“They don’t LOOK like they’re in love,” said Meadow Saffron, flinging flower petals after the trio.
“They’re just pretending,” Sweet Pea assured her. “You can tell.”
Rick turned. “Who said ‘Remember me’?”
“I gave you a card,” Paula reminded him.
“It didn’t sound like you.” He shrugged. “Must have been Dickie. Eh, Dickie?” The baby chortled.
“Nice move pulling out their earplugs,” said Bluebell.
“That’ll be their song forever after,” said Meadow Saffron, folding her arms and nodding.
“What about right after?” Primrose flew up to Unfirom’s eye level. “When are they going to do it?”
The angel winced a bit but his reply was steady enough. “The same day and time as before, only not at the party. And they know about reach other now, and Dickie.”
“Yippee!” Sweet Pea kicked up into the air and hovered on her back. “So he won’t say the wrong thing?”
“He will,” Unfirom said. “But it will be a different wrong thing.”
“And?” demanded Bluebell. “And and And and And?”
“And you will see them in the park many times–over the next seven years always with a stroller. And one day we will be needed for Dickie and his intended.”
“Oh, I do like stories that are continued,” sighed Meadow Saffron, waving at them as the three as they crossed the street.
“They had me worried.” Sweet Pea plummeted to a level where she could pluck blades of grass with her toes without having to sit up. “I thought if Dickie kept laughing, they’d be happy, too.”
“It was that silly magazine,” sighed Bluebell. “I tried to keep them from paying attention to it.”
Primrose swung a violet like a spear. “Ooh, it would be so lots easier if I had a magic wand!”
“What would you do with it?” demanded Meadow Saffron. “Aside from making the guys’ shorts all fall down?”
“Well, once you get the shorts down, there’s all kinds of options.” The phron swung her violet spear horizontally.
“It’s going to rain,” said Sweet Pea, folding her arms behind her head. “Their bottoms would get all wet.”
“You betcha,” said Primrose, through the flower stem between her teeth.
“And it’s going to get dark.” Meadow Saffron tipped not only her head but her whole body back to study the sky. “You wouldn’t be able to see.”
“I can still see now,” said Bluebell. “Look!”
She shot up into the sky, reached and peak, and then dove straight down into a trash cn. Each of the other phronik held up a number of fingers to grade the plummet, but oohed as she rose above the rim, a square orange candy wrapper dropping across her head like a floppy hat.
“Is this high fashion or not?” she demanded.
“Yes,” said the angel.
Bluebell shot out of the can and stopped one inch from his nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Unfirom nodded at her headwear. “That is high fashion. Or not.”
The phron tipped her hat forward with one thumb. “Did you ever fly?”:
“Of course,” said the angels, his eyebrows up.
Bluebell flashed dazzling teeth. “How? When you’re so heavy?”
“Whoops!” Sweet Pea, still in midair, flipped over onto her stomach. “I smell fries!”
“But it’s too early@!” Primrose exclaimed, as everyone rushed toward the fence in the direction Sweet Pea was looking. “How much time did we spend on those two?”
“Which two?” demanded Meadow Saffron, her head swinging left and right, her nose sniffing for fried food.
“There!” squawked Bluebell. “There they are!”
A woman with red overalls over a white tube top was walking along the sidewalk beyond the fence, munching the last of an order of fries. The phronik leapt and pirouetted along the top of the fence, calling “Drop it! Drop it! Drop it drop it drop it!”
One fragment of fry dropped from her fingers, took a lucky bounce, and landed on the lowest horizontal rail of the fence. The phronik pounced.
“I’ll go watch for other couples,” said Unfirom. He liked, when possible, to avoid watching them eat.
Meadow Saffron, elbowing Sweet Pea away from the potato piece, replied, “Don’t hurry! We’ve got business!”
Sweet Pea was responding with a knee, but spotted an entire fry bouncing through the fence. “Ooooh, I just love a sloppy eater!”
“As usual,” the angel informed them, “I will summon the four of you when you are needed.”
Blubell, clutching an armful of cold potato, fluttered up to him again. “How come you always need to call us all?” She pushed the fried fragment into her mouth and somehow continued, “Why can’t we do it in shifts?”
“I wore a skirt,” said Primrose.
Blubell shook her head, nearly dislodging her orange hat. “No, listen. Two of us could eat, to keep up our strength, while the other two do the job.”
The Angel’s face was impassive, but there was the teeniest hint of strained eternal patience in his voice. “I’ve told you. It takes all four auras.”
Meadow Saffron, keeping her eyes on the woman with the generous bag of fries, still heard this, and replied, “Well, you’re the auricle.”
“I say it’s just auratory,” said Primrose, waggling a finger at the woman, in hopes this would do for a wand.
Sweet Pea jumped over her lying crosswise on the fence, and sang “If there’s something nice to say, say it Aura Lee!”
Unfirom had already found their most recent couple rather trying along these lines. “Each of you has an aura which calls to the romantic in a mortal’s being. Primrose‘s aura is of young love, Meadow Saffron that of love in old age. Sweet Pea is shallow, impulsive love, and yours is of deep devotion.”
Bluebell put a thumb in her mouth. “I knew that.”
“Did you?” inquired the angel.
“I’ve got a feeling you’ve said it before,” the phron informed him. “Your nose twitches when you say things over. But why couldn’t we mix it up? Young Love there could go out with shallow, and do the high school kids, so Old Age and I could do everybody who’s ovwe twenty-three!”
“Hey!” shouted Primrose. “I’d be doing most of the work!”
“No, no dear,” boomed Meadow Saffron. “You don’t want to cross the street! Not really! Come eat in the park! It’s so pretty!”
The woman could not hear her, but did pause. “Yay!” shouted Sweet Pea, when she turned left instead of right.
“See what power we’ve got?” demanded Bluebell, her eyes shifting back and forth between the woman with food and the angel with attitude. “We could probably do it ONE at a time!”
“Frankly, you can’t be trusted to do it four at a time,” the angel informed her. “That’s what I’m doing here.”
“Is that it?” demanded Bluebell, kicking at his nose with both feet and just missing. “I thought you were just being a creepy old toad!”
“Hunger has an effect on your disposition,” Unfirom replied, “I shall leave you to your snack and resume my patrol.”
‘Think you’re so smart.” She glared as he strode away but was able to spot a falling fry and catch it before it hit the grass. Sweet Pea, meanwhile, took a stance at one corner of the container of fries, the better to watch as potato went into the woman’s mouth.
Not long after that, the last of the potatoes were gone, and she had nothing left to do but slide down the greasy sides of the container. “Bye!” she called, waving to her departing hostess. “Thanks for everything!”
Bluebell, meanwhile, had finished eating and had taken Meadow Saffron by one elbow. “Why don’t you and me go out and show something to that sniffy angel?”
Meadow Saffron frowned. “I don’t know. When I showed him my sore toe I stubbed yesterday, he didn’t look very interested.”
“No no.” Bluebell crouched a little and, glancing behind her to make sure no one else was listening and then up, to make sure Meadow Saffron still was, whispered, “I mean show him that the two of us can do one whole couple all by ourselves.”
“Youi mean by auraselves,” said Meadow Saffron. “Do you think we could?”
“It’ll be easy.” Bluebell tried clapping her hands and snapping her fingers at the same time, without much success. “He just doesn’t want us to find out how much we can do without his old bother. Huh! Think we need an angel?”
“Yes.” Meadow Saffron sat down in the grass and began to twiddle her thumbs. “He knows which ones are the items, and will get their whole business wrong.”
“Oh, that.” Bluebell twiddled two thumbs and one big toe. “We can just pick two people and…. There! Them!”
Matthew Melt glared along the cracked sidewalk. “I remember the houses being whiter.”
“I suppose you remember the grass being greener,” replied the orange and black individual, without expression.
Matthew glared at Mohankle. The parchment with the spell on it had not been inexpensive, the ingredients for a potion not easy to find. But the chance to slip fifty years back in time and look over his home town should have been worth the trouble. First off, though, he had expected a guide just a little more impressive than this multicolored individual in a cheerleader outfit from Matthew’s old high school.
When Mohankle had finished materializing out of the cloud of steam, Matthew had demanded, “If only I can see you, why bother with that rig?”
Mohankle had met Matthew’s hauteur with his own. “How do you know it’s not what I wear all the time? Let’s get on with it.” A spirit from the beyond should have shown a little more respect, he thought, particularly on finding out that one had been summoned by the famous Matthew Melt.
Still, he felt he could put up with it, just to put the finishing touches on his memoirs. Lafayette had been a sad shock to him, though. The wonderful stores downtown were a little cheap and tawdry to his older eyes, the school a shabby matter with battered textbooks and antique seats, his parents’ house a dingy place whose massive front stairs seemed to have been replaced with short concrete steps.
What he had mainly come back to see, though, was the source of his discontent. “I haven’t seen one sign of greatness so far,” he muttered, mainly to himself.
Mohankle shrugged. “Keep watching. It has to be there.” His voice, though, showed just a mite of disbelief. Matthew glared at him again, and then at the boys across the street.
All he had wanted to add to his notes was testimony to the blindness of his neighbors. They had somehow failed to see, throughout his youth, the aura of future greatness that radiated from everything the young Matthew Melt did. He had wanted to see for himself what a great man looked like in childhood, and point out the hints that somehow his whole family and neighborhood had missed.
Young Matthew had taken some hunting. Finally, though, here the boy was in shabby, cramped (it was a lot bigger in Matthew’s recollections) Garry Park, playing “Airplanes”, a game which had always appealed to him for its strategy and timing but which from across the street seemed to involve mainly making a lot of noise.
He watched himself trip and fall into a puddle. “Doesn’t seem to be so bright,” Matthew muttered, watching him splash the mud onto Kevin and Kim.
“You weren’t, actually.” Next time, Matthew thought, he’d call up an otherworldly spirit with a sense of respect, or at least less sensitive hearing.
“It isn’t!” he snapped. “You’ve brought me to the wrong place.” He thought about this. “That’s it! This is one of those alternate universes, where things were different. It’s someone else’s past! The railroad didn’t bring the line through Lafayette in this universe. That’s why it’s so small, and the school’s so underfunded. I didn’t get the same schooling. Miss Schmidt probably didn’t teach grade school in this universe, and I grew up….” He pointed at the grubby boy in the park. “Like that!”
Young Matthew, dodging the mud thrown back at him by Kim, ran out into the street. A Corvette came around the corner much too fast.
Seeing himself lying in the roadway, blood spurting, whiny voice pleading to be told what happened, Matthew’s reaction was one of triumph.
He jumped up, hand outstretched. “That proves it! That didn’t happen! The car missed me!”
Mohankle had also risen from the bench. “Because you weren’t distracted by the fat old man ranting to himself across the street.”
“Ha!” Matthew shook a finger at the boys clustered around the boy, who had stopped whining. “But that would mean I never grew up to be…wait!” The finger he was pointing looked a bit transparent.
“This is actually your own past,” said Mohankle. “Now.”
The words lingered longer than the mouth that uttered them “That’s silly!”
“True,” said Mohankle, now alone on the sidewalk. “Very silly.” And, with a nod, he vanished.
It seems to me that though we have done our due diligence in reporting o the behavior of dogs and cats (and chickens and storks and skunks) on postcards, we have been ignoring an only slightly less popular postcard mammal. We have spoken very little on the activities of rabbits, bunnies, and bunny rabbits.
Rabbits are, of course, very involved with Easter cards. Rabbits and eggs have worked together on this holiday for centuries, due to the intricate relationship of Spring, Rebirth, Fertility, and other symbols of the Sunday.
Why the Easter Egg and the Easter Bunny came to be the most famous pop-folk symbols of the celebration is a story just as intricate, but what matters to the postcard artist is how the story can be told on a card.
This is sometimes done in surprising ways. After all, where are the jelly beans?
Of course, rabbits are also a popular symbol of something else related to fertility and spring.
Not all of these postcards are quite as inventive as the Easter ones. But then, what the rabbits have been up to is not all that original either.
Bunnies are bunnies, after all.
Except when they’re not, of course. (I am also intrigued by the artist’s decision to give the lady rabbit a figure that lets you know who’s the mamma.
If we’re going to talk popular folk roles for rabbits, we also have this card, which took me, um, a little while as I tried to figure out what I was looking at. Kinda sorry I DID figure it out. Good luck my…let’s move on.
This card is unusual, for though there are plenty of good, reliable photographs which show cowboys mounted on the backs of jackalopes, this is one of the few which makes the noble steed a common jack rabbit. And whereas the average jackalope postcard includes a long paragraph on the back explaining the history of that rare breed, the back of this postcard treats it matter-of-factly, stating merely that every cowboy has a favorite bronc for the job of cattle punching, and this is a popular choice.
The folklore of the jackalope is extensive, and really a matter for a whole nother blog, but just to remind you that there IS an obvious difference between a jackalope and a jack rabbit, here is a reminder.
If you’re looking for real exploration of the history of the bunny rabbit, you need to get yourself more like this one, which shows there isn’t really all that much mystery about rabbits at all, if you just think things through.
There is THIS mystery, though. I have been unable to find out much about the farm run by THIS rabbit, but we may hear more of it some day. It may look like a perfectly genial agricultural community (in fact, some people have opined that the rabbit is explaining to the cow that it’s HER turn to drive the tractor TOMORROW.) But it is obviously a highly secret experimental community where bunnies are half as big as cattle, ducklings are three times as big as lambs, and swans are being turned into microscopic entities. (If you don’t see this paragraph whe your computer takes you inevitably to this blog, that is evidence that the Authorities have stepped in to suppress information about the whole operation. You have been warned.)
Daring—very daring—to slide onto a bench which was already occupied. But Paula thought the next bench looked dirty. The air was cool, though, and the sky, if cloudy, was bright. Anyone with an experience of movies knew murderous attacks took place on rainy nights or shadowy pathways.
She cast a wall-eyed glance at the man as she slipped her paperback free. He seemed to be ignorant of her presence, his eyes closed while one foot bobbed to whatever he was listening to on those earphones. You couldn‘t be too careful, of course. And there was Dickie to consider now, on top of all previous fiendish possibilities. Plus a murderous attack would mess up her schedule for the whole day.
Time now to get back to Leofwine, and her stroll in the garden. Paula had doubts about the author’s claim that Leofwine found peace in the garden. For the preceding two hundred pages, Leofwine had behaved like the kind of woman who didn’t go out in daylight lest the rays of the sun bleach her toenail polish. Still, one had to cut the author a bit of slack. This was bench reading, not a novel designed to change the mores of the modern world.
She was just settling herself when she felt the plastic pop from one ear, allowing a dusty song about how love could be kind and cruel, wonderful and terrifying, funny and awe-inspiring to blare out into the morning air. Her electronics liked the song so much it seemed to blare it out twice, one version slightly ahead of the other.
Paula smiled a quick apology to the man on the bench, and found him smiling an apology himself. That was where the second version of the song originated: one of his ears had similarly rejected its speaker, probably when he slid away to make more room for her on the bench. Paula caught at her earphone and shoved it into the right place on just the fourth try.
Rick took five tries to accomplish the same thing; he was keeping an eye on the woman. She seemed self-possessed, well-clothed. But you could never be sure who was waiting for the right moment to launch into a pitch for a handout. Plenty of these street people took babies out to show off why they were asking for money.
He glanced at the child in the stroller, who chose that moment to wake up, possibly prompted by the blare of music. Round eyes blinked, and then the child laughed at something unseen by Rick. Most infants are attractive when laughing: Rick had to smile.
The woman noticed, and smiled back. Rick started to look away before she could speak, and saw her frown.
Smiling at the baby, Rick had not noticed a wayward breeze dropping a pink flower petal onto his lap on the right spot to make it look—for a second—as if he had dressed very carelessly before coming out. Paula had not noticed the breeze either, but she had noticed the petal right away. It held her gaze long enough to make her frown. When she realized what she was actually seeing, she blushed a little and turned away.
But the frown, and the questioning arch of one sharp eyebrow, made Rick feel he had to say something. If the woman was not after a handout, perhaps she thought he was interested in her baby as a kidnapper. Best to disabuse her of that notion.
Still smiling, he said, “I do like that bib.”
Understanding the petal had already told Paula this was not the kind of creep she’d assumed at first. But she was still alert for trouble, and her mind informed her, “First thing he says to me starts with the word ‘I’. He’s really talking about himself.”
What she said aloud was, “Yes. Of course, Dickie’s not old enough to realize that’s Herman Melville.”
Rick nodded, thinking, “Good job I didn’t ask her where she found a bib with Karl Marx on it. What a show-off!”
Aloud, he said, “Oh, Moby Dick and Dickie are a natural match, aren’t they?” That would show her he knew who Herman Melville was.
“Ah,” thought Paula, “He’s really telling me he knows who Herman Melville is. This man simply has nothing to talk about except himself.”
She expelled a breath with ruffled the fringe of hair on her forehead. “It’s really appropriate when he wails.”
“Uh-oh,” Rick thought. “Gotta top that. Still, she’s got an original line.”
“Would you call that a Type E joke?” There! What did she think of that?
“Not bad,” is what she thought. “So you’ve heard of a Melville boo besides Moby Dick. One and a half points to you. What now? Ask Dickie if the cow says ‘O moo’?”
She was saved from this fate by Dickie, who shouted “Tglagh!”, reaching two little hands apparently toward the man.
“No no, Dickie, that’s not your da-da.” Paula patted his hands without really pushing them back. “He’s in Phoenix.”
“Letting me know her husband’s out f town, is she?” Rick decided he was probably sophisticated enough to resist the wiles of a woman with a stroller. “Play it cool,” he told himself, “Unti you can walk away.”
Smiling at the baby instead of looking at her, he remarked, with extreme apathy, “Phoenix, eh? On work?”
“On the lam,” said Paula, before she could stop herself. Why had she mentioned Robin at all? This man hardly needed to hear that story.
“Hmmmm. Why did she feel like bringing up the one who got away?” Rick thought. “And what do I say? Can’t introduce myself. She’ll think that now I know the coast is clear, I’m interested.”
“What is he thinking? Should I casually mention an older brother, to make him think Dickie and I don’t live alone? Sounds stupid and I haven’t even said it yet.” Paula smoothed down some hair that was not out of pace on Dickie’s forehead.
“Tgeb,” said Dickie, pushing her hand away. “Geb?”
An hour seemed to pass between “Tgeb” and “Geb”; Paula ran her tongue across the backs of her front teeth. “Do I introduce myself? If I tell him my first name, he’ll think I’m interested, and if I use my last name, he can look up my address and phone number.”
“Well, if he’s on the lam, he should have gone to Los Angeles, since that’s where the Rams are.” The sexual symbolism of a ram on the lam struck him just as he uttered the last syllable. “Er, sorry.”
The symbolism seemed to have missed her. “You do look sheepish.”
Rick lowered his head a bit. “I knew I couldn’t pull the wool over your eyes.”
Paula wondered whether it was wise to carry on this kind of combat with a stranger; puns had not been covered in any Twelve Step Guide to Intelligent Interaction. Then she realized she HAD to reply, “Shear genius!”
“If we’re going to engage in wordplay to the death,” Rick was thinking, “I suppose it’s a gentleman’s role to start the introductions. Or would she think that’s old-fashioned?” It was difficult to consider these problems when he had to admit, “I knew I couldn’t stump you with such a yarn.”
“Stringing me along, eh?” she snapped back, at the same time wondering why he couldn’t tell her his name, so she could avoid pretending to accidentally drop a business card?
If it was old-fashioned for him to start with the introductions, then why didn’t she? “I’m losing the thread of this conversation,” he told her.
“Pretty good line,” she sniffed. “Be careful, or I’ll sic my thesaurus on you.”
Rick was impressed. “Not everybody knows how to pronounce thesaurus.” He frowned slightly, checking his own pronunciation even though he knew it was right.
Paula didn’t notice the frown. “I can spell it, too. I’m a proofreader by trade.” There. One step closer to an introduction without committing to anything.
Dickie was waving at something just behind the bench. “Thglagaldagha!”
“How do you spell that?” asked Rick.
“It’s his word. Let HIM spell it.”
Rick grinned. “Who…ahem…for whom do you proofread?”
Paula smiled back. “I’m free-lance. Anyone old enough to realize the computer’s programs can’t do everything. I index as well.”
“That sounds interesting.” Rick knew better than to tell anyone their job sounded like fun; no one ever talked about a job except to complain about it. “You get to read all kinds of things before anyone else.”
Paula grimaced. “It would be more interesting if people could spell.”
He spread out his hands. “What more could you want? That guarantees steady business.”
Paula’s eyebrows arched up, the eyeballs rolling up until the pupils were out of sight. “No way. I lost my latest job because I was finding too many mistakes in the text.”
Rick was on familiar ground: let anyone complain about their own job long enough and he could whine about his. “Why? Were you getting paid by the mistake?”
The memory was still painful; Paula shrugged. “They said I was just too picky.”
“Huh! What was it?”
Paula’s upper lip stretched in an effort to keep the rest of her face straight. “An English textbook.”
Rick lowered his head; his eyes arrowed. “You’re joking.”
She raised a hand. “Proofreader’s honor.”
“Were the mistakes their own, or the computer’s?” Rick leaned back, stuck out his legs, and crossed his ankles. “If the program says King Author carried Excalibur, they accept it.”
“Of course.” Paula tossed a hand in the air. “Take the machine’s word for it. It was programmed by wiser heads…which majored in math and keyboarding.”
“What can you say to someone who spells ‘unknown’ with an x?” Rick’s hands went up in the air, echoing her gesture. He thought about asking her rates; maybe she’d like to index the back issues of “A Note From Mother”, the comic produced in his spare time when he had spare money. He could use a proofreader, too: Vivian couldn’t spell “Cat” without recourse to her mouse.
Paula laughed, but told herself “Watch it. He’s stretching out; he’s starting to relax. Either he’s decided you’re not a threat, or he thinks he’s making progress. No one’s making progress on ME, Pal.”
Perhaps she should go back in now. She could stay and maybe let him make a LITTLE progress. Or she could come back tomorrow and find out if he was always here around this time. She ran one hand across the handle of the stroller, which shifted the pocket on the back. A red and white magazine slid to one side, allowing the title “Chariots Afire: Fantasy Criticism” to show above the headline “Spider-Man’s Web Address”.
Rick leaned to his left. “Do you read that?” he demanded.
Paula shoved it down a little more securely. “You’ve heard of it?”
He nodded. “You must have a job if you proofread it. I don’t know what kind of editor they must have.”
Rick noticed the silence that answered this before realizing her chin had come down and her eyes were almost closed. “Stupid,” he told himself. “Who’s going to carry a copy of that but someone on the staff?” He cleared his throat.
“Actually,” he said, his voice loud enough to distract Dickie for one second from the paper cup bouncing along in the grass, “It’s not so much their editor as one of their reviewers: Paula Rogers.”
Paula hardly noticed that she was in a position reminiscent of a large cat about to pounce. A paper envelope from fries was jerking in a strange pattern along the sidewalk, and she did not notice this at all.
“What did I review?” she demanded.
Rick sat up, uncrossing her ankles and shoving both feet under the bench. “Ah Sorry. I expected her to be drooling.”
“Dickie handles that department for the magazine,” she told him. “What did I review?”
He set his back and shoulders against the bench. The best thing to do was act as if he did this all the time, and didn’t care. “Moonwebs.”
Her intense gaze shifted to a frown of puzzlement. A scrap of newspaper rolled up into a ball and then spread out into a triangle, but only Dickie noticed. “Moonwebs. Moonwebs?”
This hurt worse than the original review. “You called the review ‘Tap Shoes of Doom’.”
Paula remembered her own titles better than theirs. “Oh. The dancer with mystic powers.”
His eyelids came down; his shoulders twitched. “You said it had the internal consistency of a Screwy Squirrel cartoon.”
She had rather thought that line would leave a scar; she just never expected to meet the walking wounded. “Well, yes, I….”
Rick had more to deliver; he had rehearsed his rebuttal since he had first read the review. “Aside from the fact that it had nothing much to do with the review, hardly anyone who reads little critzines like yours is going to be old enough to get the reference.”
Paula had actually thought this at the time; she had thought of the line some weeks earlier and had just been waiting for a place to use it. But this buzzard had not earned the right to point that out. After all, he was dumb enough to have written that stupid comic book in the first place. She shoved a foot back under the bench, bracing for combat.
“It made as much sense as your untutored peasant girls making reference to sixth century Frankish queens.”
“She might be a sixth century peasant girl.” So she had caught the Fredegund reference. This woman was dangerous.
Two starws caught up in a breeze lunged at each other and engaged in a brief fencing match. Dickie’s eyes were fastened to the sight, which no one else seemed to notice.
“As for doing a comic book centered on a dancing….”
Rick’s jaw jutted. “You said it was a rip-off of ‘Zell, Sword-Dancer’, and claimed I’d watched Riverdance too often on videocassettes in my youth.”
Her face came eight inches closer to his. “You took a peasant girl who had no more training than an annual prance around a Maypole discovering, under a full moon, that she has a talent for intricate and mystic dance moves.” Her upper lip curled. “Lust exactly when it’s needed.” She tossed her hair. “And your spelling is ridiculous!”
This caught Rick in mid-retort. “That wasn’t my…Viv…someone else did the lettering!”
She nodded sharply. “You could have checked.”
A Milk Duds package stood up on end and spun around, the wind managing somehow to bounce it upside-down and back without interrupting the spin. Then it, and the dueling straws, dropped to the ground as if the wind had lost interest.
“And Issue 5 covers the whole dance training question,” Rick replied. This sounded limp, even to him.
“You couldn’t think of an excuse before that? What makes you think you’ll have an Issue 5?”
“At least as many issues as Chariots Afire.” Rick leaned back into the attack, his shoulders rising from the back of the bench. “And where do you get your Illustrations? Do you copy them off the restroom wall, or does Dickie do them with crayons?”
“He eats crayons.”
“Dickie? Or your illustrator?”
“It’s not as if your…what’s her name?…Slainhe is any lost Rembrandt sketch. It’s a good thing you TOLD us that was expert dancing, since she looked as if she was playing hopscotch.”
“The review made it sound as if numbered steps would be about her speed,” muttered Tick.
Paula snorted. “She wouldn’t have learned numbers.”
Nothing in the park was amusing Dickie right now. He was wrinkling his nose and chiisuing between a whimper and a wail when movement beyond the fence caught his eye. One of those green things that turned up late in the books mama read to him was rising through the weeds along the park lodge. She always made the most entertaining hiss sound when these things appeared in the books. Dickie waited to hear what sound this one made.
The hiss started, and then water gushed from the creature’s mouth. Dickie applauded; Mama had never done THAT.
“Hey!” bellowed both adults, as the water from the hose hit them. Rick threw himself forward, pushing the stroller so his body was between the spray and Dickie.
“Where….” He started to say, turning to the proofreader.
But Paula was in midair. Rick’s mouth dropped open, collecting water, as she cleared thewaist-high fence in a single bound, diving for the tap.
Turning away, Rick coughed water from his throat. This cleared Dickie’s view of Mama holding up the now silent green creature. “How could this….” She started to ask.
Rick leaned against the side of the stroller. “What kind of special training do you need for a jump like that?”
Paula started a glower, but laughed, and let the hose drop. “I don’t DO Celtic dancing! I can’t keep my hands still that long.”
“I can change it to mystic square-dancing,” said Rick. “Let’s hear a good old yee-hah!”
Patla had traded her interest in dancing for one in the fence. “How do I get out of here now?”
Rick put out a hand. “If jumping again would endanger your secret identity, just climb over.”
Well, look out.” Paula put a foot on the metal rod that ran left and right in the fence. “One, two….” Hands down on the top rail, she pulled herself over.
“That’s got it.” Rick put his hands on her waist, and helped make sure she landed on her feet. He did not, however, immediately let go.
Paula turned a little red. “People can see you.”
Rick stuck his hands behind his own back, but pointed out, “Doesn’t matter. In a thousand years, they’ll all be dead.”
Paula’s face was turned from him as she checked Dickie and the stroller. Not much water had hit Dickie, who was laughing and clapping about it. “So will you.”
“Will you write to me, even if I’m dead?”
This brought her face toward him. “What?”
Rick turned his face toward the sky. “Just address the letter ‘Tomb it may concern’.”
Her shoulders sagged; her brow came down. “You shouldn’t joke about grave matters.”
Dickie chortled, most likely at a leaf that danced just beyond his toes. Rick shrugged. “I’d stay and argue that with you, but if I don’t change out of these wet clothes, I’ll start coffin.”
“Me too. Here.” Paula reached behind the copy of Chariots Afire and drew out a card. “If you Slainhe wants her dialogue spelled right next time.”
Rick reached into a damp shirt pocket for a simple piece of plastic. “If you want to knock any more plot devices, I can give you a cut rate subscription.”
Having officially ended the conversation by trading business cards, they should probably have walked away in different directions. This did not seem to occur to them.
Sometimes, in the summer, my mind slips from its serious consideration of crime, violence, and other features of the coming elections, and meanders in the direction of Wistful Vista.
Now, those of you who are old enough to remember vintage trivia questions will recall that Fibber McGee and Molly of sitcom fame lived at 79 Wistful Vista, an address tucked away in the radio somewhere between the plains where the Lone Ranger fought the good fight and the big city where his great-nephew did the same as the Green Hornet. But that tidy home with its untidy closet is not the Wistful Vista visited of my contemplation.
A woman I knew was absolutely dedicated to nostalgia for an era she mostly missed. Born in the 1940s, she yearned for the music of the 1920s, the movies of the 1930s, and the radio comedies which bloomed before she was born. Fibber McGee and Molly did not leave the airways until well into the 1950s, so maybe she DID get to listen to them first time around. I any case, she missed them in a world where movies were now in color and women wore trousers to work. (This is the lady who signed a petition at her workplace demanding that women NOT wear this inelegant article of clothing on the job. This was, er, in the 1970s. She sighed “I always was in the forefront of going backward.”)
She lived alone in a largish house after her parents died. (She, um, insisted on buying it from them instead of inheriting it. And despite some heroic attempts, she never married. We may discuss her financial and romantic lives at some later date.) So she decided she needed a poodle puppy. Her parents, after a number of years with, I think, Shelties, had always had poodles. She set out to find one.
But she was thrifty. She did not want some poodle puppy with an expensive pedigree. The vet whom she had come to know while caring for her mother’s last poodle, Wimsey, warned her not to go below three figures for any reason, but she always knew better. She hunted down every cheap purveyor of poodles she could learn about. (And, because she was a person of moral fiber, declined a very inexpensive puppy she found in a basement with fifty or so others, and immediately went home to call the authorities, who later raided that basement. She was cheap, but she had her standards.) And at last she found him: a poodle puppy which could be all hers for five dollars.
The vet looked over her find and shook his head. The treasure, whom she promptly named Wistful Vista, was bald, swollen to double the proper size, and suffering from puppy strangle. He warned her this was NOT going to be a long-term relationship, but said he would do his best. Little Wistful was cured of the mange and the puppy strangle, and eventually grew hair everywhere he should have had hair EXCEPT his muzzle. And he fell madly in love with his thrifty owner, who loved him right back.
However, although her parents had raised many a poodle puppy to responsible doghood, she did not have them to give her advice. She yearned to bring Wistful to meet me, she said, but he had never QUITE mastered being housebroken. AND she lived a long way away; he never liked to ride in the car without sitting in her lap while she drove. AND, contradicting the truism that “bargain dogs never bite” (or something like that) he liked to invite people to play by biting them. Hard. She was constantly finding his teeth in quite the wrong place whenever she sat down. (I always wanted to ask if Wistful was the only one who did that, but I had too many manners. Now I shall never know. But, as I said, we will discuss her romantic life at some future date.)
But I always think of Wistful come summer, for his owner was far too thrifty (and her house too oddly constructed) ever to invest in central air conditioning. She had a single window unit air conditioner, which she put in her bedroom window and let run all day long, without ever going into the bedroom, or letting Wistful do so, in daylight. At night, she and Wistful would retire there, at which point she turned the unit off. (If you sleep with the air conditioning on, you die of pneumonia. She could prove this: her mother died in a hospital in summer, and THEY kept the air conditioning running 24 hours a day, in spite of her warnings. Proof positive.)
I never heard how SHE beat the heat, but she knew Wistful needed assistance in a Midwestern summer. She thus soaked towels in cold water, wrung them out, and folded these on all the places where he liked to sit. The evaporation of the water would keep the towel, and her poodle puppy, nice and cool. I have never tried this, so I don’t say it didn’t work. I WILL say it was unusual.
She and Wistful, just to spite the vet, lived happily for years until she died, completely without warning, on a day she had planned to go to a little place she knew that sold groceries with expired selling dates at a discount. I was unable to attend the estate sale (where, I am told, mold warnings were posted on the entrances) but I do know Wistful was inherited by one of her staff (she was thrifty, remember: all her servants were part-time) who was the only person Wistful bit just once. The man smacked Wistful a good one, and Wistful thus learned the man did not WANT to play the game, and never bit him again. His owner was puzzled by this, but never tried it herself.
I do not know if Wistful still bites and barks among us, or if he is elsewhere, waiting to pounce upward at his One and Only. But on warm days in the summer, I think about him curling up on damp lukewarm towels, and wonder until the whole world turns wistful.
We have spoken, hereintofore, of the custom of our ancestors to send New Tear cards. We don’t know that a lot nowadays. Nice custom, really, but when people look over what they’ve spent on Christmas cards and the like in December, the impulse no longer exists. We have also spoken of the prevalence of pigs on such cards. (By the way, a number of the cards in this article are NOT things I currently have for sale, but come from the collection of one of my clients, who fell in love with New Year pigs on postcards. She would also like to know what became of all the papier-mache pigs you see in these cards, so if you know where a genuine vintage pig exists let me know. It might bring us all good luck.)
The whole package was designed to wish the recipient luck. A pig around the house meant you would never lack for company and, come the right time of year, sausage. These pigs are often accompanied by other signs of good luck, or prosperity, especially money bags, four leaf clovers, horseshoes, and…chimney sweeps.
The chimney sweep starts to appear in western literature around the early modern period, when people started to gather in cities in cottages and shops and houses hastily constructed without use of architects. Civic authorities realized that many patched-together chimneys around wooden houses were a danger, and the sweeping of chimneys became an important part of being a homeowner. But how did the sweep become a symbol of good luck? (A sweep was also a symbol of something exceptionally dirty, but there’s no mystery about that.)
Right up until today, among the British, it is considered good luck for the bride to see a sweep on her wedding day, leading to a nice side income among those of the chimney professions. (There still are such people. They say the work soots them. You knew it was coming, so don’t make that face.) Was it because they were so obviously alien, a creature from another world with their mysterious equipment and darkened garments? Does the custom of, say rubbing your buttons when a sweep passes come from a darker tradition of averting demons (frequently identified in folktales as someone of the wrong color)?
In Germany, the Interwebs informs me, the sweep is still associated with New Year’s Day lucky wishes: with toy sweeps attached to bouquets, or candy sweeps included in New Year’s gifts.
They don’t even have to appear with pigs for the charm to work. They can come with any sort of benevolent wishes for the new year, again, primarily those signifying prosperity.
Or impending spring, which may explain the prevalence of birch twigs (which some scholars say have meant spring as these were the first trees to come back after the Ice Age; I think they’re reaching) and the amanita muscaria or fly agaric mushroom (although some of the same online anthropologists trace this to the poisonous and/or hallucinogenic properties of the fungus, others insist it turns up so often in art because it’s pretty. That’s why Smurfs live in them.)
Maybe the sweep is also a symbol of prosperity, since you need money to hire one, or good luck, since having your chimney cleaned keeps your house from burning down. In any case, the sweep is always appearing on New Year postcards to wish you luck.
ALTHOUGH sweeps also symbolized other things to the population at large. THIS New Year card makes reference to the long-standing stereotype of sweeps romancing the maids in the houses they served. (Here, obviously, an upstairs maid.)
It was a running gag on postcards, not unlike the frequently expressed belief that your cook was spending her time (and YOUR money) entertaining policemen on their beat. This may have happened as often as it does on postcards, or it may simply have been because the evidence (a floury handprint in the case of the cook, a sooty e on the part of a sweep) was so easy to illustrate.
Sherlock Holmes is not required to understand why this sweep didn’t finish his job the first time around. Anyway, it sort of fits in with the jolly, lucky attitude of the sweep.
None of this covers the dark side of chimney sweep history, with its tales of climbing boys bullied into cleaning tiny chimneys, or the number of books in which the sweep is the villain (consider Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies.) There ARE one or two postcards which suggests running into a sweep might NOT be grand good luck. But it’s the way of the world. These are the people who probably don’t want pigs in the yard.
“Oh, my goodness!” Meadow Saffron threw herself backward in the sky, a hand across her forehead. “I thought we’d never do it!”
“It was a fight to the finish from the start,” Sweet Pea agreed, flipping flower petals around her.
“Gotta remember that joke,” said Bluebell. “Hey you! There’s a joke about a girl whose privates bits could sing the national anthem? Have you heard it?”
“No,” said Primrose, flying by upside-down.
“You must have: it’s the Star-Spangled Banner!” This punchline provoked peals of laughter, al of them from Bluebell.
“I cannot believe she ever played an angel,” Primrose, still upside-down, remarked to Unfirom. “She’s so pretty!”
Meadow Saffron came up from behind Unfirom to pull his hair. “How will it come out now, Wingshoulders?”
Unfirom shrugged. “Oh, they’ll shock their children.”
This called for squeals and high fives, some of which involved feet and buttocks. Unfirom looked away, scanning the park. “You have also changed the lives of several women running around the track,”
“Hey!” Bluebell kicked his ear. “If you’re so powerful you can see the future and stuff, why can’t you just do this job and let us chew our toenails?”
Undiron’s head tipped back. “If it was a matter of holding back that statue before it fell on someone, I could do it. But I lack the touch for delicate work.”
“Oh, well, that’s right.” Bluebell zipped away, slapping her heels together. “Yer way too big for delicate stuff.”
“We’re dainty,” Primrose agreed.
“We’re experts at daintiment,” Meadow Saffron chimed in, swirling in a midair pirouette.
“Dibs on that ice cream!” shouted Bluebell, diving past the other two for a puddle on the sidewalk.
“I saw it first!” shrieked Primrose, zooming to cut her off.
“Wait! Wait! There’s angels here! We have to share!” Sweet Pea dropped from the air to sit with a splash in the pale puddle, and then launched herself back into the air. “There! Now everybody can lick it off!”
Unfirom raised one hand to her with thumb and forefinger extended, as if to catch hold. He thought better of it, and turned away. As he strode across the grass, the phronik were singing
Sister Susie’s cause was folks with icy legs,
So she spent all her dollars making darning eggs;
But everybody laughs today at fixing socks
So now she lives on Plum Street in a cardboard box!
Percolator, coffeemaker,
Subaru and Studebaker:
All ya got is all yer gonna get,
Waddya bet?
The angel moved across the grass. He mourned again that his powers were limited to the reasons couples got together, and not whether they did at all. He might have been able to do some real good, instead of serving simply as a guide for the phronik.
He paused at the side of a bench, looking over the woman with the handmade sign leaning top down between her ankles. She pulled back a sleeve to check her watch. Unfirom knew her as well: she was another Griese Park regular. And she was always early.
Today, there was more amiss than earliness. She slumped back on the bench. She was rather a slumping individual at the best of times, a bit heavier than was considered the current fashion. Also neither up to current fashion, nor quite suitable for the weather, were the heavy, baggy clothes she always wore to the park.
She checked her watch again, and then checked left and right along the sidewalk before turning her eyes again to her sign. Her shoulders dropped in toward each other. Unfirom could tell without any recourse to reading her thoughts, that it wasn’t so much a matter of her being early as everybody else being late.
She had fought hard to keep the fight against the passive park idea visible. She had helped people compose letters to the right people; she had led marches. She had been, perhaps, a shade too diligent. Her followers counted on her to keep doing the majority of the work. It looked as if she would be marching alone today.
No purpose in materializing to march with her this morning. If by chance someone took a picture of the march–or if she remembered to take a group photo herself–he wouldn’t be able to make his image register. This would make her crusade even more difficult.
She stared at her feet, or perhaps the burger wrapper pinned down by the pole of her sign. She shifted. This might have been a coincidence, but Unfirom felt sure she had spotted the words ‘BIG BOOTY” staring up from the greasy paper. But perhaps he’d been listening to the phronik too long.
Still invisible, he took a seat on the bench, keeping a safe margin between himself and the mortal. He raised one hand, palm pointed at the side of her face. It did not touch her, but the energy radiating from it did. The woman blinked. Unfirom listened in on her thoughts.
Yes, the first thing he needed to do was turn her eyes away from that wrapper. In her brain, she had connected her less than elegant form with the untidy nature of Griese park; she was wpndering whether both weren’t simply unnecessary to the town. He needed to find a way to turn her thoughts to the larger picture. This was not, as he had mentioned to Bluebell, his forte.
He sorted through her thoughts for the ideals and memories that had led her into this crusade. Lots of movie scenes in there, many of them dealing with young lovers in parks and meadows. He tried to ease these to the forward of her consciousness, pushing back her awareness, more bitter though no less sharp than his, that there were no pictures of herself as part of a pair in a meadow anywhere.
Her eyes came up to the runners on the track, and the tennis players. Unfirom brightened her memories of couples and green grass just a bit, and then retreated from her brain. She needed to do the rest by herself.
The chin wrinkled. The eyelids came closer together. The pole of the sign poked a hole through the burger wrapper as she rose.
At the same moment, Unfirom spotted the woman with the stroller. Nodding farewell to the crusader, he marched back toward the fallen ice cream.
“My turn!”
“Is not! You had two turns in a row! Probly seven!”
“Whee!”
Apparently they had decided to argue about who got to sit in the ice cream instead of who got to eat it. Unfirom reached in, took a pair of wings at random, and pointed the owner at the benches which lay across the softball diamond from the ice cream.
The woman with the stroller was taking a seat on the righthand side of the righthand bench. A man in a tight blue suit was already sitting on the leftmost edge.
“They’re the ones, hmmmmm?” inquired Primrose, the owner of the wings the angel held. She kicked a drop of ice cream from one tow toward the benches.
“They’re the ones.”
Bluebell was apparently paying attention. She sped across the park to peer down into the stroller, and then at the paperback book on the diaper bag. She squealed.
“Who is it?” Primrose demanded.
Bluebell swung around, drew herself perfectly upright, and with hands folded before her, sang
I have a favorite author:
Her name is Judith Krantz,
Because in every book of hers
The folks take off their pants.
“Oooh!” Ice cream streamed from Sweet Pea’s elbows and knees as she zoomed across the park. Unfirom let go of Primrose so she could join the others. Meadow Saffron did a loop around his head before completing the group. Despite starting last, he reached the bench before three of the phronik, and pulled Bluebell down to listen as he held the rest back.
“These two will get together at a party eight months from now. They won’t remember each other from the park because they have hardly noticed each other.”
“You want us to make it so they notice each other,” Bluebell stated, trying to pry his fingers from her ankle.
“If you would,” the angel replied.
“Why?” she demanded, kicking at his fingers with her free foot.
“He won’t learn about the baby until afterward,” Unfirom replied, “And he will say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. The woman will buid this remark and make it go further than it should, which will lead her to suicide on a rainy street less than twenty=-four hours later. When the man hears of this, he will be so stricken with guilt that he will spend a great deal of money trying to adopt the baby, who will, naturally, be awarded to an aunt and uncle instead. He will stalk the family for four years, until finally the uncle shoots him down on another street on another rainy night.”
Meadow Saffron stuck an index finger into the dimple on her chin. “Kind of exciting, really.”
“Oh!” cried Sweet Pea. “But the gun will wake up the baby!”
Meadow Saffron frowned. “There is that.”
“Well, I like working with babies,” said Bluebell, who know had both arms and one leg wrapped around the angel’s thumb. “They throw their food.”
“Yeah!” said Sweet Pea. Her colleagues joined her in front of the bench as Unfirom let go of Bluebell. The angel shrugged. Whatever worked.
I never knew my Great-Uncle Walter. According to my grandfather, who seemed to like his brother-in-law, Walter was one of the finest mechanics in that corner of Iowa, a man who could repair an engine in moments and understand at a glance why a furnace had stopped giving off heat. But Walter felt he was wasted on such a job.
What Walter WANTED to be was a farmer, one of those souls who must gauge the humor of nature, dealing with good weather and bad, and then estimate the needs of the market. My grandfather felt Walter was fair-to-middling at growing crops, but an utter failure at selling them. Once the crops were harvested, he would hold off on the selling. This week was too early, for Walter, always. NEXT week, demand would be higher, and he’d win a much better price for his year’s work.
And every year, at least according to his brother-in-law, he would be the last to market, selling when buyers were glutted with product, and get a lower price than anybody else. My grandfather never knew why Walter didn’t go back to fixing engines, or try to repair his own timing.
Great-Uncle Walter came to mind while I was reminiscing about one of the many people who tried to tell me how to do things in the days when I sold used books. In a way, he was like a lot of my unpaid advisors, who liked to tell me not to sell things. It seemed sometimes that everyone in the world who was willing to share their business acumen with me felt I could make more money by selling less. From bestsellers (there are way too many of those) to books more than five years old (no yuppie would ever pick up something like that), their advice told me my big mistake in selling books was trying to sell books.
What made this chap different was that he was all for selling books: he just felt I should hold back on CERTAIN books. “Hang onto that,” he’d tell me. “You’ll get a better price for that in two or three years.”
Barring the fact that I had not been allocated any spaces for boxes labelled “Books To Sell Three Years From Now”, I pointed out that in most cases where he gave me this advice, the books were very much in the news, and the time to strike was now. He would shake his head and explain the dangers of my situation.
The first book he advised me on was a signed first edition of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, famous at that moment due to the fatwah decreed against the author. Letting word out that I even possessed this signed copy would bring people rushing to the Book Fair for all the wrong reasons. (This was advice I had from a number of other sources on all kinds of things I wanted to offer for sale: publicity would be impossible, as it would bring thousands of protestors to ring the building. I waited and never did see this phenomenon, but it may have been something about our publicity. We didn’t advertise to the right crowd, I reckon.)
But the sum of his advice was “Much better to wait until AFTER he’s been murdered.”
As a reasonably modern marketer, I am not averse to capitalizing on someone else’s tragedy, but this struck me as perhaps a bit iffy. I also did not have a shelf in storage listed “Boos To Be Sold After the Author Dies.”
This was not the only time he made the same suggestion There was a tell-all book on Chicago crime, a book of poetry in which the author accused her father of molestation…his advice was always that I wait for the inevitable murder. He was absolutely adamant in 2009, when a book arrived which, as it turned out, was verifiably inscribed to an old friend by the new President of the United States. “You set that away,” my advisor told me. “It may be worth a lot now, but it’ll be worth a hundred times as much after the assassination.” African-American himself, he refused to believe that Barack Obama could make it through four years in the White House.
I sold the book that year. My business practices were never beyond question (“You want to put out ALL those copies of the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood?”) but, unlike Great-Uncle Walter, I was content to grab the money and run. On the other hand, my advisor still has HIS job (he’s hanging onto it until his paintings really sell, though they’re too advanced for today’s critics), so use your own judgement.
Getting really tired of this, America. Where is our sense of historic preservation? Why is there no reliable place where we can look to find the names of those heroes and heroines who have made our lives worth living? Are we so caught up in proving we are the peak of civilization that we can’t look back on those who went before, raising their flickering torches to dispel the darkness?
All I wanted from the Interwebs was a hint about the identity of the unsung genius who invented cinnamon toast. And what did I get? Everything else.
Now, I will admit right off the bat that I wasn’t really expecting a name and a date. It MIGHT be possible, but as bread and cinnamon have been known for roughly as long as humanity has been interested in food, with neither butter nor sugar any younger, it seemed unlikely. The most I was hoping for was perhaps a clue to what part of the world first produced this classic accompaniment to winter and/or bad colds.
First, the Interwebs tossed me down another rabbit hole entirely. Cinnamon Toast Crunch has such a fanatic following that it was assumed THIS was what I wanted to know about. But other people have written the tale of Chef Wendell and his improbable success. I wanted to go back farther.
Clearing away to boxes of cereal, I found the Interwebs littered with recipes and reminiscences. That was more or less what I was looking for, with hopes of perhaps running into citations from grease-stained cookbooks of generations past. I did run into a reference to a specific cookbook, but the writer would not tell me the name of the cookbook, which appears to have been one of those where people in a community donate recipes, and get their names printed under these. The one I was shown came from Illinois, which was a letdown,. I still have no serious data on the subject, but I am convinced that cinnamon toast is older than Illinois.
I wandered among the reminiscences involving people’s grandmothers making cinnamon toast for adoring grandkids. A few of these grandmothers, shown in pictures, um, looked to be about my age. Others seemed to be contemporary with MY grandmothers. But only two facts stood out from these warm recollections.
Every one oof these Grammas made cinnamon toast differently. AND NOEN OF THEM DID IT RIGHT.
Cinnamon toast, as is well known, is CORRECTLY made when it is made the way you remember it, down to whether it is cut into two triangles or four. (Yes, I see those of you who cut it into strips. I will allow for this variation, since it makes for good dunking. WE never dunked our cinnamon toast, but do your own thing.)
First of all: the ingredients. Most everyone agrees that storebought white bread is the proper starting point. Yes, when cinnamon toast was new, I presume homemade bread was used, and I see no reason to sneer at such a thing. But storebought bread is already sliced into the proper thickness, after all.
Then comes butter (or whatever butter substitute you prefer. Those who cheat by using a cinnamon-flavored spread are out of the running. We’re going for the classic here. You perhaps use a sugar substitute as well: I wouldn’t trust it, but that’s a matter of personal conviction. And you need cinnamon, of course.
AND THAT’S IT! Those of you who add vanilla, nutmeg, mace, sunflower seeds, walnuts, or pecans are gilding the lily. If you’re going to that much trouble, go bake a pie.
There is considerable differentiation in whether you spread the butter cold and hard or warm and soft, and whether you put the cinnamon on top of the butter and then the sugar, or the sugar first and THEN the cinnamon, before the cookie sheet is put in the oven. And then…hold it.
Oven? Children, did you not hear about a device called a “Toaster”? It existed for years as a long-handled device to hold over the fire before household electricity gave us a squat buddy to sit in the kitchen or the dining room, perhaps covered with a quilted toaster cover (a nice science fiction story explained once why some people use these and some don’t). I did not find one cinnamon TOAST recipe on the Interwebs which mentioned the TOASTER.
Once again, I must go forth into the Interwebs as a pioneer, and explain how cinnamon toast is MEANT to be made. No one online has bothered with MY Mother’s recipe, so here it is. (No, I have no idea where she picked up the recipe. Either of my grandmothers might have been involved.)
You take two pieces of bread from the bag and put them in the toaster. (If you have that much counter space and use a four-slot toaster, go for it.) Once this toast pops up, take it from the toaster (with or without saying “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”) and put on a plate. Spread butter on this hot toast. Now comes the tricky part.
For many years, my mother made enough cinnamon toast that she kept a broad salmon-colored Melmac cup filled with her cinnamon and sugar mixture. This was plain old table sugar and cinnamon from a red can, mixed about half and half until it was a uniform color (no streaks of cinnamon or sugar). Sprinkle this liberally on the buttered toast. Pause. Now, taking a piece of toast by one corner, hold it diagonally over the broad cup and tap, so any cinnamon and sugar not adhering to the butter falls back in the cup for next time. Repeat with second slice. Return the toast to the plate and cut diagonally into halves (if you’re in a hurry and the tea is getting cold) or fourths. Serves two: one if eating alone and feeling self-indulgent, three or four if the smaller people have very short attention spans. If more is wanted, the toaster is still there.
The nice thing about this recipe is that just about anybody over the age of six can handle it without the need of oven mitts or cookie sheets (a broom and dustpan, maybe, if the small person hasn’t mastered toast-tapping skills.) I don’t know why this recipe is being suppressed on the Interwebs, but perhaps the Cookie Sheet Lobby will allow this blog to be printed.
By golly, it’s enough to make me despair of my NEXT project. Who was it, do you suppose, who first came up with the cinnamon roll?
Lewis Switzer regarded the world around him as he did himself: with a grand benevolent satisfaction. That the air hinted at impending rain worried him as little as did his own faults, and he found nothing displeasing about the slightly shabby park around him (as it included the limber limbs and interestingly torn shorts of the young lady currently rounding the track.)
He had always found something reassuring in the onset of autumn. No doubt it went back to Kindergarten, where you learned the new year started neither in January nor April but in September. He should have been a teacher or professor himself, he supposed, but selling used books was somewhat in tune with the old rhythm. The bookstore experienced rebirth about when the campus did.
Not that slack or busy seasons worried him. The store served to occupy his time in retirement, a congenial rectangle of calm after the madness of managing several links of a chain bookstore. Once he had worried about quarterly statements, about unlocking doors precisely at ten: things that had nothing to do with the natural rhythms of life.
Now, since the life of a dealer in used books need not start before noon, he could come here and study the users of the track as he pleased. The freshmen had yet to discover the track: they would start to appear after the college teams really started to monopolize the track on campus. They would come by twos and by threes, stripping off sweats to cries at the cold and the wind and giggles at the danger of dashing around in shorts in a park so far from home. Sophomore women, still largely in twos and threes, would ignore them or give advice, whichever flattered their air of sophistication and experience. Juniors or seniors were more often found running alone, or in the company of a congenial Significant Runner.
Lewis thought the male runners were similar, but couldn’t tell them apart. In fact, he couldn’t tell the male runners apart much at all, unless one was in the company of a female runner who interested him. Best after all, he supposed, that he had not become a professor; he would have been discharged long ago, and for just cause. There were no faculty rules for book dealers. So he could retain what income he made at the store, with his savings and pension, to be apportioned among his second and third wives, along with his dwindling number of minor offspring.
As the weather was pleasant, the recollection of his wives and children also pleased him. In days to come, when he was gone, the boys might very likely amble here as he liked to do, and enjoy the scenery as he had always done. What became of the store and savings did not concern him nearly so much as the hope that he could bequeath to his sons and daughters the pleasures of such autumn mornings.
“Puget!”
A dog he had not noticed was charging onto the grass, following the scent of a pizza crust Lewis had had no reason to observe before, even if it had been there. He pulled back against the fence to let the dog pass, if the dog was so minded.
“Sorry!”
The dog was not hostilely inclined, so Lewis was at liberty to consider the woman with the animal. She was tallish, roundish, rather too old, but not way too old, and she had a pleasant smile of apology.
“Oh, I like dogs,” he told her. Puget, who had put on an unexpected burst of speed, now just as irrationally stopped short. He frowned at the spot where he was sure that pizza smell was and sniffed around the grass for it. No one noticed that it had bounced into the air some six or seven feet. On the other side of the fence.
Shirley checked the ground to be sure Puget wasn’t gobbling up trash, and then checked the stranger Puget had nearly bowled over. This was a man of medium height, in a worn tweed suit. His nose was aquiline, his eyes large and commanding, his hair—where it appeared—salt and pepper, a phrase she had not, now she thought of it, heard for years. Manners, she supposed, kept people from using it around her.
A grave dignity showed in his smile: a professor at the local college, she supposed. Going further, she decided he was likely an English professor. Something in his face put her in mind of Dr. Salter, who liked to quote line upon line of the juicier sections of Chaucer to the women in the front row of English 101.
“I have a schnorkie, myself.” Force of habit, Lewis decided, had made him strike up a conversation with a woman he rather wished wasn’t there. One of the runners might seem them together and assume this was his wife. She looked old enough…too old, he hoped. Still, his appeal to the freshmen was as a father figure.
She had been leaning down to address the dog, but the word caught her attention. “I beg your pardon?”
“A schnorkie. Part Yorkshire terrier, part Schnauzer. Schnorkie.”
She laughed. “I do like that word. Schnorkie. She tugged on Puget’s leash to encourage him to stay. She had come to town, after all, to talk to some of the local characters. This character seemed willing to talk.
“Some words do just roll off the tongue. Rhodomontade. Candelabrum. And Wirbelsturm: that’s German for cyclone.”
Shirley’s head moved slightly to one side unconsciously mimicking Puget. “I know that. In fact, that was my maiden name.”
Her head drew back and her shoulders came up as the man leaned in, staring. She looked to the small canister of pepper spray on the handle of the leash/
“Charley?” he demanded.
It had been a matter of decades since anyone had called her Charley, a nickname her stepfather had given her. On informing her mother’s new husband that her name was Shirley, not Charley, he had replied, “Yes, but I am not a priest and I refuse to preside over a Temple.” Joke and man were endeared to her at that moment, and in the same moment one of nine Shirleys in the second grade that year had cheerfully become Charley.
“Ye-es.” The man was standing back now, looking her over as if not entirely pleased by a discovery. “It is. Charley Wirbelsturm.”
“It used to be.” She studied his face. “And you would be….”
He turned his head, looking toward the dusty track. “Do you remember walking through Robertson’s Woods just as the rain started?”
Her lips drew in. “Well, no.”
He raised his chin, still pointed to the track, as if his profile was supposed to assist her recollections. “Do you remember a little white box with a little gold ring inside?”
“Not really.” The profile was telling her nothing.
His lower lip slid forward just a bit. “Green velvet lining in the box?”
Puget wanted to move on, and so did Shirley. “I’m afraid I>>>>”
She moved one foot forward, but his face came toward hers again. The lips started to move, but he stopped whatever he had been about to say. His shoulders dropped a bit, and he sighed.
“Do you remember me sticking two footballs under my sweater to imitate Professor Flowers, not knowing she’d just walked into the room?”
“Lew!” she exclaimed, making Puget’s head come around.
“I knew it.” His voice was suffused with gloom. “They’ll scratch that on my tombstone.”
“Ha!” She took a step forward. “Your hair! What became of it?”
“Mmf.” He turned to the track. “For all you know I lost it after graduation and I’m just now regaining it.”
“Rogaining it, I suppose.” She chuckled. “Of course it is you. But I haven’t seen you in….” The hand she had been moving between Puget’s ears came up to point. “You skipped the class reunion last month>”
He shrugged. “I only attend the ones ending in zero or five.”
“Lew, it was the fiftieth!”
His shoulders came up as he turned to stare. “Was it? Really? But that ends in th.”
He put a hand down for the suspicious dog to sniff. “If it comes to that, Charley, you had more hair in those days, too.”
She patted herself behind the left ear. “Well, I started bald, so I figure I’m still ahead of the game.”
She looked him up and down. How like Lew to wear tweed in September. In college he had always, always worn those cardigans, thinking they made him look British and thus more intellectual. Which they had actually, if you were a simple underclassman and not very sophisticated. She supposed that was why she had picked him from among all the would-be athletes with letter sweaters and would-be beatniks with beards.
Lewis looked at his foot as an ice cream container, perhaps dislodged from the grass by a doggy forefoot, rolled in front of him. “Do you still have your collection of all those napkins they rolled around the nineteen-cent cone at Joe O’Neota’s”
She flashed shining teeth at him. Hers? Yes, of course, drat the luck. He’d seen them too many times to mistake them. “No, I sold the whole collection to my daughter. She insulated her house with them.”
She’d put on some weight, he thought. Not so much as little Jenny Calhoun, he supposed, who had been going to make a big noise as a dancer. Last time he’d seen Jenny, she was still capable of making a big noise, but only if she fell down on the dance floor.
“Say, did your brother ever….”
“He did, but it didn’t last.” She reined in Puget, who was taking a close interest in that ice cream cup. “Now he runs a Vegan Tx-Mex place in Iowa: The Greenest Taco.”
Both of his chins withdrew into his neck. “They served us green tacos at the Gran Mexicano, but we never ate them.”
Shirley nodded in sorrow. “I tried to explain that to him, hut he didn’t get it.”
“You always were quick.”
“After eating a green taco, yes.” Her head tipped to one side. “There was a time when I was fast.”
“That’s what they tried to warn me about, but I ignored them, and lost my reputation.”
“As I recall your reputation, that was just as well.” Lewis thought her face had gone a bit stiff. “Do you hear much about the others?”
He thought this over. “Well, there was a story about Myrtle going to a special clinic in Switzerland, and taking classes so that now her private parts can whistle The Star-Spangled Banner. Have you heard that?”
Her face was now thoroughly frigid. “I have not.”
Lewis’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, you must have! It’s our national anthem!”
Shirley pressed the butt of her left hand against her forehead. “So that was you, then?”
“Who?”
“That killed vaudeville?”
“Not I, Prosecutor. Those DNA tests were contaminated.” His drawl was casual, unconcerned. But his thought was, “How pleasant: not at all as awkward as last time.”
Her thoughts were running along the same lines. “He was so stiff at that reunion. Maybe he’s growing up at last. Better not to tempt fate.”
“Well, Puget will be wanting to move along,” she said. She gave the leash a little tug, but Puget himself seemed to be studying something on the ground next to the fence. He started in the direction opposite to the pull, and took her a step forward, himself bouncing the man against the wire of the fence.
“Puget!” she snapped. The leash got a fiercer pull. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“Not at all.” Lewis reached down to pat the dog again, turning to try to see what the dog had lunged for. All he saw were new white lines painted on the ball diamond. “He didn’t get far, poor puppy. He didn’t know he was dealing with the only girl trombone player in the marching band.”
“Gloriosky!” Round eyes rolled up. “The one who turned left instead of right and wound up marching thirty yards backward.”
His upper teeth showed in a grin. “The one who used to sneak out after halftime, climbing the fence so Macfarlane wouldn’t catch us.”
She scowled. “I remember you giving me a boost.”
“So that’s why you always made me go over first after that.” He sighed. “Of course, we missed some thrilling last second losses by our heroes on the gridiron.”
“Pneumonia would have been a small price to pay for the excitement.” Shirley shifted the leash to her other hand. “So what are you doing now, Lew?”
“This and that.” Shrugging, he leaned back against the fence. “Took an aptitude test and found out what I’m most qualified for is retirement.”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“Why not?”
There was the slightest twitch of her upper lip. “I was going to.”
Lewis grinned in appreciation, but thanked the powers that were that this affair had not gone as far as it might have. Living with Charley would have been a constant competition. He bounced his back against the fence. Not that he wouldn’t have won, of course, but even if you did have the fastest car in town, you didn’t want to be racing ALL the time.
“Well.” After one more bounce, he stood free of the fence. “I suppose you have other….”
Both heads jerked around as a sound system in a passing car lost all control, volume shifting so suddenly that it apparently shocked even the young woman driving. The melody was heavy on drums, though the lyrics screamed that the singer lived to dance and danced to live and why not come dance while the music was still playing?
Lew snorted as the car passed by. “Still got your tap shoes, Charley? Or are you too young to have been there when we won the freshman talent show?”
Shirley rolled her eyes and urged Puget onward. “I decline to recall that much corn before breakfast.”
“Goes against the grain?” Lewis moved as Puget’s head swung down toward something invisible but obviously interesting. “But you do remember how Steve tried to be cool by switching his piano selection at the last minute and not only came in last and got himself suspended.”
This time Shirley had to tip her head back to roll her eyes as far as the memory required. “Little Richard he was not.” Her head came back down. “And he went to seminary. Where’d you go, Lew, after? You never sent much to the reunion booklets.”
She stole a glance: his head was up and square with his shoulders. “I did some time in the military.” His eyes met hers. “Intelligence, of course.”
Shirley didn’t see where of course came into this. “Washing secrets out of garbage cans?”
He shook a finger at her. “That was only the first six months. Then I moved up.”
Her chin came out. “Emptying garbage cans?”
“If you really want to know…..” He lowered his head and his voice, and looked up and down the sidewalk. “At the end I was pasting newspaper and magazine clippings into classified scrapbooks.”
Puget looked up in alarm as his mistress clapped her hands and cried, “Ooooh! A war hero!”
Lewis raised his nose. “Shows what civilians know. It took me two years working as a clipper before I moved up to paster.”
Her head swung back and forth now, as if her neck was loosening under the impact of these revelations. “Lew, whatever made them take you, with your record? And your beard?”
His lips pursed. “You laughed at it.”
She laughed now. “I think I have a picture of that yet. You looked like you dusted your chin with cocoa.”
Lew’s face stiffened. The memory was too intense for him to notice what sounded like four tiny tongues clicking in exasperation.
“You have that next to the picture from the Christmas concert?”
Mirth dropped from Shirley’s eyes. Her upper lip drew back to expose her teeth again. “Just that one of the black eye you had next day. What did you mean by stepping on the lead angel’s train?”
His nostrils flared. “How was I supposed to guess lead angels didn’t wear underwear?”
Her eyes jerked away from his; she snorted. “I was going to spring that on you later.”
His eyebrows came up. “Spring is exactly the word that came to mind as the angelic robe started down.”
She caught her underlip with her upper teeth. Charley had always done that: always. “I wish I had pictures,” he went on. “I didn’t have time to appreciate the full effect with you swinging at me.”
So no one had cured Lew of that superior nod; Shirley yanked Puget away from the fence and back to the sidewalk. “Well, it didn’t ruin my blossoming musical career. Would you believe I was asked to sing lead for Claudia and the Carhops?”
“Not for thirty seconds.”
She smiled. “You’re getting smarter, Lew. I taught you well.”
She turned away. Her plan was to continue right across the street and back to the hotel. While she was planning this, however, Puget decided to pursue a scent which took him to the wrong side of one of the big green garbage cans. By the time Shirley recognized this, the can was on its side, sending the night’s supply of chicken bones and pizza boxes onto the sidewalk, to Puget’s obvious delight. This quite ruined her exit.
“You, Puget,” she said, hauling on the leash and the rim of the can at the same time, “Are a dog.”
Lew squatted to gather in two straws and the box from a Booty Burger Berry Bomb. “Huh. Just like Campus Clean-Up Day.”
“Campus Clean-Up!” Shirley snatched a drumstick away from Puget’s opening outh. “We were always assigned to the woody end of campus. And you stole leaves from my pile.”
Lew frowned at a cigar butt before flicking it up into the can. “Did I? Doesn’t sound like me. You’d think I’d wait until you had them all raked up and then jump in.”
Shirley raised an eyebrow at a battered issue of Stripes Magazine before flinging it after the cigar butt. “There was a prize for the biggest pile of leaves. A Pogo book, usually, or Peanuts.” She reached down for some wing bones, looking up to make sure he recalled this.
“That’s right.” He delicately lifted a half-eaten chicken breast into a Booty Buddy Box. “I was also hot for literary adventure.” His drawl slipped a little as he went on, “I thought about carving our initials in a tree, but I didn’t know how. Anyway, our faculty advisor wouldn’t have appreciated the damage to campus infrastructure.”
This Ranch Wagon cup was already biodegrading. “Lew, you would never have stopped at initials. You were the epic poem type.”
Lew sat back on his haunches. “I was, wasn’t I? I think my favorite was the one that started ‘Oh, Tempting seductress!” He bounced a Chicken Smidgeon cup into the can. “Or was it “Oh, Seductive Temptress!’?
Shirley snagged two ribs from a broken umbrella and one from Barrett’s Ribs. “You wrote that you would remember you existed by thinking of me.”
Lew was studying a battered plastic bag. “Did I write that?”
She rose, tugging some of the wrinkles from her tidy suit. “Somebody did. If it wasn’t you, it should have been.”
With Lew still crouching in the scraggly glass, Shirley had an excellent view of his bald spot. When the can was blocking him from view (and with no mirror handy) she had begun to believe that she was what she had been. A wisp of lost future passed across her vision, and was gone.
She turned away with a little sigh. “And there was always a football game to follow Campus Clean-Up. And we always lost.”
“That’s why they stopped having Campus Clean-Up. It wasn’t complaints from the professors or the janitors: the coaches wanted to break the curse.” Lew rose from his crouch, refusing to grab the can for support no matter how much his knees complained. “You know, the college team here has a home game tonight if you’re staying that long. I could….”
Humans and dog cringed at the sudden blast of a whistle. “Car alarms!” snarled Shirley, looking up the street. “I’d better not. Nice seeing you, Lew.” She turned away in time to miss seeing a metal whistle fly through the air as if kicked. Then her head turned back over her shoulder. “Besides, I know what happens at those games.”
Lew raised an eyebrow. “I have no idea what you mean.”
She winked at him. “Casey Busso.”
“Casey!” He hadn’t thought of Casey in years, perhaps because laughing that hard was bad for his back. “That can’t happen here. I’m sure the world can’t afford teo casey Bussos in one century. If it could afford one.”
She turned around and came back, shaking a finger. “You put him up to that, you devil!”
“Now now.” He shook a finger right back at her. “The Student Government cleared us on inquiry.”
“Student Council.”
“Oh, to be sure.” He nodded, folding his hands together. “I always called it Student Government just to be difficult.”
Her lower lip stuck out to expel a long breath past her upper lip. “That was a lot of shouting over nothing.”
“Not exactly nothing, Charley. Pour dignity was involved.” He leaned against the fence again. “Student Councils were for immature little high school kids. There we were, savants of nineteen and twenty, worthy to be called a Student Government.”
“Everyone was so ferocious about it.” She shook her head. “It was silly.”
“That, too.” He looked off toward the track, but his eyes slid toward her. “Not if you read Vera veritas, of course.”
“Vera Veritas was silly, too. Half the newspaper staff suspended for refusing to say who was writing under that name.”
Lew nodded. “And new rules for the paper, too. Ten years later, there’d’ve been riots.”
Shirley moved the leash to her free hand again. “It made the administration as silly as the rest of us. After all, Vera Veritas was on THEIR side. That was what the article was really about: leave the name of the Student Council alone and work on the big issues, like who was the band going to be at the Snow Ball.”
“It was her style,” he said. “She could make you mad whichever side you were on.”
“That’s a writer with style.” Shirley studied a spot between Puget’s ears. “That line about the difference between good counsel and Student Council was nice. You steal it somewhere or think of it yourself?”
Lew pulled himself upright. “Me? I started the petition to rename it Student Government. Nearly got suspended myself. Again.” He wiggled his shoulders as if trying to work out a muscle cramp. “I always thought YOU wrote Vera Veritas, Charley.”
“Me?” Her head came up. “I was the one who kept demanding the Student Council investigate her!”
“I know. You brought me THAT petition.”
She frowned. “They never talked about suspending me. Maybe because I was on the Student Council. Huh!” Her eyes rose. “Who was it, then? John Memos? No, I bet it was Flo.”
“Flo?”
“Florence Shoe. You remember: red hair, so tall….” She started to put her hand out into the air, and dropped it to one hip instead. “Lew, are you really telling me it wasn’t you?”
He held up both hands. “I thought all along it was you, especially with what you…what Vera Veritas said about…. I thought you’d changed your mind about…the whole damn everything. I was…. Well, what about Bob Rivers?”
Shirley shook her head and kicked at a Chicken Smidgeon they’d missed, not noticing this put it closer to Puget’s ready jaws. “And I was positive it was you. I didn’t blame you for switching sides, because I knew if you thought of something really funny to say, you wouldn’t let principles get in the way. What about Gabriel printler?”
“Bob Rivers,” he said, with a definite nod. “Well, now, Gabriel might’ve….” His eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t kid me at this point, Charley? Couple of those jokes had you written all over them.”
She stepped back to study his eyes. “And I thought it was YOUR delicate satiric sledgehammer. I did feel….” She blinked. “It doesn’t matter. I wonder what they DO call it now.”
Of course it hadn’t really mattered, Lewis supposed. He hadn’t ever really thought, in basic terms, “Well, if Shirley’s going to give me a petition to sign and then make me look like a fool in the newspaper, I don’t want to talk to her.” But it might’ve been in the back of his mind.
She broke into this reverie by moving down the sidewalk again. “I need to get Puget back.”
He nodded. “Where are you staying?”
“The Sun-Inn takes dogs.”
“Good for the Sun-Inn.” He came forward to pat the dog again. “How…long are you in town?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. What time’s the game?”
“One.” He came up alongside her. “How’d you come to land on this bump in the road anyhow?”
She ran a hand up her neck into her hair. “I sort of inherited a spot on the Board of Trustees of the Pont-a-Methon Museum when my husband died. I was going to be passing north of here, and I thought I might actually attend a meeting, and maybe see this park people keep writing letters about.”
Lew took hold of one of her elbows. “Let me tell you a few things about this park, Charley. I don’t know if you remember seeing a letter I wrote about it but….”
“Of course I remember you,” she said, frowning. “Whatever did you think?”
“No, I said remember a letter from me.” He took a deep breath. “I do like that perfume of yours.”
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