MARY'S BIT or THE BRIDE WORE BLACK
Readers may be interested to hear the most popular period for marriages runs from May to October. When I read this tidbit I thought it must also be a busy time for choosing bridesmaids.At this point I should confess I had but a short career as a bridesmaid.
My younger sister and I were bridesmaids when my older sister got married. The day was grey and brought wind as cold as gold off the Tyne. We wore chaplets of artificial flowers and shivered in ankle-length taffeta dresses featuring wide scalloped collars. At least our matching muffs kept our hands warm. Unfortunately, given the role we played we were unable to roam surrounding streets as we often did looking for a bride and her relatives leaving for her wedding. It was the local custom for such parties to toss pennies from the taxi as it left for the ceremony, forming a nice supplement to our pocket money. We always knew where to take up position by a front door because the wedding taxis were immediately recognisable by white ribbons stretched from roof to bonnet.
My next spell of bridesmaid duty was for the afore-mentioned younger sister's nuptials. My dress was probably purchased, unlike the home-sewn duds we'd worn as children, inasmuch as it resembled the type of dress that might have been worn at, say, a cocktail party, had such things existed round our way. It had full skirts and its main feature was a boat-shaped neckline not quite off the shoulder, so suitable for a church wedding. I'm sorry to say my thoughts drifted a bit during the ceremony -- it will be no surprise my school report cards were occasionally marked "must pay more attention" -- but when my sister turned to hand me her bouquet, I fortunately was able to snap immediately out of whatever daydream I was wandering in and take it as it was offered.
On another occasion I was with three others, all of us strangers to the town where mutual friends were getting married. Thus it took longer than anticipated to find the registry office where the ceremony was to take place. Our journey to the venue was notable not only for its awful weather but also for featuring an incident when a large lorry got far too close to us as we passed it. Looking out from my back seat I could see the huge hubs on its wheels spinning almost, it seemed at the time, a hand's width away and suddenly enormous as they approached ever closer.
We were strangers to the town where the wedding was to take place and it took us longer than anticipated to find the registry office. When we finally found the building its door appeared to be locked. So we walked around the back and found a window. Looking in, we could see the registrar's back and the happy couple and their guests facing us. We stood outside in sleety rain, present at the wedding and yet not present, a Schrödinger's quartet watching the proceedings through the glass and doubtless looking like the orphans of the storm to those within. Especially since I was holding a baby while his mother was soothing a fretful toddler.
Mr Maywrite and I married late in the year in one of the less popular months. In honour of the occasion he wore a tie. Meantime, in the interests of historical accuracy, I shall reveal my dress was black with a mille-fleur pattern. Yes, the bride wore black. Judge Valentino from down the street presided over the proceedings. Feel free to make jokes about it -- everyone else has!
NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER
We've thrown the ornamental iron gates of Maywrite Towers open to welcome our latest feature: Behind the Scenes, which will feature essays from guest authors. Our first contributor, Jane Tesh, author of the Grace Street Mysteries, writes about how fictional characters sometimes have their own ideas and one character in particular who said Let Me Tell It.https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/weve-thrown-ornamental-iron-gates-of.html
ERIC'S BIT or PAPER AND INK TO BITS AND BYTES
Years ago I gave up printed books for e-books. As a legal editor, I worked all day in front of a monitor years before home computers became available to non-geeks like me so I was never averse to reading off a screen. Besides, a story isn't a physical entity. Books -- paper and ink and glue -- are only a means of transmitting the ideas from an author's mind to a reader's mind.Today you can grab digital files from the Internet any place you happen to be but when books were all real objects instead of electronic bits and bytes you had to go to real places like libraries and bookstores to find them. I recall hiking to the library over the highway and through town, past the drug store, the barber shop and the five and dime and staggering home weighted down with Dr. Seuss titles. You don't get that kind of exercise clicking the download button.
That was nothing compared to lugging huge tote bags of books along endless New York City blocks, like trekking through Death Valley in summer or the Donner Pass in winter. Catching a bus in the cavernous maze of the Port Authority was an adventure in itself.
These day-long expeditions into the city were, in large part, to hunt books that weren't native to small, local stores. There were trade paperbacks, an exotic species back in the day, reserved mostly for literary and foreign authors I'd barely heard of -- Alain Robbe-Grillet, Arthur Rimbaud, Max Frisch. On the lighter side, city stores carried British editions of science fiction novels with bright glossy covers that made American paperbacks look like country cousins.
Amazon was still only the name of a river but you could order books via snail mail directly from publishers. Along with your order the publisher would send a sheet listing all their titles, which made for exciting reading. More excitement was to be had at school where once a month everyone had the option to order from the offerings of Scholastic. Well, it was exciting for me but then I was always a reader.
There's no doubt that a thick stack of pristine paperbacks newly unboxed gives one more of a frisson than a "download complete" message on a computer screen.
I grew up with physical books but by the time I was born they had become less of an art form, as evidenced by my grandparents' bookshelves. There I found volumes with marbled endsheets, gilt edging, and slick frontispieces. As a very young child I thought it strange and wonderful to see colored pictures printed right on the covers rather than the jackets.
Books themselves were something new and magical, My grandmother sat with me in her living room rocking chair and read Heidi, The Wind in the Willows and the Old Mother West Wind stories by Thornton W. Burgess featuring such characters as Reddy Fox, Unc' Billy Possum, Danny Meadow Mouse and Grandfather Frog. I remember the meadows and forests they lived in but I also recall their habitat as being the oddly small books with two color pictures on the cover and humorous illustrations tipped in amongst the pages.
I can't help thinking about the law books I wrote and edited. I was writing with a computer almost forty years ago but the legal tomes to which I contributed were still printed, stuck between covers, and ended up on law office shelves. These days attorneys don't have to rummage through hundreds of bound volumes and enormous specialized indexes. They search electronic databases with a few keystrokes.
Most legal books are just decoration. The next time you're watching a show and the scene moves to a lawyer's office check out the books on the shelves. Chances are you see some beige volumes with a red band toward the top of the spine and a black band below. These are mostly part of the National Reporter System, which began back in 1879 and contains decisions of the federal courts and state appellate courts. You often see them -- inappropriately -- in the offices of doctors, business tycoons, apparently any place the set designers want official looking volumes.
I wouldn't be surprised if today more National Reporters weren't sold for scenery than for legal research -- a good example of the declining importance of books as we knew them.
AND FINALLY
The Orphan Scrivener has always been of the electronic persuasion and always will be. We don't see bound volumes of this newsletter any time in the future. What we do see in the future is the next conglomeration of bytes and bits being transmitted into your inboxes on June 15th.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, a bibliography of our novels and short stories, and libraries of links to free e-texts of classic mysteries and tales of the supernatural, not to mention a couple of our short stories of the latter ilk. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our handles on the site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time!
