…is sometimes expressed most quietly.
To Jenn, from whom I have accepted the renewed gift of storytelling, I thank you for allowing me to draw a character loosely based on your biographical details.
The real person’s qualities outshine the fictional one and is so much more fun to share a dance without purpose, design or pretext.
May your friends and family forgive me if I draw them in poor lighting or exaggerated grotesquely.
Historians have never paid attention to one fact: our history was written by our parents before we were born.
Their actions, just like ours for our children, set the stage for their direct descendants.
You must have a clear understanding of that solid principle, that unwritten immutable law of the universe, before going on with this story.
For you see, before they were born, two famous aviators met Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for a memorable fictional character whilst Queen Victoria reigned.
While the middle-class prudes proved their noble worth, the threesome of Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter went off on an adventure.
Ever had a three-wheeled vehicle in which all three wheels steered independently? Most likely not. Either one wheel turns and the other two point permanently in one direction, or two wheels turn in synch with each other and the third wheel points permanently in one direction.
So it was with our flyers and their eccentric co-conspirator who set out on an unpublished expedition.
Unpublished until now, that is.
Ground into a pulp and turned into a felt hat were the notes, diaries and maps used by the explorers. It wasn’t until a new computer deciphering program was invented by a retired secret agent to ferret out the hidden codes in the city maps of foreign countries that the threads and fibers of the felt hat were pulled apart and reassembled in their original form.
The hat sat in a hat box as hats are wont to do, taking up space in the attic of one Hegrapevinucus Forvell, the famous daguerreotypist who had documented the lives of both the famous and notorious across two centuries.
M. H. Forvell died and left his fortune to a geographic feature named Pilot Knob in middle Tennessee, not far from Readyville, where his belongings were carted and stored in caves carved out of the rock.
Using an aeroplane-engined dirigible, Earhart navigated her two companions over the knob, spotting the secret caves one early dawn morning.
They tethered their lighter-than-air craft to an old pine tree and descended a rope ladder to the caves.
Stored in giant clay jars sealed with impenetrable tar and humongous glass jars sealed with water-resistant wax were the life’s work of Forvell.
Much of the information was repetitious — farm harvest records and stock market buys/sales/trades, for instance.
But one container held a series of inventions, some patented and some stamped “For My Eyes Only,” including one for converting printed paper or paper covered with handwriting into articles of clothing, wallpaper glue or, to the interest of M. Hatter, a felt top hat.
From then on, when one of the three had finished a logbook or diary, the Hatter would use Forvell’s secret formula to reconstitute the water-dissolved and shredded logbook or diary pages, forming hat shapes.
None of them was a more prolific writer than the other. However, multiplying their output by three meant quite a few journals were filling up on a weekly basis, driving the Hatter mad with desire to create as many new styles of hats as he could — tall, skinny, fat, short, see-through, invisible, and everything in-between.
Eventually the Hatter ran out of ideas for new hats and the two pilots realised they needed to return to public life.
Before they did, their records show they had more fun in a short period of time than should be legal (and some of it wasn’t!).
While they were tethered to Pilot Knob, they overheard some old-timey mountain music, the good stuff, hypnotic, said to turn you inside out, stop the motion of the planets and move you and the world around you over to the parallel train track of alternate universes.
Little did they know that they had changed their timeline.
They also had inadvertently invented a new social period called Steampunk.
The song they heard that changed history? Well, you already know what it is: “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” written so far back up in the hills, no one had heard of sheet music or sound recording devices, so no one knows exactly when the song was first created or by whom.
And by changing history, Lindbergh, Earhart and the Hatter changed everything, including the style of dancing the local people performed to their mountain music.
No longer did they buck or clog dance. They started a new craze, a dance sensation called the Lindy Hop and their clothing style became the name of the new era — Steampunk.
To get back to that time, Guin and Lee adopted the Steampunk clothing style and started learning a Lindy Hop dance routine that would induce a hypnotic trance and send them out of one spacetime continuum into another.
They had also found some of Forvell’s writings and wanted to create their own electromechanical wonders based on Forvell’s notes scribbled on incomplete inventions.
But which would you rather read about — how Guin and Lee invented a new form of space travel or what Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter discovered but had told no one because it was so earth-shakingly stupendous?
Don’t answer flippantly.
The answer you receive will shift history again, maybe by only the slightest change but also maybe by large changes all jumbled up together.
Be willing to accept the changes your answer causes.
Alice may never return from Wonderland and you don’t want that, I can tell you!
Thanks to her husband for letting me borrow USA Today bestselling author Kimberly Lang for a dance or two tonight during our East Coast Swing dance lesson. As a bonus, I even got Kim to autograph the copy of a book she gave me afterward, titled “The Downfall of a Good Girl,” dedicated to my sister, Anne.
Was Kim a good dancer? What? Are you kidding? Partners never kiss and tell what happened on the dance floor!
Besides, I’ve got my own novel to write and real life to influence it.
For instance, there’s a showcase on September 21st with a certain someone I want to feature in my novel and my wife has already conceded it won’t be her.
Jenn, think Abi and Gilley will let me borrow you for a showcase dance?
During my morning walk, passing through a wooded lane and out into former cotton/soybean/corn fields where I used to fly remote-controlled airplanes in winter, down the country road not far from old horse and emu farms turned into suburban tracts, the concrete slabs of sidewalk held bird droppings, algae, hardened footprints of a small dog and the label for a Sears brand lawnmower.
At six in the morning, cars and trucks rolled past, their occupants hidden from view.
Low clouds hung in the air as if to say, “We could have been fog if the air had been colder and more humid.”
Walking for 35 minutes, I met no other person walking or running. I saw one jogger off in the distance.
I was left to my thoughts, the early morning haze of dim dreams and leftover conversational thought trails.
Have you ever been overcome by smoke? Perhaps a campfire, a house on fire or chemical fogging?
Lack of sleep for months and years have turned me into a murky-minded zombie of sorts.
While people are dying while playing out their version of the Boston Massacre in Egyptian cities, I have the luxury of complaining about the lack of sleep.
Not a complaint, really.
Merely an observation about a snoring wife and cats who like to play musical chairs with beds and sofas at night.
After the walk, I returned home, kissed my wife on her way to work and showered, sitting down at my work desk, thinking about a friend who counseled my family during my father’s last days and penned the following note:
Tom had given his time unselfishly both while my father lay dying and after my father’s death so naturally there is a permanent bond between us just as there is a permanent bond to the man who married me to my wife.
I cracked open the Bible (Revised Standard Version) given to me by the Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church on September 26th, 1971, signed by the church pastor at the time, H. Reid Montgomery — nothing like having a real Scotsman for your Presbyterian minister to impress you as a child growing up in the church.
I immediately turned to the 23rd Psalm:
1 A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want; 2 he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
With that in my conscious thoughts, I wrote a letter of sympathy to Tom, asking him to let his stress-based depression be a gift rather than a burden.
During my walk and while writing, in my thoughts were remnants of a conversation last night between my wife, Guin and myself and a subsequent conversation between my wife and me about the previous conversation with Guin.
From an early age, I knew I was a socially-dependent person.
Even though my sister was a rival for my parents’ love, she was also a good companion to have because she followed me around and would do anything her big brother would.
She was a litmus test for my curiosity and courage.
When I was a teenager, I intercepted a note between a boy and girl in band class. The boy said I was in love with her and the girl wrote back that it was no big deal because I would fall in love with anything and anyone, even a piece of shit.
I knew what she meant. I have no filter for my love, accepting people for whomever they say they are or want to be, willing to overcome my subcultural conditioning and ignorance to determine their needs, helping to the best of my limited abilities.
As a person by myself, I have no needs, wants or expensive hobbies. I have been happy for many years now spending most of the day at home without human contact, writing books, coining journal/blog entries (often in response to online news/comments) and piddling around in the yard/garage.
However, should a person come to the door, I’m like an eager dog wagging his tail, desirous of conversation and face-to-face body language communication.
My codependent tendencies, my desire to please others, has not been completely detrimental to my health but it has caused problems, such as when, through rewards and encouragement from coworkers and upper management, I would give my all to a company objective only to miss the fact that the company no longer needed my department, laying off my employees but keeping me, giving me headache-inducing survivor’s guilt.
My hearing loss and blinding headaches in the last few years have, according to my wife, affected my memory, just like Tom.
For me, the question of whether being a virtual caged animal in a marriage of diminishing returns (i.e., if marriage is a protective nest for procreation, what happens when the chances for offspring approach nil?) is par for the course for my personality traits and/or not healthy/normal has not been answered despite marriage counseling and psychologist/psychiatrist sessions back in the 1990s.
My wife told me it has not gone unnoticed that when she, Guin and I are in conversation, Guin and I tend to mimic each other’s movements, as if Guin and I are two codependent personalities feeding off each other.
Guin is about the same height as my sister, with very similar body features — brown hair and medium athletic build.
She is athletic like my sister, like I thought my wife was when we got married, who went camping and hiking with me for several years before she admitted she’d rather stay at a hotel or B&B in the mountains than hike to a mountaintop and sleep in a bag on hard ground, her clothes and hair smelling badly like campfire smoke on the way back to our house late Sunday evenings, requiring a late-night shower instead of much-needed sleep. I admit that I hike less than I used to, replacing hikes with suburban walks/jogs, like substituting cotton candy for nutritious fruits and veggies.
Because my memory loss has increased, I have fully adopted the writer’s slogan, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Or better yet, maybe a fake quote by Mark Twain would apply better here: “During my recent European excursion, I spoke to a man named Freud who was convinced that all of man’s thoughts and actions are based on sex. He’s obviously never met Mrs. Twain.”
In any case, my wife says that I have gotten into the habit of making up what she said to me, wishing she had access to a voice recorder that could play back what she really said in a conversation versus what I twisted and reworked into a personally-entertaining blog entry or short story.
So, what is the truth? Why do I enjoy dancing with Guin in ways unimaginable with my wife? In Mars’ gravity, for instance.
Is it simply the recognition of a similar thought set in another person, eager to let thoughts and ideas take off exponentially/logarithmically as if there is no tomorrow because after you’ve been in a life-threatening automobile smashup and seen Death, shaking his cold hand and smelling his bad breath, you embrace life because you know there is no promise for a tomorrow on this planet?
Is that why I have a burning desire to see myself in writing at least once day, virtually screaming to the world “I’m not dead yet!”
Would I dance every night until they turn off the lights if I had the chance?
Would dancing for hours completely flatten out my feet like marathon training/running used to do?
If there is no tomorrow, hadn’t I better answer these questions today?
After a recent trip to New Orleans and a dinnertime discussion with my niece about the voodoo culture of the Big Easy, I looked down at my mother’s copy of Reader’s Digest and saw a totally different cover.
The original cover:
What I saw:
You know steampunk has entered the mainstream when more than two pages of [Simplicity/McCall’s/Butterick] steampunk costume design patterns are available in a Walmart DIY clothing catalog at the fabrics department.
I am a woodsman in that I am a man who lives in the woods. I respect the right for private property ownership such that if we are all responsible stewards of the land we own, then our community benefits us, providing us good health, space for happiness and time to prosper.
I also believe that good fences, even virtual ones, make good neighbours — keep your eyes out of my business, including drones, network snooping/spying and next-door peeping Toms — in other words, I believe I can trust my neighbours to do the right thing, even when evidence points to the contrary, thus leaving room for education, instruction, advice and creative/constructive criticism to steer us toward being good neighbours, regardless of the past.
My next-door neighbours, Robert and Lauren Justice and their child, Olivia Grace Justice, like to keep their outdoor lights on at night — it adds an aesthetic value as well as provides a sense of security; however, when I sleep in the sunroom at night, their lights are disturbing, or, when I want to look at stars, planets and moons, their lights are a distraction.
Thus, I am led here, to this moment, where I begin documenting the privacy fence I’m constructing that simply blocks our back deck and sunroom from our neighbours, allowing both of us to use our private property as we please while leaving as much as the woods open between us.
= = = = =
A few years ago, a subcontractor built a sunroom attached to our house. During construction, I added a “French drain” under the sunroom to prevent water running off the hill behind our house from flooding our crawlspace.
After they finished the sunroom, I built a new wood deck. At that time, the lot next to ours was undeveloped so our deck extended out into the woods.
= = = = =
Eventually, the lot next door was developed, making us feel crowded in by suburbia:
Before our sunroom was built, I disassembled the old back deck where the sunroom would go, cutting down a tree to make room for the new back deck. I piled the pieces of deck wood on the ground, eventually moving them to the side of the house, where they sat for almost ten years.
Now it’s time to design the new privacy fence. First, I need some architectural inspiration:
Basically, I need a 12-foot tall fence.
So, the bottom six feet will be a louvered fence and the top six feet a type of trellis.
But I want a trellis design that reflects my background, but not overtly. Some inspirations from Celtic crosses:
First “cut” of the design:
…followed by iterations…
I have at least one stained glass piece to add to the fence:
This is the final version I hope to achieve (taking into account the best-laid plans of mice and men, unlevel posts and all that, of course):
The whole fence will be backed by reed fencing from Lowe’s:
But first, time for a beer! 😉
treetrunkdings 