Then Cheryl had to review Dead Poets Society. That’s about boys at a conservative prep school. Yes, I know, it sounds dull as monotony. What? You say boys don’t sound dull? Oh—you turned thirteen. Now you know what boys are. Ah, well. As it happens, I found this to be a profoundly moving picture. You see, it shows the kind of private high school I went to, and the kind at which I taught English. What a horror! Don’t ever go to a school like that! But to this school comes a new teacher, who believes that poetry should be appreciated, not inflicted. I kept whispering the names of the authors to my daughter as lines from poems were quoted: Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—as I said, I went to this type of school—(Oh, my, now there’s a song by Crystal Gayle on the FM. I always think of her hair) only now they were being rendered with feeling and understanding. The boys began to catch on to the spirit of it, and formed their secret group, The Dead Poets Society. They would sneak out at night and smoke cigarettes—that’s the adolescent notion of privilege, which you definitely don’t need to emulate—and look at pictures of bare-breasted women—okay, you can do that if you want to—and recite poems with feeling. But later one of the boys, balked from anything meaningful by his stern father, committed suicide, and the school sort of framed the good teacher as responsible and fired him. So it’s a sad ending, except that at the end the boys finally show their respect for him by standing defiantly on their desks. He had taught them to look at things in new ways, you see, such as from the height of their desks. You think that’s stupid? No it isn’t; that was a really feeling conclusion to the movie. Of course it hit me twice as hard, because I know the horror of the conformist education—my whole life since has been a muted protest to conformity—and I really appreciated it. Yes, I left teaching after one year because of similar frustration, and no, they didn’t want me back anyway. I retired to full time writing and have never stopped. So yes, you should see this movie, because you will be moved by it, and it will help you to understand some of what I am made of, if you’re interested. Good, competent, feeling teachers are a treasure, because the system discourages them. Penny brought home a paper with her teacher’s marking on it, and all I can say is the man comes across like an illiterate ass. He writes “don’t end a sentence with a proposition.” No, that’s not a typo, and yes, you can end a sentence with a preposition. Actually, his advice is good, in an unintended way; I’m trying to get Penny to send that example to Reader’s Digest. But he’s making up rules not to be found in Fowler’s (that’s the ultimate authority) and doesn’t know the distinction between “to” and “too”—I mean, this is the ilk teaching a college course?! And if my daughter protests such ignorance—she happens to have been raised in a literate family—she’ll just get penalized in her grade. So as you can see, I have some emotional involvement here. See that movie, when you get the chance.
Am I boring you yet? Not quite yet, but close? Okay, another movie. We live in a conservative Christian community, so naturally it banned Last Temptation of Christ, as I think I mentioned before. Well, this week Ron Lindahn, the artist in charge of the Xanth Calendar—yes, I’ll send you one, when I get a copy—sent me a copy of it, so I finally got to see it. Actually I’m not terrifically interested in religion, but I keep an open mind. This was fairly dull, as I expected, but worthy; it’s a more realistic picture of Jesus Christ than you generally see. When he is crucified he has a vision of being rescued, and getting married and having children: of being ordinary, in fact. But in the end he realizes that he can only deliver his message by being crucified, and he begs to go back. Then he is back on the cross, and the movie ends. I think it’s a worthy movie, and that those who ban it are bigots.
Last night my wife and daughter were watching reruns—they seem to prefer them to new material—but during commercials Cheryl flicked through other channels. They say you can tell who is the boss of a household by who controls the remote control for the TV. I don’t even know how to use it! One of the things on another channel was a movie about a man who got seduced by his best friend’s sexy daughter. She was in a bikini and brother, did she have the stuff! Naturally that didn’t interest my wife or daughter; they put it back on the reruns, then left the house for ten minutes. So I struggled with the controls and found the channel—which was now running continuous commercials. Finally it got back to the movie—and wife and daughter returned. Sigh. You say you don’t understand why I should want to watch a girl in an overstuffed bikini? Well, naturally not; you’re one of them. But the movie had degenerated into slapstick anyway, no more bikinis. Sigh.
Beautiful flute music on the FM. Life does have some compensations. Okay, next letter I won’t talk about movies. Meanwhile, keep up with your exercises and practice your swallowing. And don’t look at me slantwise through those right-angle-vision glasses! Is Cathy there? I understand you have a therapist named Cathy; how do you expect me to tell them apart? Well, say hit to roommate-Cathy. Did Sue read you “Dead and Breakfast” yet? She sent me a copy. Now she’s in my Jenny Directory too; it’s getting crowded in there with all you people jostling elbows!
August 1989
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A young girl learns to finger-spell. A not-so-young man gets not-so-younger. The Tooth Fairy works overtime. And serendipity is discussed.
* * *
AwGhost 4, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Okay, I’m back on the downstairs system, with the conventional address macro. I had the day all planned out: In the morning I would answer the woman whose husband left her for the Other Woman after twenty years, and then answer the woman who is pondering leaving her alcoholic and abusive husband after a similar period, and then get on to this letter, and wrap everything up before horsefeeding time. Ha! I had two calls from my literary agent—he’s talking to the folk who hope to make Xanth into video movies so you can see them (well, maybe some other folk will see them too, if that’s okay with you), and I had to note some figures in my computer files because I got statements on seventeen fantasy novels yesterday—yes, Xanth novels are still selling well—, and we had a visit from relatives of the folk who own the property next to us, which acreage we would like to buy so that it can never be despoiled by encroaching houses, and the bunnies and possums and box turtles and all will never be disturbed, so of course we were polite to them but they aren’t interested in selling the property, and well, here it is horsefeeding time and I’m only this far along in this letter. Ever thus! STOP SNIGGERING!
Stop it, or I’ll stick my tongue out at you. I’m not bluffing. See? OPEN YOUR EYES! You think I can’t make you do that? Just watch:
My first enclosure is a photograph of a painting of a cute little cat. I CAUGHT THAT! YOU PEEKED! On the back it says “This I did for one of Jenny’s friends …” No, that’s coincidence; this woman paints, and her daughter is named Jenny, but I’m showing you this—I can’t give it to you, because it’s a gift to me, and, well, you probably understand the ethics of that. But I thought you’d like seeing it. And your eyes are wide open now, aren’t they! You keep trying to get the better of me, and you should know better.
Okay, I’m back from horsefeeding. I have to move this letter right along, because my daughters and wife mean to drag me off to eat out, because they won’t all be here for my birthday, so I’ll lose the last part of the day. So—what? What do you mean, what do the horses eat? Grain and hay, that’s what. Oh, you mean what are we going to eat? Well, when I do go out, I take a little bit of everything edible (non-meat) from the salad bar. So let’s get back to this letter—what? Oh, all right, I’ll make a report when we get back. I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning, because it’ll be too late tonight.
Now to business: my daughter Cheryl found a baby turtle along the drive a couple of days ago. It was a water turtle, and it was far from water, so she brought it to the house—she was driving, and so it got a car ride—and I took it down to the lake. Then we went out and looked for more, in case they had hatched and
were similarly lost, but didn’t find any. Well, we saved one, anyway. This morning, or maybe yesterday morning, I saw another turtle, right by the barn door; I had to open the door over her shell. She was laying eggs there. That was a land turtle. Well, if some predator doesn’t dig them out, we’ll have more turtles in due course. Turtles are fun, and we encourage them.
Actually, my contacts with wildlife are fairly frequent.
Sometimes a bunny doesn’t know which way to go to get off our drive when I’m pedaling my bicycle out to get the newspapers, and a couple days ago, during my run, I went full-face into a spider web. Remember that clipping I sent you? No, I got all of it except the spider, though I suspect the spider wasn’t exactly pleased with the loss of her web. Stop smiling; it’s not that funny. Meanwhile we have one magnolia tree that had a bloom on the first day of AwGhost last year. Guess what: not this year. But we have two azaleas, which normally bloom only in early spring, with flowers now. Maybe plants take turns.
Did you know that Neptune has three more moons? That makes six, now, though the new ones are all baby moons. In my novel Macroscope, which you don’t have to read, I have Neptune’s big moon Triton having a little moon of its own; I’m waiting to see if they spot that moon, in which maybe I’ll be famous for having described it first. Maybe in a few million years those little moons’ll grow up to be big moons. Which reminds me: there was an item about a couple who had a dwarf child. Something in the genetics. So they adopted a Korean child with similar dwarfism. I don’t know those folk, but suspect I’d like to.
I had a call from your mother, right after they took her face apart. She informed me that my address of Twenty-Tooth Extraction Drive was wrong; they took out twenty-three teeth. Sigh. But it was the tooth of the month, just as I predicted. No, a drunk driver did not run his trailer-tractor rig over her face, it only looks that way. She’ll be better any month now, and she means to come in and make you look at her face before it becomes uninteresting again. That way you’ll know what kind of a glare to expect if you misbehave. She also warned me not to be too affrighted by the letter she had just mailed; it was written when she was mostly out of her mind. Today that letter arrived—and it was perfectly sensible and interesting. Maybe that’s what she meant.
Next enclosure is for your roommate, Cathy: it’s a Cathy comic I thought she’d like, about how people train dogs and how dogs train people. You’re a cat fan, so Cathy must be a dog fan.
Oops—I must have forgotten to clip out the Alligator Children’s page last Sunday. Will you ever forgive me? Here’s Curtis, anyway.
Today I received ten letters, a number of which were also birthday cards. I don’t know how so many folk found out about my birthday. Are you sure you haven’t squealed? Some even send gifts, which I’d prefer they didn’t, because I’m not sending them gifts. One woman says she’s madly in love with me, and no, she’s not my wife, she’s someone else’s wife, but she keeps sending letters of adoration. Humorous ones, fortunately. I guess it’s easier to love me from afar. STIFLE THAT SNIGGER! Once she wrote “I just turned forty, and I’m still mad about it!” Her last card showed a purple dragon, and said “I know how you like to fantasize. On your birthday, may all your dreams come true!” And a sign to hang on the doorknob: “DO NOT DISTURB—unless you’re part of my fantasy!” This time she sent me a device you’d like: it’s the Traffic Buster, which is a little box with an ON/OFF switch that turns on madly blinking lights, and four buttons marked Auto Machine Gun, Grenade Launcher, Death Ray, and Rifle Gun. The idea is to scare impolite drivers out of their wits, and of course that means just about every other car on the road. You want to listen to one? Okay here’s the Grenade Launcher:—— = = POW! Did you hear it? Tell your daddy to put the device on your Christmas list. Then you can visit the hospital and scare all the nurses with it.
I understand you’re learning sign language now. Would you believe: there is sign language in Xanth #12, Man From Mundania. Because Ivy can’t understand Mundane speech, but signs work okay. I also have sign language in my Indian novel, Tatham Mound. That’s not quite the same, but similar. It’s a universal language, really; with it you can talk to anyone who knows signs. My daughter Penny has done some work in signs. So I wish you well. All the same, if you can connect up one more nerve in your head so you can talk directly, that’s okay too.
Which I guess brings me to a more serious item. Two days ago I had a good day’s writing going, but in the afternoon it washed out because of phone calls and the mail. A letter asked me to send one of my dreams—the night kind—as they are collecting dreams of famous folk. Who, me? WATCH THAT SNIGGER!! Trouble is, the only really dramatic dream I can remember I already described, in Bio of an Ogre, and I don’t like to repeat myself. Then the first call: from the guy who is working on the Xanth video movie. He said a studio is interested, and might send down a jet plane to bring me there and show off the first sample. I won’t sign a contract, see, until I actually see a bit of it, to be sure it’s of the quality I want. But they must be pretty sure it’s good. So it’s an exciting prospect; maybe Xanth really will be animated. Then, later, your mother’s call, sounding as if they hadn’t gotten quite all her teeth out, because she could still talk, and that reminded me that you still can’t walk or talk or eat. It didn’t seem fair that good things should be happening to me, when I really don’t need them, while you are the one who really needs something good, like a burst of healing in the nerves. I mean, you have the brain and you have the body, you just don’t quite have enough of a connection between them. That night I dreamed a sort of mixed-up melange that faded as soon as I woke and tried to remember it—you know how dreams are—but it was as if I took a jet plane and visited you and you couldn’t talk to me. That didn’t cheer me much either. So I described that dream, and its background, and maybe the dream-book folk will be satisfied. I penciled it out for my secretary, which means it’ll be about ten days from now before it’s actually typed up and ready to go, so if you or your mother object I can intercept it then.
8:30:40 P.M.—Well, I’m back tonight, to my surprise, so I’ll tell you about it. We headed off at 7:00 to RAX, and I loaded up on a bit of everything. When I came to the broccoli soup I had a problem: they had forgotten to cut up the broccoli, and it was all in huge branches. I had stems sticking out over the edge of the bowl and dripping cream soup on the floor, and when I tried to tilt the bowl the other way the soup crept up to burn my fingers. (Was that a titter?) To eat it I had to pick it up by a soupy stem and chew off the ends, which tried to dangle like clam stomachs—I don’t know how meat-eaters can stand to eat clams!—and though the ends I held were ice cold, the ends I was trying to eat remained ouch hot. (That sure sounded like a titter.) But the soup was good and so was the mixture of everything else I had on my plate. Do you like onions and hot pepper? No? Well I do, in moderation, so I had them, and of course finished with three flavors of pudding with peach and pear slices and apple sauce on top. We were a party of six—Wife and I, and our daughters Penny and Cheryl, and their two boyfriends—and naturally I was the last to finish. I always am. Everybody else in the world eats at hectic speed. I tried to hurry, but that just gives me gas—well, never mind. Just be glad you weren’t there. We got to talking about how it was in school. In my day, when they served that kind of large-curd tapioca we called fish-eyes, folk would put a fish-eye in a spoon and use it as— you know what a mortar is? It shoots a shell up, so it loops down and hits someone else on the head? That’s the idea. These big sticky fish-eyes, those innocent teachers … (now that sounded like a laugh!) More insidious was the butter. I had a pat of it once that was so cold it clinked as it hit my plate. But when it starts to soften, well, if you use a spoon to flip it up so it sticks to the ceiling, over someone else’s head, and slowly melts—oh, that’s old stuff to you? Ah, well. Maybe you should tell the nurse that you and Cathy want to practice eating, starting with butter and spoons. Maybe the nurse will be dull enough to fall for that.
&
nbsp; Harpy therapy! Be a good girl, if you can’t get any butter. (Hey—I think that’s a pun! It was accidental.)
AwGhost 11, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Well, my days have been hectic again. Yesterday the phone started ringing, and I was calling New York and California and points between, and—but I guess you’re not interested in that. So—what’s that? You say yes, you’re not? Oh. Well. Um. If you feel that way …
But one thing yesterday will interest you: we found a skink in the living room. A skink is a sleek local lizard. Nothing wrong with it, except that it won’t find many bugs to eat in the living room. So we shooed it out, but it hid in a closet, and it was a job to shoo it out from there. We finally got it out the door, and closed the door—and later in the day there it was in the living room again. We pondered and concluded that either there had been two skinks, which seemed doubtful, or it had a secret entrance and had come in again. In which case it wasn’t trapped and could find its own way out again. So we left it alone, and it disappeared. Okay. We don’t mind it inside, we just didn’t want it starving there.
Yes, I finally had my birthday, and no the world did not come to an end. My wife gave me a compact disk player, and my daughters and their friends gave me assorted disks to go with it. So I’ve been listening to Pete Seeger songs and Simon & Garfunkel and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture—hey, on my stereo system, the cannon sound from different directions!—and his “Marche slave” whose marching beat I like. Funny thing, it seems that “slave” is not capitalized though it derives from “Slav”; he wrote it to help raise funds when the Russians were aiding the Slavs fighting the Turks. Anyway, having learned about compact disks, I find I like them. So we saw this ad to buy about 60 disks with most of the light classics cheap, and— ah, well, it’s hard to resist a sale. Meanwhile I have also been listening to cassette tapes of Jim Reeves, about my favorite male popular singer, and Crystal Gayle, well, you know, that hair.
Letters to Jenny Page 13