* * *
*AUTHOR’S NOTE:
WHEN THESE LETTERS WERE WRITTEN I WAS MAKING PLANS TO GO TO A CONVENTION NEAR JENKY, AND MEET HER THERE. BUT I COULDN’T SAY SO DIRECTLY, BECAUSE HER FAMILY WAS NOT SURE WHETHER THE HOSPITAL WOULD ALLOW HER TO ATTEND. SO I JUST HINTED.
October 1989
* * *
Feeding tubes disappear. A convention is mentioned. A visit occurs. And twelve cats and a mother purr in unison.
* * *
OctOgre 6, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Five days after my treadmill arrived at the local Sears store, they got around to letting us know, and we picked it up and assembled it, and today I tried it for the first time. Last week I tried the exercycle. Stop yawning! I tell you, they will put you on similar devices, in the name of therapy, the moment you start walking. The cycle enables you to use your arms too, which is good, but the treadmill seems to be more intense exercise. I set it at five to six miles an hour, which is slower than I normally run—I do about seven and a half mph—but that was enough, because I found that a level limited treadmill, where I couldn’t swing my arms, was different from running out under the sky. I feel it more in the upper thighs and less in the calves. So I “ran” 2.62 miles in 30 minutes, instead of 2.9 in 24 minutes, but at least I got no sandspurs or fly bites or spiderwebs in the face. Now my wife is concerned, because for the first time in twelve years she actually saw how hard I exercise and she says I’d better slow down—wives are like that—and she’s also afraid my flying sweat will stink up the house. Anyway, when they put you on one of these machines, remember I told you so. Tell them you’d rather take a walk outside. It won’t do any good, but you might as well tell them anyway, just to make them feel guilty.
I received your letter, dictated to Laurie, I think—she didn’t give her name. In that you say it is fun to think about going home soon. Well, if my information is correct, you are home right now as I write this, because it is Friday. I hope you are having a good time, meeting all the cats again. I hope your mother survives the experience. She thought she would go visit you, and instead you went to visit her. Her nose will be browned off about that; you’re one up on her now. (Oops, I’m in trouble; your daddy is laughing about that “browned off nose” comment, and your mother doesn’t know why.)
I also got a cute little letter from your roommate Kathy. All this time I thought it was Cathy, with a C, but it seems to be with a K. So I sent her my reply by way of Sue, and she may get that before you get this. So if she’s been smirking, that’s why.
Your mother says the Post Orifice is chewing up all the red magnolia seeds I send you. I’ll get one to you somehow; it takes a lot of intelligence to figure out how to get around something as stupid as the P.O., but I’m sure it can be done.
Let me tell you about a trip I made this week. I hate to travel, but this was set up by my daughter Penny: a visit to her boyfriend’s grandparents. It is almost impossible for a father to say no to a daughter. Oh, you had noticed? So on Sunday the Oneth of Oct Ogre we drove down to St. Petersburg, and it started out well: before we even got off our tree farm, we saw three deer. One was small; maybe they were Daddy Deer, Mommy Deer, and Baby Deer. But none had horns, so we aren’t sure. Now we know we have at least three on our property, because we saw them all at once. Good enough; we’ll do our best to see that they are never hunted.
Where was I? I just got interrupted for half an hour by a call from a publisher. How can I concentrate on something important like this letter, when these sniveling other things interfere? What? What do you care, which publisher, about what? It wouldn’t interest you. You say you’ll be the judge of that? Okay, it was from Susan Allison of BERKLEY, letting me know that they printed 175,000 copies of the paperback Bio of an Ogre. Yes, I know that conversation wouldn’t have taken half an hour. But while I had her on the line, I told her about how the ELFQUEST folk and I may do Isle of View in comic format. You see, BERKLEY distributes the Quest folk’s books, so are interested. So you see, it didn’t interest you—oh, it did? Well, you’re perverse. If it wasn’t for Jenny Elf you wouldn’t be interested, admit it.
But I was telling you about our trip. It turned out that Alan’s grandmother—Alan is Penny’s boyfriend’s name; he worked for me this summer, doing research, so I could get ahead of schedule on Tatham Mound—had a stroke two years ago, and that caused her to be unable to speak, and to lose the sight of one eye, and she can’t walk very well. Now she has recovered the ability to speak, and is about to get special glasses that will enable her to read again. So I mentioned you, because you have similar complaints. It’s funny how different things can cause similar problems. A stroke is when there’s a problem with the blood circulation in the brain, and it causes part of the brain to suffer, and the parts of the body relating to that part of the brain can malfunction. So she and I got along fine. She has a rock collection she has given me: stones she picked up from around the world, each with its history. I have the stones, but I have to get the histories from her, or they don’t mean much. We all went out to eat at a restaurant, and the waiter came to tell us we had parked in a handicapped zone, but it was legitimate: Grandma McCulla is indeed handicapped, and has a handicapped car sticker. We talked about problems with restaurants, because my two daughters and my wife and I are vegetarians. I guess you know about that sort of thing. If you and I are ever eating in a restaurant, we’ll have the same problem. It’s a challenge. I told of the time I first encountered whipped cream in a squirt-can, back about 1953. It wouldn’t work, because I didn’t know how to push the top. Then suddenly it did work, and the cream shot out and bounced off my gingerbread dessert and across two and a half other people. No, don’t get ideas! Your mother would Not Approve. But it’s sort of fun to remember.
Am I boring you yet? Oh, you mean that dreamy look is just because you are thinking about what you could do with a squirt can of whipped cream? Don’t you dare!
Something I heard on the radio: the toilet paper habits of families are different, according to their income. If they make over $50,000 a year, they have the toilet paper unroll from the top; if they make under $20,000, from the bottom. Can you figure that out? I think it must be a status or class thing; upper-class unrolls from the upper side, and the underclass from the underside.
Have you been keeping up with Calvin and Hobbes? This past week he locked the poor baby-sitter out of the house. She’s a nice girl, but Calvin isn’t a nice kid. Why do we enjoy reading about such a brat so much? Well, maybe you can skip being a baby-sitter, Jenny.
Remember when our alarm system fouled up? It did it again, after being fixed. What’s the point in having a high class system if it just malfunctions? Maybe they finally have it straight now. What bothers me more than our setting the siren off when we are punching the code to deactivate it is that the automatic dialing of the police doesn’t seem to be getting through. We called to tell them it was a false alarm, and they said that they had received no alarm, and anyway our number wasn’t valid. So we checked with the folk who installed the system, and they said our number was valid. Hm. I wonder if Calvin and Hobbes did something to it?
Tuesday morning I went out to feed the horses, and they weren’t there. Worried, I trotted out to the tree farm part, but they weren’t there either, and my flip-flops kept flip-flopping off my feet as I tried to run. When I came back to the barn, there was Snowflake but not Blue. So I went in the other direction, down to the lake, and there was Blue, browsing on the water plants. “Feeeeed!” I neighed, and she followed me back to the barn. So all was well, but I was worried for a while. This week I also met a cute little green frog in our newspapers two mornings, and a midnight black spider, and a crow on the top of our closest power pole. I thought its head and beak should be bigger, but I was led astray by cartoon crows, you know, like Heckle and Jeckle, which are not realistic at all. Someone is waxing sarcastic at my expense in a fanzine now because I said it was inhumane of him to routinely squish spi
ders; he wants to know how humanity can relate to spiders. How can it not? But I doubt anything I say can educate that sort. Meanwhile we have two azalea bushes still making lovely red flowers. They’re supposed to bloom in early spring, maybe FeBlueberry, and these did—and never stopped. Which reminds me of all the trees we saw in the section of St. Petersburg we visited: you could hardly see the houses among them. That’s nice; maybe houses don’t have to displace trees.
Am I boring you yet? You’re so silent. Kathy asked whether I ever phoned you, and I said no, because I don’t think you can talk well enough yet, and I couldn’t hear the talk-board if you pointed to words on it. With horses you can’t tell what they’re thinking unless you watch their ears, which move freely. But I can’t see your ears, either.
Well, let me tell you one more thing. This week we had a water filter system installed, because we have sulfur and iron in the water. The one smells bad and the other stains my teeth. The man warned us that for a couple of weeks the deposits in our pipes from the water would be flaking off, now that it’s pure, so we shouldn’t worry if we see things in it. Well, just so long as I don’t see big hairy things in it that look back at me! They had to cut off our water for several hours to install it, so when I brushed my teeth I had to take a cup of cold water from the refrigerator to rinse my mouth, and I carefully poured the rest over the toothbrush to clean it. I never turned on the tap at all. Then I learned that the water had been reconnected. Sigh. Does that sort of thing ever happen to you? Not recently? Ah, well.
Okay, let me know what was boring about this letter, and I’ll cut out those parts next time. Meanwhile, have a harpy therapy session, Jenny. I hope you enjoyed your visit home. I hope your mother survived it.
OctOgre 13, 1989
Dear Jenny,
You have the privilege of being the second person to receive my new-format window-address type letter. I’ll pause a moment while you catch your breath; I know the news overwhelms you. What’s that? What do you mean, it underwhelms you? Didn’t you see the window in the envelope—no? Well, make your daddy fold the letter back into the envelope so he can show you! The thing about this is that it enables me to avoid typing the envelope; if I have the address right in the letter—and I do, because that’s put on from my glossary file—it’s also right on the envelope. I’m doing this so I can answer fan letters faster, and handle the job myself again, as I did before I got the secretary. For various reasons I’ll be phasing out the secretary, one of them being that it can take me two weeks to answer a letter that way, and sometimes I’m in more of a hurry than that. So—what? That wasn’t what you were asking? Well then, girl, what were you asking? Who the first person to receive my window letter was? You mean you’re jealous that you weren’t the first? For shame! Do you think I would test such a dangerous new procedure on you? No, I tested it on my collaborator Robert E. Margroff. We do the Dragon’s Gold series novels together, and are about to do the fourth one, Orc’s Opal. When it worked on his letter, I knew it was safe for yours. Now aren’t you sorry you made all that fuss? No? Did I ever tell you how difficult you are? Yes? I thought so.
Brother! I just heard the radio mention casually that the stock market had dropped 190 points today, and I dashed through the house to check with my wife, and cracked my left shoulder into the door frame and scraped my elbow and wrist. Ouch! Why? We have some stocks, is why; I hate it when they plummet. In the old days when I had nothing to invest, I rooted for the stock market to set new lows, but now I don’t. Oh, you mean the door frame? It seems to have survived. For a minute I thought maybe you cared about my bashed shoulder—Ha! I see that smile! You were teasing me! And you say I shouldn’t go dashing around the house between paragraphs? Well, maybe you have a point.
However, just in case there’s a smirk still in you, let’s talk about arithmetic. Yes, I thought that would sober you up. But it can be fun the way I do it now. Unblink your eyes; I tell you it’s true. You see now I have this program that can cut and paste the numbers and do the math for me, so I don’t even have to type them in. If you did your math that way, you’d never make a mistake. That way you might even learn not to detest it too much. Maybe. Possibly. Conceivably.
Meanwhile, how are things here? This morning I saw the sunrise as I biked back from fetching the newspaper. The sun was under the clouds, so they were red underneath. But there were a couple of clouds sitting on the horizon, like mountains, having nowhere else to go without falling off the edge of the world, and they cast shadows. So there were these two radiating bands of gray shadow crossing the red. I never saw the effect before. And last time I mentioned the little green frog in the newspaper box; yesterday I brushed what I thought was a green leaf from my pocket, and it jumped: it was the frog, hitching a ride on me. I was going to take it home, but it jumped off halfway there. So I shooed it off the drive, to be sure no one would run over it; I hope it finds good flies there.
Today was a scary day. It’s Friday the Thirteenth, and there’s a computer virus that’s supposed to wipe out systems on this date. So yesterday I backed up everything, just in case. But there was no problem; evidently my systems are not infected. Say—maybe that virus got into the stock exchange computers, and that’s why the horrendous drop! But the investors are like chickens, spooking at anything, so probably when they learned it was Friday the Thirteenth, there it went.
I ran on the treadmill again today. I set it at seven miles an hour, which is comfortable for me, and it kept slowing, then speeding up again, and in half an hour it showed 2.99 miles. So it was averaging six miles an hour instead of seven. It’s malfunctioning, and I want to complain—after all, it cost $900—but my wife says that’s just the way it is. The world’s a pretty sorry place when equipment is expected not to function properly, even when new. I like the exercycle better, but my knees bend too far and start hurting, so I can’t go as hard as I want. So that’s not ideal either. Sigh.
I’m seeing more articles about the tragedy of the forests. In Brazil they are destroying one of the last great rain forests, and ruining the world’s climate in the process. But we’re no better here, as special logging interests cut down the Alaskan Tongass forest, with the few remaining virgin stands we have. A TV program was going to expose it, but the logging interests threatened to boycott the sponsors, and most of them dropped out. So the forest keeps getting cut, so someone can make a dollar today, though the world go into terminal funk tomorrow. I am disgusted. So are you, I think.
Meanwhile on a more positive local note: this week a TV station decided to see whether Duracell or Eveready batteries were better. They put them into two toy piggies, and the piggies oinked, wiggled their noses and walked. Which one would go longer? They thought it would be over within three hours, but when the time came for the evening program both piggies were still snuffling along. Next day they were still doing it. Finally today, just in time for this letter, after thirty hours running time, the Duracell piggy gave out. The Eveready was still going, the winner. Actually, both types of battery were impressive; in my day it seemed that a battery would last ten minutes and poop out. Those were certainly cute piggy toys, though!
Bunch of enclosures this time, mostly comics and car-toons I thought were fun; you may have seen some already. The No Cent man sent me more “money,” so here are his “one world” and “hug” coins. I liked the picture on the Business section, with its treacherous path; try cruising your wheelchair along that one at speed! And ALLIGATOR EXPRESS. Most of the contributors are younger than you, so I thought I wouldn’t send it, but I liked the “Tropical Depression” cartoon with its sad cloud, so here it is.
Have a harpy day, Jenny, and say “Hi” to Kathy for me. Your mother tells me you folk are calling me “Uncle Xanth.” I must be writing uncley letters! Oh—you say you want a purple dinosaur on your letter, because I put a blue one on Kathy’s letter? Okay, this time.
OctOgre 20, 1989
Dear Jenny,
You would not believe my day! Her
e it is quarter to seven in the evening, when I had nothing to do today except your letter and one other. Now I’ll have to scramble to get yours done. Let me tell you about it—what? You’re not interested? Okay, then, you tell me about your day.
…………………
Jenny, you’ll have to speak up! All I heard was a row of dots.
********************
Well, that’s louder, but now it sounds like a row of asterisks. Did I tell you the poem about the asterisk? I don’t remember. I don’t think I have. Okay, here it is now: Mary had a pair of skates/ With which she loved to frisk/ Now wasn’t she a foolish girl/ Her little *
You don’t get it? Well, don’t have your mother read it, idiot! Have your daddy read it, and make sure he pronounces the * (asterisk) at the end. Oh, now you get it!
Here’s something I heard on the radio this week: “A theologian is one who answers questions no one is asking.” You don’t think that’s funny? Well, how about this one—what? Oh, you’ve decided to listen to my day after all? Are you sure? How sweet of you!
It started at 5:30 A.M., when all was dark. I woke to the sound of a faint beep-beep-beep. That’s what my power-supply box says when the current is off. Was the power off? So I got up and barefooted it down to the study wing of the house—and the lights were on. They hadn’t been on before. My daughter Cheryl was home overnight, visiting from college; was she there? No, the room was empty—and no beep-beep. Not there, anyway; now I heard it behind me. From the bedroom I had just left? I padded back, but it wasn’t from the bedroom either, It was from downstairs. Was it the security alarm system? But that doesn’t go beep-beep, it goes WHOOO-WHOOO-WHOOO!! earsplittingly. Maybe it wasn’t a burglar in the house. So I went downstairs. It was coming from the kitchen, I turned on the light.
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