So, when last we got together, we were discussing what I insist on calling the “grade school Valentine postcard”: an aesthetic choice of artists and/or postcard publishers to apply classic Valentine form to postcards which could be sent all year long. This involved a bright picture with a fairly obvious bit of wordplay which led to the sentiment, as with, say, a picture of Bambi saying “DEER me, I want you to be my Valentine!”
Last time, we considered those which led to the sentiment “Why don’t you write, you deadbeat?” This was far from being the only sentiment to utilize the grade school Valentine strategy. Another popular postcard theme was meant to follow up on those cards, so that slow correspondents could respond with a “Sorry I’m such a deadbeat” cards. The theme was just as popular, but could now use jokes and arts that would have been frowned on in a second grade Valentine box.
As in this card, in which the degree of naughtiness depends on which person you feel is speaking, and the intention of those who used the word “feeling”.
But surely one of the most used phrases ever on a postcard is “Having wonderful time. Wish you were her.” (Right after “I am fine. How are you?”) So plenty of grown-up Valentines were designed to rob the sender of a line that would help fill all that space on the other side.
These cards were actually part of a major transition in the theory and practice of postcarding. In its early history, postcards were, as noted hereintofore, the equivalent of texts: something you could send to friends to send news, convey invitations, or just share a joke. As the twentieth century ground on, postcards were becoming something you sent while on vacation.
Our grade school Valentine “wish you were here” cards did not limit themselves: there were still plenty of people who sent cards the old way, and used these to invite old friends to come and visit them in their homes. But they were designed to be useful to the new breed, who had rented a cabin at the lake and decided “the more the merrier”.
Whether there was a subtext of “I know you can’t come, but don’t you wish you could>” kind of depends on the sender. But this applies to any postcard you sent from your five-star hotel room OR that grubby fishing shack with no electricity but a large liquor cabinet.
As noted in our last thrilling installment, there was also room on such cards for more than just gags about monkeys and giraffes which would not shock a second grade teacher in the classroom.
After the lottery comes through and I have the time and money to do all the research, I WILL look up postcard collections in libraries and find out how many of these cards were, in fact, sent by second grade teachers who had gotten out of the classroom long enough for a beach vacation. They may have gravitated to the artistic style they knew best even on an out-of-town skinny-dipping expedition. Don’t wait around: the lottery has not been doing much for me since I suggested some of these postcards would make best-selling Instant Win tickets. I should send another one of those “Why Don’t You Write?” cards to remind them I’m here.
We have discussed in this space before the matter of the classic grade school Valentine, and how it related to postcards. I have nothing new to say about this, but I DO have a couple of new postcards along this line, so I thought we’d revisit the proposition.
For those of you who had NO friends as a child (or who went to a progressive school which banned Valentines on the grounds that it led to competition and bad feelings), the classic grade school Valentine involves a bright picture, and a bit of wordplay relating it to the holiday. A big clown face might be accompanied by “I’m not CLOWNing around – I want you for my Valentine” or a fold-out dachshund might say “I’m LONGing for you to be my Valentine!” The capital letters were necessary to punch up the joke (unlike the example here, which not only has those tracks but the easily missed play on “bears investigating” and “bear’s investigating.”)
A person cannot live on Valentine’s Day alone, so this same basic form was transferred to postcards, which did allow a little extra space for more words.
This was an especially easy job when, as with the Valentines, you had the same basic message to push out on dozens of different cards. So it was a natural for the very popular “Why haven’t you written yet?” postcards. This was also a nice break from the Valentine lines because you could draw frowning faces, something that was not considered useful in the grade school Valentine.
And artists who produced mile after mile of cute animals and cute children could actually draw grown-ups doing grown-up things.
Note to self: someday, when you lose all reason and start to buy up bales of old school Valentines, see if there are as many that deal with fishing as there are postcards. Also consider the question of whether artists themselves would rather be doing something besides leaning over a drawing board, especially when the fish are biting.
Oh, it’s true: sometimes the adults don’t look that much older than the kids on the Valentines. But if you check the fine print (on his T-shirt) you can see we are dealing with an adult here.
In the postcard format, there was room for landscape art, if that was something you yearned to do.
Or if your skills in goofy creatures went beyond, say, bunny rabbits and seven year-old policemen or nurses, you could spread out and show that, as well.
And on a Valentine for seven year-olds, you didn’t get to try your hand at pin-up art. Sure, the JOKE is just as bad as any on a Valentine, but at least you were getting a little variety.
Affretz swung up his sword to whack the dragon away, but the dragon let go at once and shook its head.
“You don’t understand!” Steam dribbled from its nose as it whined, “You’ve broken half the spell! Help me break the other half!”
“Spell?” demanded the prince. “Oh, I get it! What happened? A wicked fairy at your christening?”
“No,” said the dragon. “Come this way. I had an evil stepmother: one of the ogre’s friends. Walk faster. No, you can leave your horse and things. He won’t be back. Whenever anybody beats him he goes down to the lowest towers of the castle and pouts for days, kicking anything that lives there. Can you walk faster?”
Affretz tried, but between the rough forest track and his limp, it wasn’t easy. “Why? Where are we going?”
“By helping a dragon, you broke the part of the spell that kept me from talking. Now I can only get my own shape back by helping you rescue somebody else.”
“Rescue?” said Affretz. “Who? Deedee?”
“I don’t know any Deedee.” The dragon bit a fallen branch and stepped over it to leave the path. “Look out for that rock there: it bites. But Gelvander said there were princes in the forest. If he thought YOU were an ogre, then he meant somebody else.”
“Oh.” Affretz was following as quickly as he could, but he was taller than the dragon, and had to push back low hanging branches, some of which tried to tug at his sleeves. “My brothers. But they’ll be all right. They’re the best there is at what they do. Alain’s the bravest and handsomest prince in the world, and Archels is the strongest and smartest.”
“They must also be the deafest,” said the dragon, “If they didn’t come running to find out what was going on when Gelvander was shouting. Or are they asleep? Can’t you walk any faster? You walk funnier than I do, and I’m a potbellied old dragon.”
“I can’t help the way I look, or the way I walk,” Affretz replied, kicking away some ferns who were clinging to one of his boots.
“Oh?” said the dragon. “Did you have an evil stepmother, or was it your christening?”
“A fairy,” Affretz replied. “And they hadn’t even made her mad or anything.”
“I think fairies are more trouble than they’re worth,” said the dragon. “But anything magic makes me nervous. I’d love to go home and just be a prince again. Abnormal phenomena just make me all fluttery.”
Affretz didn’t think the dragon looked much like a prince, but, after all, the ogre had felt the same way about him. “So where ARE we going?”
The dragon blew a cloud of steam at a large snake with two mouths. The serpent slithered away. “I heard the wailing trees. They’ve caught something.”
The dragon raised its wings, releasing billows of dust. “Let me just fly ahead and see if what they caught is worth bothering about.” The round purple bulk bounced into the air and floated among the trees, looking like a lost balloon.
Affretz raised his sword: the purple beast might be leading him into a trap. Then the pudgy form turned around and came back.
“It looks kind of like you,” the dragon said. “Only with arms and legs like tree trunks and a face that wouldn’t stop a waterfall on its way down.”
“That’s Archels.” Affretz kicked a rock that was sneaking up on them. “He won’t need any help.”
“The strong, smart one, is he?” said the dragon. “The wailing trees must have been a nasty surprise to him.”
Affretz heard a high-pitched hum, but before he could ask about it, he spotted an immense striped spider lurking in the foliage. He raised his sword above his head.
“That’s not the problem,” the spider told him. “Hey, stop! Don’t touch that!”
Affretz, looking for even ground to brace himself on for a spider fight, had been about to steady himself by putting a hand against a tree trunk. He jerked his hand back as a brown blob of glup fell onto it.
“Little drips like that are no threat,” the dragon said, as Affretz tried to shake the goo loose. “Some animals take them home as ornaments. But if you get coated with the big drops, YOU’RE the ornament. Like that spider. Or your brother…Archels, did you say?”
Affretz looked beyond the spider and saw a struggling shape covered in brown ooze. He recognized the boots, though, the only part of Archels that wasn’t yet covered.
“How do we get him out?” Affretz exclaimed, hurrying forward behind the dragon.
“Keep that sword ready to pry him loose,” the dragon replied. “I’ll see how much of that stuff I can melt with my steam.”
They had to duck goo-covered elbows and knees, but the dragon and Affretz took up a position behind the struggling captive. As steam started to puff from the dragon’s nostrils, the hum around them turned into a series of short, sharp notes.
The dragon glanced up. “Oh, don’t blubber. You can get other prisoners. I need this one.” He took a deep breath. “Oh, this is going to be simply awful for my sinuses.”
Hot fog streamed in such clouds from the dragon that Affretz had to turn away. “Try the sword, try the sword!” the dragon called, stopping to take another breath.
Affretz pushed the point of his sword into the amber grease and twisted. Archels pulled the other way, his head popping out of his helmet, and the brown prison. Long threads were pulled out of the ooze as the strongest prince in the world struggled to break free. The dragon breathed another cloud of steam across the captive prince, and Affretz cut at the threads of ooze. Archels pulled away some more. “I can….” He started to say.
A roaring pop split the air as Archels split through the brown prison and rolled onto the forest floor. He was up in a moment, eyes open for new threats.
“Yay!” shouted Affretz, raising his sword.
“Yay!” echoed a voice he had not heard before.
Where the dragon had been producing steam there now stood a young man wearing brown velvet robes, a tufted hat, and large black spectacles. He shook out the sleeves of his robe and then tossed both hands in the air.
“I am I! Prince Nestor once again!”
“Thank you, Prince Nestor,” said Affretz, as Archels, who was rubbing brown paste from his face, nodded in agreement. “And congratulations. Now if we can find….”
But there came another roaring pop, and Prince Nestor disappeared. In his place was a large owl the same color as the prince’s robe.
“It is SO nice to have things normal again,” said the owl, in prince Nestor’s voice. “I can fly home to my tree where we don’t have any truck with magic.”
“You’re an owl prince?” Affretz inquired.
“You guessed it,” said Nestor. “And this is the time of day for owls to be sleeping. I can get a decent nap without that ogre kicking my cage to wake me up. Brrrr, those magic creatures make me twitter.”
“Turn human for a while,” Affretz requested. “I have another brother somewhere in these woods!”
“I haven’t seen MY brothers in years,” Nestore replied. Long wings swung out. “I’ve got no time to stop and sniff the flowers.”
“Wait!” But Prince Nestor has risen toward the tops of the trees, and was gone in a moment. Affretz turned to Archels. “Did you see that?”
“No,” said his brother. “Help me get this stuff out of my eyes.”
Affretz explained as they pulled goo from the prince’s face. A little more steam might have been helpful, but they had had as much help as they were going to get from the purple dragon. “I’d rather deal with your ogre than these trees,” Archels said. “Has Alain come back yet?”
“Not so far,” said Affretz. “Maybe he found the door to the ogre’s cave.”
The two princes set off in the general direction of the road Alain had taken. They found it, but not Alain. “Just trees.” Archels poked one with the tip of his sword. “They aren’t sticky, at least.”
“They look like they’re watching us.” Affretz pointed down the path with his own sword. “Maybe they’re guarding that beautiful flower. Are there footprints or….”
His head jerked up and his eyes went from the path to the massive red and blue petals folded in on each other all over the flower. “Prince Nestor said something about flowers. Was it a clue, do you think, like what the old man told us?”
Archels frowned. “It’s too early in the day for flowers to be all closed up that way.”
Something whispered, “Sssslay! Sssslay!”
The voice was not coming from the flower. “Who said that?” Affretz demanded.
Archels grabbed his arm and pointed. “Look! Alain’s sword!”
The two princes ran at the flower and found spiky leaves rising from its base to hold them back. Archels swung his sword down at them. With a BOINGGGG, the blade bounced off of the plant’s stem.
“Rootssss!” the whispering voice called. “Rootssss!”
“Dig up the roots!” shouted Affretz. Both princes jabbed their swords into the dirt, not the most efficient means of gardening.
But it was effective. They had managed to dig a small hole when a hand shot up from the dirt to grab Affretz’s nearer ankle.
“Nothing, Captain. Not a single break in the Cotner Case.”
“Only a matter of time, Lieutenant. Continue to monitor Facebook, and keep your staff on Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Something could be posted at any time.”
“Can do, Captain. But, er…”.
“But what, Lieutenant?”
“Wilson had an idea, sir. What if the perp didn’t take a phone with him?”
“The diabolical cunning! No! I refuse to believe we’re dealing with a mastermind of that….”
“Sir?”
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“He’s here again, sir.”
“What does that crackpot want?”
“I wanted to tell you Watson has the culprit in the Cotner case outside in the rickshaw.”
“What? How did….”
“When neither the crime nor the loot was posted to social media, we realized the culprit must be someone who did not use such venues. After that, it was simple. We checked every name in the latest census records against the Internet and found only nine people who fit the profile. As three of them were in prison, and the other five are bedfast in other institutions, the ninth name had to be the culprit.”
“Well, you’ve done it again! This should take your success viral!”
“No, Captain, no. I prefer that the police department get the credit. It is best if the public knows officers of the law are at their posts.”
They say a person can learn a lot about life from fishing. This is, as our ancestors said, as may be. I can’t speak to it. I gave up fishing at the ripe old age of eight or so when my excitement at actually catching a fish was dashed when I was told I had to throw it back (it was ALMOST as long as my thumb.) But I WILL say there are life lessons to be learned from looking at POSTCARDS about fishing.
BE PROACTIVE. Our postcard cartoonists were nearly unanimous in rejecting the old saying that “All things come to those who wait.” Postcards flourished in the age which honored the go-getter, the person who went out and took the good things in life without waiting in line.
UNDERSTAND YOUR PRIORITIES. Before you can go out and get what you want, of course, you need to decide what that is. Once you’ve made that decision your course becomes clearer. As the fine old motto has it: Plan your work and then work your plan.
REMEMBER YOUR GOALS: Don’t let yourself be distracted from your main aim by other possibilities. You need to stick to your plan once you’ve planned your stick. (Wait, that’s not quite…..)
NEVER SETTLE. The go-getting ideal does not accept substitutes, or “almost good enough”. Keep aiming for the stars. (note: you need to be fairly definite about that. I can find almost no postcards which involve going after starfish.)
ON THE OTHER HAND, LET’S BE REASONABLE. Hey, Captain Ahab went after what he wanted, knew what it was, and wouldn’t settle. And look what it got him: star billing in a classic tragedy. You should sometimes reassess your priorities and goals. Beats drowning.
FOLLOW THROUGH: Yes, getting there is half the fun. But if you want ALL the fun, be prepared to deal with what you wanted once you get it.
THINK TWICE, SPEAK ONCE. Many postcards remind us of the main work hazard of being a fish. If a fish would just keep his mouth shut….
WHENEVER POSSIBE, JUST TELL THE TRUTH. One of the downfalls of those who talk too much is that when they have something actually significant to say, no one is listening any more, especially if they are known for giving in to that common fishing fib habit.
PAY ATTENTION TO THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE. You will often find they know what they’re talking about. (This doesn’t mean you HAVE to believe that story about the three hundred pound catfish, or always put your hat on backward until you get in the boat. But you can’t sort out the good advice from the so-so unless you listen to all of it. Speaking of which, never forget this blogger’s main watchword: Everything In the World is Off By a Quarter of an Inch. If that fish back in nineteen-aught-whatever had been a quarter of an inch shorter, I wouldn’t even have been able to see it, and might not have become so disillusioned so young.)
Meanwhile, having been surrounded by a sack, Dimity found herself being dragged down stairs which would have been much too high for her to have walked down. They felt like tree roots as she bounced across them, but the smell alone would have helped her guess she had been taken underground.
“You are mine now!” roared whoever was dragging the bag. “Mine!”
“What do you want with me?” Dimity demanded.
“Oh, every ogre has to have a princess around the place,” the voice roared. “For weeping, sweeping, mopping, moping, crying, begging for mercy: things like that.”
A door slammed. Now Dimity was being dragged along a bumpy floor. Another door went bang, and the bag was tossed down to roll along a floor that was even bumpier. After a mere second of rest, the sack was jerked away, sending her facefirst onto the floor again.
The floor was dirt, as well as dirty. Dimity tried to push herself up, but was shoved back down again. The hand that pushed her was dirty, too. She looked over her shoulder along the dirty arm attached to the hand to see who this hand belonged to.
He was big, much taller than any of the three knights, or the purple dragon. Round red eyes burned in his face, above a nose that went in instead of out. Dripping fangs went right through his lower lip. Hair draggled from the back of his head, down a body that was pale and soggy. All he wore was a kind of raggy brown kilt.
He was even uglier than Sir Ceee, though it was close.
“Who are you?” Dimity inquired, while pulling herself a little farther along the floor, away from him.
“Gelvander,” said the ogre, thumping his chest with one fist. “And your name is ‘Mine”. You’re nobody else’s damsel now, with ball gowns and a feather bed. Do you good to sleep on cold rocks.”
The rocks sounded like a good idea. Dimity snatched up a couple and, rolling, flung them at the ogre, just to see how he felt about this. Gelvander dodged them, and snatched the princess up by one wrist.
“I shall dress you in greasy garments and feed you bits of bats,” he said. His breath smelled of unwashed socks.
“No, thank you,” said the princess, kicking in the direction of his third chin.
Gelvander had expected that, too, and the kick missed. With one deft flick of the wrist, he tossed the princess into a cage that was standing open, and slammed the door, just missing her fingers.
“Wait there.”
Dimity thought that was a silly thing to say, as she had heard a lock click when the door banged shut. “I’ll be back to explain your damsel duties after I see if those princes have defeated my dragon. I expect they have. He’s always been worthless. I’ll be back to see if you’re any better in a bit, damsel Mine.” He slammed the door on his way out of the room. A clump of dripping mold landed on the top of the cage with a sploooorp.
Dimity wasted no time. She rose to her feet and gave the cage door a quick kick, just to see how difficult this was going to be. The door didn’t budge.
“Nice joke on the ogre, giving him a damsel who’s going to fall apart if she doesn’t meet a prince soon,” she said, hands on hips. “But he probably wouldn’t laugh and I don’t think it’s that funny myself. I’d better just escape.”
Anyway, the cage did not appeal to her. The ogre appeared to have been using it as a trash bin. And such trash! Bones, rotting turnips, spoiling peaches: what Dimity liked least of all were the rusty bits of armor and tarnished hair ribbons.
Putting her hands through the bars of the door, she felt around until she had hold of the lock. It was the turning kind, which needed a combination to open, but Dimity didn’t believe this particular ogre could remember very many numbers.
“This would be tons easier if you took better care of your things,” she scolded him. The lock was rusty, and hard to turn. Bits of rust kept scratching her hands. Maybe the ogre, who was bigger and perhaps got regular naps, was unbothered by such things.
She heard a click, which cheered her up. But then she heard the boom of a slamming door.
Gelvander smashed into the room and gave the door a good kick behind him. “Give a dragon a comfy cage for a hundred years and what happens? He turns on you! Helping a prince! I hope he gets his brains boiled!”
Spotting the cage, he gave this a kick which sent it sailing along the floor. Dimity rolled back into the trash inside the car, and hit her head on one of the bars of the back wall.
“Keep thinking,” she told herself. “Ah!” She shoved one hand into a pocket.
Gelvander kicked the cage again, so hard Dimity thought it might roll right over. She wondered if that would help.
“Oh, please, please, please, don’t hurt me!” she cried. She hoped that sounded convincing: she’d never pleaded for mercy before.
“Hurt you?” roared the ogre. “Hurt you? Twit! What do you think I dragged you all this way for? Of course I’m going to hurt you!”
Dimity was crouching in the garbage, ready to run if he kicked the cage hard enough to break it apart. But Gelvander reached down to open the door. She bounced forward the second that was open, throwing her anti-monster charms right into the ogre’s face. She used the other hand, and both feet, to scramble along the floor to the exit.
She got halfway there. Then a large hand caught one ankle and lifted her into the air.
Her little silver hammer charm was stuck to Gelvander’s forehead, which was growing a red spot around it, and her golden arrow was caught among some scraggly hairs. He didn’t look especially impressed. He didn’t look especially happy, either.
“I thought I told you you were Mine,” he snarled, and shook her until her pencils fell out of her pockets. “Don’t you know I’m Gelvander the Grand, monarch of this haunted forest and terror to all who know me?”
“No, you didn’t introduce yourself thoroughly,” said the princes, who was able to brush the floor with one hand and grab a couple of pencils back.
The ogre shook her again. “I have powers that scare bears in their lairs! Wolves howl like owls! I’ll teach you a couple of things, you damsel, you!”
Gelvander carried Dimity out into a dim hallway; she was glad she’d tied her hair back before starting this adventure, since he probably would have stepped on it every chance he got. She was hauled into a damp, foggy room filled with orange light.
He dropped her onto the floor so he could slam this door, too. “Didn’t your mother teach you how to enter a room properly?” the princess demanded. She had had kind of a headache to start with, and all this banging of doors wasn’t helping, especially as he had dropped her on her head.
“Silence, damsel!” roared the ogre. “Do you know where you are?”
“How would I know that?” Looking around the room, Dimity found it was filled with row upon row of rough wooden tables. On each of these in turn were rows upon rows of pots and vases and jars. Out of each container grew a number of plants, some beautiful, some horrible.
“This is where I grow special flowers and trees for my forest,” Gelvander informed her. “My forest grows and grows, and one day will cover the earth! Every prince and princess, every damsel and grandam, will have to live in it and do my bidding. And here are flowers for you, oh damsel Mine!”
With one hand, he snatched up a pot of flowers. With the other, he caught up the same ankle he’d clutched before, and dragged the princess behind him into a small room just off his plant laboratory. Of course, he slammed this door shut before dropping the pot of flowers and the princess onto a high, hard table.
“Don’t move,” he warned Dimity. He reached up to a shelf on the wall and brought down two bottles. One held liquid. The other held cotton, which he took out and jammed into his long dirty ears.
“These flowers,” he said, shouting because he could no longer hear himself, “Are my Poppies of Horrible Nightmares. Sleeping Poppies just send people to sleep. These poppies will make you sleep and bring up every worst nightmare you have ever dreamed, and make them worse. The last damsel couldn’t say anything but ‘don’t” for two months after she woke up.”
Dimity looked at the thick green leaves with new interest. Gelvander opened the second bottle and shook a few drops onto the plant. “Sing, my poppies!”
Tiny red flowers appeared among the leaves. Perfume, sickeningly sweet, filled the air. A song whispered from among the new blossoms.
“Louder!” said Gelvander, letting a few more drops of plant food fall from the bottle.
The flowers expanded to the size of Dimity’s fists. The sweet scent grew thicker, and the song was louder. Some petals seemed to be moving like lips.
“That’s it, my poppies,” said the ogre. “Put the princess to sleep. Make her dream dreams that scream.”
He turned to Dimity, who was crushing her fists against her ears. The song was doing nothing at all to soothe her headache.
“Still awake?” he demanded. He poured plant food from the bottle onto the blossoms. “Louder, you wicked weeds! Sing louder!”
The flowers grew now to the size of Dimity’s head. She could definitely see several mouths singing on each flower, each with a pair of squinched-up eyes above these. The song continued the increase the size of her headache, no matter how hard she mashed her hands against her ears.
“You should be twitching in troubled sleep by now!” Gelvander roared, “Terrified by vast vicious visions! What’s wrong? Are these wicked things singing at all?”
He ripped the cotton from his ears. Wide red eyes opened wider, and then shut tight. Gelvander sat down hard on the bumpy floor.
“But wh….” He started to say, and he stretched out, eyes closed, lips trembling.
Dimity watched the ogre for a while, to make sure this wasn’t a trick. Then she reached to the bottle sitting near her and upended it, pouring every lost drop inside onto the poppies.
“Keep singing,” she whispered. The flowers, doubling in size art once and showing an inclination to double again, seemed to nod. She saw teeth in the mouths of the blossoms.
Sliding forward, the princess dropped from the table and started to tiptoe toward the big door. She heard the ogre roar again.
She looked behind her. “Stay away!” the sleeping ogre cried out to whatever he was dreaming. “Stay away!”
“Fine with me,” said Dimity, and hurried out of the room.
One of my numerous former employers has for years tantalized us with the possibility of a massive exhibition of items from its collection related to dogs and/or cats. I never had anything to do with that branch of the place, but I would bet anything that one of the reasons this has never happened is because the cat people want a cats-only display and the dog people…remind me to tell you some day about the staff barbecue which included a Cutest Pet contest, in which the two halves of staff immediately chose up sides and staked out their territories. (This never reached the level of food fight, because on our salaries we were not going to waste a single hot dog bun.) They COULD mount an exhibition of dogs AND cats, but that would require careful counting, since neither side would allow the other to have an advantage and there would need to be exactly the same number of kitties and puppies in the exhibit.
It occurred to me, while cogitating on that ancient feud, that although I have treated of dogs in this space, AND cats, I have never considered the postcards which show both. Those of us who grew up with classic animated cartoons, particularly Tom and Jerry but also the works of Disney, Warner Brothers, and similar artists’ studios, MIGHT assume the majority of dog and cat postcards involve the eternal chase: Dog after Cat (after Mouse.)
But this doesn’t seem to be the case. My inventory, as well as a look at the offerings of other postcard mavens online, suggests that the two cartoon animals are more often involved with romance.
It’s another one of those dissertation topics I keep tossing out to my readers that society observes certain conventions in the portrayal of the sexes. Paintings from ancient Egypt and other cultures, for example, show women as being lighter skinned than men, though presumably both had to work out in the sun. It has also long been a convention in art and cinema that the hero is always taller than the heroine (really tall actresses were generally relegated to comic relief.) And in these romantic dramas featuring cats and dogs, the dog is almost always the boyfriend, while the cat is the girlfriend. (Cats are always grooming their hair and dogs pee in public: I get it.)
The pairing was ideal for postcard cartoonists of course. Not only did it offer comic possibilities, but there was a Romeo and Juliet touch of forbidden affection underlying your story. (Of course, Romeo and Juliet itself is centimeters away from turning into a comedy, with those preposterous parents, the messages that go astray, the “we’ll pretend you’re dead” plot…I think Shakespeare made the right choice, but what if…where were we?)
In effect, of course, in the “boy chases girl” teen romance fashion, we DO have dogs chasing cats in these postcards.
Although we are pretty close here to a dog chasing a dog gag (or dog AND cat chasing a dog. THAT would have been a new twist on…excuse me, I have to go send a note to a movie studio. Hallmark, here we come.)
It’s all about accidents and chance. Did you ever run across some rediscovered artist online: some songwriter ignored in her own day whose friends preserved her manuscripts and recordings or author whose stories and poems were published in cheap, quickly discarded magazines? Years later, someone comes along and says “Hey, look at this!” and brings out the results to bring the originator some posthumous fame? That’s a wonderful thing, but what about those artists whose manuscripts went into recycling, whose paintings were burned to make room in a warehouse, and whose tapes were erased so they could be reused? Those make the survivals all the more amazing.
Anyhow, the face smiling at you at the top of this column is Lavonne (Lenins? Levins? Levine?) at the age of 2 years and 1 month, in Des Moines, Iowa in December of 1915. We know this because someone wrote it on the back of the RPPC (Real Photo Postcard) which was printed for sending out to the family. If you are one of those highly specialized blogreaders, used to scanning everything you find on the Interwebs for inconsistencies and things that don’t sound right, you may be objecting, “Yeah, I see her name and age, but where do you get 1915 and Des Moines out of that?”
I don’t. Instead I marvel at the accident which saw related postcards survive together to be bought by me. For HERE is Lavonne with her little brother Darrell eight months later. And, once again, useful information has been added at the back.
We even get the address of that house in Des Moines, which MIGHT, if I wanted to exhaust myself in research, add useful details on that last name. But there’s no hint whether they owned the house or rented, and records of a family that lived there for only a short time…what? How do I know THAT?
Well, again by mere chance, here are Lavonne and Darrell roughly two years later. Lavonne has maintained her smile and either Darrell dislikes having hs picture taken, or knows he is starting on a life as straight man. Now, id I had been paying attention to online auctions, there might be more of this story (these three came in two different auctions from the same seller) but I am perfectly happy to leave Lavonne and Darrell in 1918, without necessarily pursuing the next hundred and six years.
For example, here is Hazel Ann, also photographed in 1918. That’s all anybody wrote on this RPPC, but here I can cheat. I knew the original owner of these cards, who was Hazel Ann’s little sister, born in 1924. So, with a last name, I was able to find out what became of Hazel Ann.
Hazel Ann, shown again in 1918 with a protective older brother, never married, and worked her way up through a number of clerical jobs to become chief recordkeeper and motivational power behind a big city not-for-profit, and marketing director for a for-profit, all of which earned her a laudatory obituary. Worth remembering. And so, I suppose, is the brother who was buried with what remained of the rest of his crew when his bomber was shot down in France during World War II.
Remember, all ye would-be rediscovered artists: the key to a happy ending is knowing when to stop the story.
Affretz sat up and rubbed his eyes. Was something wrong? He couldn’t hear Deedee talking.
There was nothing much to see but the wagon, the sinister forest, and the horses. He was about to call out when he heard Archels’s voice.
“How could we let him get away? I wanted to find out what dragon steak tastes like?”
“Well, to judge by this dragon,” Alain answered, “It probably tastes a lot like chicken.”
His brothers stepped out onto the path, sliding swords back into their scabbards. “What’s new?” asked Affretz. “Did you all go off and leave me sleeping while something exciting was going on?”
“You looked as if you needed your sleep,” Alain said. “It wasn’t all that exciting. Just a little purple dragon. Deedee wasn’t afraid of it for a second.”
“Where is she?” asked Archels.
“Didn’t she go with you?” Affretz demanded.
After Alain and Archels explained the situation, they all called for their companion. When there was no answer, the brothers drew their swords again.
“I knew there had to be some kind of fiend behind all this,” said Alain. “You can tell it’s that kind of forest, just by looking at it.”
“We didn’t pass any fiends on our way from the south,” said Archels. “Maybe if we keep going north, we’ll find the fiend.”
“Let’s hurry,” said Affretz. Even if Deedee was able to talk for hours on end without getting tired, she was still not the sort of person you liked to think of in the clutches of a fiend.
The princes rode north, but before they got very far, they found the path broke into three narrower paths. “Which way do you suppose the fiend is on?” asked Archels.
“Well, there are three paths and three of us,” Alain replied. “Shout if you see Deedee or any fiends.”
Alain took the path to the right. Not very far along it, he heard a whimper. He didn’t think it sounded like Deedee, but since he’d never heard her whimper, he couldn’t be sure. He hurried toward the sound.
In a small clearing, the whimper came out again, not from Deedee but from a huge red and blue flower. The color of each petal shifted and they were ruffled by the breeze.
The flower was surrounded, as if imprisoned, by tall black trees, their long sharp branches reaching in at the flower. The trees seemed to lean in and the flower trembled.
“No, you don’t!” shouted the prince, jumping into the circle.
A wind in the trees seemed to be whispering “Ssssstay back! Thissss was hard work.”
Alain knew how hard it was for trees to move: they must really hate the flower. He swung his sword, lopping off half a dozen branches.
“Ha! There, fiend! Now try to….”
“Fallallop,” said the flower, as it swallowed him.
“We tried to sssstop you,” said the trees, waving their shortened limbs.
Archels took the path to the center. Not fr north of the path, it broke into two other paths. On the branch to the left, he saw a giant striped spider, twice as tall as the prince, completely still. One leg was raised as if to strike Archels down, but it waited and watched.
Archels did not charge right in. He glanced up the other path, and saw a smaller creature, half woman and half wolf. It too did not move, waiting and watching the prince.
“Ah,,” said the prince to himself. “Anyone would think a hero smart enough and strong enough to get this fae would naturally attack the big monster first, to get it out of the way. So this is a trick, and that wolfwoman is the real dangerous fiend.”
No one moved. “But maybe,” he thought, “They expected a smart prince would figure out the trick. In that case, the spider is the REAL fiend.”
Archels looked from one creature to the other. They stood waiting.
Archels nodded. “But no one could have predicted that the strongest prince in the world would come up this path. I can pull down one of these tall trees and knock both monsters down before I go on.”
Dozens of light brown trees, much prettier than any he’d seen so far, grew between the two paths. Archels picked out a good tall one, and threw his arms around it to lift it free.
“Oh!” His hands sank into the bark. No matter how hard he pulled, his fingers would not come free. A sound of crying, as if from far away, came to his ears.
Archels looked up among the leaves. Of course! These were the Wailing Trees he’d read about. This brown stuff was not their bark at all. Wailing trees produced a thick sap, the color of amber, which hardened so fast that some authors called it amber grease. A thick heavy dollop landed on his head.
What made matters worse was that, from this angle, he could see that neither the spider nor the wolf-woman would ever move again. They had been alive once, but now the sun highlighted a thin, solid coat of amber grease on each, showing they were now nothing but fierce statues. The prince twisted and pulled, but his arms sank deeper into the soft brown ooze.
Affretz, having taken the wagon and all three horses with him, was not moving as fast as his brothers. His path did not take long to bring him to something strange.
A very tall and extremely ugly man was trying to fight with a fat purple dragon which kept hissing steam. The man had only a wooden club, and wore no armor. Looking up at the sounds from the path, the man bellowed, “Awake, are you? How about lending me a hand here?”
Affretz started forward, but stopped after three steps. “You have to be careful in a haunted forest,” he thought. “Just because this man looks like me doesn’t mean he’s right.”
As he thought this, the big man jumped to the side, striking the dragon on the head and kicking the pale purple belly at the same time. “Talk back to me, will you?” The man jumped away from another cloud of steam and struck the dragon again. “You’ll be getting no supper tonight!”
The dragon was far too slow and entirely too small to fight back in any useful way. Affretz frowned. The man didn’t NEED any help fighting. “You just think it would be fun for me to beat up on that dragon!”
The thought angered him so much, he drew his sword. “Hey, that’s pretty,” said the man. “Did you steal that from a prince?”
“I AM a prince!” Affretz replied, running forward.
“No fair!” shouted the big man. “Princes are supposed to be good-looking!”
“I’ll teach you what princes are supposed to be,” snarled Affretz.
His foe swung that club up to knock away Affretz’s sword. This took the big man’s attention away from the dragon. Hot steam billowed along the backs of the huge legs.
“No fair!” the big man roared again. He stuck out one long bare foot so he could kick the dragon with the other, and Affretz jumped up to land on the long white, ogreish toes.
“Yeow!” The ogre-like man dropped his club and ran off up the path. Affretz started after him, but something jerked him back.
The purple dragon’s mouth was clamped around the prince’s right boot.
While I was refiling some of the postcards we examined in our meditations upon romance, the idea leaped out at me that we have been passing by a fairly common romantic association on postcards of the past. That is the connection between romance and food, the association of the stomach and the heart. The two requirements are basic and eternal, and our postcard people understood how natural was their association.
Think of how we express these things: our romantic target is often called “sweet” or “yummy”. We become “passionate” about a great restaurant, and I have seen more than one chef described as “creating dishes which call to your heart.” (Better than calling to your epiglottis, I suppose.)
Sometimes, of course, the two are seen in conflict, and a young man learns the lesson of taking his sweetness out to dinner, only to find out how much it costs to feed a relationship. (There are plenty of these postcards, but most deal with the price of champagne and other beverages. The link between romance and booze is a more complex topic, to be treated when we have more time on our hands.)
And on occasion, the postcard artists admit that two hearts can be set on fire so thoroughly that they don’t see their food through the resulting smokescreen. (Dorothy L. Sayers covers this in a scene where the hero’s mother, meeting her son’s fiancée, finds her so befuddled by the unexpected proposal that she can’t remember whether she’s eaten anything over the preceding twenty-four hours.) Just because the heart and stomach are close friends, they DO sometimes work at cross purposes.
Many times, though, the food directly brings on the romance. There are dozens of postcards which show grateful diners yearning for their waitresses. And how much milk must have been consumed by those men who pursue milkmaids! I’m surprised the dairy industry survived at all, between the delays in getting her back to the dairy, and the amount those suitors must have drunk (at least to suggest that was all they were really after.)
Some cartoonists were not afraid to become even more intimate in their connection of food and romance, moving on to topics where some artists would have given way to nausea. These are the postcards which show us lovers feeding each other. This is probably a game which goes back centuries, and the only reason we have no paintings of Cleopatra feeding Marc Antony grapes is that the painters just gave in to weak stomachs.
Playing this goes on well into the honeymoon period, and even reaches the kitchen of the couple.
See, our artists saved their closest associations of food and love to the couple which had set up housekeeping together. We have the couple warm and cozy in a meal just for the two of them,
And the newlyweds working together in the kitchen as they go through figuring out how this whole complex process really works (baking, I mean.)
A folksinger once came forward with a song about this, called “The Hugs In the Kitchen Are the Best.” Although the postcard folks were willing to point out they DID sometimes make the meal go wrong. BUT folks don’t live on broth alone.
