timepie by the slice

2012-01-30T20:41:00.000-08:00

"The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard."

Barbara W. Tuchman, big deal historian, who was born 100 years ago today, who, I'm pretty sure, wrote and/or said many a cool, intelligent thing but the above quotation has got to be one of the coolest. But the birthday person who's been on my mind today [along with a dreadful, infuriating, nightmare-inducing story I heard on NPR today and how truly marvelous & splendid is the 1999 movie Topsy-Turvy which I had on while I was painting this morning] is the 32nd President of the United States, who turned 30 on the day Ms. Barb was born. That'd be Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the greatest, most interesting & complex Americans ever born, no foolin.'

‎"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle...."True individual freedom cannot exist w/o economic security & independence. People who are hungry & out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." Franklin D. Roosevelt, b. 30 Jan 1882.

Just For You to Know: Chapter Five

2012-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Five

In which we celebrate Independence Day in Independence. I learn more about life and death and Richie Scudder. Robin returns and I’m so happy and then I’m not.

Already before noon on the Fourth of July, the shimmering air was smoky with firecrackers and Black Cats. It was as hot as the inside of a cow and every bit as humid. Mama decided that she’d stay home with the little kids. She’d put a wet washcloth on her head and take a nap in front of the window fan, something she’d been doing more and more of here lately.

Dad could hardly touch the steering wheel without burning his fingers. He pulled his ball cap low over his eyes and shook his head at Jimmy. “Honey, you gotta wear those durned corduroys today?”

“I’m not too hot, Dad. Honest.”

If I were a mean person, which I’m NOT, I would say he wore those long britches so no one would see his pudgy white legs.

“Okay, kiddo,” Dad said. “To each his own.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, son?”

“Did you know that exactly one hundred years ago today was when they just got done fighting the biggest battle ever in the whole western hemisphere? In the Civil War? It was at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in eighteen-sixty three.”

Dad rubbed at his pointy nose. “Wahoo! Is that right?”

Jimmy grinned. “Uh huh!”

After a load of sweating and band music, we saw the sun bouncing and flashing off of the teeny spectacles of a genuine Used-to-be President of the United States, Harry S. Truman. He said it was great to be in a country where we could say mean things about the fellows in the government and not get thrown in jail, then go fight the whole world to defend our nation if we had to.

“That’s right,” said Dad under his breath. “I fought for this country and the right to gripe about those knuckleheads in Washington. I swear, President Kennedy’s the only fella in that town who’s got any sense.”

Between Dad’s commenting and the broiling sun over our heads, it was hard to concentrate on Mr. Truman’s speech. I thought about popsicles or would have if Clark hadn’t poked my arm. “Carmie, look at Jimmy. He’s getting sick or something.”

Sure enough, Jimmy was swaying. I grabbed his hand and called out, “Dad!” A lady behind us exclaimed, “He’s fainting!” all in the instant that Jimmy fell. Dad caught him and carried him through the crowd. Clark and I passed people squeezing themselves together to make a path for us. A sunburned woman wearing plaid shorts pulled a bottle of orange Nehi out of the cooler at her feet. “Here, hon. Give this to him.”

“Thanks, ma’am.”

President Truman, too far away to know about us, kept on with his speech.

Dad set him down in a puddle of shade under a tree by the parking lot. Soon puny-looking Jimmy was

drinking nice lady’s pop and Dad was fanning him with a newspaper.

“Golly, honey,” said Dad, “couldn’t you have waited until after the speech to go and faint like that?”

ker-BLAM!

“A cherry bomb!” someone yelled.

“Some darn kids blew up a trash can over there!”

I still had my hands over my ears when another BOOM came from the same direction: from the cars shimmering in the parking lot. Then there was a series of pop-BANGS , dog-barking, and people shouting, “Hey!”

“Some danged fool – !”

“...those tough kids – !”

“They tied firecrackers to that pup!” Dad hollered and a black, wild-eyed blur whizzed right past us. Zoom-away went Dad and Clark.

“Catch it!” Jimmy shouted, trotting after them.

I just stood next to the tree, both of us rooted to the spot and too smart to be running on a hot day. It was a long time before Clark and Dad came back.

“That dog’s probably in Kansas by now,” Dad said, wiping his red, sweaty face with the tail of his shirt.

“Where’s Jimmy?” I asked and in the next instant, we looked in the direction of scary sounds: tires squealing, people shouting and screaming.

Dad took a wild look around then glared at me. “I thought he was here with you keeping an eye on him!”

“Mister?” Some stranger hollered at Dad, “Is that your kid over there?”

We ran to where four or five sweaty people were bunching around Jimmy. Tears streaked his dirty face and his corduroys had a rip in them. He’d wrapped his bloody tee shirt around the dog.

“I think she – she’s dead!” Jimmy sobbed. “She was running because she was scared and a car hit her. The person who was driving didn’t mean to. I tried to save her, Dad.”

“Here now, boy,” said Daddy. “Here now. Of course you did. Let me look at her. Maybe she’s all right. Maybe she is. You come sit down, son.”

I could tell by the look on Dad’s face, as he examined the little dog, that it wasn’t all right, not at all. Folks clucked their tongues and shook their heads. Someone said, “That pup’s a goner. All’s you gotta do is look at it...” Then we heard a familiar, nasty voice: “Man! I ain’t never seen nothin’ so funny!”

The people around us turned to look and they parted so we could see Richie Scudder laughing out loud with his pimple-pussed buddies. “I never seen a dog run so fast: pop-pop-pop-pop! Did you get a load of that jelly-bellied kid scrambling to get a hold of that mutt?”

The creeps were too busy cracking themselves up to notice Dad bearing down on them. He grabbed Richie’s shirt with one hand and made a fist out of the other. He used the same voice he must have used on tough railroad cops in the bad old days.

“What’d you say?” Dad’s arm-muscle bulged out his angel-harp tattoo. “Did I hear you laughing at my boy?”

“Your boy?” Richie blurted while Dad kept right on, his voice getting louder and louder. “You kids tied gol-durned firecrackers to that pup? You kill a dog and laugh about it?”

“Kill it? We didn’t –! ” Richie looked over at us and anybody could tell he didn’t know until that minute what’d happened to the dog. Color drained out of his face down into his hightops. “Look, we was just havin’ some fun...”

“Pop him, Dad!” Clark cried. “Sock him in his snot-locker!”

“Take off!” Dad snapped. “Don’t let me catch you or your lousy friends messing with no harmless pups nor any kid of mine, you got that?”

Richie and his buddies walked away. One of them, when he was a safe distance from Dad, laughed, sort of. Dad snorted air out of his nose. “I should have punched that hoodlum,” he growled.

I saw a look on Jimmy’s face right then, a determined look that made me see how he would look and be when he became a grownup man. He ignored Clark telling him how brave he was. He just went off carrying that little dog in the direction of our car.

We were all quiet on the way home. Jimmy got to sit in the front seat. “I’m going to name her Cracker,” he said. “You think that’s a good name, Dad?"

“Yes, son. A fine name.”

He buried her in the backyard and helped Jimmy tamp Cracker’s scrap board of a grave marker into the ground. We all stood there while Jimmy read, in a steady voice, the Bible verses that began, “The Lord is my shepherd...”

I was glad for the dog that she had us to feel bad for her while she was on her way to heaven but still, her sad funeral made me all the more anxious for nightfall. At last it came, magic, buggy darkness full of pops, fireflies, and smoke. Georgie got to hold his first sparkler. From across the street, we saw the red spark of old Mr. Herman’s cigar along with its owner coming slowly towards us, to sit with us and watch Larry, Clark, and Harry running across the dark yard trailing smoky light like laughing comets.

Mama and Jimmy pushed the porch swing back and forth with their feet in a slow, comforting rhythm. Was the baby crying or dreaming in there, in Mama’s broad, firm middle? Planning what kind of person it was going to be? Was it hearing firecrackers all far away, like corn popping in the kitchen? Did it know what kind of family it had signed up for or were we all going to be its surprise too? Or did it still have a chance to be born to rich people in Paris? I wished I could talk to Robin about it. She said they’d be back right after the Fourth of July and anyway, she had to be back in time for my birthday next week.

A series of especially loud booms came from up the street. “Oh my goodness!” Mom exclaimed. She smiled down at herself and pressed her hands against her belly. “That woke up the baby.”

Old Mr. Herman ran his hand through the tuft of white hair on the top of his head and took his cigar out of his mouth. “I reckon that Skudder boy and his friends must’ve bought out the inventory at the fireworks tent out on the highway. Now you know,” he said, “he wasn’t always such a harum-scarum fellow. I can remember when Richard was a good boy, a proper lad, before he lost his mother.”

“Well,” said Dad, “he’s a proper knucklehead now.” With that, he walked over to where Mom was a nightcloud in the porch shadows. He bent down to kiss Jimmy’s cheek, then Mama’s belly and didn’t seem to mind at all that smiling Mr. Herman watched him do these things. Daddy handed Mom a sparkler, as if it were a rose and it lit up her mild, happy face. It was as if, sometimes, my folks were their own family, no matter how many kids came along to mess things up.

“Thirteen years ago, Carmenita, that was you in there,” Dad said, as he lit another sparkler and handed it to me. “Man, I was never so excited and nervous.”

Firecrackers popped, sparked, and danced in the smoky dimness as Mama stroked the top of Jimmy’s head. “It’s okay. Mama’s boy,” she murmured. Behind his glasses, Jimmy’s eyes were wide and dark.

I was more and more impatient all the next day and the next, waiting for Robin to come back. In the refrigerator was a strawberry cake Mom and I made to pay back Robin’s mom. In my sketchbook was a princess I drew to calm myself down. She was on top of her castle by an ocean. Wind blew her gown, her cape, and the silky veil flowing from the tip of her pointed hat. I was going to add a sailing ship for her to see in the distance, but I kept going out on the porch to watch for the Culpeppers’ big black car to come around the corner.

“Carmie, stay in or stay out! You’re making me a nervous wreck,” Mom said, fanning her bright face with a newspaper. “Take these kids up to the playground, why doncha?”

“But it’s gonna rain any minute.”

“I hope so! Maybe it’ll cool things off.” She lifted her chin to breathe in little breaths. “Go on now. I need to rest, just a little bit. Jimmy, you go too. You need some fresh air.”

Jimmy followed me and the little squirts out the door, looking like he’d a whole lot rather stay in and read his book.

The sky over the swings and jungle gym was an angel kingdom full of cloud-mountains, all dark and light, looking like a good place for thunder-gods and goddesses to have their palaces. I steadied Georgie on his twenty-seventh slide down the sliding board. The other boys were making themselves dizzy on the merry-go-round when we heard a huge thunder-boom.

Georgie screamed, half-scared, half-excited.

“Whoa!” Clark shouted. “Look at the lightning!”

“One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi,” Jimmy started counting.

“Come on!” I hollered. Big cold raindrops were already plopping on us and polka-dotting the playground. “You don’t have to know how close it is. Let’s go!” Thunder cracked like a giant whip. I scooped up Georgie and all us kids ran home through the rain, not even noticing that the Culpeppers’ big black car was back where it belonged. I didn’t even see Robin and her little brother on their front porch until she yelled at me.

“Boy oh boy, Carmen, if anybody ever says you Cathcarts don’t know enough to come in out of the rain, I’ll tell that person he’s full of prunes!”

Over on the Culpeppers’ front porch glider, our stories, Robin’s and mine, tumbled out and collided into each other.

“Mr. Herman told Jimmy he saw Mrs. Truman up at the store…Hey, did you know Richie’s got a job there?”

I left out Clark embarrassing me with his big mouth and me seeing that cute boy. “Anyway, she was buying a can of pork and beans and...”

“...fireworks in St. Paul and my dad played the piano in a wedding for one of his cousins. I got a new dress for it and ...”

“...that poor little dog! You shoulda seen the look on Richie’s face when he thought my dad was gonna sock him – hey, the rain stopped!”

“We had to stop the car right by this busy road so Darren could puke from eating seven hot dogs in a row and you shoulda seen my mom...”

“Hey, my birthday’s next Friday. Did I tell you that?”

“Nope. Mine’s October 27th. I wish I’d waited and gotten born on Halloween.” Robin shrugged her shoulders. “So are you going to have a party?”

“Not really.” My whole insides were buzzing with the good news I’d been saving up and putting off telling, to make it even more exciting. “We’re gonna have my cake on Saturday because Dad works Friday, right? He works nights now, but so anyway, listen: My aunt – you’re really going to like her. She’s going to take off work so she can take us, me and you, to the movies over in Kansas City and go see Cleopatra! Won’t that be so neat?”

“I’m not sure that would be an appropriate film for Robin.”

“Mom!” Robin jumped to her feet; we both did. Did I even notice Robin’s mom in her doorway listening to me? No.

“No, please!” I said. “My Aunt Bevy’s gonna call you and…”

But Mrs. Culpepper had turned her attention to Jimmy who was carrying a pink-iced cake across the driveway into her yard. “Is that for us? How nice!”

Then she caught sight of her kid over in our yard full of puddles and boys. Immediately her smiling mouth was a scowl. Words began pouring out of it like BBs out of a bucket. “Darren Albert Culpepper, you’re soaking wet! And filthy dirty! You come get cleaned up! Robin, we’ll discuss this later. Thank you; what did you say your name was? James? Did you help your mother make this cake?

Oh, you did, Carmen? Well, how very nice; you and your brother had better run along now. Robin needs to set the table for supper. Darren, leave those disgusting sneakers on the porch. We’ll see you later...”

Robin signalled me with a quick look at her treehouse. Her lips made the word, midnight as all three Culpeppers went inside and their door clicked shut.

2012-01-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

"That's all a man can hope for during his lifetime - to set an example - and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history." Wm McKinley, b. 29 January 1843

"Start every day with a smile and get it over with." W.C. Fields, b. 29 January 1880

Dang: My New Favorite Word

2012-01-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

Dang.

I just burnt a perfectly good pot of chili for which I set beans to soak, for which I'd seasoned beautifully with red pepper flakes, onion, garlic, but I set it to boil, told myself to set the timer so I wouldn't forget then forgot all about it by the time I got upstairs to my painting, a painting of a little blue-eyed girl, cuddled under a patchwork quilt, painting while I listened to the beginnings of Prairie Home Companion on which Joshua Bell, glorious violinist, is violining even as I type, having come back from downstairs, drawn by the scent of chili. Stronger the scent loomed & blossomed, as I approached the kitchen, morphed into the stench of burnt chili.

Dang.

And dang: I intended to post a few words about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart yesterday, 27 Jan being the 256th anniversary of his birth, in Salzburg, Austria, where, I trust, 'Wolfgang' did not sound like a completely impossible name, if not suggestive of feral canine threat. I've made a tiny daily ritual of checking Wikipedia to see whose birthday is today. Not as obsessive as it sounds. Just a way of remembering, of noting the existence of long-gone birthday dudes & dudettes, such as Simonie Gabrielle Colette, the French writer pictured here, born on the 28th of January, 1873, on whose lips the word 'dang' would be foreign indeed, but looking at her picture, I want to know her better. I want to track down what she's written. Failing that, I can at least note her birthday. A grain of sand in the scales, on the side of memory. Lest she be forgotten, her and the rest of the folks living in the Deadlands, so I can have the tiny little itty bitty 'cool!' of knowing that W.A. Mozart & Kaiser Wilhelm II & Donna Reed share a birthday; so I'll know a little more, so I can fill in the blanks of my handsome little birthday book given to me by my friend Vicki Grove, so when I'm dead, some relative or another can find it among my detritus, my effects. The joke is that I might be the only one who'd love charming junk like that. Ah well. Dang.

Scattered!

2012-01-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

Okay, so what I'm wondering is what I'm thinking, typing on this instead of what I've been doing in the last couple of hours:

1. going [to get away from this scattered anxious day] to see the great & marvelous Dolly Parton in "A Joyful Noise" & walking OUT of it because the screenplay was so stinking simplistic/rotten & cartoonish

2. then, as my dear sister Laura agreed w/ me that the movie wasn't worth our time, we had the fun of sitting across a restaurant table from one another.

3. hurried home to get back to work on my illustration

4. while listening to always amazing Studio 360 [it was about Nikola Tesla this evening - oh baybee]

5. with Project Runway on w/ the sound off

6. while worrying that I haven't blogged in the past couple of days else I'd have written a bit about E.T.A. Hoffman, such a big deal in his day/so forgotten now: such is fame, so that's why I'm typing, but not much longer because the painting remains to be completed. 'Twill be a late night tonight: That's certain.

Just For You to Know: Chapter Four

2012-01-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

Four

In which I climb a tree; I get a penpal and a friend.

We Cathcarts go to the store.

Mrs. Culpepper’s mouth opened and her eyebrows shot up to her teeny bangs. “I beg your pardon?”

“Uh, my…er… I mean, no thank you, ma’am. That’s real nice about the cake,” I babbled my way out the door. “But, well – we’re allergic! And I gotta go home now. Nice to meet you guys – honest!”

Outside, goony Darren and Clark were yelling, “So long!” to each other and “Hi!” to Dad as our old Rambler surged up the driveway. Harry and Larry exploded out the front door. “Daddy’s home!” Dad’s eyes and big grin looked light in his grimy face. He wiped his hand on his work pants and handed me his lunchbox so he could hug my shoulder. “Hey, Buddy. How’s your mom?”

“She’s fine.” Especially now, I thought, since I’d saved her from what we both hated: unexpected, snooty company. “Did your job go okay?”

“Well, if you don’t mind getting bossed around, being on your feet all day, lugging loads, and turning screws, it was alright. Beats looking for a job!” He stopped paying attention to me so he could pick up the twins. They clung on to him, like baby monkeys, as Dad then Clark and me followed up the porch steps, Dad hollering, “DOR-thy!”

Next door, Robin was making a silly face at me and twirling her finger at the side of her head. I frowned back at her. Did she mean me or her cranky mom? I went on inside.

Robin probably meant I was the nutty one, saying we were allergic to cake and running off like that. But then I looked around and saw what Mrs. Culpepper would have seen, through her icecube eyes.

We’d only been here one day and already George had scribbled on the walls. Toy trucks, squashed gobs of clay, TinkerToys, and blocks covered the floor. I saw baskets of clothes waiting to get folded, cereal bowls, and chocolate milk glasses perched on stacks of Mama’s beloved magazines. I saw a roach speeding home to the wife and kids living in a 1957 Ladies’ Home Journal. The little boys had crowded back around the television, their faces six inches from the black-and-white blast of Three Stooges reruns. Jimmy was flopped on our squashy couch with the poking-out springs and falling-out stuffing. He was eating a sandwich and reading about Kit Carson, using my art book for a lap desk. I sniffed at peanut butter, grubby boys and – something else.

As soon as I got my art book stowed under my pillow upstairs, I clumped back down to find Georgie. “Come on, kid,” I said. “Let’s go find you some dry pants, okay?”

He smiled up at me. “Okay, Carmie.”

“You gonna remember to go potty like a big boy next time?”

His smile dimmed. “Okay.”

Robin would be cuckoo too, if she was always having to get some little squirt to use the bathroom like

regular people.

I peeled wet training pants down Georgie’s rubbery legs as he held tight to my shoulders and I imagined me perfecting this and everybody in it. Digging around for a little pair of dry pants, I decided that I’d definitely not be cheerful. There’d be no whistling while I worked, like Snow White in the cartoon. No, I’d be a goddess, a fierce one, who needed no bunnies or birdies to help her. I saw, like in a mind-movie, my white robes, my long red hair flowing and blowing against the blackest of thunderclouds, and sparks shooting out of my keen (no glasses) mythological eyes. With a well-aimed lightning bolt, CLEAN was our house! OUT went the television reception right in the middle of the boys’ cartoons – ZAP! Into a giant trash can went all our junk: Everything but the encyclopedia and whatever was mine. Flames licked the clouds!

In real life, Daddy was smooching Mama, all blushes and giggles. He even kissed her butter yellow dress where it was stretched over her belly and the baby inside. I felt my own face get hot.

I survived all of the usual suppertime burps, farts, spills, sit-up-straights, clean-your-plate’s and don’t-play-with-your-food’s, only to see Darren Culpepper’s face mashed into the front door screen. “Clark! You in there? Come get this cake, wouldja? My mom made it for you guys. Then can you come out and play?”

Robin was out there too. I hurried out to the porch, telling her, “It’s so nice and cool out here. You wanna sit on the swing?”

She did, but she stole glances through the window, trying to see what was so mysterious in our house that I wasn’t asking her to come in like any regular person with nice manners would do. Robin was probably wondering exactly what kind of a goon I was. “How come you didn’t want us to come over? And you were fibbing, right? About cake making you guys sick?”

“Well, uhm, we aren’t really settled yet and, you know, company makes my mom nervous…” My voice trailed off with her looking at me like lawyers on TV looked at criminals in the witness chair.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I just didn’t want you all to find out that we’re a messy bunch of nuts.

“You did seem pretty crazy. Of course, I like that in a person. My mom just said that she wished I was allergic to cake so I wouldn’t be so fat.”

“She did?”

Instead of answering, Robin pointed at the tree in her yard. “You wanna come and see my office?”

“Sure.” I really did, too, but I got scared as soon as she was up there and I was still on the safe, hard ground. She called down through the leaves, “Come on! You’re not a scaredy-cat, are you?”

I was. I was a nut and a scaredy-cat.

I struggled up the rope ladder until Robin helped me onto the floor boards that had been wedged into three big branches. The leafy roof made deep shadows so she shone her flashlight on an old sofa cushion and a wooden box with a lid and a lock. “To keep Darren and the other squirrels out,” Robin said with a grin. It was stocked with a half-eaten bag of potato chips, pencils, a notebook, some jacks, acorns, a spare yo-yo, two candy bars, and a package of pink Hostess Snowballs. She ripped these open, handed me one and took one for herself. I fished a Trixie Belden mystery out of the box. “You read these too?”

“Yeah, Nancy Drew, Sue Barton, Betsy-Tacy, Laura and Mary on the Prairie. I like all those books.”

“Me too.”

“This is the best part of my whole life,” Robin said. She popped half a Snowball into her mouth all at once. She ate the other half, licked her fingers, flicked a cake crumb down at her house, and said, “Mom doesn’t allow me to eat junk like this.”

We swatted at mosquitoes and dangled our legs off the edge of the treehouse in the blue-green twilight. It smelled like summer. I could see Mama moving about in the yellow light of our kitchen. It was quiet around us except for birds and cricket until we both heard Mrs. Culpepper’s voice coming from inside her house. “She sounds kind of mad,“ I said, and hoped that wasn’t rude.

Robin snorted. “Old Yeller. That’s my mom’s nickname and she doesn’t even know it.”

I put a hand over my smile.

“She’s okay, really,” said Robin. “She likes every-thing just so and wishes I weren’t such a big fat tomboy and was cute and precious like Darren instead. My dad doesn’t yell at us. He’s nice. Tell me about your folks.”

I hesitated. “It’s not a pop quiz, you know,“ Robin said,

“Well, my mom’s pretty quiet and my dad’s nice too, except for when he gets mad. He blew his top the other night and smacked me.”

“Huh?”

I felt guilty, tattling on my basically-good dad, but I did it anyway. “He did. Right in front of half the town over at Mugs Up.”

“He did not!”

“Did.”

“Why?” Like I must’ve done something terrible.

“I shot my mouth off about Mom having another baby.”

“Don’t you like being in a big family?”

If I said no, I’d be a traitor plus it wouldn’t be exactly true. And it’d sound too dumb to say I’d rather be an artist than a big sister. After a long moment of me not knowing what to say, Robin handed me a Milky Way and punched me in the arm, friendly-like. A girl never did that before and it gave me a nice feeling. I punched her arm too and unwrapped the candy.

“I wish you guys didn’t have to go to Minnesota.” I wished we could just stay up in the tree forever, but no. We jumped at the sound of Mrs. Culpepper saying,

“You and Carmen had better come on down out of there. It’s late.”

“In a minute,” Robin called down.

“Now!” her mom barked. “I’ve got your bathwater running.” She disappeared with a soft thwack of the screen door.

It was late, late, late before I fell asleep. The pictures in the Botticelli book from the library were too beautiful to stop looking at. I ran my fingers over the perfect faces Mr. Botticelli painted in Italy in the 1400s. Was that how Italian ladies looked? If I really practiced could I draw and paint like that? Be a great American artist in the 1900s? The thought made a buzzing by my heart.

The book was beside me in my bed when I woke

up. I looked out the window and saw that the Culpeppers’ shiny black Buick was gone. It was off somewhere, carrying them north to Minnesota.

Clark yelled at me from way downstairs. “Car-mie! Robin left a note for you! Under the front door! Want me to read it to you?”

“NO!” I scrambled into my shorts. I ran downstairs while Clark bellowed, “’Dear Carmen, I’m real glad you guys moved next door...’”

“Stop it, you little brat!”

“’We could be penpals if you want,’” he went right on. “’Here’s my grandma’s address....’”

I grabbed the letter away from my dopey brother. He laughed then a light bulb must’ve lit up in his pointy little head. “So then could I write to Darren?”

“If you can write,” I muttered, reading over the note for myself. I smiled: Robin Culpepper wanted us to write to each other.

“As good as you,” he told me and stuck out his tongue. It had crumbs on it plus there was chocolate frosting all around his mouth from having Mrs. Culpepper’s cake for breakfast. We all did and saved the last slice for Dad.

“Robin’s mom is kind of cranky,” I said to Mom, “but she sure makes good cake.”

“We’ll write her a thank you note.”

“I’ve got the address. Robin and me are penpals.”

When I wrote to her, I tried to make babysitting little brothers, hanging laundry on the clothesline, and making Kool-Ade sound super-interesting. I didn’t tell her about the best part of my life: staring at the Botticelli pictures and trying to draw my favorites, in case she might think I was a goon. And I was too shy and too chicken to tell Robin I missed her, but she was brave. On the back of a fish postcard she wrote:

Dear Carmen,

My grandpa took me to this lake. I caught a walleye. To see what it looks like, turn this card over. Are you guys getting settled? Tell Jimmy I say hello. Yours ‘til the ocean wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.

Your friend,

Robin Delaine Culpepper

P. S. I miss talking with you.”

I couldn’t help smiling with happiness, then I chewed my lower lip. Robin hadn’t ever been inside our house. Would she really want to be my friend if she ever saw how messy we are and that we NEVER get settled? She might think we’re lazy instead of folks who can’t ever seem to get organized. We never found enough places to put stuff away and no matter how junky, our old clothes and magazines were, according to Mama, “too good to throw away.” We piled it all in corners and shoved it under beds.

“I’ll sort through it all one of these days,” Mom said, settling herself on the couch in front of the fan. “Georgie, come take a nap with Mama.”

“No.”

Almost two weeks after we moved in, I found our guardian angel picture in a paper sack and put it up in the front room. It’d hung on the wall at Blue Top and every other place we’d lived. The angel wasn’t as beautiful as Mr. Botticelli would have painted her, but she was pretty. A hundred times I’d tried drawing her floaty hair and soft face. She was always on duty, keeping a pair of pink-cheeked little knuckleheads from falling into a bright blue river. How did angels get their robes off over their wings, I wondered. And did they ever get bored, sick, and tired of having to watch over people? I asked Mama, “Do you think we really have a guardian angel?”

She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling, as if our angel might be gazing back at her through the cloudy water stains. “Oh,” she said, in her soft, vague-sounding voice. “I’m pretty sure we do.”

On a postcard with a picture of a wagon train on it, I wrote to Robin about it.

Saturday, June 14, 1963

Dear Robin,

Do you believe in guardian angels? I think I do. I saw the baby kick from inside my mom. Her belly feels like a basketball. It’s kind of creepy imagining that somebody’s INSIDE of there, thinking about stuff. What if THIS baby is twins, like another Harry and Larry? Scary! It’s boring here without you next door. I miss you too.

When you’re old and you have twins (I hope you won’t!)

Don’t come to me for safety pins,

Mama walked by me as I was writing Your Friend, Carmen.

“Carmie, don’t let me forget my pickles and sardines when Daddy takes us to the store later.”

I grimaced at (1) the treats Mama loved to eat when she was going to have a baby, and (2) the idea of us Cathcarts going to the store together.

“Oh, the kids and I will go in for you, Dee,” Daddy said, later that evening. “You rest yourself out here in the car. Just give me your list, why doncha?”

“No, now, I’m fine,” Mama told him. “I like to pick things out.”

Would it even do any good to ask to stay in the stationwagon by myself and draw? Or try, in the store, to keep my distance from my slow-moving mom and the rest of my family? Nope.

Dad grabbed a cart and patted Mama’s arm. “Carmie and I will keep the boys out of your hair.”

Looking after little kids mostly boils down to following them around, trying to keep them from getting broken while they’re breaking everything else or sliding down the slick floors between rows of canned goods. That’s where Harry dropped a can of peaches in heavy syrup on his foot, then Dad gave Larry a spanking for horsing around and busting a box of eggs.

Both twins were bawling when a woman on the loud speaker barked, “Clean up in Aisle 8.” I was keeping my eyes down or I would have noticed that the kid with the paper hat and the mop was none other than creepy Richie Scudder. “Oh man, I might’ve known,” he said, real loud, so people would know how disgusting and messy us Cathcarts were. An annoyed-looking woman and the cutest boy I ever saw turned to stare at us. And wouldn’t you know they were right next to us later on, over in Aisle 3: Paper Products and Hygiene Items, where Clark was practicing his reading. “Carmen,” he hollered. “What the heck are ‘Sa-ni-tar-y Napkins’?”

The cute, sandy-haired boy made a face and his mom rolled her eyes like we were the world’s worst, low-class weirdos.

Could there BE anything more embarrassing?

“Carmie,” Dad called to me as I fled the scene, “you’re as red as a tomato! There’s nothing to be shy

about!” Which made the whole thing even more hideous.

Before we got out of there, Georgie had another tantrum. The plump checkout girl flat refused to ask Clark “Who’s there?” no matter how many times he said “knock-knock.” When I grow up and I am a rich, famous artist and embarrassing relatives come knocking on my studio door, I’ll be just like that girl. I’ll ignore them and hope they’ll go away.

Mama collapsed into her seat while Dad and Jimmy and I loaded all the grocery sacks into the back of the station wagon. Mama fanned her red face and told us all to be quiet because she felt like all the air was out of her tires.

“Yeah,” said Dad, “Everybody just put a sock in it back there.”

I didn’t say a word, not even when we were almost home and I remembered that we all forgot Mom’s sardines and her sweet pickles.

“Oh well,” she said later on. “We’ll pick them up on the way back from my appointment on Friday. Daddy’s taking off work to get me to the doctor and Carmen, you and Jimmy can look after the little ones.”

“Will you tell them they have to mind us?”

Harry and Larry made faces at me and stuck out identical tongues. Mom gave all the boys her sternest look and said, “Everyone just be nice.”

That was what she always said about the whole world, the Communists over in Russia, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, black and white people in America. That goes for everybody: just be nice, for crying out loud.

Jimmy, off at the library, taking our books back, got out of babysitting. Not me. I showed Clark and the twins how to make a brontosaurus out of clay. “Look, you guys, you stick your little fingernail in its face. That makes a smile.”

“Make a tyrannosaurus rex!” cried Larry.

“Then he can eat these guys!” Harry growled.

They both roared and bared their teeth as they made their dinosaurs extinct between the palms of their hands and watched cartoons. Georgie’s thumb slipped from its mouth socket as he fell asleep on the floor beside all the toys, coloring books, broken crayons, and mashed reptiles.

“Clark, help me pick this stuff up, wouldja?”

“You’re not my boss.”

He wouldn’t quit watching Popeye and Bluto even one second so I thumped his head – not hard. I’d’ve tidied up the whole room, but the mailman brought a new magazine with Mrs. Kennedy on the cover. Inside were more pictures of the First Family plus news that they were going to have another baby too. Maybe it’d have the same birthday as our baby. Maybe they’d invite us to the White House, I thought, as I studied an especially nice picture of Jacqueline Kennedy. Next thing I knew, I was drawing her face on a piece of notebook paper. Drawing’s just daydreaming with a pencil. That’s all I was doing when I suddenly got yanked back into my real world. Where was our blockheaded guardian angel when Larry decided to skip his way downstairs? The little dope didn’t bust any bones or even bleed, but did that keep him from howling all the louder when he saw that Mom and Dad were home?

“Was everybody nice?” Mama asked.

No, but I was the only one who got yelled at.

PIE

2012-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

"It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world."

Elizabeth Blackwell, remarkable, deeply, totally admirable Eliz. Blackwell, who earned her M.D., the FIRST woman in the "modern" world to do so, on this day in 1849. AND, you may wish to know that

1. we had awfully unseasonable thunder, lightning, and HAIL here in Independence last night

2. I've only got 5 dwgs to go on the book I'm working on

3. today is National Pie Day As Irving Berlin once wrote, "let's have another cup of coffee; let's have another piece of pie!"

Cut a thick slice and savor every bite, for the love of pie and in honor of the indomitable Dr. Blackwell.

2012-01-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

"When the bell tolls three times, it will announce that I have been killed. If I am killed by common men, you & your children will rule Russia for centuries to come; if I am killed by one of your stock, you & your family will be killed by the Russian people! Pray, Tsar of Russia. Pray."

'The Mad Monk," Grigori Rasputin, b. 22 January, 1869

To you few, you precious few, who may check in on this blog, let me tell you that my rough dwgs for a picture book-to-be are well underway. I love being indoors on a cold, grey day, ruling out rectangles w/ pencil on tracing paper, arranging the text, planning, staring at the blank paper - then it gets to feeling like work, in a good way.

It's a story, written by Stacie Hutton, about a coal miner's daughter, & it's scheduled to be published later this year by what looks to be a happening little publishing operation called Headline Books, out of West Virginia. So what this means is I need to quit this here typing and get back to the drawing board! And totally by the way, it was on this day in history, 1901, to be exact, that Queen Victoria died and her big fat lothario of a son got to take on the big fat, long-awaited job he was born to. It's Lyndon B. Johnson's deathday, too. 1973 - I remember - it was just a couple of weeks after old Harry Truman kicked the bucket. jeepers - 39 years ago! So, is LBJ deader than Queen Vicky? Is he higher up, farther on? Anyway, they had a lot quieter and a good deal more dignified passing than the Mad Monk. I mean, click here for more evidence, should you need it that history is not for the faint of heart.

Inauguration Day

2012-01-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

So. One year from today, January 20, 2013, one man or another will swear his allegiance to the Constitution and to the people. I don't even want to think about all of the speechmaking and TV ads - OUTRAGEOUS it is, all of the treasure squandered on bilious propaganda when there are people going hungry & homeless - and BS-ification betwixt now & then so I'll confine myself to saying that there will be a speech, a big whacking parade, and a boatload of crowded parties, after which the man of the hour will, depending on this election's outcome, either step into the elevator back up to where he & his glorious womenfolk have been living for the past four years OR the new guy will settle in under the mammoth, unaccustomed burdens whilst he & his family check out their new digs - what Gerald Ford, I think, termed the best government housing to be had...."the great white jail," according to President Truman. President _____ will get a faceful of what he bargained for, relentlessly campaigned for/be careful what you pray for. Or President Obama will adjust his grip on the load he's been carrying all the while. If you're reading this you probably already know that, up until FDR's second inauguration (in 1937, pictured here), Presidents used to take the oath on the 4th of March and of course, all the while, Big Money will carry on, business as usual, whoever, whichever, whatsoever happens in the next year.

Enough. I'm fixing to start a new book, just as soon as I sign off here, here, this bit o' blogposting being sort of the wind up before pitching in. A fine day it is, I was going to say, to inaugurate a new regime.

To get started.

To get the game on.

To swear allegiance to your cause, whatever it may be.

Just For You to Know: Chapter Three

2012-01-16T07:45:00.000-08:00

To any who might be reading this, bless you, thank you, and I've added hyperlinks, highlighting the historical context hoohah. So you can see what some of the real-life people & places look like. CH

JFYTK/Chap. 3

In which us Cathcarts and the neighbors meet each other,

Jimmy and I go to the library, and I help Mama get out of having company.

It was still dark early morning when Dad put his freshly shaved and Aqua Velva’d face close to mine and asked, “Are we still buddies?”

“Sure.”

“You make sure you get along with your mama today, okay?” I felt a kiss and his warm peppermint breath on my cheek. “She’s gonna need your help this summer. No spending all your time with your nose in a book or drawing pictures. You’re a big girl now.”

“Okay,” I told him. Okay, okay, just go away. Then, to make up for thinking that, I wished him good luck on his new job. He wasn’t a mean dad, not really.

I found Mama in the basement, stuffing jeans into her washing machine. We didn’t have one at Blue Top.

There she had to wait until Daddy could drive her to the

Washeteria in Osceola. She pointed at a couple of big laundry baskets “The best way to help me,” she said, “would be to go hang all this on the line out back. How ‘bout that?”

“Okay.” I couldn’t help noticing that she sort of leaned against the washer, as if she was too pooped to stand on her own. “But don’t you wanna go up and lay down or something?”

“It’s nice and cool down here. I’ll be up in a minute and later,” she said, “maybe you and Jimmy might want to take a walk? See the neighborhood? Not too far, you understand, but maybe you could get acquainted with the library up by the courthouse? I think it’s on Liberty Street. We don’t have to get all settled right today, do we?”

“Nope,” I said. “We could put it off a day or two.” I returned her smile, then I about killed myself, lugging first one heavy basket of wet clothes, then another up the steps and out the back door. I got a look at our new old house in the daytime. It looked better at night, I decided, and pretty ratty compared to all the other houses on our street.

As I pinned up two or three hundred underpants and things, Clark and the twins played Hide & Seek between the wet workpants and bedsheets with a goofy-looking kid with a blond flattop. “This is Darren Culpepper from next door,” said Clark. “This is Carmen. She’s the oldest.”

The little squirt didn’t seem to know what to say to that. He just wiped his nose with the back of his hand and squinted up at me so I asked him, “You any relation to somebody called Robin?”

“She’s my big sister.”

“You guys got a tree house in your front yard?”

The kid frowned. “Yeah, but Robin hardly ever lets me play in it.”

As soon as Jimmy and I started out on our walk, the old man across the street waved at us and began shuffling across his tidy yard. “Hello there!”

The old fellow offered us the hand he wasn’t using on his cane. We shook it and smiled back at him. “Let me tell you children welcome to the neighborhood,” he said.

“I’m Oscar Herman. Isn’t that a terrible name: Oscar?”

“I kind of like it,” Jimmy said.

“Me too,” I added, and it was true. I did.

“She’s Carmen Cathcart and I’m Jimmy. I’m her brother.”

“Why, those are nice names!” said Mr. Herman with a grin. His teeth looked very white and storebought. “Happy to know you.“ Now he used his free hand to tip his ball cap at us. He pointed his walking stick up the street to where two straw-hatted black ladies were bent over working in a garden full of zinnias.

“They’d be the Monroe sisters.” Mr. Herman cranked his voice up louder, “Hey there, Miss Lillian. Pretty day, Miss Effie!”

They waved and called out, “Mornin’, Oscar.”

“These here’re your new neighbors, Carmen and Jimmy!” He paused a little bit and hollered, “Cathcart!” We all waved and said ‘hey’ to each other

Mr. Herman said to us, softly now, “Miss Effie’s the skinny one and the fat one’s Miss Lillian. They both got the arthur-itis -- so do I! -- but they sure do keep up their flowers.”

“Sir,” I told him, “we gotta go to the library. Can we bring you a book?”

His furry eyebrows rose up at the suggestion. “No thanks, I got forty chapters to go on the one I’m reading.” He told us how to find the library as he reached into his pants pocket for a couple of thick white peppermints. “You and Jimmy take these now.”

We thanked him and headed up the sidewalk. It was shaded by trees, broken and humped in places from their roots, like toes poking up under the blankets. Jimmy’s tee shirt was stretched over his soft middle and tucked into his corduroys. I had on my cutoffs. They showed off my knobby white legs to anyone who might be watching. Up by the house on the corner, someone was. “Hey, Jelly-Belly! Who’s your bird-legged girlfriend?” A high school kid sneered and blew a puff of cigarette smoke at us. He was leaning on the propped-open hood of big car, the kind Dad called a “road barge.” It sat next to a rusty-looking pickup truck. “You part of that hillbilly family that moved into the spook house?”

He looked like he’d put the black oil from his old Cadillac right on his hair. Just as this bozo flicked his cigarette at us, a flying something out of nowhere bopped him on the head. “Ow!” he yelped.

There she was, the moon-faced, tree girl, standing in the middle of the sidewalk with her hands on her hips. “That’s what you get, Richie Scudder, you creep!”

“Yeah, yeah, big talk, Pudge,” he jeered back. He picked up the apple she’d thrown at him and took a bite out of it. “I was just welcoming the little twerps to the neighborhood.”

The girl spit on the sidewalk in his direction, then walked over to us. “Richie thinks being a bully makes up for being a dope.”

She was pretty. Her eyes were the kind with smoke rings around the blue and her skin was pale like Snow White who’d have gotten terrible sunburns if she hadn’t lived with dwarves in the woods where it was shady. I admired the red ribbon braided through her long black pigtails and couldn’t help grinning at her.

“You’re Robin Culpepper, right?”

At first she frowned, me knowing her name and all. “So who are you?”

“Carmen Cathcart.”

Jimmy poked his hand out at her the way Mr. Herman had to us. “And I’m James.”

James!

Robin smiled and shook his hand.

“You want to come with us?” he asked. “We’re going to get our library cards.”

She tilted her head sideways, sizing us up. “I gotta go ask.”

At first I was afraid she’d be sorry she went to all the trouble of getting her folks to let her go for a walk with us because Jimmy was in an informative mood. He told her all the other kids’ names, that we’d lived on a farm, that we used to have a goat named Gertie, and that goats’ eyes are shaped like rectangles.

“Not the whole eye, but the black pupil thing in the middle. Our eyes and turtle eyes are round -- cats’ are pointy. That’s just for you to know. And guess what else?” he said before I could shut him up. “Our Mom’s gonna have another baby!”

“Neato! A brand new baby -- right next door! It must be fun, being in a big family,” Robin said, digging a yo-yo out of her shorts pocket. “Ours is just my folks and Darren and me.”

Fun? The words ‘hillbilly family’ were still scorched and smoking in my brain, I glanced at Jimmy and said, “It’s sort of fun. Sometimes.” Okay, it was. Sometimes.

Richie came roaring past us, blasting his car horn. “Creep!” we called after him. “It’s a good thing you guys moved into that house,” Robin said, sending her yo-yo out and back, snap. “I was afraid it was gonna be buried in weeds and junk like a Sleeping Beauty castle with the ghost of old lady Millinder -- that used to be her house, you know -- still spooking around in there. Or it’d get torn down like my mom says it should’ve been years ago --.” Robin flicked a wary look at us. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have talked about your house like that.”

Since I didn’t want to say I agreed with her mom, I changed the subject. “So is your junior high school really big?”

Robin yo-yo’d a few steps before she said, “Yeah. When I first went there last year, in seventh grade, I got lost a lot. You gotta be quick between classes, getting to your locker and stuff.”

Oh brother.

“We’ll walk by Maple Street,” she went on, “so you can see it if you want to.”

“I do,” said Jimmy.

The school was made out of bricks. It looked old-fashioned -- and huge, compared to the school we’d been going to. Jimmy and I stared at it while Robin Rocked-the-Baby with her yo-yo. I think she figured out I was nervous.

“’Everybody’s dumb the first week’ is what my dad says and he teaches high school.” Then Robin kind of bugged out her eyes. “This whole junior high thing gives me the creeps. Don’t tell anyone, but I still miss elementary.”

“Me too,” I said, feeling relieved. Maybe eighth grade wouldn’t be too gross after all. To make myself seem like a casual person someone would want to be friends with, I picked up a stick and clattered it along a picket fence as we went on walking. “Have you always lived in this town?”

Robin nodded. “Same old house, same old town. Boring, huh?”

“I think that’d be neat,” I said softly.

“Me too,” said Jimmy.

“Hey,” Robin said, “if you guys are new, maybe you don’t know that big white house over there is where President Truman lives, him and his wife.”

“He’s the one who decided to drop the big bombs on Japan,” Jimmy told us even though we knew that already, of course. “Dad said it settled their hash once and for all and ended World War II, but still --. Do you guys suppose he has nightmares? About those bombs?”

Robin didn’t think so, but she didn’t look too sure about it. “Do you like President Kennedy?” I asked, following after her.

“My dad and I do. My mom voted for Mr. Nixon, though.”

I liked our president. I’d tried to draw him and the First Lady a thousand times, but I never yet made them look as handsome and beautiful as they did in Mama’s magazines.

We walked past a statue of Andrew Jackson on a prancing horse on a big stone pedestal. Robin gave Jimmy a poke in the arm. “They named this county here after him. Just for you to know.”

Jimmy gazed up at the statue. “He was the seventh president,” he said, kind of automatic and dreamy. Robin’s eyebrows went up, like she’d never met anybody like Jimmy.

In the dim, cool library, Robin aimed us at a lady who gave Jimmy and me library card forms to fill out. “You can each check out one book today,” she said, “since this is your first visit.”

“Do you have any art books?” I asked.

It turned out that she had loads of big, thick, glossy ones. Robin and Jimmy went off to the kid books while I followed the librarian’s pointed finger to the art section. “Boy,” I whispered, “I’m going to love living here!”

I pulled a heavy book out of a bottom shelf. The outside said BOTTICELLI. That was the painter’s name, it turned out. The book was full of pictures of what must have been his painted daydreams of a mythological country full of pale, purely beautiful goddesses with long necks like flower stems. Just the sort of fairytale perfection you’d never find in real life. Not in mine anyway.

“You gonna carry that book all the way home?” Robin asked. “It must weigh four or five tons.”

“It’s okay.” I cradled the book in my arms, which were about to fall off by the time we got to the grade school on the corner by our street.

“That school’s about three times bigger than the school we went to in Vista,” said Jimmy.

“My mom teaches first grade there,” said Robin. “Hey, maybe she’ll have your little brothers in her class.”

I rolled my eyes. “Lucky her.”

Robin glanced at her house. “You guys wanna come in?”

“Uh, no thanks.” Jimmy held up his biography of Kit Carson from the library. “I gotta go read my book.”

“I do,” I told him, “so could you take my book with you?”

“Sure, okay.” Jimmy took my Botticelli book, then made a face like I’d handed him a sack of cannonballs.

Robin’s house smelled like Clorox, Ajax, furniture polish, floor wax, and cake-in-the-oven. I marveled at the tidy, polished, rich-people living room. There was even a glossy black piano with its lid up, like on television. I saw a bit of gleaming kitchen.

“My folks must be in the back yard or something,” said Robin. “Wanna come see my room?”

“Sure!” All along the carpet-covered stairway, pictures of Darren and Robin, from baby-days to now, marched up the walls. At the top of the stairs there were suitcases.

“We’re going up to Minnesota to visit my grandparents,” Robin said, seeing my curiosity. “We go every year.”

We just met and she was leaving? That was a lousy thing to find out. “When will you be back?”

“After the Fourth of July,” she said. “This is my room.”

It was like walking into a magazine picture of “A Perfect Blue and White Bedroom For Your Little Girl.” There was a dollhouse in the corner and a canopy over Robin’s bed. It made me feel kind of rotten and jealous.

“Where have you been?”

A tall woman with short dark hair and a starched blouse was standing in the doorway. It looked like you could slice boiled potatoes with the sharp crease in her slacks.

“We went to the library, Mom. Dad said I could go.” “Well then, you can tell him why you’re late for your piano lesson. Did you go downtown with your blouse not even ironed?” Then she looked at me and flicked the smile-switch in her head to ON. “I’m Mrs. Culpepper, Robin’s mother. And you’re --?”

“Carmen Cathcart” I said. “Uh – we just moved here yesterday. You know, next door.” I motioned my hand in the direction of my house while Robin tried to iron her plaid blouse with her fingers.

“Well, Carmen,” Mrs. Culpepper said, as we followed her down the steps past all the pictures, “your mother must have her hands full, getting settled and all. And is it true what my son tells me? That she’s going to have another little one soon?”

“Yes, ma’am.” My face felt like one of those cartoon thermometers going hotter, hotter, up, up, up.

Aunt Bevy said once, “For every person you meet there’s a wonderful-horrible set of stories that would just flat wear you out if you knew ’em.” Just by going in her house and meeting her mom, I got a lot of clues about Robin. I figured Mrs. Culpepper probably deserved to have Harry and Larry in her class.

“Is this the girl-next-door?” said a deep voice. The light haired, cheerful guy who owned it gave Robin’s braid a friendly tug. “Jim Culpepper,” he said, sticking out his hand for a shake.

“I’m Carmen, uh, Carmen Cathcart. Nice to meet you.”

Robin’s mom went off to her shiny kitchen. Mr. Culpepper plunked himself down at the piano and began playing as good as on a record. He asked me if I liked Beethoven and I remembered that he was a high school music teacher.

“Uh, yes sir. I think so.”

“Caaaaaar-men!” Clark hollered from out in the yard, “Mama wants you!” just as Robin’s mom appeared beside me, a cake in her hands.

“We’ll walk over with you, Carmen, and welcome your mother to the neighborhood -- Jim?” She’d have snapped her fingers at him, seemed like, if she hadn’t had her hands full. I looked from Robin to her parents. Good grief! These tidy people? In our crummy old messy house?

“No!” I blurted.

83 Candles on the Reverend's Cake

2012-01-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. January 15, 1929 ~ April 4, 1968

So.

If only.

In a better world.

Don't I wish that he could have been celebrating his 83rd birthday today, surrounded by his family.

Don't I wish that he could've been on one of the Sunday morning programs today, being asked his opinion about the candidates and the issues confronting voters in this here election year.

But no.

21st Century

2012-01-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

Okay, so yesterday I sort of crossed another narrow, but perilous & fast-moving river, deeper into this here 21st century, when I opened the nifty little box containing my first e-reader. Why did I break down and get one? A Kindle, to be exact? I was nudged into it, wanting to read a novel, written by my Joplin, MO, friend, Veda Boyd Jones. You see, I'm not what anyone, who has the mixed pleasures of knowing me, would call an early-adopter of new technologies, my theory being 'why in the hell would I want to pay money for another appliance that's going to make me feel stupid, inadequate, and reinforce my deeply held beliefs, despite much evidence to the contrary, that the world does not work, is not available to me. Mainly because, among my many good attributes, there is precious little patience or optimism. It took my sister Laura, holding my hand [virtually, over the phone] to talk me through the setting up. It was like I was the tense stewardess, fighting back tears [because she didn't know what the hell sort of number would satisfy the mute, demanding little god of the computer in order to connect this little slab of smart plastic to a wi-fi network, all the time knowing that any child would know just what was wanted and would laugh at me for being so dim], beside the unconscious pilot & Laura was the seasoned flyer in the air traffic control tower. And then, relieved, exultant, butembarrassed for having been so weak and ignorant it worked: Cheryl's Kindle! I managed to download Veda's book, too: Joe's Ghost, it's called and I'm only one chapter [read sometime in today's wee hours] into it, but so far, so GOOD. Thank goodness, too, because isn't it so awkward and horrible if you read something written by a dear friend and it sucks?

Anyway, not so by the way, MY novel, Just For You to Know, is available too, Kindle-wise, as well as on this here blog, one chapter every Monday [I'm going to start adding hyperlinks, referencing the true historical elements] I'm by golly going to cut the price on it because I want it to be read because even if I hadn't written it I would think it deserves a wide audience, too. This coming Monday: Chapter Three.

Meanwhile, back to the 19th century, back to work on the Arrow Rock Coloring Book. Two & one half dwgs to go! A reading of Carl Sandburg's mammoth bio of President Lincoln will keep me company.

Paul

2012-01-12T10:01:00.001-08:00

Paul Wesley Harness

22 April 1958 ~ 10 January 1980

Wasn't he a good looking young man? I'm told that his Bombholders buddies called him 'Baby Face.' When he was a little boy, my dad's nickname for him was 'Toady.'

Just for you to know.

The Square

2012-01-11T19:25:00.000-08:00

When we were 11 or 12, my cousin Myrna and I used to walk up to the shops surrounding the old Jackson County Courthouse in the center of Independence, MO, our hometown. Not the courthouse pictured here, of course. No, we'd walk up to "the Square," where the library used to be so when I wrote my one novel, the one I've been serializing here lately on this blog, I had Carmen Cathcart walk up there, too.

Wanted to write about a girl like I'd been at 11 or 12, with a big, restless, messy family [if Hoarders had been on then, we could have been televized!] and more younger siblings than I would have had, had my parents consulted me. Oh well, anyway, it's a long time ago now and what I was going to say was that I walked up to the Square today on my own, to mail a pkg at the sad, grey, understaffed post office. I love walking about this old familiar set of streets. Union. Delaware. Maple.

And I was going to note that it was 32 years ago today that we got word that one of my little brothers was killed, thanks to a too fast car and a too icy road and a too inebriated driver. Of course it's sad that he missed out on these past three decades or so of life, but it's not like I really knew him. It's sad that we missed out on knowing the older man he might have been, but then, he missed out on the anxious business of growing old, of seeing how the Square and the nation have changed, not so much entirely for the better. Life is a curious business, no?

Mary and her Pa

2012-01-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

They share a birthday, these two, bless 'em, and bless Mary's kid sister for summoning up the discipline to write one book after another, telling us about them. Charismatic, restless, fiddle-playing Charles Ingalls, born on the 10th of January, way back in another election year. I think Martin Van Buren won. His - Charles, not Martin - & Caroline's eldest, Mary Amelia, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, smart, & astonishingly patient, doncha think? Was she that silent, that uncomplaining in life, about being irretrievably blinded? Maybe so. She came into an entirely different world than yours & mine. Born 'bout 3 months before Lincoln was assassinated.

Ah well. 'The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.' Still, I'd be willing to bet that not everyone's upper lip was as stiff as Mary Ingalls. Not sightless eye was dry. And by the way, why didn't Pa teach her & her sisters how to play that violin?

Meanwhile, folks are lining up at the polls in New Hampshire as I type this, casting their votes for one Republican or another. Me, I'm signing off now. Gotta get back to work on my coloring book. Five dwgs to go! I'll have a juicy episode of American Experience [Check out your local listings! Support Public TV! www.pbs.org] to keep me company while I work [that and a plastic can of storebought chocolate frosting]. All about that wild child, Billy the Kid.

What was that guy's story anyway? Reckon I'll find out.

No Kicking Him Around Anymore

2012-01-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

"I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in there position, I'd have done the same thing."

You know who said that? Richard Nixon, poor, dreadful, resentful, ever furious, dutiful, conniving Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, born 99 years ago today. And I surely would write more about him, but I've got loads of other things awaiting doing. Ah well. Plenty has been written by about him already. Anyway, as hard as he was on others and on the nation, I'd be willing to bet he was equally, everlastingly nasty w/ himself.

Sigh...

Just For You to Know: Chap. Two

2012-01-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Just For You to Know: Chapter Two

In which we move into our new, crummy, old house and we have company.

Jimmy has his own room. I have worries.

I folded my arms and hated the sting in my nose: first sign of the tears that come when I’m mad. Yes, Daddy, I told him in my head, as a matter of fact, I do find our family pretty embarrassing.

He didn’t slap me hard. It hurt my feelings mostly. A bad surprise on top of a bad surprise plus strangers and my brothers staring at me -- except for Jimmy who bit his lower lip and looked at his lap.

“You made Mama cry,” Larry whispered, frowning at me. Dad tossed an “Everybody just settle down now” over the back seat and peeled out of the lot. At least everyone was quiet for a change as he drove through the dark streets. Georgie fell asleep on Mama’s lap and Clark read street signs.

“Noland Road. River Bou-le-vard. Cottage – hey!

Is this our street, Daddy?”

I covered my eyes with my hands and it wasn’t long before I felt us slow down, surge up a little hill, and roll to a stop on crunchy gravel.

“Please, please, please,” I prayed into the stillness when the engine stopped. “Just don’t let it be too horrible.” I looked to see where the latest chapter of our same old life was going to be. Dad got out, stood up, and whooshed out a big breath of air. He pressed his hands into the small of his back and said, “Well, now!” to everybody but me, seemed like.

“Wow,” Clark breathed.

“It looks like a haunted house,” Jimmy said.

We kids climbed out, me hugging my sketchbook to my chest. We all stood in the rutted driveway that ran alongside the house, which did look pretty spooky. Leafy shadows cast from the streetlight flickered across the dark windows. Even darker, inky-black treetops swayed high over the pointy roof of our tall, rickety, ratty-looking house. What would be a good name for this house? Deep in the dark front porch, chains clinked on the swaying swing. Creepy Crappy Crummy Cathcart Castle? Across the street, a light came on and in the moment before he closed it, an old man shape darkened a front door.

In my memory, I saw our old neighborhood: a field across the road where Farmer Scott raised soybeans. Here there were sidewalks, big old houses with porches, and a streetlight on the corner. Its glow lit up a brick grade school in the next block. Clark pointed at it. “That’s where us boys are going to go, except not Georgie.”

“I wanna go!” Georgie whined.

Probably our house had been built and painted about the time the last wagon train rolled out of town. ‘A fixer-upper,’ Dad called it. Meaning it was either us or the wrecking ball. The spooks that lived here would probably be upstairs packing right about now and heading out to the highway to scare innocent motorists, or bunking with their relatives at the graveyard until they found a new, more peaceful place to haunt.

The air smelled like mowed lawns and purple irises.

It sounded like crickets plus someone somewhere listening to a ballgame. Somebody next door was playing a piano, real good too, with both hands. Would the folks around here be glad we moved into their neighborhood? Was there anybody in these houses who might be friends with me?

“Come on, Carmie,” Dad said, as he turned the key in the lock of the back door. He wasn’t going to let a tight-faced twelve-year-old mess up his fresh start. Besides, once his temper flashed out a few thunderbolts, he calmed right back down again and liked everyone else to do the same.

Sorry. Not me. Too bad.

I shrunk away from Mama’s hand on my shoulder then followed everyone following Dad into the house.

The place had electricity anyway. Light from a dim, dangling bulb shone down on our tired selves and a yellowish kitchen full of the boxes and sacks which Mom and Dad had been moving up here while I babysat everybody back at Blue Top. They were stacked here and there on the icky-looking linoleum. A mouse, probably the smartest one in her family, took one look at us and ran for her life into a crack under the cupboards.

Mama sank down on a kitchen chair and closed her hand around my wrist as I started past her. “Carmie,” she said, “you and Jimmy have the two rooms up on the top floor, okay?”

“Really?” Jimmy grinned at this good surprise. It was a first for him. One good thing about being the only girl: You just about always get a room to yourself.

“Not fair!” Clark cried. He gave Jimmy an arm-punch, then they scrambled for the stairs. I leaned down and pressed my cheek onto the top of Mama’s head. You can be mad about having a really bad day and people not telling you things and still try to make things a little bit nice anyway.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I walked away from her before Mama could say anything back to me.

At the top of two sets of stairs I found a tiny room. It was pretty smelly, like hardly anybody but mice had been in here in a long, long time. As soon as my fingers found the switch I saw a frosted square of light fixture. The bulb in it that worked shined out as best it could through a whole bunch of moth corpses onto a slanting-down ceiling, one window, cardboard boxes, my bookcase, my bed and dresser, and brownish wallpaper all polka-dotted with clumps of oatmeal-colored lilacs.

I breathed in deep, and treated myself to THE most satisfactory sound: the slam of a door shut tight between yourself and the whole entire, crummy rest of the world. I flopped down on the bed and, after a moment, comforted myself by looking at my drawing of Sarah Somebody, erasing every mark that wasn’t perfect. I scrubbed my pencil back and forth, sharpening it on the cardboard back of the sketchbook, and drew curving lines around her face. Press softly, then harder: thin then thick then thin again, my pencil gave her graceful curls and made me feel calm until – tap, tap, tap.

Jimmy’s voice followed the taps through the wall: “I’ve never had my own room before. This is so neat! Carmen, how come you’re so mean about the new baby?”

Before I could answer which I wasn’t going to, the far-downstairs sounds of a noisy kid-chorus announced company at the front door. A foghorn voice cried out, “I can only stay a minute!”

“Aunt Bevy’s here!” Jimmy cried. He and I got downstairs just as Mom was coming out of the kitchen and saying to herself, “Oh, for crying out loud.” She loved her big sister, but did she like unexpected company? Not at all.

“Say Bev, comin’ to see us on a Friday night?” Dad teased. “Seems like you’d be out on a date.”

Aunt Bevy’s bright lips tightened before she replied, “So I am – with you guys!” So I figured she must’ve gotten her heart busted again. Our only aunt lived over in Kansas City with a poodle named Trixie and no husband, “but not for want of trying,” said Daddy. Aunt Bevy told me once about her long ago husband, Bill. “He got shot in the big war by some Nazi son-of-a-gun.” She’d been on lots of dates. “But nobody was ever as nice as Bill.” Aunt Bevy worked in the hat department at a big store downtown where people called her Miss Gillespie. She was what Dad called a “career gal.”

Tonight Aunt Bevy swept into our front room in her turquoise pedal pusher outfit. She’d stabbed chopsticks into the top of her dark brown, ratted-up, swept-up hairdo. As she hugged Mama to her perfumed smoky-smelling self, I couldn’t help thinking that my mom sure was the opposite of her skinny, stylish sister. In her homemade pastel dresses, Mama was like a candy-colored cloud. She was quiet like a cloud too, big and puffy-soft with thunder hidden inside.

“Might I offer you ladies a swig of Kool-Ade?” Dad asked them.

When everyone took him up on his offer, I got up to help. “No, now, Buddy,” Dad told me, “I can manage.” Buddy’s my nickname. It meant Dad was sorry for popping me in public.

Mama smiled at him and plopped in her rocking chair by the bay window. Aunt Bevy gave us kids hugs of our own, saying, “Be an angel, Jimmy-pie, and bring me an ashtray, will ya, please? Now which one of you twins is Larry? Say there, Georgie-boy! You been takin’ cute pills? Clark, knock knock!”

A big grin split Clark’s skinny face. “Who’s there?”

“Boo,” Aunt Bevy replied, firing up one of her stinky Lucky Strikes. She smiled when Clark answered back, “Boo who – oh man, everybody knows that one!”

“Whatcha cryin’ for!” Harry shouted, really happy to supply the punch line. Aunt Bevy gave me the usual, ‘Carmen, look how tall you’ve gotten!’ But she made up for it, digging a sack out of her huge straw purse and handing it to me.

“Hey, thanks,” I said, pulling out a fresh pad of drawing paper, “I really needed this!”

“Good goin’ Bev,” Dad drawled. “That’s the first smile anyone’s gotten out of Carmen all day.” I ignored him and followed Aunt Bevy’s gaze around our jumbled front room. She frowned up at our chandelier. “It looks just the tiniest bit like a flying saucer, wouldn’t you say?”

“I think it looks more like that Russian satellite,” said Jimmy. “You know: Sputnik.” To me, it was more like a garbage can lid fitted out with light bulbs, but I wasn’t going to say so. Its puny glow lit up the ceiling’s water stains. I searched them for shapes and faces, like you would in clouds.

Aunt Bevy, who’d gone back to searching through her big purse, cried, “Ta da!” and whipped out a – well, it looked like a wad of soda straws. Then she jumped to her feet and sort of let go of the straws, but they didn’t spill all over the place like you’d think because they were all tied together with thread in a way that turned the straws into corners, angles, and towers.

“A straw castle!” she exclaimed, ignoring Georgie playing piano on her Calypso Coral toenails. She didn’t seem to notice Larry tugging her shirt as she hung her present from the bottom of our Sputnik chandelier. She grinned down at Mama. “Remember how Pop used to always have one of these in the diner?”

“Auntie Bevy?” said Larry.

“He called it his dream castle in the air,” Mama said. I repeated the words to myself: dream castle in the air. Neat.

Larry spoke louder. “Aunt Be-VY!”

“Honey, your mother and I were --”

“Guess what?” Blabbermouth Harry interrupted Aunt Bevy and spilled all the beans. “Mommy’s gonna have another baby, didja know that?”

“Hey!” Larry shouted. “I was gonna tell her!”

“Ha ha, I beat you!”

“Brat!”

“Stupid!”

“You two pipe down!” Dad said, picking his way across the room, pitcher in one hand, sack of Dixie cups in the other. He shot me a sharp look, like he was double-dog-daring me to say something about the baby.

“A baby?” Aunt Bevy’s skinny drawn-on eyebrows frowned low in Dad’s direction. They shot right back up again as she tilted her head and flashed her eyes over at my mom.

So. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think a new baby was such hot news.

Aunt Bevy bent down to kiss my mom’s cherry-colored cheek. Mom’s hands rested on her big stomach, sort of like she was protecting it and her eyes seemed to be telling her big sister to mind her own business. If Aunt Bevy had any worries or questions, she hid them away. She squeezed my mom’s hand and lied like she was supposed to.

“I think it’s just wonderful, Dee-Dee. ‘Bout time for a little girl, don’t you expect? I think I know someone who could use a sister ‘round here.” Aunt Bevy smiled at me. “Help you out with all these brothers, huh, Carmenita?”

A sister? Helping me?

“Sometime in the fall, right?” Aunt Bevy asked, fiddling with her silver cigarette box.

Mama flickered a smile in Dad’s direction before saying, ”Probably sooner.”

Aunt Bevy was getting ready to set fire to another one of her Lucky Strikes, then she glanced at Mama and decided to take a tiny sip of orange Kool-Ade instead. She wrinkled her powdered nose.

Clark pointed at Mom’s midsection. “Is it moving around in there?”

“What?” the twins demanded. “The new baby! Scooch over!” Clark told Georgie. Soon all four of the

little boys were crowding in to mash their heads up against Mama’s belly like bandits listening to railroad tracks to hear if a train was coming. I went over and gave Aunt Bevy a goodnight-and-goodbye hug. “Thank you again for the sketchbook.”

I made my escape upstairs and put a closed door between me and my family. I leaned against it, listening to their distant voices. As my eyes got used to the dark, as the storm clouds inside of me smoothed out, I walked over to the window. Way up here on the third floor made me feel like I was in a tower room in a fairytale castle, like in the story of Rapunzel, except my hair wasn’t long enough for anyone to come up and get me.

I beat on the window frame until it opened, looked past and through the dark treetop to the yards and street way down below. Dad and some of the boys were walking Aunt Bevy to her Volkswagen Beetle. I could just barely hear Dad telling her, “you be safe now.” It wasn’t hard to hear Aunt Bevy’s loud voice: “It’ll be mighty nice to have you all close by. Is Carmen okay? She seemed kind of grumpy and out of sorts.”

I tried to hear what Dad said to her, but all I got was a bunch of ‘nighty-nights’ before my aunt’s car rumbled away. The sounds of doors closing, kid-voices and stair-stomping sifted through the house.

“’Grumpy and out of sorts,’” I muttered. I folded my arms on the windowsill and rested my chin on them.

Another baby. Seven children. Maybe a big family would be all right if you were rich and famous like President Kennedy and all of his brothers and sisters. I couldn’t help thinking about those gas-station jerks and people staring at us like weren’t they lucky not to be like us messy, ugly, poor, noisy, stupid Cathcarts.

Oh, sometimes I hated every single feeling in my head! They all came running out like roaches when you turned on the light in the kitchen. I should have a can of thought spray.

I sat down on a box full of books, smoothed my hand across my new drawing pad, and thought about my parents. They loved babies. I just had to face it. For them, babies were like a clean sheet of paper or a new address: a fresh start, everything possible, and nothing ruined yet.

Sort of like a first day of school, which was another terrible thing to be gloomy and nervous about: a new school, probably a thousand times bigger than our school in back in Vista. And this wasn’t even going to be plain old elementary -- this would be junior high!

Oh, put a sock in it, I told myself. Don’t be a crabby pouty-baby over things you can’t stop from happening. Then some woman shouting in the distance interrupted the mean lecture I was giving myself.

“Raw-BIN,” she called, “for heaven’s sake come down out of there. It’s past your bedtime!”

A chubby-looking girl emerged out of the pool of shadow at the bottom of the big tree in the neighbors’ yard! She looked right up at my window and waved at me! Then she stomped up her front steps and went inside without even looking to see if I waved back.

Sunday

2012-01-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

Golly. A good ten hours' worth of drawing today: fussy pen & ink, but I took time out to chop cabbage fine and little carrots for a fine pot of chicken soup. Life has many warm compensations, no? Such as unseasonably delightful winter weather, crossing another dwg off my tbd list (7 to go), and a new season of Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. Baybee, those costumes!

Sorrow & Rainbows

2012-01-07T06:23:00.000-08:00

"I have been in Sorrow's kitchen & licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands." Zora Neale Hurston, whose birthday is today. Born she was on the 7th of January, 1891. Now, if I hadn't gotten in the habit of birthday-checking [I note them in a little second-hand, red-bound Birthday Book, larded w/ Chas. Dickens quotations. Vicki Grove gave it to me, bless her.] & quote-collecting, never would I have come across those beautiful words. Now. A fast walk 'round the block then down to work: Words to fuss with: double-checking a little piece about the remarkable Hiram Young [slave-turned-freeman-businessman-wagon manufacturer, b. 200 yrs ago this year] Drawing to be done. Gotta draw the Prairie Park Plantation c. 1849 for my Arrow Rock [MO] Coloring Book. I reckon Mr. Young and more than a few forgotten souls at the old plantation knew a thing or two about sorrow. And, let's hope, at least one peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows.

Man Oh Man, Where Does the Time Go?

2012-01-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

"Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep." Carl Sandburg wrote that. He shares a birthday w/Joan of Arc, 'bout 500, no, 466 years apart, seeing as if the powers that were hadn't set fire to her, the Maid of Lorraine would have been 600 years old today; can you believe it? . And if I were not absolutely drowning in work - needing even now, right exactly this minute, to be doing a pen & ink dwg of 1827 pioneers being ferried across the Missouri River to the Arrow Rock landing - I'd wax on about poor J. of A., bless her soul. What she DID! And oh my gosh, what DID she look like? Sound like? I mean, she and her world did exist; I know they did as I know there really were 1827 gadabouts, probably bitching w/ one another about the 1828 election coming up, but I cannot imagine those times, those places, those people. I mean, I can, but do I believe in them? I guess I have to. History is such an abstraction, no?

Another Season/Another Reason

2012-01-04T20:27:00.000-08:00

Red and pink plush teddy bears. Cellophane-wrapped candies.

So, the weary hard-working souls who mind the shelves at the dreary castles of retail have packed up all of the Christmas dreck and wheeled the beginnings of the Valentine dreck. Don't you guys find this dispiriting? It's a mercy to pay for my jug of Mr. Bubbles and hurry home to get back to work on my Arrow Rock Coloring Book. I be drawing a picture of Wm. Becknell, heading out on the long trail to Santa Fe 'bout 190 years ago. Yes, well I know that Independence is supposed to be the trail's tail end, but no; that came later. He headed out from the old river town of Franklin & then to Arrow Rock and one west a ways to Independence before doing the long dusty mosey to Santa Fe. Can I even imagine riding a horse, looking after a string of mules, camping out, sleeping rough, night after night, some 800 miles? Now that's dispiriting.

Good.

I've cheered myself up.

Whew.

2012-01-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

"Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no." J.R.R. Tolkien, who was born on the 3rd day of January, 1892, in a green world that was changed forever in the summer of 1914.

So, we've made it through another set of holidays and here's the time when I wish I'd gotten my house strung up with lights. Ah well. Maybe for Valentine's Day. And not so by the way, I've got not one, but two brothers who share a birthday with Mr. Tolkien. One of my earliest memories is going and picking up baby Timmy, lugging him into the living room. I was four. I was not anywhere near so cute when Ronnie was born, ten years later.

And as for the 2nd chapter of Just For You to Know, do be watching for it next Monday.

Just For You to Know

2012-01-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

Here is the first chapter of the darling of my heart, first published by HarperCollins in the summer of 2006.
JUST FOR YOU TO KNOW

One:

In which we go to our new town by way of
the graveyard. Decoration Day, May 31, 1963.

“Well, what’s our address going to be?” I asked.

“715 North Cottage Avenue, Independence, Missouri, U. S. A., Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth, third planet from the sun in the Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe,” my little brother replied. Jimmy was ten years old and happy to offer information anytime, anywhere. “We’re going to be at 39º north and 94º west.” He pushed his glasses up with his stubby finger. “That’s our longitude and latitude address, just for you to know.”

As if there was a tiny X marking us on the world.

“No foolin’?” Dad grinned at Jimmy in the rearview mirror as he turned our old stationwagon through the graveyard gate.

You know that things are pretty crummy when

going to a cemetery is a high spot. We stopped and I escaped out the car door and filled my lungs with cool green air. I filled my eyes with crooked stones, some of them topped with concrete lambs and angels, all marking long-ago funerals. Every year, no matter where we lived, we came to this old graveyard by the Missouri River and set a canning jar full of peonies by Grandma and Grandpa’s tombstone.

I looked to see if there were any tears in Mama’s eyes for her folks who died before I was born. There weren’t. Her freckled face was mild as milk, like always. Mama was quiet as usual and her chapped hands rested on her broad middle.

“Can they hear us up here,” Clark wondered,

“like reindeer on the roof on the night before Christmas?”

Now in my personal opinion, you don’t exactly have to be Clark’s age (seven and a half) to believe in Santa in the chimney, but did I want to imagine dead people down under the grass, listening to us, maybe jealous of us tramping around upstairs, alive in the fresh air? Nope. Still, Clark’s idea sure got the twins going. Waking up the oogly-booglies in a pair of freckle-pussed six-year-olds: this is not difficult.

“What if they reached their hands up through the grass?” Larry asked Jimmy who shrugged.

“What if they waved at us or grabbed our feet?” Harry asked me. I rolled my eyes. The twins went prancing about on tiptoe as if the cemetery were paved with hot bricks, lifting their feet high out of reach of ghostly hands. That’s exactly what I want to do when I’m dead: lie in the ground waiting to scare little kids even more witless than they already are. As traced my fingers over the carved name of a dead stranger, an idea reached out and grabbed me. It sent me hurrying back to the car for my pencil and my sketchbook.

I put a sheet of paper across the face of an especially mossy old marker, one you couldn’t even read. With my No. 2 pencil, I revealed a hand pointing up to the dear dead person’s heavenly home. I hunted for another really old tombstone and found an even neater one. Biting my lower lip, I rubbed my pencil fast. A face appeared, an angel’s face with eyes like headlights and bird wings on its shoulders. And then, calendar dates: November 25, 1814 ~ April11, 1873. A birthday and a deathday. Bookends, they seemed like, on each end of Sarah Somebody’s shelf of days. I couldn’t make out her real last name, the carving was so worn down. I began imagining all her sad relatives standing around this marker, this place in another springtime, all dressed in black and crying. What was she like? I imagined Sarah What’s-her-name when she was alive and pale, in a long white dress.

Then, on the same page, beside her pencil-rubbed angel, I slid into a daydream, drawing her long black hair, her dark eyes, staring back at me from across a canyon of years, staring like the eyes of the tombstone angel when – Smash! Into my imaginings came grubby fingers, grabbing at my drawing, smearing the pencil, crumpling the paper. I smacked two-year-old Georgie’s slobbery hand away from my drawing.

“I wanted to look at it!” my littlest brother wailed.

“You messed it all up!” I shouted into

his face. It crumpled up too as Georgie bawled out his hurt feelings, like he was the only one who had any. He was still blubbering as we piled back into the car, Harry and Larry

scuffling like little lion cubs, Dad telling me what a snot I was. “How can you be so mean over a piece of paper?”

“How come you don’t yell at him for ruining my picture?”

“Be nice now, Carmen,” Mama said.

Clark and Jimmy opened up their books and I pressed my face against the cool window glass as our car rumbled past the rusty graveyard gate. That’s when I saw an old lady off and away by the crumbliest stones in the weediest corner. Our eyes met in the instant before we were lost from each other’s view. Was she there to decorate her sweetheart’s grave? Maybe he had been a soldier and got killed in a war. Now there she was: a bent old lady with a jar full of lilies. Just when she’s remembering their very last kiss, she sees a red-headed, twelve-year-old girl staring at her out of the back of a station wagon full of kids and junky card-board boxes. Maybe she’d think I was trying to tell her something. I imagined myself hollering, ‘Help! I don’t belong with all these dopey little brothers! I’m being kidnapped!’

‘She didn’t look at all as if she belonged with them, Officer. Here, I wrote down their license number on the newspaper I wrapped around these lilies I brought for Harold.’ Then the police pull Dad over. ‘Sorry, Mister,’ says the cop, ‘but we got a report you got a kidnapped girl here.’

‘No, Sir, we’re the Cathcarts! That’s my girl, Carmen, my oldest. I’m Gene and this is my wife, Dorothy. We just stopped here to leave off a jar of peonies.’

‘Is that true, little lady?’ the policeman asks, narrowing his squinty eyes behind his sunglasses.

‘We’re the Cathcarts, all right,’ I sigh.

He peers into the junky station wagon crammed full of Gene and Dorothy Cathcart and their six kids.

‘You got my sympathy, kiddo,’ he says to me...

“Hey!” I felt a poke in my shoulder then Jimmy said, “I’m talking to you.”

“Huh?”

“You’re always daydreaming.”

He’s next to the oldest in our family. James Eugene Cathcart. We’re both red-headed, marshmallow-middled,

glasses-slipping-down-their-noses kind of kids other kids ignore. One thing at least, Jimmy’s a lot squashier in the middle than I am.

“No, I’m not.” Then I lied again. “I was just thinking about Blue Top.” Well, not a lie exactly. I had been thinking about it some. Anyway, Jimmy believed me.

“Remember when we stood out there and saw Friendship Seven?” he asked, in a far away sort of voice. “And Clark kept waving his flashlight so that astronaut –”

“John Glenn,” I supplied.

“Yeah, so John Glenn could look down and see us?”

The good memory made us smile. Blue Top was where we lived, until this morning anyway, more than a hundred miles back down the road, on the other side of Osceola. Like rich people in books name their mansions, I named our crummy, weedy, old farm after the meadow-topped hill there. All summer, all over, it bloomed with clover and sky-colored cornflowers. A person could lie down in them and imagine fairies in the grasses and king-

doms in the clouds. Or, lying very still, with your head pointed north and your feet to the south, you could feel the earth turn. Plus, out in the tall weeds, nobody could find you and make you come inside and babysit or something. Now, as one of the boys took a littler boy’s toy away and they were screaming and punching each other, I said, “I guess I’ll sort of miss living there.”

Jimmy nodded thoughtfully. “It was sort of a dump.”

The way he said it told me that he was proud too, partly, of our folks for doing something as nutty as buying a goat and a brushy bunch of land with a worn-out house where you had to go outside to a stinky outhouse to pee and pray that the black swooping wasps would stay outside, buzzing in the hollyhocks.

We only lived there for a year or so and, since I was little, eight different houses before that. I know because I wrote down a list. Dad said he guessed he was “just a restless sort,” as if he was satisfied. He always seemed to want to be somewhere else. Me, I just wanted to be some ONE else.

We’d make new friends at our new schools, the folks always promised, but generally that wasn’t true, not for Jimmy and me anyway. I did like this one girl this past year: Janice McFarland, but I wasn’t her best friend. We’ll probably forget about each other now that our paths have separated. Liking the sound, I whispered out those words: “our paths have separated.” Mostly, the girls I really cared about were ones who lived in books, like Laura Ingalls and her sisters or those best friends in the Betsy and Tacy books. I chewed the inside of my mouth. It’d be neat to have a best friend sometime, in real life.

“Do you think that Gertie will be all right?” Jimmy asked. “Not be too lonesome over at Farmer Scott’s?”

“Beats me.”

Our goat, Gertie, got sold to our neighbor across the road. He was a real farmer, not like Dad who just felt like living in the country for a while even if he did have to drive and drive and drive to get to his job in Springfield. Gertie would figure out her goat life one way or the other. Everybody had to sooner or later.

I opened up my sketchbook and smoothed out my drawing of Sarah on the crumpled angel rubbing. Georgie watched, real serious-like, while I used a clean corner of my eraser to get rid of the worst smudges. Just as I was trying to make her nose look prettier – it’s really hard, in case you want to know, to draw the nose-holes without giving the person a pig nose – the car hit a bump in the road. Now, on top of all her other troubles, poor Sarah had an ugly pencil mark on her lip. I blew my bangs up with an angry puff of air and looked over at Georgie.

“The car’s too jiggly.”

Georgie nodded. It’s nerve-wracking to have paper in front of you and not be able to draw, so I held the sketchbook up so Georgie and I could look at page after smudgy page of ladies, all pretty solemn in spite of their beauty, their long hair and flowing gowns. The last page in my book was blank, like snow nobody’d walked on yet. I glided my hand across the smooth paper. The most excellent picture I’d ever draw might happen there.

A fresh thought came into my head, how white paper was like moving to a new address. Anything was

possible there. What was it like, this new house? I hadn’t seen it yet. All’s I knew was where it was on the globe of the world and that it wasn’t far from Dad’s new factory job. Anyway, maybe my family and I could be different, living at 715 North Cottage.

“We’re going to live pretty close to where a genuine used-to-be President of the United States lives,” Dad said, looking back at all of us in the rearview mirror. “Can any of you guys tell me who that might be?”

“Harry S. Truman,” I muttered. Not that people like us will ever get to see a real president out walking around, just being a guy.

“Independence was where the Oregon Trail started,” Jimmy told us all. “Back in the pioneer days.”

Big deal. Maybe it was an exciting place about a hundred years ago IF you were wanting to join up with a wagon train and go on a bumpy, scary, disgusting, ox-poopy, frontier trail. I could just imagine Dad saying, ‘Let’s go to California! It’ll be an adventure!’

Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that.

Now Clark stabbed me in the arm with his finger. “Carmie, look at this one!” He held his joke book two inches away from my eyeballs.

“Leave me alone.”

“’How do you tell if a elephant was in your refrigerator?’ Do you know?” When he couldn’t stand me ignoring him even one more second, he blurted out, “’When you find footprints in the Jell-O!’”

Laughter exploded out of him.

The twins began fighting over graham crackers, spilling them over the checker game they were trying to play. When Harry accidentally elbowed Larry in the head, they tipped over a sackful of Mama’s old magazines onto Georgie who began to howl. Oh man, how’d I end up in Gene’s and Dorothy’s Traveling Loony Bin? Somewhere up in heaven I must’ve gotten on the wrong bus.

“You kids pipe down right now, I mean it!” Dad yelled.

“Pick up those crackers, you boys,” said Mama. “And don’t eat them if they’ve been on the floor. Throw

‘em out the window for the birds and the critters.”

Boy, that got their minds off their troubles: throwing all the crackers and a few checkers out the window. I hoped the rabbits or raccoons wouldn’t be squashed into hash, trying to gather up smashed graham crackers all over the highway. And what would some poor hungry robin do when all he got was a checker?

“Mama!” Harry shouted. “Georgie peeing his pants!”

“Oh gross!” Clark yelled. “Don’t get any on me!”

“Carmen,” said tired-sounding Mama, “you wanna change him? His red shorts are in that grocery sack.”

If there was one thing I knew for sure it was that no matter where we lived, I’d always be changing some little boy’s disgusting wet pants. Once a long time ago, I changed Harry’s diaper and he peed right in my eye! Clark thought this story was the funniest joke in the world. It made Harry very happy and proud.

“Let’s all sing, okay?” Dad suggested. “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain,” he began, and even Mama

and Georgie, sort of, were singing dumb stuff like “we’ll all

have biscuits and gravy when she comes.”

“How come Carmen’s not singing?” Larry asked.

Dad tossed me a glance over his shoulder. “She thinks she’s too old.” Then he pushed back his ballcap and began singing, “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” loud and deep, high-pitched Clark joining in. When the last note trailed off, Mama said, “You sang that for me the first time we ever met when you came bumming ‘round our diner, lookin’ for a handout.”

“Handout?” Dad retorted. “Bumming! Didn’t I sing for my supper?”

I looked at the back of Dad’s head and tried to see in my mind the way he was in the 1930s hard times. Imagining my dad as a teenaged hobo, running, panting, jumping onto a moving boxcar train -- it made me shiver. Maybe that was how he got to be a restless sort, being on his own after his mom died out in California. “After my daddy lost his business, he went and got drowned in the Pacific Ocean. I hit the road, saw the whole entire U.S. of A., I did, AND met your Mama.” I didn’t mind at all hearing Dad tell his story even a million times.

Mama was working in her family’s diner when her father found my tired, hollow-in-the-belly dad sleeping out back, on one of the picnic tables. Instead of telling him to ‘go along and git outta here’ like some people did, my Grandpa said, “Go out and wash up at the pump. I’ll have Dee bring you out a sandwich.” Dee: that’s my mom. I tried to imagine him, the black-and-white Grandpa in the photo album, the Grandpa in the graveyard under the peonies.

“Kids,” Dad said, “that’s how I met your mama.” He smiled in her direction. “I sang to you, remember? A half a dozen songs, I bet, for two ham sandwiches and a glass of lemonade!” His open hand swirled in the hard highway wind out the driver’s window. A harp with angel-wings was tatooed on his sunburned arm.

“Didn’t we throw in a piece of cherry pie?” Mama asked him.

“Well, your sister baked that pie. Bev’s a beauty

and a pistol -- but a baker? No MA’AM! And didn’t I write to you anyway? Every week, even when I went off to save the world from Hitler and the Japs and nearly gotmyself killed? Didn’t I come home and marry you and help you make all these babies?” Dad’s light eyes blazed as he waved his window arm and our old Rambler swerved there for a second, throwing all us “babies” into each other.

“Gene, you wanna be watching for a gas station?”

“You feelin’ okay, honey?” Dad gave Mama a worried look.

“I’m fine.”

We pulled off the blacktop into a podunk, one-pump gas station just outside our new hometown. Mom came out and Dad was paying a blue overalls-guy for the gas when I went inside the joint. Probably the hick teenage boys hanging around the counter didn’t see me go in there or else, maybe, the pimply one wouldn’t been yacking to his greasy-haired buddy about “the hillbilly family in that rustbucket out at the pump.”

“The mom looks like she’s got another bun in the oven,” said Goop-head, lighting up a smoke.

“What a cow,” Crater Face sneered. “Like they don’t got enough kids already.”

I stalked out of the Ladies restroom and yelled at them. “Shut up, you blockheads!”

Boy, I ran out of there before the surprise drained out of their stupid faces, but they pulled their sorry selves together enough to laugh at us some more as we drove away.

I met Dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “What’s the deal?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What happened in there?” Jimmy wondered.

“Leave me alone,” I muttered.

Mom aimed a questioning glance at me, then went back to window-gazing at the houses going by.

Me, I just looked down at my balled-up fists.

“Must’ve been something,” Dad said, “the way you came tearing out of there.”

Clark began practicing his reading. “’Wel-come to In-de-pen-dence, Queen City of the --’ Dang! Dad! You’re going too fast! I was reading the sign!”

“Of the Trails,” Jimmy offered. “Trails, Clark. Because of the wagon trains.”

Dad ignored them, repeated his ‘Musta been somethin.’ I looked up from my lap to the back of Mama’s head. Her hair glowed a beautiful red in the last of the sunset light. I could’ve stuck up for her better. Maybe said, ‘She is not EITHER going to have another dumb baby. You don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s just -- I don’t know, big, okay?’ I could’ve told those jerks. ‘ She doesn’t have no stupid bun in the oven, you morons!’

“Are we almost there?” Larry hollered from the back of the station wagon.

“Yeah, Daddy,” Harry called out from right under my feet, trying to find a checker. “We’ve been in this dumb car all day! Aren’t we at our house yet?”

“The house is just a little ways from here now,” Mama said.

“Three hours,” Dad griped. “Been on the road for three hours. Is that all day?”

“Root beer!” Clark shouted. He tugged at the back of Dad’s seat, pulling himself up so he could holler in his ear,

“See the sign up there, Daddy? Can we get some? Can we?”

“Can’t we just keep going?” I grumbled, but I was drowned out by chants of “Root beer! Root beer!”

Dad seemed to get Mom’s permission. “Okey-doke, then!” he exclaimed. “Root beer, in honor of our first evening in town and...“ We came to a stop in an empty space in the crowded drive-in. Dad gave my mom a lovey-dovey look then reached over to bring the back of her hand to his lips. “Well,” he said, “just in honor of...summertime.”

I leaned my head out the car window. There was the night’s first star, all by itself in the warm, blue twilight. I could be that star. I could be a space traveler. If I were up there in the sky, I could appreciate this evening from far, far away. The thought orbited around and around inside my hot tangled head.

Cars full of old couples and normal families surrounded the orange and white-painted drive-in. A couple of shirtless high school boys in a pickup truck honked and yoo-hooed at the tired-looking, pony-tailed

waitress. Dad switched off the engine and flipped on the

dome light so Mama could dig around in her purse and, as a bonus, everybody at the root beer stand could get a really good look at me and my messy, goofy family. I hunched my shoulders and tried to smooth my hair.

“Dad, turn the light off, please?” I asked politely.

“Your Mom’s looking for something.”

“Leave it on,” Clark said loudly. “I’m trying to read my joke book. Listen to this one: if a cabbage and a carrot are in a race, who wins? The cabbage -- get it? It’s ahead. A head! Oh yeah, Daddy, I wanna BIG mug.”

“I like the light,” said Larry, sticking his tongue out at me.

After a whole lot of noisy figuring out what everybody wanted, the twins climbed over the back seat a few dozen times, banging up against us other kids until Clark punched them and Dad started yelling. It gave them something to do while we waited for the waitress to bring her tray full of heavy, slippery mugs. Everybody in the cars beside us heard Dad smacking his lips: “Man, that hits the

don’t it?”

Georgie: “I can hold it!”

Mama: “No, let me hold your mug. You don’t want to spill it, now.”

Clark: “Hey, you brat, listen! I’m telling a JOKE! What do you call a ...”

Harry: “You bumped me on purpose! Mom!”

Larry: “Daddy, he made me spill my drink!”

Jimmy: “Don’t get any on my book!”

Mama: “Everybody be nice, now.”

Dad: “All of you just put a sock in it, settle down, hurry up, and drink your drinks!” Then he turned to Mama and softened his voice. “Dee? You okay, honey?”

“What’s the matter?” Jimmy asked.

Mama sighed. “I’m just… oh, we’re all tired out.”

“Your mama’s not feeling good,” Dad said.

“Me neither,” I muttered.

“Maybe Mom’s gonna have another baby!” Clark hollered, as if it was the best joke yet. A mom, dad, and their only child in their shiny car looked over at us Cathcarts like Mama was the old woman in the shoe.

“A baby?” Harry called out.

“Mommy’s going to have a baby?” Larry shouted from the very back of the stationwagon, just as the waitress appeared at Dad’s window to take away the tray full of mugs. She rolled her eyes, more people in the other cars chuckled, and Dad glared at all of us in his mirror. “Maybe,” he said, like somebody had dared him to say it.

“Is that true?” The boys were all asking, “Mama, is that true? Are you going to really? Are you? When Mommy? A new baby? Is that really true?”

Their flutey ‘trues?’ and ‘are yous?’ sounded like hooty owls. I saw Mama bow her head and Dad leaned over to kiss her cheek. “She sure is“ he said, his voice all soft, his face all proud, “later on this summer.”

“What?” My voice came out too angry and too loud. Before I could stop them, hard words popped out of me like snakes out of a can. “Another dumb, stupid, bawly baby? Don’t we have enough, for crying out loud?”

Dad whipped his head around in my direction. “What was that you said?”

It seemed like slow-motion but it only took a

second for Dad to lunge back from the steering wheel. “You ashamed of us, Carmen? You ashamed of your own family?” His long arm whipped over the front seat and I saw the back of his hand coming for my face.

What I'm Wondering

2012-01-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

1. Why can't or won't men wear hats like this one pictured here on long-gone Lorenzo de Medici? Doubtless that flappy business would be maddening on a windy day. As I recall, I liked what I read of him in Irving Stone's wonderful book The Agony & the Ecstasy. One of my favorite writers, no foolin.'

2. How'd I get to be such a cranky old weirdo?

3. Can a person NOT be a cranky, anti-social, tech-phobe weirdwad by willpower alone?

4. Why does Bashar al-Assad of Syria have to be such a murderous, delusional piece of work?

5. Why did blogging seem such a good idea when hardly anybody reads blogs?

6. Or do lots of people read blogs and I just don't even know it?

7. Why can't everybody just MAKE there not be such a long, abysmal, divisive, pissy, way-too-damn talkative, time-and-money-consuming way of electing a President in this country?

8. I mean, I'd almost rather have a king and/or a queen than listen to all this nonsense, wouldn't you, dear whatever goober's reading this? But then, originally a 'blog' was short for web log which is like a journal and people aren't expected to be reading other people's journals, right?

9. Would anybody read it if I started posting/serializing my novel here, starting tomorrow? We'll find out, I guess. Just for you to know, I called it Just For You to Know, and if this world were not so rotten, millions of people would have read it by now. Honestly, it's so good and tragic and funny I can't believe that I wrote it, but then I'm not the person I was then. Like the Missouri River is not the river it was yesterday or will be tomorrow, right? I suppose.

10. Aren't you glad that Kim Jong-il is dead, as long as he was totally unwilling to do anything for the people of North Korea except to allow them to go hungry and wave at him? But then is usefulness and compassion the only criteria for someone being allowed to live? I think not.

11. How are a Shih Tsu and a Great Dane like me and Ryan Seacrest? They're both dogs and we're both people. Go figure.

12. Why have I confined myself on this blog to writing about dead people and their birthdays? Well, because it's a way of remembering these people, calling a precious few live people to their attention, because someday we'll be dead and now that we're alive, we won't want to be forgotten, but if there's anything to the hereafter worthwhile, we probably won't care if anyone remembers us because we'll be A. otherwise busy or B. oblivious to the whole affair. Not like I'll get to choose, but if I did, I generally choose the latter, not wishing to get in the sort of eternal trouble I used to hear about in Sunday School/not wanting to let myself hope for paradisiacal enlightenment & happy celestial reunions.

13. In any case, besides Betsy Ross, Lorenzo de Medici, and J.Edgar Hoover, the writer E. M. Forster, (Edward Morgan Forster, whose books I intend to read this year [at least one of them because get a load of what he wrote once upon a time: "If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words."] share today as a birthday.

14. What was Michelle Bachman thinking?

15. And I'm wondering if the project/proposal I've been working on the past few days will pass muster at the Nat'l Geographic. I'm sending it off tomorrow or the next day and my fingers, they are crossed. Then I'll get back to the coloring book I've been illustrating for the village of Arrow Rock, MO. A nifty little place, if you've a mind for history. George Caleb Bingham, the painter, used to live there. Did you know that under his wig he was as bald as an egg? Well, he was, poor fella.

Christmas. It's been going on all day!

2011-12-25T21:54:00.000-08:00

So, I'm not entirely wanting to give up and go to bed because that'll mean that Christmas is over. I've been drawing all day. A pen & ink dwg of Laura•Mary•Carrie•Grace. Someday it'll be a notecard that Laura Ingalls pilgrim-visitors to Mansfield, MO, will buy. But that's someday. Today it was the quiet fun of sitting & drawing, watching lovely TV: Cranford.

Quiet biss on toast, that's what it's been. A necessary analgesic in the face of what the pissed-off sons of extreme Islam did in Nigeria today. Thank heavens for means of escape, reality-wise.

2011-12-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors & laugh at them in our turn?" Miss Jane Austen, born 236 years ago today. I'd wax on about her, but I have other things to tend to.

So, this blog, as it has been from the inception a few years back, is going to change. I set out as I always do, like a merry tractor, roaring forward with elaborate, romantic (manic?) notions of writing daily - every blessed day - about things & individuals historical. Then I settle into my customary, procrastinating, distractible self and let days go by, their commemorations left unremarked. You might, though, you precious few who chance upon this posting, direct yourself to this link, featuring an ethereal melody conceived & worked out by a fellow whose tormented life began on this day in 1770. In any case, beginning with the new year, this blog will take a rather different form as I cannot bring myself to do away with it entirely. I just can't.

Laura's Prairie Rose

2011-12-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

So, okay, according to what I know about her, Laura & Almanzo Wilder's daughter Rose was altogether as headstrong as her parents. Her mom, in particular. She was born up in Dakota 125 years ago today. Being a deep-dyed fan of Mrs. Wilder's books, I cannot but be fascinated with Rose Wilder, without whose editorial assistance & advice, her mother's would never have been published to such acclaim, read with such pleasure. Reverence even.

I love knowing, thanks to my friend Bill Anderson (justly admired biographer of LIW & knowledgeable in all things Ingalls/Wilder) that journalist Rose & her good friend "Troub" (Helen Dore Boylston, nurse/WWI vet/author of the delightful series of Sue Barton books) traveled about Europe together after the Great War. That she & Rose took LIW all the way west on Route 66 to California in roundabout 1927. Ah well. Rose Wilder Lane. God rest her. Serious needleworking Libertarian dame.

And she shares a birthday w/ Walt Disney [1901], Gen. Geo. Armstrong Custer [1839], 8th President Martin Van Buren [1782],sappy romantic poet Christina Rossetti [1830]. So much for astrology.

A pair of dames...

2011-12-04T09:03:00.000-08:00

So, in the course of tracking down the birthdays of the eminent, interesting [to me] dead, I came across a lady I'd never heard of. That'd be Octavia Hill. A social reformer, who actively concerned herself w/ the atrocious living conditions of poor folks in Victorian London. She came into the world on the 3rd of December, 1838. And, just for you to know, it was 150 years ago this very day (Dec. 4), an entirely different sort of dame was born. Helen Louise Leonard her name was, but the world came to know her as Lillian Russell. If you click HERE you can hear how she sounded in 1912 and see how she looked.

I'd wax on a bit about how much I would love to have glimpsed ol' Lillian in life, illumined by flickering gaslight, about beauty and the exceedingly different roles its pursuit figured in the lives of these ladies, but their work is done and mine is not.

December

2011-12-01T19:47:00.000-08:00

"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December." James Barrie

So this day began in a motel buzzing with dressed up and excited people who'd come to see their dear ones graduating from initial training, I'm guessing, at Fort Leonard Wood. My folks went down there years ago - gosh, it must be at least 30 years ago - to visit my little brother Paul. And now I'm home from 200 miles' worth of driving through beautiful rural Missouri from three days of visiting some lovely schools roundabout Waynesville. Golly, talking to little kids about books, about mastering reading, writing, language. Drawing pictures for them. Entertaining them. 'Twas some serious fun, no foolin'.

Everyday Deathday/Birthday

2011-11-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

‎"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections & relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc."

Mathematician Ada Lovelace, who d. 27 Nov 1852

So, I'd write more, wax on, elaborate upon the life, extraordinary times and works of this remarkable lady, but there is much to be done before I set off driving to Waynesville, MO tomorrow morning, some 200 miles from here, to talk to classrooms full of children there [the BEST part of my job].

If you're reading this maybe I'm amazed AND I direct you to this link re: Ada Lovelace Day.

What's more, I point out to you that today marks n Ada's deathday AND the anniversary of the birth, in 1834, of the exceedingly beautiful British actress, diarist, and influential abolitionist, once she got an eyeful of life on her husband's Georgia plantation.

"I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution."

Fanny Kemble Butler

One More Thing About Mary

2011-11-26T13:30:00.001-08:00

Didn't mean to publish yet! Had me an oh-no moment. I wanted to say to whomever happens to come across this post, try to look past the grainy black & white, Civil War-era photo in my previous post re: Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who'd have turned 179 years old today if she hadn't died back in 1919 - not long after the close of WWI, just a few weeks after Teddy Roosevelt died, by the way], the somber, poignant expression and note how pretty "Dr. Mary" was. But the larger pic posted here definitely does. These smaller images of Dr. Walker, Dress Reformer, taken later on in her long life, shows how bold and courageous she was, going about in her 19th century world, in trousers. When asked about them - even arrested for wearing them- Dr. Walker would boldly reply: "These are not men's clothes - they are MY clothes!"

And Another

2011-11-26T13:12:00.001-08:00

"Oh, they’d heard whispers of such things, but they’d never EVER seen it! Not in clear, summer daylight on a public street! Scandalous!

Positively sinful! Illegal! Outrageous!

“That’s that Miss Walker.”

“Didn’t I read about her in the newspaper?”

“I hear she met with President Lincoln himself!”

“She gave a lecture over at the town hall.”

“What’s that fancy medal on her coat?”

“Why, that’s the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration a man can get.”

“But isn’t she a woman?”

“I’m afraid so,” his mother replied.

“But she’s wearing PANTS!”

From a book I wrote about Dr. Walker, but am not allowed to illustrate, which hurts my feelings. I'm told that it will be published sometime in 2013, which goes a long way towards cheering me up, but not entirely. Still, no big deal and not worth a backward glance when compared to what that lady put up with.

It was on this day in 1832 that the fearless Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was born up in Oswego, NY.

A Long Gone Voice

2011-11-26T06:48:00.000-08:00

"The difference between the men and the boys in politics is, and always has been, that the boys want to be something, while the men want to do something.”

the great Eric Sevareid, who'd be 99 today if he wasn't already dead.

This link will take you to his farewell from the CBS Evening News. Jeepers, that was 34 years ago. Really, I loved listening to his take on things, his way of using the language, his calm, measured voice.

Speaking of cherished voices, I woke up to Scott Simon interviewing Doris Day on NPR this morning. Oh baybee.

2011-11-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." Andrew Carnegie

So, for one thing, I revised my Thanksgiving Carol, fine-tuned it & added a verse. For another, I spent a large bit of time, shopping and cooking for my family [made 'em sing my song w/ me], hollowing out pie pumpkins & stuffing them, roasting them. Oh baybee: try this recipe. For yet another, the indominatable Carry A. Nation was born on this day in 1846, on Andrew Carnegie's 11th birthday.

My Thanksgiving Song

2011-11-19T08:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a song I wrote for you all to sing when you all get 'round the table next Thursday, to the tune of We Gather Together:

Thank you for turkey and plenty of stuffing

Of giblets, chopped onion and bread, sage, and thyme

And mashed potatoes, marshmallows, sweet potatoes

Hot gravy and carrots and corn and green beans.

Thank you for hot buttered rolls, jam, and jelly

Glass dishes of celery and pickles and beets.

We all will make merry with sauces of cranberry

And if there’s still room, we will have pumpkin pie.

Thank you for friends and our family here gathered

For all of our blessings, protection divine

For these years of living we all are thanks-giving

For whipped cream and hot coffee and cold pumpkin pie.

Tippecanoe

2011-11-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

"Let us form one body, one heart, & defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, & the graves of our fathers." Tecumseh

And many more such graves there would be after the battle that took place two hundred years ago today in what is now the state of Indiana. I'd wax on about what happened at Tippecanoe, how the bloody incident contributed to Presidency of General William Henry Harrison, albeit not its brevity; how it all might have turned out very, very differently, had not the great Tecumseh been away that day from Prophet's Town.

2011-11-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

‎"Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils."

Cyril Connolly

And I have a yard full of them. Only last night they were trampled upon by princesses and ninja warriors.

DANG!

2011-10-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

John Adams (1735-1826): "As much as I converse w/sages & heroes, they have very little of my love & admiration. I long for rural & domestic scene, for the warbling of birds & the prattling of my children. " And Abigail.

Dang! It's the 30th of October, not the 31st. Not until tomorrow is Ethel Waters' birthday & that of all of the other Halloween babies. SO, huzzah for the great Overlooked, the perplexing, stubborn, exuberant, highly intelligent and passionate, devoted husband and patriot, second President of the nation that would never have existed w/o him. Who was the first president to live here Who grew up here. Who died here at an exceedingly advanced age, on the day of the great Coincidence. Subject of one of my very favorite books, of all of those I wrote & illustrated, that is, The Revolutionary John Adams.

Ethel & the Halloween Babies

2011-10-30T04:06:00.000-07:00

"It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays," the first day of which was 115 years ago today, when the great Ethel Waters was born, in 1896. Exactly 101 years after the birth of poet John Keats. He, too, had a lot to say, but not nearly as many years of life in which to say them. My introduction to Ms. Waters was seeing her sing at many a Billy Graham crusade on our black & white TV. (Years later I went to one in person, went forward, not out of a 'wake up smell the coffee' moment for my soul - already been through that more than once, but to see the great preacher a little closer. People stare at you, fyi, as you make your way to the podium, doubtless hoping to see tears.) Anyway, check out that link above to her Wikipedia bio and be knocked out by some of Ethel's yesterdays, her hard knock childhood, & what she did, how she sang when she grew up. Can't sum up a person's life in a moment, can you? That's the truth is beauty is truth is beauty..."that is all ye know on earth & all ye need to know."

Miss Ethel & Mr. Keats, just for you to know, share a birthday w/ Dale Evans, who also sang her way up & out, & Juliette Gordon Low, Girl Scout No. 1. and today marks 85 years since Harry Houdini got sucker punched, thence failed to escape Death's clutches. Now there's a desk to be cleared, dwgs & painting to be done, and oh my gosh, tense it is when you've finally finished a manuscript and sent it out into the world...

Distant Hoofbeats

2011-10-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

"Not by a long shot was it the last adventure in beating the western wilderness: seven and a half years of railroad tracks racing to meet at the Golden Spike were just ahead. But its the ponies and the daring young men who ride in our imagination.

When the wind is in the West, listen for distant hoofbeats.

It's the Pony Express."

Cheryl Harness

They're Off! The Story of the Pony Express

I loved working on this book. It's been years ago now. One day I was driving up to St. Joseph, MO, about an hour north of here, to visit the Pony Express Museum [click link above], to research. Next thing you know, I was taking a pile of artwork to the P.O., kissing the pkg. for luck, lest it be lost in transit and I'd feel compelled to throw myself under a buss. Must have been like that [except for the bus] for the army of characters who planned & executed the audacious business of establishing speedy, regular postal delivery between the eastern States & faraway California. BANG: They were off! 3rd of April, 1860. Big fat election year! Young men riding through the wilds, all kinds of weather, day & night. No headlights on their horses.

Then, as of the 26th of October, 1861, it was over. It wasn't like the fastest horse could outrun electronic messaging via telegraph wires. Now it's been 150 years, almost 55 thousand sunsets, as of today, can you believe it?

Sigh...

2011-10-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

"If it was with my dying breath,

I would caution anyone

against attempting the feat..."

Annie Edson Taylor

"O shut the door! and when thou hast done so, Come weep with me..."

Wm Shakespeare [maybe] Romeo & Juliet

So. Just a note, a bit of pencil sharpening, so to speak, before I get down to writing this novel I've been working on. I learned about Annie Edson Taylor when I was illustrating Julie Cummins' Women Daredevils

and, if you read it or the Wikipedia entry on this lady, I'm betting you'll be as struck as I was by the pathos of this intelligent, educated widow's story. Years of plucky enterprising to avoid poverty's ever-present undertow led up to her celebrating her 63rd birthday by allowing herself to be packed into a specially made barrel, having the lid screwed on then rolled onto the waters leading to Niagara Falls. 110 years ago today. 24 Oct. 1901. A quaint picturesque time it looks to be in the old photographs. Long skirts. Big hats. Streets full of clip-clop. Social safety nets? Welcome to the poorhouse. Cuppa gruel?

Why'd she do it? Shoot, if it killed her, she wouldn't have to be broke and scared anymore. If she survived (No one ever had.), she'd make a bundle on the lecture circuit. Nothing on TV back then, after all. Oh well. I've got to get to work on my own [exceedingly amusing] get-rich-slow scheme. Suffice it to say Annie got cheated & poverty dragged her down just the same.

May good fortune shine, hard times not get too hard.

Disappointment, not without Consolation

2011-10-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

Henry Emmons, follower of William Miller, Biblical scholar, who'd been pretty certain that Jesus was fixing to return, imminently to the scene of the crimes:

"I waited all Tuesday [Oct. 22, 1844, known in some circles, ever since, as The Great Disappointment] and dear Jesus did not come;– I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber, as my natural strength was leaving me very fast, and I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain– sick with disappointment."

I only know about this because I & my parents, who art in heaven w/ all the other dead people, including poor disappointed Henry Emmons, and their pets, got involved with the Seventh Day Adventists, back when others of my generation were either at or wishing they were at Woodstock. The SDA happens to be made up of folks who get a bang out of end-time scenarios, 'cleansing of sanctuaries,' and arguments w/ well-thumbed Bibles: so, is He coming back pre- or post, before or after the Millennium?

Ah well.

That was what it was. That was then, this is now: the 167th anniversary of the disappointing night, even more disappointing morning after, having given away all and spent a chilly night in one's nightgown, watching for the heavens to part. Am I laughing at such people? Only ruefully. I've not been a stranger to passionate tangents, the urgent desire to believe.

So the 22nd of October sticks in my mind. One reason I remember today's Sarah Bernhardt's birthday. 167 years since La Divine Sarah was born. Allow me to totally recommend Madame Sarah, Cornelia Otis Skinner's bio , the life & times, that being the 1890s, le fin de siecle, of the great, eccentric French actress [redundant? maybe. peut-etre].

Okay. Enough of this work avoidance. This danged novel I'm struggling over will not be written w/o a boatload of attention & application. I'll confine myself to pointing out that the best and funniest Stooge, Curly Howard, a.k.a. Jerry Horwitz, was born this day in 1903. Died 48 years later, going to show you: comedy & tragedy = next door neighbors.

Pretty Boy Floyd got killed this day in 1934 AND AND AND AND this very day marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the glorious, handsome, prolific composer and performer of the most demanding piano music ever, the great Franz Liszt. Do check out this little take on him in this excerpt from the swellegant little movie Impromtu.

Okay. Down to work.

Today

2011-10-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Today I'm finishing this draft, by golly. Had the idea years ago. Told a bunch o' kids about it.

"Cool!" Told another bunch of kids about it just this week.

"Cool!" Gosh, I adore gassing away to innocent school children about the books I used to do before everything went down. And I'm finally finishing this draft, fueled on Folgers & candy corn, gonna get it revised by Halloween. And did you know that Mickey Mantle and Bela Lugosi share a birthday? Well they do. 1882 & 1931. Back to the writing. If I don't finish this novel, I'll be quite angry with myself and there's been more than enough of that.

oh yeah - a couple of other things

2011-10-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

I love Christiane Amanpour's earrings, especially the turquoise ones. And I'm sorry I used sort of a cuss word in my previous post and I'm thrilled that that glamorous gasbag Sarah Palin decided not to run for the Presidency and I've been listening to this link again and again, just for the beauty. And the Farmer Boy chapter is called 'Fall of the Year.'

what things are like today

2011-10-09T07:37:00.000-07:00

So, for one thing, Autumn is here, in person, as it were. Leaves falling, showers of dry, gold flakes that were tender green nubbins a few months back when I was thinking Thank God - no more goddam snow! As soon as I get done typing this, I swear, I'm going to go downstairs and get my copy of Farmer Boy & reread the Turn of the Year chapter, about autumn at the Wilders' red house in upstate New York. I recommend whoever's reading this to do the same - shoot, read the whole book! It really is wonderful. Timeless even.

My sister's been sick. She's got a doctor's appt. next week and we're worried. What's going on inside of her?

And I've been sick - bit o' food poisoning or something, but I'm better now and I hope I never have to throw up ever, ever, ever again. Don't you hate throwing up?

And John Lennon would be 71 today and I don't like the political incorrectness in me, my personal feeble-mindedness at still being kind of angry at Mark David Chapman, whose action outside of the Dakota was pretty likely symptomatic of mental illness so was it criminal? Was he bad or was he sick? I think both.

And the novel I've been working on has lots of good in it, but still a lot of not so good in it so I must wrestle w/ the angels. Do like I was telling a whole bunch of kids just the other day: Work hard until I make it look easy.

AND there are bunches of comfortably dressed people sitting out & about w/ badly designed signs because they're upset about the fact that our country's not what it was [and never has been, come to think of it]

because the gap between the rich & the poor is going Grand Canyon out from underneath our feet

because the middle class is slipping away

because school teachers are being laid off

because so many people are out of work

because big business & big govt. are pretty much one & the same

because the 'job creators' aren't creating jobs, not in America anyway. no, they're doing business and if they can do what they do for less money overseas, they're irresponsible, they're letting down their investors if they don't. if they can avoid paying taxes and get away with it, they're irresponsible if they don't and the future's a scary place. It always has been. So what's to do? Do what Steve Jobs did: Stay hungry [work to feed the hunger for what is needful, i.e. change. a better life. a better way of doing things, of making people happy, including yourself] Stay foolish [take chances].

So for me anyway, today, that means finish this novel, work on it until it's no longer stoopid. that's what I call the pursuit of happiness.

Here I am, Lauer

2011-10-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm just now ever so grateful for having survived the long dark road, just now home from the far eastern side of Missouri, from visiting Mason Ridge Elementary over in the environs of St. Louis. It was pointed out to me, by an alert reader, that I've been slacking, blog-wise. Because it feels so pointless sometimes. And then again, one's feelings are not the best indicator of what there is to be done. And not done.

That being said, gosh, how grateful and happy I am to get to gas away at innocent, delightful school children - THE best part of my job, THE most fun - I adore talking and drawing and making kids laugh, sharing w/ them the virtues, the pure joy of reading, learning, knowing, imagining those who have gone before. How grateful I am that no distraught deer hurled itself in front of my headlights out on I-70. How grateful I am to have been away, doing what I got to do today and to be home again, home again, rich in happy memories.

2011-09-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

So. I meant to write yesterday, honest, because all day long it was the 17th of September, 47 years since Charlie Finley, the owner of the KC Athletics, brought the Beatles to town. Why couldn't I go? Because we were living in a ratty old farmhouse, made worse by my messy family moving into it, down around Chilhowee, a good 60 miles from KC. I was 13. Couldn't drive. No friends. No money, but rich in anguish. My poor old long-commuting dad brought me a couple of Beatles singles. One was a Vee-Jay 45, the other a Capitol.... very, very, very nice of him, especially considering all the crap & ridicule I took off of him re: those long-hairs.... And I found out some time later that 17 Sept. 1964 marked 102 years since the Battle of Antietam. Nearly 23,000 men, lost, killed, wounded, just one day.

Just.

One.

Wretched, bloody day, poor souls.

And I got to participate [talk. sing (!), make people laugh - shoot, cut me off another slice of that! I love talking to a bunch o' people] in the annual author breakfast at the Reading Reptile. If you're ever in Kansas City, go there. You won't be sorry. You might think that you're walking into a bookstore. You'll quickly realize that you're entering Pete's & Deb's living work of art. I hurried home afterwards to take Mimi outside to relieve herself then got down to painting. Listening to The Good Earth. Boy oh boy, that Pearl Buck. no matter what else she wrote and she wrote a lot; she'd written her masterpiece. She was magic. [read it if you haven't] It's like no matter what J.,P.,Geo., & R. did, they'd been the Beatles to the world & carved their songs into the culture.

so I didn't write a word yesterday. didn't even sign a book. Nobody bought one.

Hard times, but there are compensations.

starting fresh

2011-09-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

So, it seems fitting to revisit this blog this week, being a time for new beginnings, buying school supplies, sharpening pencils. After a very long inertia siege, I've taken up one of my several unfinished novels. Beastly it is to conjure characters into existence then leave them languishing in my hard drive. I've a painting [for a handful of historical panels hereabouts, in the Queen City o' the Trails - did you know that a man who had worked long & hard to buy his freedom ended up building many a wagon, intended for the long trails to Oregon & Santa Fe? that he became a most prosperous businessman just a few blocks from where I sit typing?] to do, a sculpture [I've been taking myself weekly to a ceramics studio] to complete, and a massive revision to do, for a book having to do with the Gold Rush, when my hometown was far and away livelier than it is these days. So heck, why not blog?

I can think of lots of reasons....

Mid-May Madness

2011-05-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

So, I've lost count of how many days until I turn 60, but it's creeping up on me and after all, does it matter? I'll still be the same doofus I am now, but by then, God willing, I shall have this manuscript done. I'll have found out tomorrow that the illustrations I mailed at the US Post Office on Saturday morning made it to New York. Somewhere there is a publisher at which I still have a contract for a bona fide picture book, its publication long delayed. And what happened on this day in history? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to wager that loads of people were born or they fell in love or they died too soon. Or long after they prayed to go. All of the above. And outside, in the dark, purple irises are in bloom.

57

2011-05-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

The spirea are blooming as they doubtless were 127 years ago when Mittie Truman gave birth to baby Harry down in Lamar, MO. Mimi and I hiked up to his Presidential Library yesterday morning, a big fat thrill for a little black & white dog, getting to run, run, run all around the great green lawn. For me, it was more of a Rocky Balboa deal, trudging, huffing, puffing up the slope to the however many steps there are to the front porch to peer in through the big windows to see the tremendous Thos. Hart Benton mural that gleams from the wall within. What a glorious painting it is! Then back home again, all sweaty & breathless, Mimi panting & both of us eager for a cold drink of water. Out walking again this morning & determined I am to keep it up and get a good deal thinner than I am today, please God. Never have I been so .... well, I'm not going to type that particular F-word. I didn't expect to be so becalmed, unable to move through lack of wind in my sails, i.e. umph, at this stage of life.

BIRTHDAY

2011-05-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

SO, yes, today would have been Elaine Harness's 83rd birthday if she hadn't gotten her ticket punched back in the autumn of 1992 and glad for her I am, bless her heart, that she was able to pass away when she did. In the many years after this picture was taken, she had six more children, gained SO much weight, and got terribly, terribly sad. Life wasn't all she hoped it would be when she went to some California photo studio with little me. Some 13 years later she would tell me 'don't be like me.' Okay Mom, I pretty much ran with that little piece of advice.

How pleased and proud she always was, by the way, that she shared a birthday with the great and marvelous actor, Gary Cooper, who, had he not passed away way too soon in the spring of 1961, would be celebrating his 100th BIRTHDAY this very day. As for me, today makes 59 days before I turn 60, 59 more days in which I intend to make it my business to better observe poor Mom's sad, soft, thick, trapped, checked-out example as life has a way of catching up with a person if you're not careful, when you're not paying attention.

65, I think

2011-05-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

So, wide open popped my eyes when I switched on the BBC about 1 A.M. and heard the news that the old renegade had been surprised by intruders, shot in the head, & dropped in the ocean. So long Osama, it's been bad to know you.

Off I need to be going in the next little while, off driving across Missouri for to talk to three groups of sleep-deprived middle schoolers about books & such. Will they want to know that yesterday [today] marked 119 years since flying ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, THE Red Baron was born? We'll see, but I doubt it. Still, aerial battles. 80 victories, intense young pilots - pretty goddam thrilling. Will they care that today [tomorrow] is a birthday shared by Bing Crosby [who?] and Golda Meir [ditto]? But it'll be Pete Seeger's birthday. And Sugar Ray Robinson's. Oh well. I'll tell 'em about books, about history, its role in our lives, our role in history. After all, look how one person, caught up in a wide sequence of events, can bend it, as today's [yesterday's] death dude so demonstrated. Glad you're gone, O.b.L., you rascal you.

68

2011-04-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

Now yesterday I stood in a dim museum, what once was a busy RR station - set off from there with my grandma in 1967, on a train trip up to Julesburg, Colorado. In 1919, she [Eula] and her new husband [Harley Wolfe, home from the Great War] set to farming there..... I stood w/in inches of the ruffled taffeta gown Diana Spencer wore once upon a t. - went out & rented a color television just to see that wedding, golly, years & years ago.... So, this morning, to Mimi's mystification, I rolled out of the sack in the early dark to see today's Gown. Silk satin & lace it turned out to be and worth the getting up as were the Hats. I know it's a tiny bit chilly-hearted, watching all of this irrelevant hoohah [but gosh, the history ]when so many folks are sorting through the tragic storm wreckage. That Tuskaloosa twister came perilously close to a dear one. Ah well... thoughts are whirling fast. I'd better get to painting.

74

2011-04-23T07:35:00.001-07:00

So, I meant to post this yesterday, on the 22nd of April, which would have been my little brother Paul's 53rd birthday, had it not been for an icy road, a late night (in Jan - golly, all of a sudden I cannot recall the year, she wrote, appalled & chagrined.... 1980. that's when), and too much drinking. Paul's the little guy in the foreground here. Beautiful little boy. Toady - that was his nickname. And there's Timmy, head tilted and Gary, taller, older, darker of hair, more grievous of future as there are some things - life, for instance - worse than an early death.

And there am I, at age 11, holding baby Laura Jeanne.

Golly.

73

2011-04-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

"My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

So wrote Wilfred Owen. His words, his still all too goddam pertinent [thinking here, just now, of photographers Tim hetherington and Chris Hondros], words, are inscribed on the tombstone that marks the final resting place for Rupert Brooke, who died on the 23rd of April, 1915... thus sharing a deathday w/ Wm. Shakespeare....

. He was another British poet, another 'Tommy," one of the many thousands of British soldiers whose lives were lost in the Great War. Owen was 25, as a matter of fact, when he was killed in France in 1918, a week before the guns went silent.

Young men - and women - dying in the wake of the misdeeds of the old.

77

2011-04-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world. So begins Ralph Waldo Emerson's glorious poem honoring the citizenry of Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, and thereabouts, on the 19th of April, 1775. The people, the places, and their importance all deserve more time and more words than I can afford to give them right this minute. There is drawing to be done.

Long live the Republic.

78

2011-04-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

So. Here I am, I and Grace, my little red hoopie, as we appeared in Veda Jones's driveway in Joplin, Missouri, this past weekend, on my way over to the little town of Diamond. What's there? A beautiful museum, well worth the visiting, The George Washington Carver National Monument. It's got a peanut warning on the front door - made me smile.

The "Peanut Wizard" was born thereabouts in the early spring of 1865. For a bit more about Dr. Carver - really, a tremendous individual, you may well wish to read today's posting on the I.N.K. blog. Now, as for Interesting Nonfiction for Kids, I must go and, with luck and the continued application of the seat of my pants to the seat of this chair, write some.

80

2011-04-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

So, I'm BACK from a fairly longish drive down to the SW corner of MO & back, from gassing away to a swell gaggle of visitors to the Geo Washington Carver Monument. It's just outside of Diamond, what might be termed a hamlet. A village? Anyway, a nice little town with a TERRIFIC museum nearby, concerning the life & works of a most significant individual.

And the night before? Visiting, sniveling, eating, drinking, laughing, wine-ing & whining with dear, swellegant author friends Veda Boyd Jones & Vicki Grove ... then today: cold gray, soon turned to a lovely, cool & sunny 16th of April.

It's the anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's birthday in 1889 and that of lovely painter, Élizabeth Vigée Le Brun, in 1755. Garth Williams, whose illus. of Mrs. Wilder's books I loved so much when I was a little squirt [not so much now], was b. on this day in 1912, the day after the great ship went down, the day after Harriet Quimby flew the English Channel, 99 years ago.

81

2011-04-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

So, was it a rainy day like today, on this day in 1452, when Catarina gave birth to her son, Leonardo? The records say that it was Piero da Vinci who fathered the child upon her, the child who'd grow up, drawing as angels would if they cared to. Ah well, happy happy to Leonardo da Vinci, the original Renaissance Man, on the 559th anniversary of his birth. And to another painter, whom I saw walking about (at the art supply store where I worked), before he kicked the bucket -after all, sensational it would be if I saw Thos Hart Benton after he passed on. Not so by the way, not three blocks away from where I'm here typing is a most glorious mural of his - gosh, the COLOR! - up at the HST Presidential Library. Do see it if you haven't.

Now, off I go to southern Missouri, to another artist's old stomping grounds, to the birthplace of George Washington Carver. I'm to be talking about him tomorrow. I'll be sure to tell whomever shows up that there was far and away more to the gent than peanuts and that he deserves to be known and admired, as more than some quaint, peanut-butter-scented Black History Month icon.

A seeker after attention he was, but his sights were, for sure, set upon Truth.

82

2011-04-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

“America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

“The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue”

So, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee had very much more to say than this quartet of snippets, but wow, what a sampling! I only came across these because A.J.T. was b. on this day in history, on the 24th anniversary of the day on which John Wilkes Boothe got himself good & liquored up for a death-dealing at Mr. Ford's theatre. People doing bad things, thinking they're doing good things - that's history for you.