ERIC'S BIT or KING OF THE WILD SUMMER VACATION
When I was thirty and writing about my so very recent childhood, I remarked on how summers between school years seemed to stretch on forever as if that was something that anyone who'd ever gone to school or been a child needed to be told. Recently I've come to realize there is a different kind of truth to the old cliche.
In fact, those summers have lasted forever for me. The detail and persistence of my memories of living them have permanently shaped the mythology of my life and my interpretation of everything that has happened to me since. This is true of all my recollected past, but those summers, early and filled with fresh, vivid experiences, have had an especially strong effect.
Just the other evening as I started up the stairs to the office I paused to glance out the back window into a gray twilight, already thickening into night under the bushes and ferns at the border of the woods. At the edge of my vision a flash of green appeared high in the air, vanished, then reappeared closer to the center of the yard for an instant. My mind wanted to draw a dim line of imagined luminescence, a stop-action animation, joining where the flash had been to where it was.
On an another July evening, decades ago, around the edges of the big lawn, in the dark massed brush between a cottage and a creek, in the shadowy bergamot, beneath the black, drooping boughs of hemlocks, a thousand fireflies flashed in and out of existence. Our brains do not like randomness, particularly when it is too big to grasp, so almost immediately, practically before the last pale line of sunset had faded from above the rolling mountains, the insects appeared to have synchronized, like a neon sign, shattered into innumerable tiny pieces yet still blinking in unison. No longer tiny, individual fliers, but a huge, mysterious pattern, beating against the darkness.
After that, how could I ever be satisfied with a single firefly, or even a few? Right then and there was fixed in my mind the ideal summer night, that all summer nights would be judged against.
Similarly how could I be happy with a handful of days off from work once I had experienced the eternity of freedom between third and fourth grade? For that matter, why was it necessary to work so hard for a living when I was used to earning all the money I needed by ambling about, picking up returnable soda cans careless parkgoers left littered next to the brick grills and picnic tables under the birches? It didn't take many five cent deposits to purchase all the red hot Atomic jawbreakers and fudge popsicles I needed.
There was during those summers one instance of great good luck, or so I imagined. It was the year I collected Davy Crockett cards. What a thrill it was to open the crinkly wax paper, pop the hard slab of gum into my mouth, and wipe pink dust off the first card in the pack. What would it be? A picture I'd never seen, or just another of the boring pictures of Davy fighting Indians, of which I already had a dozen duplicates? The bubble gum was too sweet and the flavor barely lasted as long as it took me to go through the five cards. At the beginning of the summer nearly every pack held a new treasure. But as my collection grew so too did my disappointments. More and more often I found only familiar pictures.
The little store that sold the cards and penny candies and other items vacationers might want sat beside the road not far from the park. I recall setting out on my almost daily quest, having saved up a quarter or so from my soda can collecting. At the road I walked alongside the macadam which was hot enough to burn the soles of your feet if you didn't move fast enough.
As the end of summer neared and the unthinkable horror of school loomed, I had found 79 out of the set of 80. I lacked only Number 76 -- A Bullet Finds Its Mark. Week after week (or so it seems in recollection) I looked for that card, only to find more damned Indians. The taste of the gum was practically enough to give me a belly ache. Was #76 rare, like a Mickey Mantle baseball card? But why that card in particular, which I knew from watching the Disney series must show the death of the gambler on the ramparts of the Alamo?
It was the very last day at the park, or near enough, that I trudged to the store in despair and took the pack the proprietor kindly handed to me. I had all but given up hope as I opened the wax paper, pushed the gum aside, and ran a finger through the dust. And to my amazement there he was, Thimblerig the gambler, bent over from the impact of a musket ball to the chest.
Victory!
Years later I was told that the store owner, having heard often enough about the card I lacked, had unwrapped and examined every pack in the cartons he had so he could hand me the appropriate one.
Though the park is long gone, replaced by a gravel parking lot, those childhood summers have stayed with me. As the years have passed I've kept searching, hoping to find that final thing -- whatever it might be -- that will make everything complete.
NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER
Our anxious waiting period is over! The ticker just coughed out the first notices for An Empire For Ravens and to our delight Publishers Weekly has awarded it a *starred* review. Declaring it to be "outstanding", the reviewer is of the opinion "The cleverness of the plot and the solution to the murder are among the series’s best." Hurrah!
Meantime, Kirkus Reviews thought the novel "places the reader in the middle of the turmoil of sixth-century Rome and into a tense historical mystery."
Available in four editions, An Empire For Ravens appears in October and may be pre-ordered from
Amazon
https://shorturl.at/oCUV0
directly from Poisoned Pen Press
https://poisonedpenpress.com/books/an-empire-for-ravens-a-john-the-lord-chamberlain-mystery-12/
or from the usual suspects on or offline.
A brief description for interested parties:
Emperor Justinian's former Lord Chamberlain, John, receives a letter from his longtime comrade Felix, and, placing loyalty to a friend above his own safety, risks defying imperial edict by leaving his exile in Greece for Rome where Felix is in some kind of trouble.
For years a Captain of the Excubitors at the court in Constantinople, Felix has achieved his ambition to become a general when Justinian sends him to serve under General Diogenes in fighting for Rome against the besieging Goths.
John’s covert entrance into Rome is ambushed, driving him deep into ancient catacombs before he exits into the heart of the city. Arrested and brought before Diogenes, John learns that Felix is missing. It has been two days since he went to call upon Archdeacon Leon, a troublesome man at the heart of Felix’s dispatch to the city.
When sent to lodge at Felix’s quarters, John finds the household in disarray, evidence that Felix has taken a questionable lover and run up his usual debts, and someone is rifling supplies. Then a young woman servant, also missing, is found dead. John has many mysteries to solve before Diogenes’ courier to Justinian can return and prompt John’s immediate execution.
MARY'S BIT or WHEN APPLIANCES TURN ROGUE
Last summer I described the battle to get our lawnmower to start. I'm happy to report this year the mower has been behaving itself better. Indeed, this week it took only three pulls on the string thingy to get it chugging away.
In retrospect, the lawmmower aggravation could well have been an omen of the distressing pattern now developing at Casa Maywrite. Subscribers will remember in the last newsletter I mentioned they were conspiring to misbehave, although fortunately not in a murderous fashion as in the Benny Hill Show sketch when appliances turned rogue and attacked their owners.
Here, the fridge led the charge. It's an ancient model. So ancient that when we called the manufacturer about replacing a crisper drawer, the customer service representative could not find it in their list. So it's fair to say the model is at least thirty years old but while we can manage with the current crisper, the freezer compartment is more problematic. It works as it should and items remain rock solid in there, well, except ice cream tends not as firm as we might like, but its door is a miracle of improvisation. Its hinge was already broken when we arrived but we've managed to get it to work with a curious arrangement formed of bent wire and stretchy hair bands. We've been seeking a possible replacement for some time now. When the current appliance is retired it could serve as a garage beer cooler, if we ever drank beer and had a garage. But someone might like to take it for that purpose when the time comes.
The problem is the new fridge must be small enough to navigate the space between cooker and the corner of the stairs, since a niche under the latter is the only place it can go. Further, it must be below a certain height, depth, and width to fit the available space. So far all we've been able to find are either too small or too tall. The fellow at the store whence will come our cooker was not hopeful about our finding a model of the right height, given the current available sizes of these appliances. So the search goes on. Wish us luck!
However, the bigger difficulty we have is the gas cooker. A while ago its oven suddenly took to opening with a crash, due to a malfunctioning door rod. Either that or gremlins have taken up residence in the crawl space. Plus now the oven cannot be relied on to maintain the set heat. All in all, it seems a better idea to replace it rather than have it repaired, though spare parts are still available though the model itself is not.
An easy solution, no?
Ha!
For a start, due to the kitchen's configuration there's only space for an apartment sized cooker. These may be ordered online, but that won't work for us because we'd still have to find a gas fitter. Fortuna however smiled and we've just found a local source happy not only to provide a cooker of the right size but also to deliver and install it, and take the old one away. Can't shake a stick at that for service, can you? It may be a few weeks before it's available, since they sends in orders in batches of ten, but should things become really desperate, special delivery is available at additional cost. Stay tuned!
Irony however is not dead. Less than ten minutes after the buggy rolled home after visiting said shop, a small white service van drew up next door, its side boldly announcing it to be from an appliance repair business. The mechanical universe may conspire against us but does it have to taunt us as well?
