Tom Maggliozzi -- I'm sorry to lose you

If you have 5 and a half minutes, listen to this. If you don't have 5 and a half minutes, make them and listen anyway. 

from YouTube

 In January of 1997 I was listening to Car Talk on NPR and driving West on I-44 in Oklahoma City, coming up to the Lincoln Avenue exit when Tom and Ray Maggliaozzi got the above telephone call.
  LIVE! That's right John Grunsfeld was talking to them as I was listening. I was hearing a conversation between two men in Boston, Massachusettes, and a man in space as it happened.
  Okay, no big deal today. And the broadcast from Boston wasn't too big a deal then. But from the Space Shuttle on its way to MIR. That was a big deal.
   Forty years earlier, the Russians put Sputnik into low earth orbit. I was in the fourth grade, too young to worry about the security of the United States. But the fact that that very small, man made satellite was up there fired my imagination. I spent a lot of my spare time drawing space stations and imagining what living in space would be like. Imagining. Imagining.
  And then people started actually going into space. Alan Shephard was the first American and, of course, I knew he would be the first because he was a Navy man and my daddy was in the Navy. And I thought that by the time I was old enough to do it myself, living in space would be a reality. I thought there would be regular folks living in space. I still believe that's the future for humanity. I don't know if I'll live long enough to see that, but I'll never forget that "regular sounding" phone call to the Tappet Brothers.
  Thank you Tom. And Ray. You made me laugh out loud. You made me sit in the car after I'd gotten where I wanted to go just so I could listen to the rest of your show. And you made me listen to Country and Western music. Who knew they even had C&W way up there in Boston? I'll miss you, Tommy. My thoughts are with Ray and your family and all your NPR fans.
  And I promise I won't drive like your brother.

Happy Halloween -- Flash Fiction

image from metsblog.com

Why couldn’t Elizabeth buy the candy? He’d gone into the office early and met with vender reps all morning. He missed those long leisurely, pre-recession luncheons paid for by the reps. All afternoon he’d dealt with a ridiculous personnel problem. How could full-grown people act like hormone-driven teens at work? And now he had to stop and get candy. She’d left a voice mail that he should be home before five with candy.

He didn’t mind that she didn’t work. He made enough money for them to live comfortably now. And he appreciated that she had worked the whole time the children were growing up.

Thank goodness they were all grown up and had been very little trouble in doing it. There’d been no going down to the local police station to retrieve them. Not even meetings with various and sundry school officials about major infractions. What problems there had been Elizabeth had handled.

Shopping for candy should have been a quick in and out deal. He never imagined how many women waited until the last minute to buy Halloween treats. Why did they bring their over-tired kids? Probably fresh from daycare. Shopping in that crowd would probably be the biggest nightmare of the night. Those were, no doubt, the little darlings who would be ringing his bell from five until nine.

Oh, yes, the doorbell and strangers coming to the door after dark. With his dog, that should make for a quiet, peaceful evening. Mungo would be hoarse by morning.

And, no, he would not dress up in some ridiculous costume to hand out candy.

Elizabeth wasn’t there when he got home. She complained about never going out. He didn’t like going out. He was “out” all day. He liked to come home, have a quiet dinner, watch a little TV, and go to bed. He took her out. To eat. Sometimes to a movie. She said they hadn’t been to a movie since the last Star Trek movie. That didn’t sound right, but he didn’t keep track of things like that. Besides, she could go out whenever she wanted. He wasn’t one of those overbearing, macho men who had to have their thumb on “the little woman” every minute.

Had she said where she was going? Probably. Maybe she said something about Christmas and going downtown. That didn’t sound like Elizabeth. He wished he hadn’t deleted the voice mail.

She’d left him stew in the fridge.

Four-forty-five p.m. He considered himself a competent adult. He turned on the news and put a bowl of stew into the microwave. Mungo bounced around his feet. She apparently had not fed the dog. The microwave dinged as he set Mungo’s dinner on the floor. Before he could get to the microwave, the doorbell sounded. Mungo barked like mad and raced to the door.

He hadn’t put the candy in the jack-o-lantern bucket yet. Kids didn’t care about that stuff. He tore the candy bag open and dropped hands-full into a skull bucket, a sparkly princessy bucket, and a grocery bag.

He turned on the porch light and returned to the dinging microwave. Mungo returned to his food. Damn. The stew had splattered all over the microwave. Elizabeth hated it when he forgot to use the cover.

The doorbell again. And he still hadn’t put the candy in the pumpkin bucket. Mungo was off like a rocket – a loud rocket.

By eight o’clock he’d run out of candy. He scrounged through his sock drawer and found two rolls of quarters. But the trick-or-treaters were getting bigger. How many quarters should he give a kid bigger than him, who wasn’t wearing a costume as far as he could tell, and was carrying a king-size pillow case half full of loot? Even Mungo was intimidated.

Nine o’clock and his stew was still in the microwave. Where was Elizabeth?

He turned off the porch light, cleaned up the microwave, and made himself a cheese sandwich. He opened a beer and dumped half a bag of chili cheese corn chips on his plate. He found a movie on the TV. A war movie. He liked Tom Hanks. After this evening, explosions and machine gun fire would be calming.

One-thirty a.m. The doorbell and Mungo woke him. He didn’t understand where he was. There was no more candy and no more quarters. The time glowed red on the cable box. Some kind of zombie thing stumbled across the TV screen. The doorbell rang again. Mungo was going crazy. He shut the dog in Elizabeth’s sewing room. Where was that woman?

He switched the porch light on and looked through the peep hole in the front door – the 180-degree jumbo bronze security viewer he’d spent less than $20 on and more than two hours installing.

And there, on the brightly lit front porch stood two of the biggest cops he’d ever seen, one on either side of Elizabeth in a Santa suit.

Imagination -- short essay

earth-mind from dreamstime.com

The mind is a wonderful thing. It invents everything – even things that can’t be. Or, at least things that the very same mind can’t make be.

I had a dream, a very strange dream.

Something happened to the earth. A cataclysm that shook and frightened my sleeping self. And my first clue that something big had happened was in the sky. The clouds swirled oddly. Into a sort of disc, white clouds with blue sky all around.

And a man rode a horse off the edge of the earth. And lived to tell the tale. (This was a dream, after all.) Then somehow I could see the earth from a distance and it was a series of discs with space between, stacked several high. Maybe five or six. I don’t know. I didn’t count them. I was asleep.

None of the discs was the interior of the earth, just the mantel. Quite pretty, actually – all shades of blue and brown and green.

Dreams are fine, sufficient within themselves. But this dream stayed with me as I was waking. And my waking mind immediately set out to discover how this dream could be real.

How could this possibly work? Gravity? How thick would each disc have to be to have enough gravity to stay that close together? To hold the atmosphere? Then there are questions about rotation, atmospheric circulation, distribution of solar heat to generate weather and those clouds that so conveniently formed a disc, too. Not to mention having enough soil to grow grass and trees and horses for men to ride off the edge.

Where are the physicists and cosmologists when you need them?

There’s the rub. Scientists use their imaginations to figure out how the universe works, not ways to make it work the way we imagine.

Dammit Jason -- flash fiction

image from people.com

“Dammit Jason.”

“Honest Mom. I didn’t mean to kill her. She’d a killed me if I hadn’t done it.”

“Eighteen years old and you can’t handle your granny’s pig?”

“But she was gonna bite me. More’n bite me. She’d a killed me.”

“Dammit Jason. She’s a pig. Granny’s the one you’re gonna have to run from when she finds out you killed her pig.”

“That’s why I called you. I knew you’d know what to do.”

“You just be sure that blanket’s coverin’ up the floorboard. I swear the only danger my car’s ever been in has been you. You and your friends. Just two beers, my sweet Aunt Sassy. Smelled to high heaven for three weeks and now there’ll be blood all over.”

“But she ain’t bleedin’.”

“She ‘isn’t’ bleedin’.”

“I know, Mom. That’s what I just said.”

“Dammit, Jason. You said ‘ain’t.’”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”

“You pick up her front part. I’ll get her back legs.”

“She’s still warm.”

“And why wouldn’t she be? I came right over didn’t I?”

“Mom! I think she moved.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Pick her up. She can’t bite you now. You just wait ‘til your father hears what you’ve done.”

“Do we have to tell him?”

“No, Jason. We don’t have to tell him anything. You have to tell him. Now get in the car.”

“Can I turn on the radio?”

“No, Jason. You can just sit there in the quiet and think about what you’ve done until we get out past the Simpson place.”

“We gonna dump her in the river?”

“No. We are not going to dump her in the river. I’d have nightmares for weeks thinking of that poor, dead, bloated pig driftin’ on down to the Gulf. Your Granny loved that pig.”

“Did you hear something?”

“No, Jason. I didn’t hear anything except your snufflin’.”

“I ain’t snufflin’. Isn’t. I’m not snufflin’.”

“We’ll dump her in that old irrigation ditch just this side of the levee.”

“Mom, she’s movin’.”

“Jason, wishing and imagining isn’t going to make her alive again.”

“Stop, Mom! We gotta get out. She’ll kill us both.”

“Dammit, Jason.”

Writing Emotion

Comedy/Tragedy from etsy.com

The question is how best to represent emotion in literature. I have been charged with insufficiently communicating my characters’ emotions. My writing teacher and, even more so, my fellow writing students read bits and pieces of my work and invariably ask “but how does he feel?”

Here is a bit from Murder on Ceres. Rafe and Joe have just returned from witnessing a crash that killed all on board.

Joe stopped pacing. “Man, you lose power and you got nothin’. No floating, no sailing, no gliding. Without atmosphere, there’s no nothin’.”

Rafe closed his eyes, but that was no good. He could still see those flashes of light. He stood and went to the door. “We couldn’t see anything. But they’re gone. I have no doubt. They’re all gone.”

At the end of the scene each reacts to the horrifying incident in his own way. 

Joe calls his ex-wife.

“Brenda? Hi, baby. You sleepin’? Yeah, yeah I know it’s late. I just thought, you know, maybe I could come by…” He bowed his head. “Yeah, of course. You’re right. No. No. I understand. Is Joey okay?” He stood and stretched, arching his back. “That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. No. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll pick him up Wednesday morning.” Joe let his hands drop to his sides.

A quick ten-count later, Joe keyed his mobile again. “Hi, Linnie. Yeah, I’m good. How are you?” Joe leaned back in his chair. “So, you free after work? Yeah. I’d like that. Meet you at your place in about an hour.”

Rafe deals with it differently.

“There is always light in the darkness. Manny Turrentine.” Rafe quoted to no one in particular A little longer and he’d be finished here. He’d go home and the whole place would be lit up like full sun, canaries singing, and his wife pregnant. He would wrap himself in her and this day would be far away.

Minutes passed as Rafe made his account of what he’d witnessed. More minutes than words should take. More minutes than the crash took that killed all on board.

To me, both men are displaying emotion. Not by ranting and raving and chewing the scenery, but by rigid self-control. They distance themselves from the death, each seeking reassurance by reconnecting with their own real, familiar lives. 

            I would like to write emotion. My characters are not shallow people, at least not in my head. They do have emotions. I admire what I consider 'restrained emotion.' That's what I want to write.  Perhaps not quite so restrained as Cormack McCarthy. 
My daughter, who knows me and my work, says I should take care not to be too subtle. She says I should read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." That I'm more like him than I care to admit. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

With or Without Eyebrows

 without eyebrows and with

Photos by Bowtie Photography

    First of all let me just say the photos were taken by my everything-daughter Grace's boyfriend Bob O'Daniel. You can find examples of his work on deviantart.com under bowtiephotography. He was in no way responsible for my makeup.

   I wanted to write a book and have it on the shelves in the Edmond Public Library. A fairly simple want, don't you think?

   I attended classes with an excellent writing teacher, William Bernhardt. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had what I thought was a pretty good book. I hired an editor, Grace Wagner (gfmwagner@gmail.com. She edits for other writers, too. Not just her mother. I'm lucky to have her in-house.) and enlisted Beta readers including authors, a retired police detective, a retired librarian, some analytical readers, and some recreational readers. Then rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. I understand this is necessary even if you get accepted by an agent and one of the Big Five publishing houses.

   I pitched Murder on Ceres and submitted it to agents and editors, all to no avail. I've listened to other authors tell horror stories about submitting manuscripts and never hearing back. About getting and losing agents and getting agents who didn't seem to push their books. The writing community is rife with bad news about the traditional publishing world. Publishing houses downsizing and struggling even with their legacy writers. Ebooks are taking an ever greater share of the market and the old vanity presses are being replaced by legitimate small publishing houses and self-publishing. All of which seems to be throwing the New York publishers into more of a muddle.

I am obviously (look at my photos) no longer in my 20's or 30's or, for that matter, my 50's. I don't have all the time in the world to get discovered amid all this chaos. So I self-published with Amazon's Create Space.

   Murder on Ceres is a beautiful book. It's listed on Amazon, available in both print and Kindle editions. Among many thousands of other books. To catch readers' attention, I must promote it myself. Which brings us to those two pictures. Our purpose the evening that Bob came was to make a photo for business cards.

   My hairdresser had advised me to wear makeup which I don't ordinarily do. Eye-liner, the whole nine yards. I bought makeup. Now keep in mind that during my single days and working-in-the-public days, my eyebrows were still dark enough to show up without using eyebrow pencil. They're almost as pale as my hair now. I stood in the makeup aisle quite a while trying to decide what color eyebrow pencil I should buy. Have you looked at makeup recently? Not only are there seemingly millions of brands, but each brand has twenty-eleven different colors of everything -- foundation, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. I chose the slate eyebrow pencil thinking slate is gray. Right?

   Now the only other time I'd used an eyebrow pencil was for my mother after she died. I had watched her apply her eyebrows many times and I did a pretty good job for her for that last time.

   I thought about my own eyebrows. They had always been fuller than Mother's, so it made sense to me that I should make mine rather full.

    By the bye, slate is very dark gray.

   Bob was setting up his equipment -- lights, those umbrella things, a matte black backdrop -- while I did my makeup. Pretty soon my husband came to see what was taking me so long. He stepped to the bathroom door. I was facing the mirror. When I turned to face him, he got such a look of startlement (Is there such a word?) that it scared me.

   He quickly recovered and, being of sound mind and sensibly cautious, he allowed as how he wasn't used to seeing me in makeup. Bob, also being of sound mind, didn't even stutter-step. He just told me where to stand, adjusted the lighting, and took the pictures.

   As he left, Bob asked if he could come back the next evening if Grace didn't like any of the pictures he'd taken.

   The next morning, bright and early, Grace called. "What were you thinking? Did you look in the mirror?"

   "I didn't think they looked that bad," said I.

   "No, Mother," she said in that tone. "They look fine for a stand-up comedian. Groucho-Marx-ish."

    Grace may be of sound mind, but when it comes to her mother she's never been sensibly cautious or even vaguely tactful. But she loves me.

   "Bob and I will be there this evening after I get off work. Do NOT put makeup on before I get there," she said. 

    I think she was right.

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Great Grandma's Geese -- creative nonfiction

Poppy Seed Kolaches

image from laurassweetspot.com

I grew up among story tellers. On holidays they’d meet at the dinner table. The men and big boys got the table first and had first shot at the food. When they cleared out, the women would sit down. Us kids either ate with the women or we had our own table off to the side, depending on just how many people were there. But everybody told stories – men, women, and children. Ours was an equal opportunity story-telling family.

Now that I think about it, they also told stories out on the front porch in the evening before the mosquitos got too thick. And in the cellar during those scary Oklahoma storms.

Those stories were true, or mostly anyway. They would begin more or less like this one. “Did I ever tell you about your Great Grandma Hrdlicka’s geese?”

Our Great Grandma Hrdlicka – or Grandma or Mother-in-law, depending on the generation telling the story – was Bohemian. And I don’t mean she wore racy clothes or threw wild parties awash in alcohol. Though beer was much more accepted by many in my family than by most of our Oklahoma neighbors.

Both she and my great grandfather came to this country from Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. Kolaches were a common holiday food. They’re a little like Danish, but heavier. Sometimes they’re filled with prunes and sweetened cottage cheese or cherry pie filling or apricot preserves. My particular favorite is poppy seed filling.

From what I understand, Bohemia was a mountainous country that got pretty cold in the winter. Probably still does. Oklahoma may not be particularly mountainous, but it sure gets cold in the winter. When this story happened, it was well before central heat. In fact when I was a kid, it was well before central heat.

But I digress.

In my great grandmother’s time, they grew most of the things they needed including the fruit and poppies for kolachen. They also kept geese for their feathers to make feather beds and meat for the table.

One late-summer day she found her geese scattered dead around the pond. Something had to be done. The geese had not been dead long. They were still warm to the touch. They had no wounds and had that morning seemed perfectly healthy. She had no idea what could have killed them. She couldn’t take a chance on cooking them for the family. But nothing was allowed to go to waste. So she plucked them.

That evening when my great grandfather came in from the field, there was a gaggle of confused, naked geese running around. They apparently liked poppy seeds, too.