there don’t range that far. But that pig does, and he’s a hungry fellow. He’ll eat just about anything you put in front of him, and that includes rat poison.”

The years of hunting had given him an anti-civilization bias, I told him. Good thing, he said, or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.

Times of Hardship

By the time the Times of Hardship were over, everyone in Boston was united against the British. Dock workers, businessmen, shippers, the man in the street: they hated the British occupying soldiers. Boston became the Cradle of the Revolution. No town was more united in spirit than Boston.

I had three relatives, one an ancestor, who lived through them; they had grown up in the city. The Times of Hardship were actually a period of time in which England occupied Boston with troops who were rude, uncouth, and disrespectful. The troops would beat up or kill locals in gangs and get away with it. They were also allowed to compete for jobs on the docks that were already scarce. And they did this obviously because they weren't being paid enough. They showed great disrespect to the dock workers, beat them up regularly, and said whatever they wanted about who started it or whose fault it was.

The dockworkers were a rough and tumble bunch who had started out burning effigies of the Pope or of Guy Fawkes, but soon turned into anti-British mobs who would gather in gangs and attack British-oowned enterprises; such was the Tea Party, though it didn't come until later. Let's just say that the dockworker culture became visibly and violently anti-British and it was for very good reason. All through the colonies, people were generally ok with being British, ok with being a colony, until it became economically punishing to be aligned with them, so the business class, which was much more numerous and prosperous, was slowly joining the rebel cause as the various taxes took their toll. For his part, the King was arrogant and liked to use the taxes to punish the rebels. You attack our ships, we raise your tariffs that much more. You don't like this, screw you, give me your money. It seemed like robbery to people who were used to a well-ordered system of trade values.

John Leverett, an ancestor of mine, had an import business that he'd set up back in the days when British goods were really popular. It was in the old Town Dock in the heart of Boston's business district, and it sold things for women who made their own dresses: buttons, hems, lace, that kind of thing. He sold the newest of what came off the ships from England, and he'd done this for years, and made a lot of money. He lived right downtown behind the First Church, where Hudson had once lived, because as the oldest son of Knight the metalsmith he inherited it. He had his kids baptised in the church and was proud that his line could be traced up to John the Governor of the Colony in the 1670s. He was so entrenched in his business that he couldn't do much when the Times of Hardship snuck up on everyone and turned the city virulently anti-British.

So it was that a mob burned and destroyed his entire store one night. Some people have said that it was British soldiers who did it in revenge for anti-British mobs, but the more I study the event, the more I believe it was just anti-British mobs destroying everything that had any connection to Britain and looting everything they could. I'll admit I don't know who did it, but it doesn't matter; his store, his livelihood, his identity were all gone in a single night. He became an Overseer of the Poor.

Overseers of the Poor were like social workers tasked to make sure that widows and single mothers, and their children, didn't starve in hard times. Most of them had come from the business community and, like John, had enough money themselves. The community would give them a territory and then give them surplus food or money to spend to feed the people who were starving in it.

The problem was that the Times of Hardship included an economic blockade that was so bad that that money and those supplies had dwindled to nothing. It became practice for Boston children to be sent out to the countryside to be adopted by farm families who at least had food to eat, as even the adults in Boston proper were starving and whoever could do it was sneaking out to the countryside to get food and smuggle it back. Of course soldiers would stop them and harass them on the roads in and out of Boston: show me your papers, give me that food or I'll beat you up, this kind of thing. It was ugly. Everyone hated the Times of Hardship.

John's oldest son John was growing up and due to go to Harvard in 1773. By that time the whole city was aligned very strongly against the British. There were a few Loyalists, but it was getting so if you were a Loyalist you'd better just shut up or go back to Britain quick while you had time.

John had a brother Thomas, who was a printer, and whose son Thomas was also due to go to Harvard in 1773. John Jr. and Thomas Jr. had in essence grown up together, baptised in the same church, cousins the same age, both oldest boy in the family. Thomas the printer had made a fortune too, printing grammar books for people in the countryside and printing just about everything that needed printing. Printing was a lucrative business at that time though it involved importing paper and put one in the crosshairs of a freedom of speech fight that was getting pretty nasty. Thomas had done well financially and had an estate in Medford or somewhere north of Boston.

When it came time for the boys to go to Harvard, they did. They were the same age, were cousins, and were inseperable in their Harvard years. But in their senior year, Harvard moved itself off to Concord so that the rebel troops could house themselves in the Harvard buildings. By that time it was war time and people contributed whatever they could to the cause.

There was another Leverett who appeared to live in the shadows; this one was my ancestor. I'm still not sure exactly where he came from or what his timeline was. At the time John Jr. and thomas Jr. were at Harvard and in Concord, he had moved out of town and established himself in Needham on a small piece of land. He had possibly grown up in Thomas' estate in Medford, being a relative but not a son of Thomas the printer, and was a little older than John Jr. and Thomas Jr. The first of his children were born in Boston but then they began being born and recorded in Needham.

The Times of Hardship had a very strong effect on Boston and on the political climate. The Boston Massacre happened on docks that were once part of the Leverett estate, though that whole downtown estate had to be sold when John Leverett the President of Harvard died, having been starved into debt by Puritans who wanted him to give up making Harvard a secular school back in the early 1700s. The original estate, which went from what is today the Sears Building down Congress Street to the harbor (what was known as Leverett Lane, then Quaker Lane), was also the home of the Tea Party and is today where the Tea Party museum stands. It was called Gray's dock back then, and the Grays married into the Leverett family (Thomas the printer's wife) and were very prominent and important people at the time. There were a lot of land transfers between the sale of the estate and the Revolution, so I can't prove any of this, but it's well known that both the Massacre and the Tea Party happened roughly at Gray's dock so I'll stand by my claims for the moment.

Thomas the printer died during the revolution; John the Overseer of the Poor got sick and his son John Jr. moved with him and his wife to Connecticut. Both John Jr. and Thomas Jr. graduated from Harvard, in Concord; Thomas became a surgeon, but was drafted and captured on a boat, and spent years imprisoned by the British in Brooklyn Harbor, on a boat that they made a movie out of, because conditions were so horrible that people died left and right. To the colonists the conditions on that prison boat somewhat represented the contempt that Britain had for the rebels from the start, that raised everyone's ire and made them that much more patriotic to split off from a country that there was otherwise no reason to be so angry about. Why, you might ask, would the colonies need to fight and kill to be free of their British heritage? Well, put yourself in the Times of Hardship and you'll see why.

John Jr. was busy taking care of his father and mother in Connecticut, but joined the Army at one point; his service was short and late in the war. Thomas Jr. died early from his experience in Brooklyn Harbor. William, the guy in Needham, was recruited to be an officer, and fought in the Battle of MOnmouth (I believe) and the Battle of Rhode Island, but officers weren't being paid very well, and this created an issue for his family back home in Needham. It was rough times and everyone was in pretty bad health but somehow one of his sons survived, and through him apparently my line sprung up. Somehow the memory of the Times of Hardship is still in our bones. The right to free speech, the right to protest, the right to associate with whomever you want, the right to not be kidnapped and beat up randomly, the right to have whatever religion you want, or no religion at all, the right to carry arms and fight back against armed thugs, the right to keep and eat the food you grow, these are rights that we had written into the Constitution the minute we got the chance to write it. And when we did, John Hancock, first of the big ship-owners and businessmen, was the first to sign it, or maybe just signed it the biggest. Everyone was against the armed thugs by that time, there wasn't anyone who actually still wanted to see them around, taking everyone's food and beating them up at will. That had gone on for years, too many years. To be free of that was a joyous occasion, worthy of a shout out.

Local Author Fair

White Elephant

(my new one) White Elephant: A folktale retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Magical realism in a well-known story. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSXS741M

Be Our Guest

Same book, new cover
Be Our Guest: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast
I can now say that it's part of a set of three, all retellings of Beauty and the Beast; second one's done and coming soon.
Paperback $7.39, kindle $2.99, free on ku
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Our-Guest-retelling-Beauty/dp/B0FM82CSKX

Be Our Guest

Be Our Guest
A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Now available on Amazon:
Paperback $7.39 + shipping
Kindle $2.99
Free on Kindle Unlimited
(paperback link not working temporarily for some reason)

This tale is part of the Global Beasts Series in which every book features a different country. This one is set in Thailand, against the government shutdown of Tiger Temple, a famous tourist theme park in Kanchanaburi. It's a tale as old as time, but it can be seen in many ways, with a wide variety of characters. The original tale was written in 1740, and this one brings the original to light against the traditional ideas of karma, reincarnation, and animism that have been in Thailand since before Buddhism ever arrived.

Geneva Jane (cont'd)

This story is similar to the last one, but it incorporates new information and is told with a focus on Geneva Jane, who is one of my favorites.

The legend of our family's arrival in the US revolves around two boys who stole a pig in Scotland, and in running from the authorities, sought shelter in Northern Ireland, whereupon they ultimately continued on to Pennsylvania. The story may be more complicated than that but that's what we have to work with. There may be three brothers. They may have stayed in Northern Ireland for longer than we'd think.

Geneva Jane and Elizabeth were the daughters of a fisherman in County Donegal, Ireland, near Londonderry. This is important partly because it's a political boundary; Donegal is part of Ireland, while Londonderry is part of Northern Ireland. Back in about 1780 it may not have mattered so much.

But even then, there were many Protestants in Northern Ireland, put there by the king for his own reasons. They survived but living wasn't easy. The rest of Ireland disliked and distrusted them. They could not go back to Scotland; there was no work or land there. Poor people were literally being squeezed off the land back in Scotland. Such was the fate of the Wallace boys who found their way across the channel. No work, no money, no land back in Scotland.

Elizabeth and Geneva Jane's father was a Crawford, and thus associated with the Scots in the north. But he fished waters that could be said to be off the coast of Donegal as well as Londonderry. One time a terrible storm came through, and he told his sons and friends to stay home; sure enough, it killed almost the whole village, and widows and orphans grieved on all sides of them. So he was known as a wise man and a survivor, at least of bad storms like that one.

This story may have been told in the family partly to explain why Geneva Jane and Elizabeth could choose to leave. There were no men to marry! Life was hard enough in their small village, living off the fisherman's catch. But they had to have something to look forward to.

Now along came two brothers, or possibly three, looking for relatives of theirs from Scotland. They'd escaped Scotland because they had stolen a pig (supposedly), and were being chased by authorities. It's possible that one of these brothers, John, caught Geneva Jane's eye. But he found his relative, and, after a short refuge from the pursuing authorities, set out for Pennsylvania. I am not sure about which brother or how many may have gone with him. Perhaps it was just him.

Actually it was in 1770 that four Wallace brothers - William, Hugh, James, and John went to America, where they ended up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From the fact that the four went together I surmise that 1) one or two or even three were already in Ireland when John (and brother(s?) crossed the channel; and, 2) they were looking for the brother(s) when they crossed, having no money. Somehow the four brothers got up the money to go to America and did.

I would like to think that John met Geneva Jane while crossing the channel. It would make sense that the father helped with the transport across the channel, or was on shore when they landed, helping them find their way to their brother(s). She could very easily have been there, but there's no way to know for sure.  

In any case he landed in Pennsylvania somewhere, married, and had a boy. But his wife died, and he was heartbroken, presumably. He left the boy with grandparents and took the next ship home.

But he didn't return to Scotland, where there were no jobs, no land, and the law was still presumably on his trail. Instead, he went to Donegal, and found Geneva Jane. He married her (I think) and had six children, all there in Donegal/Londonderry. I'm not sure what he did, or how he got by. The youngest of the children was Robert (1796), who we are interested in because he became a patriarch of a large Walllace family in Wallace Run, near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

Scot irish were leaving all the time for the new world. Northern Ireland, and Scotland, had bleak economic times, and there seemed to be easier living in the new world. For the Scots, it was even more important to be free of religious tyranny. Elizabeth had married a guy named John Scott. He said something against the Church and was thrown in jail. Elizabeth had enough, and announced she was going to the new world. When they finally released him, he could come join her in exile. Life would be no fun for him in Ireland anyway, what with the place controlled by Catholics who held grudges.

John Scott would eventually join her, and they would end up in Wallace Run. They had a daughter who married a Wallace, as Wallace Run was full of Wallaces, so they would be relatives in several ways. Elizabeth was to get a disease or condition that hunched her over badly - but she was well loved by the entire family, as was Geneva Jane by hers.

Meanwhile John Wallace had married in Carlisle, and had a son, but his wife died. Presumably heartbroken, he left the child behind, to be raised by the grandparents, and set off to go back across the sea.

But now he picked Northern Ireland, instead of Scotland, and when he got there he found and married Geneva Jane. That's why I suggested that he'd met her crossing the channel already, though I couldn't say that for sure. It would make sense that he already knew her and perhaps was even looking for her - or maybe they had corresponded? By now she was tired of an isolated fishing village, and he was worldly, having seen Pennsylvania. They stayed in Northern Ireland and had six children, Robert being the youngest, before they would decide to go to America.

John and Geneva Jane picked 1799 to go to the new world, and they settled in Cecil County, Maryland. Of their six children Robert, the youngest, would have been only about three when they moved. It was a new life, and I'm not sure of how many of the other five children went with them; some were already grown or almost grown. We know very little about these six, except for Robert, the youngest, and an older brother named John Jr. 

John's first son William, had by now grown up in Carlisle (according to sources), while the other three brothers had scattered. Carlisle was not too far from Cecil County; but it's not clear why John and Geneva Jane chose that location; they could have chosen Beaver County as her sister had. 

Of their other children, only Robert and John had any clear tracks. Robert would fight in the War of 1812, enlisting at the age of 16, and end up in Wallace Run, while John, eight years older, ended up out in a small town in Ohio. Both were familiar with Wallace Run, though; that's where their Aunt Elizabeth llived. After the war John married a local woman and moved to Wallace Run; he would have ten children.

The names Jane and Geneva Jane run down the genealogy of these Wallaces as if Geneva Jane was a well-respected matriarch whose memory would last generations. Cecil County, however, has pretty muddy tracks. I'm not sure I could tell you where exactly she was buried, or whether there were other Wallaces around to greet them when they got there.

It is hard to track down these people becuase there were Wallaces all over the countryside, especially in the mountains of Pennsylvania, but also in North Carolina, Maryland, anywhere. They were leaving Scotland and Ireland in droves. "Wallace" actually meant "Welsh" in Scottish Gaelic, but also could mean "foreigner," so virtually anyone could have been a Wallace, and could have been shoved out of the place when times got tough, for no better reason than being a foreigner or being part of a large family with not enough money to feed everyone. And though every Wallace claims direct descent from William Wallace the Great, savior of Scotland and victor over England, none them are direct descendants, as he had no sons, and though some people claim he had a daughter, that claim is somewhat spurious. Most likely the Wallaces spread far and wide were of different clans and mostly unrelated to each other, and it makes doing genealogy somewhat difficult, like tracking down Johnsons or Smiths.

There are Roberts and James and Williams and Johns all over the place, and they tend to muck things up, cloud up the genealogical waters. Doing Wallaces. we have to keep track of middle names and always know the birth year and place. So many in Beaver County alone! They're hard to untangle, and people keep associating one with the other, by some ancient convention that if they had the same family name, they had. to be related, somehow.

It was Robert's ten that did good work filling up New Castle; the first seven were boys, so there were indeed Wallaces all over the place from his family alone. Every kid came with a first name (Robert, William, John and James being most common) and a middle name which would then help you figure out which one someone was talking about. 

Their memories of Northern Ireland I think cut them off from their memories of Scotland. Very few stories remain from their Scotland days and that's partly why we've had trouble tracking down who actually still lived back there. The father of John Sr. and the other three boys was a Willliam, but one source said they thought he'd been moved over to Northern Ireland with all the other Scots. Well if that was true, how was it that he left a son or two behind to steal a pig? Answers aren't easy. And who knows about the pig? It may or may not have squealed. 

In the late 1700s Scotland had way too many people and no land, no opportunity, no jobs for the young. John and Robert at one point were driven to steal a pig, so the story goes. The authorities were after them and they took a boat of some kind over to Northern Ireland.

Life wasn't much better over there, but there were plenty of Scots there, called the Scot-Irish. Many of them were moving to America because they were settling the mountain areas and the Scots knew they could make it there. In fact, John and Robert had an uncle James who was already over there, I believe. He had settled in a part of Pennsylvania, Beaver County, that was rugged and mountainous, a little isolated. They knew they could stay with Uncle James and his kin.

They crossed the ocean I believe sometime around 1810. Robert would have been only 14 but John was 22. They'd have to make their way over to Beaver County, in the western part of the state. The War of 1812 broke out and Robert enlisted; he was barely 16 if even that. John made his way out to Ohio. I'm not clear on the order of how these things happened.

After the war Robert married a New Castle woman, settled in Wallace Run (Uncle James' valley), and had ten children. He became a pillar of the community. Several of his boys became doctors, Several of his sons became doctors. One of those was my grandpa's grandpa.

Becoming a doctor was one way of getting out of the valley, Wallace Run. In uncle James' clan one woman's parents were first cousins; her father's parents were also first cousins. I'm not totally clear on that or how that happened, but it shows that Wallaces were so common you could marry a cousin and consider them an outsider. Grandpa wanted out. He tried farming but the soil was too rocky, so he gave it up and moved out to Iowa.

His own son my Uncle Bones ended up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. Several generations from Scotland, he no longer had the hills, the fog, the sea, anything. An outlaw spirit, is what he had left. In Scottish "Wallace" meant "Welsh" but was also used for "outsider" or "foreigner" - in fact it was used for just about anyone. Once you left, though, there was no going back.

This is true; it just happened. It occurred to me that it would make a book. I write about it because it's intense.

I was in the ER with a 7-year-old girl, cute as a button, and it occurred to me that this time we shared was very important, more perhaps to her than to me, so I got off my phone (I had forgotten my glasses anyway) and just talked to her, or participated in whatever she was doing. She had become violent, had almost killed her twin sister, and was waiting to be placed somewhere and sent away. Yet she was a beautiful young girl, on her best behavior with me, and one side of her, that occupied most of her life, she was as cute as only 7-year-olds can be.

Outside the ER room there was actually a guard, 24/7. This was lucky because at one point I was on my phone and she just darted out. The guard followed her to the bathroom and she used it, but it could have been more than that. This girl was known to just run away and had done it several times.

One notable thing about the time we shared was her love of numbers. She impressed me by doing math problems; granted, she'd just type them in to the computer and report what it said, but she knew the numbers, liked what she was doing, and always got it right. She was proud of her own success and of course I praised her a lot. When I lent her my phone, she found the sudoku app right away; that's because it has nine numbers on its little app icon. She opened it up and I taught her how to do a sudoku. Way over her head, yes, but it was notable because she was fascinated even when it was clearly too complex.

Another time she started dancing. She put a song on her ipad and just sang and danced to it. The orderlies outside the door couldn't help but smile on their way past. She had a lively spirit. Cha cha now y'all! At this point I was feeling very seventy, while she was clearly seven. I just watched and enjoyed it.

I worried about the hospital crushing her spirit. Of course it will be hard on her. I also repeated to myself, as a mantra, it's not her fault that she couldn't control her anger, or her spirit, that she would hit and scratch and run away and try to strangle her sister. They would see their mother, who loves them, and who told them she wanted them back. But they weren't coming back, and that made them angry. They'd go back to us, or to someone else, and that just didn't go over too well. And the one twin could figure it out, and could handle it; this is the way it is. You get a new home, and you make the best of it. But this second twin, she couldn't control herself. She'd hit, scratch, run away, refuse to go anywhere, resist, do violence.

I tried not to let the tragedy overwhelm me while I was there with her. I could look at her and get very depressed: poor girl, she'll have trouble where she's going; or, I could just live in the moment, be with her, be someone she knew on her path, someone who liked math and encouraged her, or who just liked her. I chose the second, obviously. Even when I argued that we are seventy, we can't handle this, I couldn't help just loving her for who she was. She's a precious soul.

Her twin, in the end, is probably better off without her. Together they find what they have in common: seven-year-old exuberance, and run with it. Together they are clearly too much for us and bad things result. Perhaps if we were younger, more on top of it, they would never have gotten close enough to each other to do anything to get her in trouble. As it happened, she almost killed her sister right in front of the social worker. We didn't have to argue for intervention. It was inevitable from that point on.

I remember the sterile feeling of an ER room. I am grateful every time I'm in there and it's not about me. Next time, I keep thinking, it will be about me. I watch the orderlies and wonder if they will be as competent when it comes to dealing with whatever breakdown I'll have, whenever it happens, which I'm sure will be soon enough. They come in pairs, delivering a heart-measuring service, or oxygen, or whatever they do. Ultimately a placement arrived and two ambulance drivers came to gather her up and take her to a place in the city.

One was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was pretty good at making her feel that it would all be ok. Nevertheless they strapped her to a kind of gurney so they could wheel her into the ambulance and take her on their way. This was their job and they knew what they were doing. She was ok with it. She knew this was coming and that it was inevitable. My wife was on the phone at that point and we told her together that she would be ok and that she'd been very good, and that we loved her. What else can you do? We love her yet we're sending her off to a hospital where she'll be alone but with other kids like her, who can't control themselves, or whose anger is just too strong sometimes. In a way, it was kind of like a milestone in her life, when she went this direction, and certain things will never be the same again. It fills me with apprehension, and a little dread, and a little sorrow of mourning for a childhood gone in the wrong direction.

Yet my last emotion is mostly just tiredness. I've had three sons in hospitals like this one, at points where I didn't know what else to do, where the hospital was the only place for them, where, if you can't control your life spinning out of control, you have to spin it right into a hospital where drugs are going to calm it down for you. And nobody especially likes those drugs, but they are what we have to deal with this. I couldn't at that point argue for anything better, and that was true for my other kids too. The memories of those experiences in those hospital environments are still burned hard into my mind's walls. Boys get off into their own minds about who they are and sometimes it's just a little too far from reality and what are the rest of us to do? Everyone has their own opinion about the value of the hospital but believe me I wouldn't be there for any of these cases if I really knew a choice, or was able to carry it out.

When they had carried her out, it was easy enough for me to just stand up, grab our things, and walk right out, back to my car. I made a comment to an information guy about finding a newspaper with brackets in it, but he agreed with me: you can't find newspapers these days; he wouldn't even know where to tell me to look. Last night, St. Patrick's Day, the hospital had been full, with what one guy called "amateurs," people who didn't know how to drink in excess; now, in the morning, it was much more empty, but the orderlies were still able to dance a little, Cha cha now y'all, in the midst of their duties. Just another day at work, getting people back on their feet and back on their way. Up on the road, I saw the ambulance as it turned onto the ramp on the interstate. It had no windows except in front. I sent my prayers through the ambulance walls. We'll see her again, and she'll be a little different.

This is a true story, to the best of my knowledge. I'm not always certain about the way my ancestors felt, but it's clear what they did, so I explore the possible reasons.

When the Civil War ended my great-great grandfather came back to Warren, Illinois, and was offered a job as literary editor of a newspaper. Warren is in the far northwest corner of the state, not far from Galena, which was the county seat of Jo Daviess County. Galena was larger, was on the river, and was considered more metropolitan. Warren was new; it had sprung up because of some local mines (across the border in Wisconsin), the possibility of a railroad coming through, and a rapid influx of settlers.

From the point of view of the newspaper, it was called The Independent, but James Walker (Leverett), my great-great grandfather, and the editor, Herst Gann, changed it to The Sentinel immediately. It is hard to glean through old issues to find the reason but perhaps it could be found with better searching. Given my guesses, I would say that the county was predominantly Republican (pro-Lincoln), not independent; the war was over and moving forward in a congregationalist spirit, it was more important to them to have the image of calling out than the image of straddling a fence.

Herst Gann was a journalist from way back. In those days that meant having every word paid for by somebody. One could make money in journalism if one could sell lots of papers and if a paper was widely distributed and demonstrably well-read. He was fine with having a literary editor but anything literary had to be well read as well. Of course one could clearly see that people were more interested in reading about local murders than reading fine poetry. Only one out of a hundred will read a poem or care about it even today; back then, in a frontier mining town like Warren the proportion wasn't much better.

That fundamental tension ran all the way through journalism in 1866 and even went straight back to Europe. On the one hand, typesetting and the printing press made it possible to make a newspaper and distribute it to hundreds, if not thousands. People bought them up and took them home and read them, soaking up the local news and opinions about national events so that they would be better informed when discussing them. They were proud of their literacy and conscious that literacy was the foundation of their democracy. Being informed voters was important to them.

As literary editor James Walker was able to both bring fine literature (written by others) to the people of the raucus mining town of Warren, and try his hand at it himself. The editor did not always sign every piece, but noticed whether people talked about it, or whether it had any effect. Herst Gann, his partner, was most shrewd at this. Both were tasked with keeping the advertising revenue coming in; they didn't rely so much on classifieds in those days, but rather went straight to the local businesses and held extended conversations in which they touted their literary goals (what service did they provide for the community?) and explained why that business would want to be associated with them. Gann was an expert at this as well. Literary is fine, he would say, as long as it fits in with our overall strategy for growth and financial survival.

Alcohol was a huge issue in the post-Civil War frontier towns. Now that there was peace, and life was getting back to normal, people were able to focus on the enormous damage alcohol had done to fronntier families, especially the women, as it ran rampant in the mining camps and frontier farms. A prohibition movement began to take shape. James Walker's older friend, an ardent teetotaller named Joel Webster Parker, was familiar with the mining camps of southwest Wisconsin, having sold supplies up there for years. He said the hops industry was moving west into southwest Wisconsin and should be stopped in its tracks, since the making of breweries would be the downfall of civilization. Those who know Wisconsin today will agree that he had a point. At the time, though, it was just an argument unfolding in the Warren Sentinel and other local newspapers.

James Walker enjoyed going to Galena, hobnobbing with local important people, getting to know business people in both Warren and Galena. He watched as his literary attempts for the most part went underappreciated or unappreciated; it was, after all, a mining town. This job would be week after week of hoping someone somewhere would read and enjoy something he wrote. Someone besides his wife and kids.

The literary argument against the newspapers was that the newspapers were prostitutes, writing more and more about what people wanted to read, caring less and less about fine literature. One might as well write one's own book, if one wanted fine literature, and stay away from the brothel newspapers. In a world where someone owns everything you say, how can you call that fine literature? Newspapers were becoming commonplace; the United States was entering the era of newspapers; more and more people were reading them. But what was happening to fine literature? It was moving to the bottom, or to the back, not fully paid for, barely read, not holding a candle to news about the local murder. Get used to being undervalued, even squeezed out when column inches are in short supply. Who reads poetry anyway? Every day you're the bastard stepchild that doesn't really belong here, but gets squeezed in on slow days when there's nothing else to say, As things. heat up there are fewer and fewer of those days. If you write poetry or literature, you're better off publishing it yourself and then nobody will buy it, and you'll starve.

James Walker gave up journalism and moved to southwest Wisconsin with Joel Webster Parker, who was able to start a merchandise store in the town of Hillsboro and employ him running teams and supplying it. Up there a brewery moved in and burned down within two years; this caused James Walker to decide that the town had unwholesome influences for his kids, and to move them up to a farm in the center of the state near Black River Falls. He would farm up there for about ten years, isolated. He would never write again, as far as I know.

The Sentinel is still around today, but newspapers are in a way different form than they were in in the late 1800's. They are like advertising inserts; most people just use them for their paper value, as for example checking their oil. Back then, if one didn't read them, one used them in the outhouse. Nowadays, we rarely even use them to check the oil.

Today all the social media titans, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, sit at the president's side. They own the information associated with your shadow; when you click "shoe" they send a signal to each other and each of your accounts is inundated with shoe advertisements. This information has combined to make them the richest men in the world, capable of buying TikTok or determining what kind of information TikTok is able to give the Chinese. What can you do besides say "no thanks?" We rely on social media to keep track of family and old friends, to tell them what we're up to, to "check in," as it were, so that they know we're still alive and thinking. I have all my books on Amazon; there is no other game in town. But I feel like my great-great grandfather, like moving to a farm out in the middle of nowhere, and living out my days free of everything except minimal contact with the outside world. Not sure that would be possible for me. Worth thinking about, though.

Sunrise over Coralville

I woke up this morning in a motel on First Avenue, Coralville and got to watch the sun rise in the hills on the Iowa River just to the east, looking back toward Iowa City. It so happens that sometime in the 1970's I was employed delivering newspapers to motels in Coralville and Iowa City, so it was a kind of coming home to me, only in this motel there is not a newspaper to be seen.

Back then, people would read them. They would drop quarters into a machine and take a newspaper out, then read it to find the daily news. These days I open up google news and read my news from a variety of sources, whatever google news links to, all free. The different organizations pester me (I actually prefer The Guardian, but don't pay for any of them), but I stay under the radar and just take what I need. It's partly because in those days I was used to all news being free to me as an employee.

I went down to this little hut down by the river which they used as a bundling house; that's what we called it. We would unload a truck at about 2 30 in the morning, and remove the wire ropes that secured them. We would then count out the bundles we needed and turn them, secure them, and put them in our truck. I had an old Suburban that was given to me to use by the boss. It had like 200,000 miles and was entirely reliable, and held lots of papers, which was especially useful on Sunday when we were doing major volume.

So these bundles, which resembled logs, would be marked by number and I'd know which one to throw on which curb, when I got way out to the suburbs in Coralville. But then on the way back, after cruising all those empty, dark, deserted streets out in the suburbs, I'd come back along First Avenue and hit all the motels. At the motels I had one of two missions; I'd either hand a specified number of newspapers to the clerk, or I'd put a slug in the machine, open it up, remove all of yesterday's papers, and put a specified number of papers in it instead. The old papers I'd bring back to the bundling house to use to wrap bundles. Or, of course, I was free to just keep one. I could take home as many of yesterday's papers as I wanted to. And I sometimes did, since I'd read the opinions or do the puzzles in the back.

It was a solitary kind of job. The other bundlers were friendly but difficult to be around - the guy next to me chewed tobacco and at three in the morning I found this kind of repulsive. But he was friendly to me; so were the people in the motels. The guy that showed me the route, the tobacco chewer, got way out into the Coralville suburbs and went the wrong way on streets, etc. and said that at 3 in the morning nobody cared and they all knew who he was and why he was doing it. It was essentially so you could maneuver around to where dropping the bundle was easier, and you didn't have to get out of the Suburban to do it. Sure enough a policeman saw us and did nothing. I was impressed and did the same when I got the route.

But one night I was out there breaking the law, maneuvering the car so I could drop the bundle, and I made some kind of mistake which caused me to run over this curb. It was rather dramatic but it was just a mistake and I could do nothing but keep on going and doing what I was doing, going the wrong way. A policeman saw it and pulled me over.

I explained to him that I was a bundle dropper and that I went the wrong way because it was 3 30 in the morning and I figured it was ok in the abandoned streets as they were. Surprisingly he said he knew all about that and in fact he'd been watching me do that for a long time; he knew the last guy but didn't know me. He was just pulling me over to make sure I was ok, because the curb-jumping was kind of uncharacteristic and at this time of night there were a lot of drunks out here doing basically the same thing. I had to laugh at that. I think he was kind of doing it just to meet me and get a scan on my general personality, like he'd feel better watching me break the law routinely if he knew who I was.

Some of the guys would get paper routes when their driving was over, so that they'd do bundle dropping 2 30-5 30 and then paper route 5 30-7. This added together made almost an income you could live on but it was a gruelling schedule. I got a school bus driving job and would work 7-8 and then again 2 30-3 30 - you can see easily that this made it hard to sleep any time except after 3 30. It was odd sleeping then and I was often interrupted, especially if I wanted to do anything else. Messing with my sleep schedule proved to be a serious error but that's another story.

Once the Pope came to Iowa and his story was all over the front page. This was important because, in making a log out of a stack of papers, your eye would fall on the same word or words repeatedly as those words came around the fold of the paper.

I'm working on a possible story for a volume on mental illness, with a theme "echoes." Well I have echoes all over the place. I have a little too much familiarity with mental illness.

Turns out the year I stopped in on my schizophrenic aunt was the same year my friend's son killed himself and his girlfriend, and a dog, thus upsetting everyone, all the survivors, all of Iowa, but particularly her, because he was her only child, and years later she'd die with dementia, and no id, and no one to care for her.

Is dementia like schizophrenia? My mom had a kind of dementia - in the end she didn't even know who we were. Here she'd raised me for many years, spent hour upon hour watching me, then what? Her mind just doesn't recognize? And then there was my aunt. She didn't recognize me either, but she'd never really seen me - but I could also tell, upon talking to her, that she just didn't do well with all real connections. Like knowing that I was her brother's son, or that my daughter wasn't my wife. She was in a good mood but pretty out of it, and it was scary.

I always thought that a killer - like the son in the above story - is almost mentally ill by definition. Like if you thought actually killing someone would be good for anyone ever for any reason, there must be something wrong with your thinking. In that case he seemed to take the life of a woman who had rejected him, so, my guess is that it wasn't a double suicide, it was a murder suicide. But on the other hand maybe people are making that part up about her rejecting him, or, maybe everyone has it wrong in general. I try to make up or find reasons why maybe he wasn't mentally ill. But things are looking bad for him, in my book, if her family says she'd rejected him. And her son - he left that son out in the truck, locked out of the house - when he did it. Who could do something like that? He must have known the kid was out there.

That year I visited my aunt was a flood year in Iowa. So, while this kid killing his ex-girlfriend, and leaving her son out in the truck, and I was visiting my aunt (I swear, not far apart in time, mid-May), it was raining, day after day, all through Iowa. As I left my aunt's house, I'll never forget - I didn't quite know my way out of town (Des Moines), but I passed over a bridge, and the water was rising very badly under it. It was scary. It was like it would envelop us all.

And it almost did, in many parts of Iowa. One friend of mine had to go way around every time she came from home to work, and I think this was a Cedar-Rapids-Iowa-City commute. One of those major roads was shut down all summer because of those endless rains.

To me, there's your echoes. They've had what, three hundred-year floods in ten years in Iowa? The water's rising under the bridge, and everyone up here on dry land is beginning to feel it.

I don't know about that story - not sure I can tie all this together. It may be a little too slippery, or even a little to real, and believe me these people I've mentioned are all real. It is quite scary being on that edge of sanity, and by the way my kids are suffering right now and I have no idea what to do to keep them from going over the cliff.

Some action is going to be required here. The wter is rising.

After a little more research I got some basic facts about the story in the below post, which is still somewhat wild, book-worthy, but now a little clearer.

One aspect of it is that my friend, the new-age woman whose only son committed murder-suicide, was already planning to move to New Mexico when it happened. She did not, as I'd surmised, go there to get away from mean Iowans. But if she was already planning to go, and he was steadily working in a place in town (Cedar Rapids) - then it would be possible for her to blame herself partly for his demise. After all, he was losing his mother, and then his girlfriend, who had apparently rejected him. She was coming to his house to pick up furniture, and had actually brought her son, thinking she'd be safe if that son was with her. Wrong.

What made him snap, kill her, kill the dog, and kill himself? I have a hard time blaming psilicybin mushrooms, though I think they've been mentioned as part of it. Mushrooms alone wouldn't make you violent. Or maybe they would. So there's a mystery there, where did that violence in him come from? Not her, I'm sure.

The other real reason has to do with the book. The author went on to be a professional writer in the big leagues, as if having the right degrees was pushing her in that direction from the start. This was one of her early works and was personal; she'd known the guy and considered him like a father, sympathetic as I am, wanting to show that something, maybe Iowa itself, drove him to it. Well I also saw him in his better days, as a sweet innocent kid, and I can still say that whenever someone goes over the edge there's always a dozen people who can't believe such a mild-mannered gentle spirit could do such a thing. We all could do such a thing, if pushed just the right way, and who knows what else was in his life that we didn't know about? I still haven't located his father, for example, don't know a thing about him.

Back to her book. She knew him as a kind of father figure, was sympathetic, went and talked to the boy (that he had locked out of the house when he did it), and the book was panned. Some very important people thought it was garbage and said so. Now I don't even ask people like that what they think of my books, because I already know what they'll say. But to her, it was a blow. She had to do better next time. She had to even eliminate all evidence of her previous failure. That's my explanation.

There's no one deliberately hiding information about what happened; it's findable though it's not easy to find it. I don't see a coverup or suppression of news articles, just news articles that are hard to find and getting harder to find every day. And I think my conclusions are right if only in a general way about her book and why I can't just read it. As a writer I consider taking on personal situations (like this one - I met the kid) - and that's a hazard of doing it. I could write a book about a writer, I think - that might be somewhat wild - but these things have to go somewhere. If it doesn't go to a grisly murder-suicide or to the mother's sad and pitiful demise, where does it go? Make the writer fictional and let it go where I take it, I suppose. Or let her just be successful, still alive, left alone, but haunted, as the rest of us are.

This is an absolutely true story and I hope I don't make anyone mad. It's told entirely from my own perspective. There's a rich kind of book in here.

In 1976--1977 I became close friends with a woman commonly called "the purple lady" because almost everythig she wore was a shade of purple though there was some pink in there. She was New Age before New Age became a thing, and that pretty much defined her. She gave tarot readings and often talked about our fates and destinies and such things like there was a power she was in touch with that she could so easily share.

She was of the non-violent variety, in her very nature - I never really heard her say anything bad about anyone. She didn't seem to have any enemies and most people knew her and liked her.

Around that time I met her son, who was a kid maybe ten or older, a soft-spoken kid, nice. I got a brief explanation that he didn't live with her, but presumably with his father, but they seemed to get along fine, and they were happy to see each other when he arrived. It seems I was discouraged from asking too much about his father or whatever divorce precipitated their separation. I have since concluded that maybe his father was a dark and mysterious character because the kid would have been entirely sweet if she had more to do with it. But sometimes those small towns around Iowa create very controlling families and maybe that one was unable to let go of that kid when she became new-agey and needed to drift off and find her way. That's as good an explanation as any.

I left the village for many years and heard only traces of what had happened: there was a fire, the kid was involved in a tragedy; she moved off to Taos never to return. Though I too was living in New Mexico I never looked her up. She had renounced Iowa entirely.

It turns out the kid was involved in a murder-suicide in which he killed his girlfriend and a dog. This story gets stranger now with every step. It is not clear where this happened because I simply cannot find a trace of it in any newspaper. I've got names, date (May 1993), some details, but not some important ones like where.

Stranger yet, a very good writer wrote a book about it (called An Iowa Murder), but took it off the market and it appears to be the only account of it even though it's admittedly subjective. The author, as a girl, knew him and couldn't believe he would do such a thing. That's kind of how I feel, except I have even less to go on when it comes to finding the truth.

Perhaps I have the place wrong, or one of their names; I seem to get entire dead ends when I go looking. One newspaper article mentioned it at the end, almost an afterthought, as if it was in this tiny town (Vinton), but too obscure to notice.

He could have grown up there - family there, etc., and very easily had a double life, one with his dad in a small town, one with his mom in the village with the tarot readings. One can imagine that people were cruel to her after the murder and that's what caused her to move to Taos, ok, I'll buy that. Iowa can be cruel that way although I must say, if he had a dark side it didn't come from her. In Taos she was an icon, quite famous, but had no one, and when things got bad there was no one around to look out for her, until one of my old friends' daughters came around and took are of her until her death quite recently. That's when I started looking into this murder-suicide. And this book that was written about it, apparently.

In the time I knew her she didn't want to talk about her marriage (if she had one) or her son, or the hard parts of being split up. She wasn't even that tuned in to mothering although she got along just fine with the kid and he seemed to have what he needed. After I left the village, there was a fire, in which she saved some of her fellow residents but at the expense of all her possessions including lots of purple clothes. And after that, the son moved into the village to be near her and know her better. He didn't stay, though, the murder-suicide was not in the village. Not sure where it was, but it wasn't there.

The details of the killing are horrible, of course. How could a person do that? Drugs, is one answer. and it's possible.

She died in bad shape a couple of months ago. Dementia, and not taking care of herself, and having no place to go, and apparently it was sad, though there was a very nice service for her after she died. None of the above was really her fault, in my figuring, because it seems to me she was probably forced to leave for one reason or another and not allowed to take the kid with her. That's just how I read it. The kid was never able to restore the bond that was cut when she was forced to leave him. Of course that's speculation. Why would she never tell us more?

People have these stories. You never know it by looking at their lost, confused faces later in life. But things happen, and we never forget, we just sometimes fail to record them well. There is no record, no record, of this one. Why, I have no idea.