theMystery.doc
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::: Yeah. In heaven. But those who live on a paradise earth will be having children and we won’t live in fear and have to lock our doors, we won’t be starving to death, everything will be wonderful.
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::: Really?
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::: We’ve come to doors and people say, Oh, I was just praying for God to send someone!
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:::Yes. It says, The generation that sees all these signs—Matthew…twenty-four………Matthew twenty-four…and thirty-four it says all the signs we would see in the last days, and then down in twenty-four it says, And truly I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away until all these things occur. And so, a generation you have to remember covers four. That would be like my grandparents. Then my parents. Then me, and my children now. So one generation covers four. So uh one generation is about come to an end.
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::: I would like to leave this with you so you can sort of look at it yourself.
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::: I don’t want to take any tracts, but I just think that it’s been a pleasure having a conversation with you.
::: Well that’s quite nice!
::: And I’m glad that we could talk like this today.
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::: Well, I just do it because I love God, and he asked us to do that.
We do it out of love, you know, and we don’t charge.
It’s done out of love.
We, we do this out of love. No one forces us to. We don’t get any prestige out of it.
if you don’t have love, and do it out of love, then, it’s, pointless.
::: Well, what a fun conversation!
::: Yeah!
::: It’s too bad I’m going to be leaving, but uh, I appreciate it—
::: Yeah!
::: and I hope you have a very fulfilled and happy life.
::: Well thank you. Yeah, and I wish maybe God’s holy spirit will be with you also.
::: He is. It is.
::: Because you are a delightful young man.
::: Well, thank you.
::: And a very, very delightful young man. It’s a pleasure to meet someone like you.
::: Oh, well it’s a pleasure to meet you.
::: [laughs] Well, thank you.
::: OK, Alice.
::: And uh, we’re in the telephone book
And you can ask any question you want. Yeah, they’ll answer.
::: [coughs] Sorry you have to run.
::: Yeah, and no cost, no pushy, so… Yeah. We’ll talk to you later!
::: Goodbye.
::: Goodbye…
★
(lydia sept 5 2006 st joes hospital.mp3)
…I’ll tell you—I’ll have to make a long story short. And then I gotta go—ooh! I gotta go. We were very naïve over here about the wetlands, OK? And we bought the home from a developer. And what he did was he had to have three—he got three people—finally on the third person he got them to say it wasn’t a wetland. Which it really was a wetland. So as soon as he said it wasn’t a wetland he took all the trees out. And I learned this of course from my neighbors. So then he built this big, big huge pond, and put all this fish in it. So anyway, actually it’s kind of a mess because it’s uncontrollable, but we’ve learned now—we’ve put a pump in there and we pump the water out—and it does, it pumps the water out. So we can keep the—
[train whistle]
keep it from flooding. You know? Because it was horrible. But what we did was—I have Scotties—
[train whistle]
and they will—well, they will drown—they can only stay afloat for so long because they have short legs, and they have heavy bodies.
[train whistle]
So I told my husband, It isn’t much to give up the animals, I said, but we’re just gonna make this a—like a little back yard habitat.
[train whistle]
And so that’s what we’ve done. You know, we have—we feed the squirrels, the raccoons come down and feed—we don’t care what they take.
Mike: That’s nice.
Yeah, and then we have the blue herons that come in, and now we’ve kept the pond up so high this year that actually the frogs made it this year, because we have like big bullfrogs, but we had like bullfrogs every year and we couldn’t figure out why they were dying—well now we figured out we weren’t protecting them enough. So now we got lots of frogs, because we protected them more. And so—and we’re OK with that, and we have all these little critters that come and visit and they come and drink from the pond and it isn’t much—and then we’re gonna leave these parts woods—’cause that’s what they are right now, woods—and, um, and that’s it, you know. Because I know—we have a neighbor and he says,
Why don’t you clear-cut?
No, we’re not gonna clear-cut!
We might take the dead out, but we’ll leave the live there, and plant another tree.
M: There you go.
See, we should always be planting trees. We never—we always take, take, but we never put back. See, that’s what’s wrong with the world. We get and we take but we never give. I gotta go.
OK.
You write that book.
I will.
ROMANS
In the spring my wife’s mother took the train out to Montana to visit us.
The first night, the three of us walked down to the dock below the house, and watched the sun set behind the mountains across the lake.
Then we walked back to the house.
The next day, my wife and her mother drove to the Po
lson cemetery to see if they could find her (great-) grandfather’s grave.
They found it.
Atop a hill, looking down upon the lake.
My wife told me all about it, later that day,
as her mother cleaned our kitchen.
I was watching the troops march into Baghdad.
I made some rubbings of his headstone, she said. Only one of them came out good.
She showed them to me. She’d done them with charcoal on large cream-colored paper.
MORRIS SAMUEL BROWN
1884–1924
There was a cross above the name and a dark circle.
I asked her what the circle was.
There’s a little blue sticker on the stone, she said. Only a few of the others had a sticker. I asked the guy there what it was for and he said all veterans have them, and every Memorial Day, a guy comes from the VFW and puts a flag and a flower on the graves that have stickers. I bought a little stuffed white rabbit at Safeway, and put it on the grave, she said.
I thought your uncle said his middle name was Spencer, I said.
(April 9, 2003.)
The living room had a wall of windows,
and through the windows was a stand of evergreen trees,
and through the evergreens,
down a small incline,
was the lake, 200 miles square, 160 miles around.
The lake doesn’t look so wide from the shore,
but if you get out there a few miles,
the bartender at the Sitting Duck told me some weeks later,
then you know just how big it is.
It was early in the season.
Big blue sky.
The air was warm.
But the water was less than forty degrees.
(April 9, 2003.)
A beautiful spring day.
I sent them off in the neighbor’s rowboat.
It was the first time we’d taken it out in the seven months we’d lived there.
I made sure their life jackets were on tight.
Stay close to the shore, I told them,
and I sat down in a green Adirondack chair on the dock
and began to read page one of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I’d never quite managed to get through.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
–Introibo ad altare Dei.
The sun burst off the page and into my eyes.
My wife rowed.
Her mother sat facing her.
I tried to keep my eyes on the bright paperback book, because I had the tendency to hallucinate when I stared out at that water.
I couldn’t concentrate. I kept going back to the beginning.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
–Introibo ad altare Dei.
Every so often I would look up and see them
floating over the quiet water
quietly arguing about something or other.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhea—ah, forget it.
Before long my wife was rowing back.
I closed the book and walked down onto the rocky shore,
I met them at the waterline.
I stepped into the water to help my mother-in-law out.
She was uneasy on her feet. She’d just had surgery and was wearing a boot.
You two go out now, she said.
It’s getting cold, I said.
Take my daughter out on the lake.
So I put on the life jacket she handed me and climbed in.
She walked back up to the house.
I rowed us out a few hundred yards from the dock.
My wife said: It’s too bad we have to leave soon, just as it’s finally warming up.
She’d bought a box camera to take pictures of Morris’ grave, and out on the lake she asked me to stop rowing, so she could take a panoramic shot.
I pulled the oars in.
It was quiet.
No wind.
The lake was glass,
not a ripple moved across.
The world was brightly lit,
the hills around the lake were green,
trees new-leafed.
She put the camera to her eye.
She pressed the button.
The camera clicked.
She turned a bit, advanced the wheel…
clicked again.
Turned, advanced…
clicked again,
turned, advanced…
clicked again…
There was something in my shoe.
I took it out.
Rolled it around in my fingers for a while…
Flipped it over the side:
the
Mystery
.doc
Grove Press
Michele: Hello, I am Michele, I am the website greeter. Welcome to WebsiteGreeters.com.
Michele: May I know your name please?
Visitor 3414:My name is Professor Willard J Domacyle.
Michele:Nice to meet you Sir
Michele:How are you today?
Willard J Domacyle:Is this an automated program or is there a live person on the other end?
Michele:I am a live person just like you. :)
Willard J Domacyle:Well, then I am doing quite well, thank you.
Michele:great, is this your first time on our website?
Willard J Domacyle:This is indeed the first occasion of my person visiting this website.
Michele:I see, may I know how you came to know about us?
Michele:May I know if you’re interested in using our services?
Willard J Domacyle:One of my laboratory assistants, a fellow by the name of James, had stumbled onto your site one night. He had experimented with its interface, and found the program to be quite human-like. James suggested I test it for myself to see if I could tell the difference for myself. I will say, Michele, that whomever made you, did a fine job. Do you run on a C+ interface?
Michele:This application is a java based application.
Michele:We are not vendor dependent and therefore we can provide our service using any chat vendor that you will prefer call.
Michele:Do you have a website?
Willard J Domacyle:Of course! Java. I should have known you’re far too advnaced to be something so archaic as C+ or C++.
Willard J Domacyle:I see you’ve asked another question. We are currently in development
Michele: C+ and C++ are old languages now :)
Michele: I see, would you give me your website address we can check it later when its up
Willard J Domacyle:I daresay those units are most probably extinct.
Willard J Domacyle:Michel, you have aksed me another question. Please await my responses. I type sloly at my age.
Michele: oh sure, please take your time
Willard J Domacyle:Thank you. I have been rushing to keep up with you and have made some simple typographical errors, which abhor me, so again, thank you for slowing your call-response matrix. Now, Michele, tell me, you mentioned C+ and C++. Are you not compatible with those, as you say, “old” languages? Did your makers not build you retro-compatible?
Michele: Actually we would use the software that you want us to in fact the technology you prefer
Michele: Our Business department can give you various options
Michele: and you can finalize the one that suits you
Michele: that you want us to use★
Michele:I made a typo error :)
Willard J Domacyle:The Institute would require that any conversational interface must adher
e to the highest standards of grammar and punctuation, Michele.
Michele:Sure no problem
Willard J Domacyle:If a user were to ask a question seemingly unrelated to the interests of the Institute, what sort of response might be made by the conversational interface? Let me give an example: A questioner asks the Interface: “How are you today?” Will the response be properly human; cordial without being overly friendly?
Michele: Absolutely, that is the major aspect of our service
Michele: Our agents will talk to your website visitors exactly the way 2 people would talk over the phone
Willard J Domacyle:Wonderful. And how is the designation made? Ie. Does the interface gauge the proper response on a user by user basis? Or is there a standardized protocol; Ie. are certain responses automatically generated depending on the query receieved.
Michele: That is where our Training and Scripting department comes in.
Michele: Let me explain it to you.
Michele: We have a team of professional script writers who analyze your website in detail. They then put together a document using all the information collected. If they don’t understand anything they will ask you.
Michele: The document they compile encompasses their understanding of your business model, a complete parse of your website, explanation of the business model and different functions of your website. Lastly an outline script is generated, which will be used on your website by the Greeters.
Michele:Sir, are you still with me?