Henry Wirz's quest for a career ended with his becoming one of the most infamous figures in American history

By James B. Daniels

IF EVER THERE WAS A MAN who was always at the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Hemy Wirz. Wirz has become infamous as the commander of Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville, the most notorious of all Civil War prison camps.

Heinrich Hartmann Wirz, as he was originally christened, was bom in Zurich, Switzerland. His father was a tailor who pushed his son to go into a merchant career that would take advantage of Zurich's business-friendly environment. Young Heinrich, however, had set his sights on medicine. Unable to gain his family's support for medical school, he had to settle for working as an attendant in a bathhouse—at the time, doctors believed strongly in the medicinal value of baths. Despite his efforts, young Wirz was forced to work with his father from 1823-1826. In addition to the ongoing debate regarding his profession, Wirz quarreled over religion. Although Catholics and Protestants were no longer killing each other in the 1840s, religious prejudice was strong. As he had with his choice of professions, Heinrich flew directly in the face of family traditions when he abandoned Cahdnism and converted to Catholicism.

The consequence was a deep and lasting bitterness between him and his family Heinrich's personal life went no better than his professional life. In 1824 he married a much older woman. Although ihe marriage produced two children, he and his wife fought constantly, usually about money. As he struggled in a job he disliked and fought with a woman he no longer loved, he sank deeper and deeper into debt. Finally in 1848 his wife left him and took their two children back to her parents, but she died soon afterward. Meanwhile, probably as a result of excessive debt or financial malfeasance, Wirz was sentenced to a short prison term and was exiled from Switzerland upon his release.

Wirz then set sail for the United States, where he started a new life working in a cloth mill in Massachusetts. He later went to Hopkinsville, Ky, to apprentice with a doctor. After a short stint there, he moved on to Cadiz, Ky, and tried to set up his own practice as a homeopathic physician. Homeopathy, based on the belief that diseases can be cured by gixing the patient minute amounts of the same substance that initially caused the problem, was no better received by the medical establishment in the 1850s than it is today.

In spite of that, homeopathic treatment was popular with member's of the public, who preferred its potions to the bleedings and other extreme treatments proposed by regular doctors. Wirz, who by now had taken to calling himself Henry, not only chose a professionally suspect branch of medicine, he did so at a time when the northern portion of the country was experiencing a huge surplus of doctors. Into this tight market walked Wirz, an unfriendly humorless man with a heavy Geiman accent, and a Catholic to boot. The mostly Anglo-Protestant doctors of Cadiz united against the pretentious foreigner. Even his marriage to a local widow availed him nothing, and social and financial pressures ultimately forced him to move again.

Louisiana, with its heavy French influence, welcomed Catholics, and Wirz probably experienced the only truly happy years of his life there. He found work as a slave doctor. The cutoff of the slave trade with Africa years earlier had sent the price of slaves skyrocketing. As a result, slave owners were willing to expend heretofore unheard-of sums on slaves' health. The standard rate of pay was $3 per year per slave treated. For a doctor who could get an exclusive contract with a large plantation that boasted hundreds of slaves, those fees could add up to the equivalent of a very successful practice treating free citizens in the North.

Working as a doctor to the slaves on the Marshall Plantation near Milliken's Bend, La., Wirz was in his element. His standoffish personality and nonexistent bedside manner were irrelevant. His new patients came to him whether they wanted to or not. He was paid whether they liked him or not. Even doubts about the efficacy of his homeopathy wei'e of little concern. As long as the mortality rate at the plantation did not surpass those of the surrounding area, his job was secure. In Louisiana, where the counties were called parishes because of the strong French-Catholic influence, he could shed his shabby past for the role of Dr. Wirz, a man with a family and a respectable position in society.

The election of Abraham Lincoln began the chain of events that would end that idyllic arrangement. Impelled by a sense of duty to serve the South, where he had found the life he had always wanted, Wirz entered Confederate service as a private in the Madison Infantry of the 4th Louisiana Battalion. He was soon promoted to the rank of sergeant. Following the Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, his battalion was assigned to guard Union prisoners. It was probably then that Wire first came to the attention of Confederate Provost General John Winder During the Battle of Seven Pines on June 1, 1862, two Union Minie balls smashed into Wirz's right arm and shoulder.

He survived, but the wounds would never completely heal. Infections came and went, and his arm was virtually useless. In constant pain, he became even more unlikable and short-tempered. Unfit for frontline duty, Wirz was nevertheless commissioned a captain, probably through Winder's intervention, and placed in command of a small prison camp nearTuscaloosa, Ala, Significantly, men who had been confined to the camp during that four-month assignment later remembered it as having been better and more humanely run than the average POW camp.

AFTER A YEAR-LONG mission to Europe, Wirz returned to the Confederate States of America, where General Winder selected him to command the new prison compound at Camp Sumter The prison was initially envisioned to hold only 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners. The tiny creek that ran through it would have been hardpressed to service even the smaller number of prisoners. As the war continued, however, the prison population eventually grew to nearly 30,000 men. overwhelming both the creek and all other accommodations. The prisoners had arrived before the walls were even completed; there were no barracks inside the camp, and no attempt was made to form an orderly layout within the walls. The initial gr oup of prisoners was simply placed into the compound and allowed to fend for themselves. The confusion this produced had a grim effect on the already unhealthy conditions.

Although he would later die for what happened at Andersonville, Wirz had little power to change what went on there. To start with, he had authority only over the inner camp itself. The guard force and everything outside the stockade were under the authority of others who outranked him. To make an awful situation worse. Wire—obsessed with order and discipline, yet in charge of a place that had none—began to take every act of disobedience from the prisoners as a personal insult. If he caught prisoners sneaking into the ration lines for a second or third time. he would curse at them and threaten to deny food to the entire camp. Although he eventually ceased making such outbursts for fear of provoking a prison riot, he would later be haunted by them.

Despite his rage, other actions and events seemed to show that Wire was not as uncaring as many thought him. When word reached him that a group of prisoneirs known as the Raiders had begun assaulting and robbing fellow prisoners, he was genuinely moved to assist the prisoneirs in apprehending the offendeirs. After the six ringleaders were tried and found guilty by the other prisoners, Wirz was extremely worried about hanging them, fearing that he might later be accused of war crimes. He relented only upon realizing that denying the execution after a full trial might well result in a massive riot. Wirz further showed his concern for his prisoners by trying to get an officer who had been captured while serving with black troops transferred to an officers' prison. This violated a Confederate government decree that any white officer found serving with black troops would not be treated as an officer.

Between Wirz's airival on March 25, 1864, and September of that same year, when all prisoners fit to be moved were transferred, some 12,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville. When General Winder died in FebruaiT 1865, Wirz was left as the sole scapegoat. Once again he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On May 1, 1865, a Union patrol arrested Wirz after sharing a meal of bacon and combread with him. His trial, presided over by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, who had presided over the trial of the conspiratore involved in the assassination of President Lincoln, was quick, and the results were a foregone conclusion. Purportedly, Wirz was offered bis life in retum for testimony that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had known of and approved the starvation and mistreatment of Union prisoners. As a matter of honor and principle, he refused. When Wirz was led out to the gallows, rows of Union troops stood in tight fonnations to witness the death of the man who had become known as the "Demon of Andersonville." Thus ended the unfortunate life of Hemy Wirz. A man who had always felt out of place, he had found a modicum of respect as an officer on the losing side of the Civil War. In the end, that little scrap of respect and position was short-lived, and he died in infamy.

The Problem with No Name

Meet the original desperate housewife.

When someone asks you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" you might answer, "a doctor," "a lawyer," "a veterinarian," or maybe even "president." But in the 1950s, most girls assumed they would be housewives after they married. Betty Friedan thought women needed more options.

Growing up in the 1920s and '30s in Peoria, Illinois, Betty noticed that her mother didn't have many opportunities to use her skills. Betty's mother had been an editor at the Peoria newspaper, but she quit her job when she married, as most women did back then. Betty shared her mother's love of journalism, so she worked with newspapers in junior high, in high school, and at Smith College. Betty was very fortunate to attend college--only 6% of all U.S. citizens had bachelor's degrees in 1940, and very few of those graduates were women. After college, Betty started studying psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and won a fellowship that would help her continue her education. Betty knew most men felt threatened by smart women in those days, and she didn't want to ruin her chances to get married. So Betty turned down the fellowship.

Instead, she moved to New York and wrote for a union newspaper and then married in 1947. When she had her first child, Betty took the maximum amount of maternity leave allowed--one year without pay. Several years later, Betty became pregnant again, and her boss knew she would probably take another long maternity leave. The newspaper fired her, which Betty knew was unfair.

Betty loved her kids, but she found life as a home maker "stifling" so she started freelancing for women's magazines. Betty also surveyed her former Smith classmates to see if they were satisfied with their lives. She discovered that some of the women were unhappy, and they thought it meant there was something wrong with them.

At the time, most women focused on raising their children and managing their households. In advertisements, women claimed they were content with fancy appliances and time-saving devices. But the women Betty surveyed didn't find complete and utter joy in waxing the kitchen floor. Betty learned that she wasn't the only housewife asking herself, "Is this all?"

Betty called the feelings of emptiness and depression that women were feeling "the problem that has no name." Several magazine editors rejected the article she wrote about it. One editor wrote to her agent, "Betty must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this."

But Betty knew the problem was widespread, and she wanted women to know they weren't alone. So she expanded her article into a book, The Feminine Mystique, and published it in 1963. The publisher printed only 3,000 copies of the first edition, but it was a hit. Soon, colleges and organizations started inviting Betty to lecture all over the country. Women wrote to Betty and stopped her on the street to tell her that reading her book had changed their lives.

Betty continued to fight for women's rights. She helped organize the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970--50 years after women won the right to vote--and she led the fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA.

"It wasn't enough just to start a movement for women's rights," Betty explained. "You had to make it happen."

Organizing for Change

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination against job applicants or employees based on their sex as well as race, color, religion, or national origin. But Betty was afraid the government wouldn't take Title VII seriously without a watchdog group. So in 1966, she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and became its first president. NOW's "first order of business" was to protest sex discrimination against airline stewardesses. At the time, airlines hired only women as flight attendants and forced them to resign if they married, became pregnant, or turned 35. After NOW held simultaneous demonstrations around the country and took legal action, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began enforcing the Title VII law.

NOW Now
Today, NOW is the largest feminist organization in the U.S. with more than 500,000 members. NOW is still fighting for an Equal Rights Amendment. To get involved in NOW's Young Feminist Task Force, go to www.now.org.

By: Young, Cleo, New Moon, Sep/Oct2006

How Was it to be Dead?

The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that's officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange--in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

Seven months ago, in April of this millennial year, I took a journey down memory lane to an old cadets' reunion at the brown stucco, pantile-roof campus of my former military school--Gulf Pines, on the Mississippi coast. Lonesome Pines, we all called it. The campus and its shabby buildings, like apparently everything else in that world, had devolved over time to become an all-white Christian Identity school, which had itself, by defaulting on its debts, been sold to a corporate entity--the ancient palms, wooden goalposts, dusty parade grounds, dormitories, and classroom installments soon to be cleared as a parking structure for the floating casino across Route 90.

During this visit, I happened to hear from Dudley Phelps, who's retired out of the laminated-door business up in Little Rock, that Wally Caldwell, once our Lonesome Pines classmate, but more significantly once my wife's husband, until he got himself shell-shocked in Vietnam and wandered off seemingly forever, causing Sally to have him declared dead (no easy trick without a body or other evidence of death's likelihood)-- this Wally Caldwell was reported by people in the know to have appeared again. Alive. Upon the earth. And--I was sure when I heard it--eager to stir up emotional dust none of us had seen the likes of.

Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia, and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories--the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us--anything that we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly that we were all of us pretty hard cases when we arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all.)

We had a keg of beer somebody'd brought. The Gulf was just as the Atlantic is in summer: brownish, sluggish, a dingy aqueous apron stretching to nowhere--though warm as bathwater instead of dick-shrinkingly cold. We all solemnly stood and drank the warm beer, ate weenies in stale buns, and did our best not to feel dispirited and on-in-years. We chatted disapprovingly about how the Coast had changed, how the South had traded its tarnished soul for a more debased graven image of gambling loot, how the upcoming election would probably be won by the wrong dope. Surprisingly, many of my old classmates had gone to Nam like Wally and come back Democrats.

And then, around 2 P.M., when the sun sat straight over our sweating heads like a dentist's lamp and we'd all begun to laugh about what a shithole this place had really been, how we didn't mind seeing it disappear, how we'd all cried ourselves to sleep in our metal bunks on so many breathless, mosquito-tortured nights on account of cruel loneliness and youth and deep hatred for the other cadets, we all, by no signal given, just began to stray back toward our rental cars, or across the highway to the casino for some stolen fun, or back to motels or Winnebagos or the airport in New Orleans or Mobile, or just back, as if we could go back far enough to where it would all be forgotten and gone forever, the way it already should've been. Why were we there? By the end, none of us could've said.

How, though, do you contemplate such news as this possible Wally sighting? I had no personal memories of Cadet W. Caldwell, only pictures Sally kept (and kept hidden): color snapshots on the beach with their kids, in Saugatuck; a shirtless, dog-tagged Wally squinting into the summer sun like J.F.K., holding a copy of "Origin of Species" with a look of mock puzzlement on his young face; a few tuxedoed wedding photos from 1969, where Wally looked lumpy and wise and scared to death of what lay before him; a yearbook portrait from Illinois State, showing Walter "the Wall" Caldwell, Class of '67, Plant Biology, where he was deemed (sadly, I felt) to be "Trustworthy, a friend to all." "Solid where it counts" (which he wasn't). "Call me Mr. Wall."

These ancient, moistened relics did not, to me, a real husband make. Though once they had to Sally--a tall, blond, blue-eyed beauty with small breasts, thin fingers, smooth legs, and a small limp from a tennis mishap--a college cheerleader who fell for the shy, heavy-legged, curiously-gazing rich boy in her genetics class, and who smiled when she talked because so much made her happy, who didn't have problems with physical things and so introduced the trusting "Wall" to bed and to cheap motels out Highway 9, so captivating him that by spring break "they were pregnant." And pregnant again and married by the time Wally got called by the Army and joined the Navy instead, in 1969, and went off to a war.

From which, in a sense, he never returned. Though he tried for a couple of weeks in 1971, but just one day walked off from their little apartment in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, never to return with a sound or a glimpse. Kids, wife, parents, a few friends. A future. Boop. Over.

This was the extent of my knowledge of Wally the uxorious. He was already legally "dead" when I came on the scene in '87 and tried to rent Sally some expandable office space in Manasquan. She'd identified me from a bogus reminiscence I wrote for the Gulf Pines Pine Boughs newsletter, though I had no actual memory of Wally and was merely on the Casualties Committee, responsible for "personal" anecdotes about classmates nobody remembered, but whose loved ones didn't want them seeming like complete ciphers or lost souls, even if they were.

The thought that mystery man Walter B. Caldwell might still be alive was, as you can imagine, unwieldy personal cargo to be carrying home, Mississippi to New Jersey. There could probably be stranger turns of events. But if so I'd like you to name one. And, while you're at it, name one you'd find easy to keep as your little secret, something you'd rather not have spread around.

On arriving back to Sea-Clift, I decided that rogue rumors were always shooting around like paper airplanes in everybody's life, and that this was likely just one more. Some old Lonesome Pines alum, deep in his cups and reeling through the red-light district of Amsterdam or Bangkok, suddenly spies a pathetic homeless man weaving on a corner, a large, fleshy, unshaven "American-looking" clod, filthy in a tattered, greasy overcoat and duct-taped shoes, yet who has a particularly arresting, sweet smile animating tiny haunted eyes and who seems to stare back knowingly. After a pause, there's a second cadged look, then a long unformed thought about it, followed by a decision to leave well enough alone (where well enough's always happiest). But, then, in memory's narrow eye comes a fixifying certainty, an absolute recognition--a sighting. And kerplunk: Wally lives! (And will be in your house eating dinner by next Tuesday.)

In eight years of what I thought was much more than satisfying-fulfilling marriage, not to mention thirty since Wally walked away and didn't come back, Sally had made positive adjustments to what might've driven most people bat-shit crazy with anger and not-knowing, and with anxiety over the anger and not-knowing. Therefore to drop this little hand grenade of uncertainty into her life, I concluded, would actually be unfriendly. (I'd decided by then that it wasn't true, so it really wasn't a hand grenade in my life.) What was either of us supposed to do with the news, short of a full-bore "Have You Seen This Man" campaign (I didn't want to see him), "aged" photos of Wally stapled to bulletin boards and splintery telephone poles beside aromatherapy flyers and lost-cat posters, with appeals made to "Live at 5"?

After which he still wouldn't show up. Because--of course--he'd long ago climbed over a bridge rail or slipped off a boat transom or a rockface in the remotest Arizona canyon and said goodbye to this world of woes.

Case closed. R.I.P., Mr. Wall. My dream, instead of my nightmare, come true.

To which fickle fate says: Dream on, dream on, dream on.

Because, sometime in early May, Sally caught the United shuttle out to Chicago to visit the former in-laws in Lake Forest. I'm always officially invited to these events, but have never gone, for obvious reasons--although this might've been the time. The occasion was the aged Caldwells' (Warner and Constance) sixtieth wedding anniversary. A party was planned at the formerly no-Jews-or-blacks-allowed Wik-O-Mek Country Club. Sally's two grim, grown but disenchanted children, Shelby and Chloë, were supposedly coming from northern Idaho. They'd long ago fallen out with their mom over having their dad declared a croaker--prematurely, they felt. You can only imagine how they loathe me. Both kids are neck high in charismatic Mormon doings (likewise whites-only) out in Spirit Lake, where for all I know they practice cannibalism. They never send a Christmas card, though they plan to be in the "where's mine" line when the grandparents shuffle off. When I first met Sally, she was still making piteous efforts to include them in her new life in New Jersey--all of which they rebuffed like cruel suitors, until she was compelled to close the door on both of them, which thrilled me. Too much unredeemed loss can be fatal. At some point--and its arrival may not be obvious, so you have to be on the lookout for it--you have to let life please you if it will, and consign the past to its midden (easier said than done, of course, as we all know).

When Sally drove her renter from O'Hare to Lake Forest and up to the winding-drive, many-winged, moss-and-ivy-fronted fieldstone Caldwell manse, which sits on a bluff of the lake, she entered the long, drafty, monarchical drawing room with her folding suitcase--she was considered a beloved family member and didn't need to knock. And there, seated on the rolled-and-pleated, overstuffed Victorian leather settee, looking for all the world like the Caldwells' gardener asked in to review next season's perennial-planning strategies (Did we do the jonquils right? Is there a reason to keep the wisteria, since it's really not their climate?), there was a man she thought she'd never seen before but queerly felt she knew. (It was the beady, piggy eyes.) There was "the Wall." Wally Caldwell. Her husband. Back from oblivion, at home in Lake Forest.


I don't know what went on that weekend. Pensive, hands-behind-the-back walks along the palliative Lake Michigan beach. Angry recrimination sessions out of earshot of the old folks. (Her kids blessedly didn't show.) Moaning-crying jags, shouting, nights spent sweating, heart-battering, fists balled in fury, frustration, denial, and a crass inability to take it all in, to believe, to stare truth in the beezer. (Think how you'd feel!) And no doubt then the rueful, poisoned thoughts of why? And why now? Why not just last on to the end on Mull? (The craggy, windswept isle off Scotland's coast where Wally'd moled away for decades.) Mull life over till nothing's left of it, soldier the remaining yards alone, instead of fucking everything up for everybody--again. TV's much better at these kinds of stories, since the imponderableness of it all is conveniently swept away when the commercials for drain openers, stool softeners, and talking potato chips pop on, and all's electronically "forgotten," during which time the aggrieved principals can make adjustments to life's weird wreckage, get ready to come back and sort things out for the better, so that after many tears are shed, fists clenched, hearts broken but declared mendable, everyone's again declared "all set," as they say in New Jersey. All set? Ha! I say. Ha-ha, ha! Ha, ha-ha-ha! All set, my ass.

Sally flew home on Monday--having said nothing of Johnny-jump-up Wally during our weekend phone calls. I drove to Newark to get her and on the ride back could tell she was plainly altered--by something--but said nothing. It is a well-learned lesson of second marriages never to insist on what you don't absolutely have to insist on, since your feelings are probably about nothing but yourself and your own pitiable needs and are not appropriately sympathetic to the needs of the insistee in question. Second marriages, especially good ones like ours, could fill three doorstop-size reference books with black-letter do's and don'ts. And you'd have to be studious if you hoped to get past Volume I.

When we reached our house, No. 7 Poincinet Road, the sky was already resolving upon sunset. The western heavens were their brightest possible faultless blue. Pre-Memorial Day beach enthusiasts were packing up their books and blankets and transistors and sun reflectors, and heading off for a cocktail or a shrimp plate at the Surfcaster or a snuggle at the Conquistador Suites, as the air cooled and softened ahead of night's fall.

I put on my favorite Ben Webster, made a pair of Salty Dogs, thought about a drive later on up to Ortley Beach for a grilled bluefish at Neptune's Daily Catch Bistro and conceivably a snuggle of our own to the accompaniment of nature's sift and sigh and the muttered voices of the striper fishermen who haunt our beach after the tide's turn.

And then she simply told me, just as I was walking into the living room, ready for a full debriefing.

Something there is in humans that wants to make sure you're doing something busying at the exact instant of hearing unwelcome news--as though if your hands are full you'll just rumble right on through the whole thing, unfazed. "Wally? Alive? Really? Here, try a sip of this, see if I put in too much Donald Duck. Happy to add more Gilbey's. Well, ole Wall--whaddaya know? How'd the Wall seem? Don't you just love how Ben gets that breathy tremolo into "Georgia on My Mind'? Hoagy'd love it. Give Wally my best. How was it to be dead?"

I should say straight out: never tell anyone that you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart that she or he is stabbing. Because, if you're not, then you don't know how that person feels. I can barely tell you how I felt when Sally said, "Frank, when I got to Lake Forest, Wally was there." (Use of my name, Frank, as always, a harbinger of things unpopular. I should change my name to Al.)

I know for a fact that I said nothing when I heard these words. I managed to put my Salty Dog down on the glass coffee table and lower myself onto the brown suède couch beside her, to put both my hands on top of my knees and gaze out at the darkening Atlantic, where the ghostly figures of high-booted fishermen faced the surf and, far out to sea, the sky still showed a brilliant reflected sliver of azure. Sally sat as I did and may have felt as I did-- surprised.

Sometimes simple words are the best, better than images of the world cracking open; or of how much everything's like a sitcom and what a pity William Bendix isn't still around to play Wally--or me. Or the ethical-culture response: that catastrophe's "a good thing for everybody," since it dramatizes life's great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice. "Surprised" is good enough. When I heard that Wally Caldwell, age fifty-five, missing for thirty years, during which time many things had happened and substantial adjustments had been made to the nature of existence on earth--when I heard that Wally was alive in Lake Forest and had spent the weekend doing God knows what with my wife, I was surprised.

Sally'd had three days with Wally already. She had gotten over the shock of a bearded, avuncular, and strange Wally hiding out in his parents' house like some scary older brother with a terrible wound, whom you see only flickeringly behind shadowy chintz curtains in an upstairs dormer window, but who may be heard to moan. Her attitude was--and I liked it, since it was typical of her get-up-and-fix-things positivism--that while, yes, Wally's reappearance had caused some tricky issues to pop up, needing to be resolved, and that while she understood how "this whole business" maybe put me in an awkward position (vis-à-vis, say, the past, the present, and the future), this was still a "human situation," no one was a culprit (of course not), no one had bad will (except me), and we would all address this situation as a threesome, so that as little damage as possible would be done to as few innocent souls and lives.

Wally's story, she told me, sitting on the suède couch that faced out to the springtime Atlantic, as our Salty Dogs turned watery and dark descended, was "one of those stories" fashioned by war and trauma, by sadness, fear, and resentment, and by the chaotic urge to escape all the other causes, aided by (what else?) "some kind of schizoid detachment" that induced amnesia, so that for years Wally couldn't remember big portions of his prior life, although certain portions were crystal clear.

Wally, it seems, couldn't put everything together, though he admitted he hadn't just gone out to pick up the Trib thirty years ago, bumped his head getting into his Beetle, and suffered a curtain to close. It had to have been--this he'd no doubt admitted on one of their cozy Lake Michigan beach tête-à-têtes--that "something unconscious was working on him," some failure to face the world he confronted as a Viet vet with a (minor) head wound and a family and a future as a horticulturist looming, the whole undifferentiated world just flooding in on him like a dam bursting with cows and trees and cars and church steeples swirling away in the gully wash, and him in with them. (There are good strategies for coping with this kind of thing, of course, but you have to want to.)

Cutting (blessedly) to the chase, Wally's trauma, fear, resentment, and elective amnesia had carried him as far away from the Chicago suburbs, from his wife and two kids, as Glasgow, in Scotland, where for a time he became "caught up" in "the subculture" that lived communally, practiced good feeling for everything, experimented with cannabis and other mind-rousing drugs, fucked like bunny rabbits, made jewelry by hand and sold it on damp streets, practiced subsistence-farming techniques, made their own clothes and set their communal sights on spiritual-but-not-mainstream-religious revelation. In other words, the Manson Family, led by Ozzie and Harriet.

Eventually, Wally said, the "petrol" had run out of the communal subculture, and he had migrated up to the "wilds" of Scotland, first to the Isle of Skye, then to Harris, then to Muck, and finally to Mull, where he'd found employment in the "Scottish blackface" industry (sheep) and finally--more to his talents and likings--as a gardener on the laird's estate and, as time went on, as head gardener and arborist (the laird was wild for planting spruce trees), and eventually as the estate manager for the entire shitaree. A complete existence was there, Wally said, a long way from Lake Forest "and that whole life" (again, meaning wife and kids), from the Cubs, the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower, the river dyed green-- again, the whole deluging, undifferentiated crash-in of modern existence, American style, whose sudsy, brown-tree-trunk-littered surface most of us somehow manage to keep our heads above so we can see our duty and do it. I'm not impartial in these matters. Why should I be?

In due time, Wally got used to living semi-officially in the stone manager's cottage, scrubbing the loo, restocking the fridge with haggis, smoking fish, burning peat, reading the Herald, listening to Radio 4, snapping on the telly, sipping his cuppa, keeping his Wellies dry and his Barbour waxed during the long Mull winters. This was the wee life, the one he was suited for and entitled to and where he expected his days to end among the cold stones and rills and crags and moors and cairns and gorse and windblown cedars of his own dull nature--there in his half-chosen, half-fated, half-fucked-up-and-escaped-to destination resort from life gone kaflooey.

Enter then the Internet--in the form of the old laird's young son, Morgil, who'd taken the reins of the property (having been to college at Florida State) and who'd begun to suspect that this lumpy American in the manager's accommodation was probably other than he'd declared himself, was possibly an old draft dodger or a fugitive from some abysmal crime in his own country--some guy who dressed up in clown suits and ate little boys for lunch. The standard idea of America, viewed from abroad.

What young Morgil found when he checked--and who'd be shocked--was a "Wally Caldwell" Web site that the old Lake Forest parents had erected as a last hope, or whatever inspires Web sites. No outstanding warrants, Interpol alerts, or Scotland Yard red flags were attached to the site, only several sequentially aged photos of Wally (one actually in a Barbour) that looked exactly like the Wally out planting spruce sprigs and pruning other ones like a character in D. H. Lawrence.

Young Morgil didn't feel it would be right to send a blind message out of the blue, so he tacked a note to Wally's door the next morning--a color printout of the Caldwell home page, the computerized middle-aged face side by side with the yearbook photo from Illinois State ("Call me Mr. Wall"). No mention was made of Sally, Shelby, and Chloë, or of the fact that he'd been declared expired. The only words it contained were his parents' tender entreaties: "Come home, Wally, wherever you are, if you are. We're not mad at you. We're still here in Lake Forest, Mom and Dad. We can't last forever."

And so he did. Wally crossed the sea to home and the welcome arms of his mom and dad. A changed bloke, but nonetheless their moody, slow-thinking son. Which was the strange tableau my unsuspecting wife walked in on, carrying her suitcase and lost memories.


At the conclusion of Sally's long recitation of the missing-Wally saga, a chronicle I wasn't that riveted by, since I didn't think it could foretell any good for me (I was right), she announced that she needed to take a nap. Events had pretty well wrung her out. She knew that I was not exactly a grinning cheerleader to these matters, that I was possibly as "mixed up" as she was (not true), and she needed just to lie in the dark alone for a while and let things--her word--"settle." She smiled at me, went around the room turning on lamps, suffusing the dark space she was abandoning me to with a bronze funeral-parlor light. She came around to where I'd stood up in front of the couch and kissed me on my cheek (oh, Lord) in a pallbearerish, buck-up-bud sort of way, then ceremoniously mounted the stairs not to our room, not to the marriage bower, the conjugal sanctum of sweet intimacies and blissful nod. But to the guest room!

I might've gone crazy right then. I should've let her mount the stairs (I heard the guest-room floorboards squeezing), waited for her to get her shoes shucked and herself plopped wearily onto the cold counterpane, then roared upstairs, proclaiming and defaming, vilifying and contumelating, snatching knobs off doors, kicking table legs to splinters, cracking mirrors with my voice--laying down the law as I saw it and as it should be and as it served and protected. Let everybody on Poincinet Road and up the seaboard and all the ships at sea know that I'd sniffed out what was being served and wasn't having it and neither was anybody else inside my walls. One party left alone to his heartless devices, in his own heartless living room, while another heartless party skulks away to dreamland to revise fate and providence, ought to produce some ornate effects. No fucking way, José. This shit doesn't wash. My way or the highway. Irish (or Scots) need not apply. Members only. Don't even think of parking here.

But I didn't. And why I didn't was: I felt secure. Even though I could sense something approaching, like those elephants who feel the stealthy footfalls of Pygmy spear-toters far across savannas and flooded rivers. I felt at liberty to take an interest, to put on the white lab coat of objective investigator, to be Sally's partner with a magnifying glass, curious to find out what these old bones, relics, and potsherds of lost love have to tell. These stationary moments are the very ones, of course, when large decisions get decided. Great literature routinely skips them in favor of seismic shifts, hysterical laughter, and worlds cracking open, and in that way does us all a grave disservice.

What I did while Sally slept in the guest room was make myself a fresh Salty Dog, open a can of cocktail peanuts, and eat half of them, since bluefish at Neptune's Daily Catch had become a dead letter. I switched off the lights, sat awhile in the leather director's chair, hunkered forward over my knees in the chilly living room, and watched phosphorescent water lap the moonlit alabaster beach till way past high tide. Then I went upstairs to my "home office" and read the Asbury Park Press--stories about Elián González being preënrolled at Yale, a plan to make postmodern sculpture out of Y2K preventive gear and place it on the statehouse lawn in Trenton, a C.I.A. warning about a planned attack on our shores by Iran, and a lawsuit over a Circuit City in Bradley Beach being turned down by the local planning board, with the headline reading " HOW'S THE DOWNTICK AFFECTING HOLIDAY SHOPPING?"

I rechecked my rental inventory. (Memorial Day was three weeks away.) I took note that the N.J. Real Estate Cold Call reported that four million of our citizens were working, while only 4.1 per cent of our population was not--the longest economic boom in our history (now giving hissing sounds around the edges). Finally, I went back down, turned on the TV, watched the Nets lose to the Pistons, and went to sleep on the couch in my clothes.

This isn't to suggest that Wally's reëmergence hadn't caught my notice and didn't burn my ass and didn't cause me to think that discomforting, messy, troublesome readjustments would need to take place and soon. Readjustments requiring Wally's being declared un-dead, requiring divorcing, estate replanning, and updated survivorship provisos, all while recriminations cut the air like steak knives, and all lasting a long time and raking everybody's patience, politeness, and complex sense of themselves over the hot coals like spareribs. That was going to happen. I may also have felt vulnerable to the accusation of marital Johnny-come-lately-ism. Though I'd never have met Sally Caldwell, never have married her (though I might still have romanced her), had it not been that Wally was gone--we all thought--for good.

What I, in fact, felt was: on my guard--but safe. The way you'd feel if crime statistics spiked in your neighborhood but you'd just rescued a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler from the shelter who saw you as his only friend whereas the wide world was his enemy.

Sally's and my marriage seemed as contingency-proof as we could construct it, using the human materials we're all equipped with. The other thing about second marriages--unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones--is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you're smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand. Sally and I had both conducted independent inquiries back when we met, and had each made a clear decision that marriage--to each other--promised more than anything else we could think of that would probably make us both "happy," and that neither of us harbored a single misgiving that wasn't appropriate to life anyway (illness we'd share; death we'd expect; depression we'd treat), and that any more time spent deciding was time we could spend having the time of our lives. Which as far as I'm concerned--and I know that Sally felt the same--we did.

Which is to say, we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past on behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that viewed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original happiness, and promised never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in the faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared that we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. We kept our kids at a wary but (at least in my case) positive distance. We deëmphasized becoming on behalf of being. We permanently renounced melancholy and nostalgia. We performed intentionally pointless acts like flying to Moline or Flint and back the same day because we were "archeologists." We ate Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at named exits on the New Jersey Turnpike. We considered buying a pet refuge in Nyack, a B. & B. in New Hampshire.

In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). "If I should ever marry," he wrote, "I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do." In Sally's case and mine, we thought a lot better of life than we'd ever thought we could. We were happy. We really, really loved each other. We lived. Together. And we didn't do a lot of looking right or left.


When Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing "The Third Man" (the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn't unhappy with me--though she certainly wasn't happy. I understood that she'd just come unexpectedly face to face with big contingency--the thing we'd schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could've risen to eye level and stared us down: the reënlivening of Wally. And she didn't know what to do about it--though I did.

All marriages--all everythings--tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don't. In all things good and giddy, there's always one measly eventuality that no one's thought about, or that hasn't been thought about in so long it almost doesn't exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, in the unconditional this 'n' that, in the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, in the forever anythings. And that is: there's a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and "true to you forever" are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says: unless, of course, I fall in love "forever" with someone else. This is true even if we don't like it, which means that it isn't cynical to think it, but also means that someone else--someone we love and whom we'd rather have not know it--is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death's where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there's a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there's also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says "unless, of course, I don't want to anymore," or "that is, unless I change my mind," or "assuming my yoga instructor doesn't advise against it." The hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan millennial election year are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?

Sally stood at the darkened thermal-glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She'd slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L. L. Bean blanket around her shoulders. I'd opened the door to the deck, and inside it was fifty degrees. I came awake studying her inky back without realizing that it was her inky back, or that it was even her--wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost entered my house for shelter and not noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.

"Do you feel a little better?" I wanted to let her know that I was here still among the living and that we'd been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.

"No." Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean's blanket around her shoulders and coughed. "I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach's got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn't that peculiar?"

"No, I wouldn't say that was necessarily so peculiar." I was trying my investigator's white lab coat on for size.

"A part of me wants to feel like my life's a total ruin and a fuckup, that there's a right way to do things and I've made a disaster out of it. That's how it feels." She wasn't facing me. I didn't really feel like I was talking to her. But, if not to her, then to who?

"That's not true," I said. "You didn't do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago."

"There's no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might've been a better wife to Wally."

"You're a good wife. You're a good wife to me." And then I didn't say this but thought it: And fuck Wally. He's an asshole. I'll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa'd out for birdseed. "What do you feel exhilarated about?" I said instead. Mr. Empathy.

"I'm not sure." She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face tired and marked with shadowy lines from too sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.

"Well," I said, "exhilaration doesn't hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went." I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. "What's he going to do now," I said, "have himself reincarnated, or whatever you do?"

"It's pretty simple."

"I'll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?"

"You get me as salvage." She turned and walked slowly to where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she were the ghost I'd mistaken her for. Her limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she'd been holding her breath and hadn't realized it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. "He'd like to meet you," she said. "Or maybe I want him to meet you."

"Absolutely," I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. "We'll invite some people over. Maybe I'll interest him in a summer rental."

"That's not really necessary, is it?"

"Yes. I'm in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours."

"Don't be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you."

"That isn't true. I'm not exhilarated. Why are you exhilarated? I answered that for you, but I don't like my answer."

"Mmm. I think it's just so strange, and so familiar. I'm not mad at him anymore. I was for years. I was when I first saw him. It was like meeting the President or some famous person. I know him so well and then there he is and, of course, I don't know him. There was something exciting about that." She looked at me, put her hands atop each other on my cold knee, and smiled a sweet, tired, imploring, mercy-hoping smile. And then we didn't speak for a little while, just sat breathing in the cold air, each of us fancifully, forcefully seeking a context in which our separate views could join forces and fashion an acceptable and unified response. I was further from the middle of events and had some perspective, so the heavier burden fell on me. I'd already started suiting up in the raiments of patient understander. Oh, woe. Oh, why?

"Something has to happen," Sally said with unwanted certainty. "Something had to happen when Wally left. Something has to happen now that he's back. Nothing can't happen. That's my feeling."

"Who says?"

"Me," she said sadly. "I do."

"What has to happen?"

"I have to spend some time with him." Sally spoke reluctantly. "You'd want to do the same thing, Frank." She wrinkled her chin and slightly puffed her compressed lips. She often took on this look when she was sitting at her desk composing a letter.

"No, I wouldn't. I'd buy him a first-class ticket to any place he wanted to go in Micronesia and never think about him again. Where're you planning to spend time with him? The Catskills? The Lower Atlas? Am I supposed to be there, too, so I can get closer to my needs? I'm close enough to them now. I'm sitting beside you. I'm married to you."

"You are married to me." She actually gasped then and sobbed, then gasped again and squeezed my hand harder than anybody'd ever squeezed it, and shook her head from side to side so that tears dashed onto my cheek. It was as if we were both crying. Though why I would've been crying, I don't know. I should've been howling.


I'll make the rest short, though it's not sweet.

I buttoned the buttons on my moral investigator's lab coat and got busy with the program. Sally said she'd be willing to invite Wally down to Sea-Clift--either to a rental she would arrange for him (using who as agent?) or to our house, where he could put up in one of the two guest rooms for the short time he'd be here. The oddest things can be made to seem plausible if you insist they are. Remember Huxley on Einstein. Remember the Trojan Horse. Or else, Sally said, she and he could "go away somewhere" (the Rif, the Pampas, the Silk Road to Cathay). They wouldn't be "together," of course, more like brother and sister having a wander, during which crucial period they'd perform what few in their situation (how many are in that situation?) could hope to perform: a putting to rest, an airing, a reëxamination of old love allowed to wither and die, saying the unsayable, feeling the unpermitted, reconciling paths not taken and those taken. Cleanse and heal, come back stronger. Come back to me. Yes, there might be some crying, some shouting, some laughter, some hugging, some crisp slappings across the face. But they would be "within a context," and in "real time," or some such nonsense, and all those decades would be drained of their sour water, rolled up, and put away like a late-autumn garden hose, never to leave the garage again. In other words, all this turmoil was a "good thing" (if not for everybody)--life's mystery dramatized, all is artifice, connected boxes, etc., etc., etc.

The Silk Road strategy didn't appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I suggested (these things do happen) that we invite the Wall down for a week (or less). He could bivouac upstairs, set out all his toilet articles in the guest bath. I had nothing to fear from an ex-dead man. I'd tin his ears about the real-estate business, talk over the election, the Cubs, the polar ice cap, the Middle East. Though mostly I'd just stay the hell away from him, fish the Hendrickson hatch at the Red Man Club, test-drive new Lexuses, sell a house or two--whatever it took, while the two of them did what they needed to do to get that moldy old hose put away on the garage nail of the past tense.

On the twenty-third of May, Wally "the Weasel," as he was known in military school, my wife's quasi husband, father of her two maniac children, Viet vet, combat casualty, freelance amnesiac, cut-and-run artist par excellence, heir to a sizable North Shore fortune, meek arborist, unmourned former dead man, and big-time agent of misrule--my enemy-- this Wally Caldwell entered my peaceful house on the Jersey Shore to work his particular dark magic on us all.

Sally became convulsively nervous, oversensitive and irritable, as the hour of Wally's arrival neared. (I affected calm to show I didn't care.) She smoked several cigarettes (the first time in twenty years), drank a double Martini at ten o'clock in the morning, changed her clothes three times, then stood out on the deck sporting stiff white sailcloth trousers, new blue French espadrilles, a blue-and-white middy blouse, and extremely dark sunglasses. All was a calculated livery betokening casual, welcoming resolution and sunny invulnerability, depicting a life so happy, invested, entitled, entrenched, comprehended, spiritual, and history-laden that Wally would take a quick peek at the whole polished array, then hop back in the cab and start the long journey back to Mull.

I will concede that the real Wally, the portly, thin-lipped, timidly smiling, gray-toothed, small-eyed, thick-fingered, suitcase-carrying bullock who struggled out of the Newark yellow cab didn't seem a vast challenge to my or anyone's sense of permanence. I had perfect no-recollection of him from forty years ago and felt strangely, warmly (wrongly) welcoming toward him, the way you'd feel about a big, softhearted pfc. in a fifties war movie who you know is going to be picked off by a Kraut sniper in the first thirty minutes. Wally had on his green, worn-smooth corduroys--though it was already summery and he was sweltering--a faded, earthy-smelling, purple cardy over a green-and-ginger rugger shirt under which his hod-carrier belly tussled for freedom. He wore heavy gray woollen socks, no hat, and the previously mentioned smelly but not mud-spackled Barbour from his days nerdling about the gorse and rank topsoil of his adopted island paradise.

He brought with him a bottle of twenty-year-old Glen Matoon and a box of Cohiba Robustos--for me. I still have them at the office and occasionally consider smoking one as a joke, though it'd probably explode. He also brought--for Sally--a strange assortment of Scottish cooking herbs he'd obviously bought for his parents at the Glasgow airport, plus a tin of shortcakes "for the house." He was at least six feet two, newly beardless, nearly bald, weighed a fair seventeen stone, and spoke English in a halting, swallowing, slightly high-pitched semi-brogue with a vocabulary straight out of the seventies U.S. He said "Chicagoland," as in "We left Chicagoland at the crack of dawn." And he said "super," as in "We had some super tickets to Wrigley." And he said "z's," as in "I copped some righteous z's on the plane." And he said "g-b," as in "I banged down a g-b"--a gut-bomb--"before we left Chicagoland, and it tasted super."

He was, this once-dead Wally, not the strangest concoction of Homo sapiens genetic material ever presented to me, but he was certainly the most complexly pathetic and ill-starred--a wide-eyed, positive-outlook type, ill at ease and conspicuous in his lumpy flesh, but also strangely serene and on occasion pompous and ribald, like the downstate S.A.E. he was back when life was simpler. How he made it on Mull is a mystery.

Needless to say, I loathed him (warm feelings aside), couldn't comprehend how anybody who could love me could ever have loved Wally, and wanted him out of the house the second he was in it. We shook hands limply, in the manner of a cold prisoner exchange on the Potsdam ridge. I spoke tersely, idiotically: "Welcome to Sea-Clift, and to our home," which I didn't mean. He said something about how ". . . whole layout's . . . super," and he was "chuffed" to be here.


Wally was in my house in Sea-Clift for five uncomfortable days. I tried to go about my diurnal duties, spending time early to late in the office, where I had summer renters arriving, plumbers and carpenters and cleaning crews and yard-maintenance personnel to dispatch and lightly supervise. I sold a house on the bay side of Sea-Clift, took a bid on but failed to sell another. Normally I'd have been home for lunch, but in grudging deference to what was going on in my house I ate glutinous woodsman's casserole, Welsh rarebit, and ham and green beans at the Commodore's table at the Yacht Club, where I'm a "non-boating" member.

Each evening I went home, tired and ready for a rewarding cocktail and supper and an early-to-bed. Wally was most times in the living room reading Time magazine, or on the deck with my binoculars, or in the kitchen loading up a Dagwood, or outside having a disapproving look at the arborvitae and hydrangeas or staring up at the shorebirds. Sally was almost never in sight when Wally was, leaving the impression that whatever they were carrying on between them during the day and my absence--hugging, face-slapping, laughing that ended in tears--was all pretty trying, and I wouldn't have liked seeing her face then, and in any case she needed to recover from it.

I certainly didn't know what the hell any of us were doing--though who would? If you'd told me that the two of them never so much as spoke, or that they went for polka lessons, or read the I Ching together, or shot heroin, I'd have had to believe it. Was it, I wondered, that everything was just too awkward, too revealing, too anxious-making, too upsetting, too embarrassing, too intimidating, too intrusive, or just too private to exhibit in front of me--the husband, the patient householder, the rate-payer, the sandwich-bread buyer? And also now a stranger?

In bed each night, with Sally returned, though asleep when her head hit the pillow, I lay awake and listened to Wally's human noises across the hall in "his" room. He played the radio--not loud--tuned to an all-news station that occasionally made him chuckle. He took long forceful pisses into his toilet to let off the lager he drank at dinner. He produced a cannonade of burps, followed by a word of demure apology to no one: "Oh, goodness, who let that go?" He walked around heavily in his sock feet, yawned with a high-pitched keening sound that only a man used to living alone ever makes. He did some sort of brief grunting calisthenics, presumably on the floor, then plopped into bed and set up an amazing lion's den of snarfling-snoring that forced me to flatten my head between pillows, so that I woke up in the morning with both hands numb as death, my eyes smarting, and my neck sore.

During the five days of Wally's visit, I twice asked Sally how things were going. The first time--this was two seconds before she fell into sleep, leaving me in bed listening to stertorous Wally--she said, "Fine. I'm glad I'm doing this. You're magnificent to put up with it. I'm sorry I'm cranky . . . zzzzzzz." Magnificent. She had never before referred to me as magnificent, even in my best early days.

The other time, we were seated, facing across the circular glass-topped breakfast table. Wally was still upstairs sawing logs. I was heading off to the Realty-Wise office. It was Day Three. We hadn't said much about anything in the daylight. To freshen the air, I said, "You're not going to leave me for Wally, are you?" I gave her a big, smirking grin and stood up, napkin in hand. To which she answered, looking up, plainly dismayed, "I don't think so." Then she looked out at the ocean, on which a white boat full of day fishermen sat anchored a quarter mile offshore, their short poles bristling off one side, their boat tipped, all happy anglers, hearts set on a flounder or a shark. They were probably Japanese. Something she noticed when she saw them may have offered solace.

But. I don't think so? No grateful smile, no wink, no rum mouth pulled to signal no worries, no way, no dice. I don't think so was not an answer Ann Landers would've considered insignificant. "Dear Franky in the Garden State, I'd lock up the silverware if I were you, boy-o. You've got a rough intruder in your midst. You need to do some nighttime sentry duty on your marriage bed. Condition red, Fred."


Wally gave no evidence of thinking himself a rough intruder or a devious conniver after my happiness. In spite of his strange splintered, half North Shore-fatty, half earnest-blinking-Scots-gardener persona (a veteran stage actor playing Falstaff with an Alabama accent), Wally did his seeming best to spend his days in a manner that did least harm. He always smiled when he saw me. He occasionally wanted to talk about beach erosion. He advised me to put more aluminum sulfate on my hydrangeas to make the color last. Otherwise, he stayed out of sight much of the time. And I now believe, though no one's told me, that Sally had actually forced him to come: to make him suffer penance, to show him that abandonment had worked out well for her, to embarrass the shit out of him, to confuse him, to make him miss her miserably, make me seem his superior, plus darker reasons that I assume are involved in almost everything we do and that there's no use thinking about.

But what else was she supposed to do? How else to address the past and loss? Was there an approved mechanism for redressing such an affront besides blunt instinct? What other kind of synergy reconciles a loss so great--and so weird? It's true I might've approached it differently. But sometimes you just have to wing it.

Wally and I never talked about "the absence" (which Sally said was his name for being gone for thirty years) or anything related to their kids, his parents, his other life and lives (though, of course, he and Sally might've). We never talked about when he might be leaving or how he was experiencing life in my house. Never talked about the future--his or Sally's or mine. We never talked about the Presidential election, since that had a root system that could lead to sensitive subjects--morality, dubious ethics, uncertain outcomes, and also plainly bad outcomes. I wanted to keep it clear that he was never for one instant welcome in my house, and that I pervasively did not like him. I don't know what he thought or how he truly felt; I only know how he was in his conduct, which wasn't that bad and, in fact, evidenced a small, unformed nobility, although heavy-bellied and gooberish. I did my best. And maybe he did his.


Wally departed on the morning of Day Five. Sally said that he was going, and I made it my business to get the hell out of the house at daybreak. I hung around the office the rest of the morning, catching cold calls and running credit checks on new rental clients.

Then I drove home, where Sally kissed me and hugged me when I walked in the door as if I'd been away on a long journey. She looked pale and drained--not like somebody who'd been crying but like somebody who might've been on a roadside when two speeding cars or two train engines or two jet airplanes collided in front of her. She said that she was sorry about the whole week, that she knew it had taken a toll on all of us, but probably mostly me (which wasn't true), that Wally would never again come into the house, even though he'd asked her to thank me for letting him "visit," and even though having him here, as awful as it was, had served some "very positive purposes" that would never have gotten served any other way. She said that she loved me and that she wanted to make love right then, in the living room on the suède couch where this had all started. But because the meter reader knocked at the front door and the neighbor's dog started barking at him out in the road, we moved--naked as two bushmen--up to the bedroom.

Next day, I assumed--believed--matters would begin shifting back toward normal. I wanted us to drive over to the Red Man Club for an outing of fishing and fiddlehead hunting, and a trek along the Pequest to seek out the Sampson's-warbler pairs that nest in our woods and nowhere else in New Jersey. I intended to put in an order for a new Lexus at Sea Girt Imports--a surprise for Sally's birthday, in three weeks. I'd already made a trip up to consult color charts and take a test-drive.

Sally, however, stayed in bed all day, as if she herself had been on a long and arduous journey. While she rested, I drove myself over to the movie theatre at the Ocean County Mall and saw "Charlie's Angels," then bought lobsters on the way home and cooked them for dinner--though Sally barely rallied to work on hers, while I demolished mine.

She went to bed early again--after I asked if maybe she should call Dr. Blumberg on Monday and schedule a workup. Maybe she was anemic. She said she would, then went to sleep at nine and slept twelve hours, emerging downstairs into the kitchen Sunday morning, weak-eyed, sallow, and sunk-shouldered--where I was eating a pink grapefruit--to tell me that she was leaving me to live with Wally on Mull, and that she'd decided it was worse to let someone you love be alone forever than to be with someone (me!) who didn't need her all that much, even though she knew I loved her and she loved me. To this day I don't understand this calculus, though it has a lot in common with other things people do.

She was wearing an old-fashioned lilac sateen peignoir set with pink ribbonry stitched around the jacket collar. She was thin-armed, bare-legged, her skin wan and blotchy from sleep, her eyes colorless in their glacial blue. She was barefoot, a sign of primal resolution. She blinked at me as if sending me a message in Morse code: goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Oh, I protested. May it not be said that I failed of ardor at that crucial moment. (The past, critics have attested, seems settled and melancholy, but I was boisterous in that present.) I was by turns disbelieving, shocked, angry, tricked-feeling, humiliated, gullible, and stupid. I became analytical, accusatory, revisionist, self-justifying, self-abnegating, and inventive of better scenarios than being abandoned. Patiently (I wasn't truly patient; I wanted to slit Wally open like a bulgy feed sack) and lovingly (which I surely was), I testified that I needed her the way hydrogen needs oxygen--she should know that, had known it for years. If she needed time--with Wally, on Mull--I could understand. She should go there and do that. Hang out. Plant little trees in little holes. Go native. Act married. Talk, slap, hug, giggle, groan, cry.

But come home!

I'd tear down conventional boundaries if we could just keep an understanding alive. Did I say beg? I begged. I already said I cried. To which Sally said, shoulders slack, eyes lowered, slender hands clasped on the tabletop, her little finger lightly touching the covered Quimper butter dish she at one time had felt great affection for, and that I subsequently winged across the room to death by smithereens, "I think I have to make this permanent, sweetheart. Even if I regret it and later come crying to you, and you're with some other woman, and won't talk to me, and my life is lost. I have to."

Strange grasp on "permanent," I thought, though my eyes burbled with tears. "It's not like we're dealing with hard kernels of truth here," I said pitiably. "This is all pretty discretionary, if you ask me."

"No," she said, which is when she took her wedding ring off and laid it on the glass pane of the tabletop, causing a hard little tap I'll never, ever forget, even if she comes back.

"This is so terrible," I said, in full cry. I wanted to howl like a dog.

"I know."

"Do you love Wally more than you love me?"

She shook her head in a way that made her face appear famished and exhausted, though she couldn't look at me, just at the ring she'd a moment before relinquished. "I don't know that I love him at all."

"Then what the fuck!" I shouted. "Can you just do this?"

"I don't think I can't do it," Sally--my wife--said.

And essentially that was that. Double negative makes a positive.

She was gone by cocktail hour, which I observed alone.


Somewhere once I read that harsh words are all alike. You can make them up and be right. The same is true of explanations. I never caught them smooching. Probably they didn't smooch. Neither did they stop midsentence in an intimate moment just when I strode through a door. (I never strode through any without whistling a happy tune first.) Sally and I never visited a counsellor to hash out problems, or endured any serious arguments. There wasn't time before she left. Apart from when I first knew Sally, Wally had never been a feature of our daily converse. Everybody has their casualties; we get used to them like old photographs we glance at but keep in a trunk.

My personal view is that Sally got caught unawares in the great, deep, and confusing eddy of contingency, which has other contingency streams running into it, some visible, some too deep-coursing for us to know about. That she began, in spite of what she might've said, to fear permanence, to fear no longer becoming, to dread a life that couldn't be trashed and squandered. Put simply, she was unprepared to be like me--which is a natural state that marriage ought to accommodate and make survivable. Heavy-footed, unnuanced, burping, yerping Wally may have reminded Sally that she had unfinished business in the last century and couldn't reason it away in the jolly manner in which I'd reasoned myself into a late-in-life marriage and lived happily by its easy-does-it house rules. First marriages have too much past clanking along behind them; but second ones may have too little, and thus lack ballast. And so it's good odds that Sally had no choice but to hand me her wedding ring like a layaway clerk at Zales and push herself out of the eddy of our life and take the current wherever it led.

I'll admit that I'm no longer so blue about Sally's absence as once I was. I don't feature myself living alone forever, just as I wouldn't concede to staying a Realtor forever, and mostly tend to think of life itself as a made-up thing composed of today, maybe tomorrow, and probably not the next day, with as little of the past added in as possible. I feel, in fact, a goodly tincture of regret for Sally. Because even though I believe that her sojourn on Mull will not last so long, by rechoosing Wally she has embraced the impossible, inaccessible past, and by doing so has risked or even exhausted an extremely useful longing--possibly her most important one, the one she's made good use of all these years to fuel her present, where I found a place. This is why the dead should stay dead and why in time the land lies smooth all around them.

By: Ford, Richard, New Yorker, 8/28/2006

The Key of Love

By: Laura Kalpakian

Her husband has no understanding of music. And she doesn’t get the games he loves. But in a crisis, they suddenly find themselves in harmony.

I’m stuck in traffic, the kids are squabbling, and I’m feeling completely overbooked, what with dinner needing to be early be cause of a flute recital and late because of a soccer game and the dog still at the vet’s.

“The light’s changed, Mom,” says Juliet, 17. Gridlock lets up; I hang a left and get on the freeway. “This isn’t the way to the dry cleaners, Mom. If I can’t wear my blue dress, I don’t even want to play at the recital tonight.”

“You look like a pincushion in that blue dress,” says 15-year-old Mary from the backseat. Mary insists on being called Mojo, in keeping with her cheerleading, track, and gymnastics skills. “You’re so skinny, you stick out of it,” she adds.

“Shut up, muscle head,” Juliet replies good-naturedly. “You’re coming with me tonight, aren’t you, Mom?”

“Mom’s coming to our game,” says Mike, 13, already taller than I am and still growing into his enormous feet.

“Your dad and Mojo are going to your game, Mike. I’m going to Juliet’s recital.” My announcement sets off a new scuffle, which I try to ignore.




Actually, we hardly ever miss Mike’s games. I missed a couple when I had double pneumonia. But my husband? Never. Greg’s a physical therapist, and he’s at work before seven every morning just so he can leave early for games and practices, track meets and pep rallies, planning boards for sports parents.

When Greg Kelly and I first started dating, I thought going out to endless sporting events was tons of fun. He liked to stand up and shout. He kept his eyes on the game and his hand in mine while I tried to follow his running patter of stats and tactics. I’d never met anyone like him. I was a music-ed major from a family who used Super Bowl Sunday to go to the mall because it would be deserted. But sports were like a religious faith to Greg’s family. To this day, my in-laws’ house is full of trophies won by Greg’s brothers. Not by Greg. He was born with weak knees, so hardcore athletics were out.

What did I care about bad knees when I fell in love with him? He had a strong mind, a great smile, energy, and enthusiasm. Early in our marriage, we could see that we’d need separate rooms for music and sports or we could not live together. So when we moved to this house, we put the piano in the living room. The TV occupies center stage in the family room, just off the kitchen. When Juliet was an infant, Greg would pace in front of the TV, patting her to sleep while he watched reruns of games. Sometimes he’d get so involved with the action, he’d shout and wake the baby up.

I chose Juliet’s name for its musical lilt and romantic association. Greg liked the name because “Juliet Kelly” had the ring of an all-star athlete. He had great plans for Juliet.

“Look at her knees,” Greg used to say when she was just learning to toddle and would fall down. “Her knees are great.”

But Juliet surprised him. Surprised me, too, for that matter. One day she announced to her father that she didn’t want to play Girls Little League. Then, at age nine, she gave her dad the bad news: She wanted to play the flute.

Greg couldn’t believe it: his daughter turning her back on athletics? But he accepted her decision gracefully, like a defeated coach, crossing the field to shake hands with the winner. No hard feelings.

Juliet’s recital was held in a small church with fine acoustics. I got misty listening to my daughter play Debussy’s “Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” In her blue dress and high heels, she looked very grown-up performing with an ensemble of advanced wind instrumentalists.

I’d taught several of these young musicians and knew almost everyone there. However, I couldn’t place the woman who came up to me after the performance, older than I, with an anxious air and a deferential manner. Her shoulders were hunched, and her hair was badly dyed-too dark for her pale face.

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m Cathy Waiters,” she began. “My son is so impressed with your daughter Juliet. She’s such a fine musician.”

I told her thanks and asked her to point out her son. She nodded toward a corner where Juliet was deep in conversation with a tall kid with black hair, olive skin, and a bemused smile on his face. “Shannon,” the woman said, “Shannon Walters is my son.”

Juliet had mentioned Shannon. But I’d always assumed she was referring to a girl. “Shannon tells me you are a music teacher, Mrs. Kelly,” she said.

“Call me Sara, please. Yes. I teach a few piano students at home and part-time in the elementary school.”

“Music is a great gift. I am so grateful my son has a passion for it. Music has given me a lot of solace in life.” Cathy looked wistful, and for a moment, I thought she might tell me why she had needed solace. But the moment passed.

On the way home, I asked Juliet, “Why didn’t you ever mention that Shannon was a boy?”

“You never asked.”

What could I say? I’d never asked.

“I was wondering if we could invite Shannon and his mother to my family birthday party next week,” Juliet went on.

“What about your girlfriends? You always ask your girlfriends.”

She ignored this observation. “I thought if you and Dad met Shannon’s mother, then you’d let us date.”

“We let you date! You went to the prom last year with Mike Weinstein.”

Keeping my eyes on the road, I felt Juliet’s patronizing look. “I’ve known Mike since the first grade,” she said. “He lives down the street, remember? That doesn’t qualify as a date.”

“Tell me about Shannon,” I said calmly.

“Well,” she laughed, “he’s not a girl.”

Shannon was the only child of hardworking Cathy and a feckless man named Dusty Waiters. Cathy had divorced Dusty several years ago, but he still lived in town. Once reminded of his name, I recalled a guy who’d broken up a couple of PTA meetings with his boisterous demands; he had seemed to those present a bully who indulged in chaos for its own sake.

Juliet said that Dusty never showed up at Shannon’s recitals or jazz concerts and only visited Shannon when he thought he could embarrass him or hurt Cathy’s feelings. Shannon was very protective of his mother. He was incredibly talented. The music teacher charged Shannon half of what she charged everyone else, Juliet went on, because he was so gifted and Cathy’s salary as a receptionist was so paltry. Shannon had already picked out the university music schools he would apply to–all top places. “He wants to write music, not just play it,” Juliet added. “He wants a music scholarship more than anything else.”

I listened silently. Clearly, their relationship was established. How had I missed this? “Don’t worry, Mom,” Juliet added. “I just want to go out with Shannon, and I know what you and Dad are like.”

I wanted to ask, “What are we like?” But I didn’t venture there. I was half afraid she would tell me–and half afraid she would duck the question and that her evasion would keep me awake at night.

After we got home, I slipped into bed beside Greg, who was reading some coach’s memoirs of a winning season. He asked about the recital so he could be specifically enthusiastic when he talked to Juliet tomorrow. I told him, though I didn’t mention Shannon Waiters. I was not at all sure how Greg would react to Juliet’s affection for this boy. He kissed my cheek, turned out the light, and rolled over.

I lay there, listening to his quiet breathing. How odd, I thought. All these years I have lived with Greg, our separate strengths and weaknesses, values and instincts have braided together, so that to our children, we seem to be a single unit. And yet he still has a tin ear for music, and I have little understanding of the sports he loves. What are we like? Could I even answer that question?

As summer drew to a close, baseball fans statewide were suddenly ignited into a frenzy of excitement when our usually lackluster major, league team, the Condors, started winning. Collective euphoria reigned when the Condors qualified for the division play-offs. The Condors had a chance at the World Series! For the first time ever!

During the games leading up to the play-offs, Greg, Mike, and Mojo all took places at the table where they could see the TV. They barely spoke. After they ate, they would slide to the low couch in front of the TV.

Juliet and I did the dishes, looking over our shoulders now and then at the TV. One night, during a commercial break, Juliet walked over to Greg and asked about having Shannon Waiters and his mother as our guests at her birthday.

Mojo laughed. “Shannon’s a geek!”

I was about to reprimand Mojo, but Greg did it for me. Then the commercial ended, and his attention returned to the TV.

“Dad,” Juliet repeated, making a move as though she might step in front of the TV, “I want to invite Shannon and his mother to my birthday.”

Greg nodded, still spellbound by the Condors. “Sure, honey, invite her. Any friend of yours is welcome.”

“Greg,” I said.

Juliet shook her head. “Wait till the next commercial, Mom.”

Birthdays are a big deal in our family. You don’t have to do any chores, and you get to choose whatever you want for breakfast and dinner, no questions asked. One year, Mike wanted frozen corn dogs. Mojo wanted pizza.

For her birthday dinner, Juliet asked for my special pasta with clam-and-artichoke sauce, a recipe I had gotten from the chef at Café Eden. To go with this, she asked for a big summer fruit salad and a green salad, a spectacular plate of hors d’oeuvres served with rustic Italian bread, and her favorite chocolate orange cake. We tied balloons to the light fixture over the table. I ironed the best tablecloth and put out china and crystal glasses for both wine and water.

Yes, all was in perfect readiness for Juliet’s 18th birthday, complete with special guests Shannon Waiters and his mother. Except that the Condors’ final play-off game was scheduled for that same evening. We had to have the TV on.

I tried to reason with Greg, to no avail. “You’ll watch TV and ignore the party. Ignore Shannon and his mother. Ignore Juliet.”

“I won’t. I’ll pay attention. I’ll be…whatever you want. But I have to see the game, Sara!”

“It’s only the play-offs.”

“Right! More important than the World Series! If they lose, they may never get another chance.… ”

“What about Juliet?”

“She can watch the game too. So can Shannon and his mother…what’s her name–Cathy?”

“What if they don’t want to? What if they don’t care about the game?”

“That’s not possible. Everyone cares.”

“OK, here’s a compromise,” I offered. “You can sit in a place at the table where you can still see the TV, but the sound will be off. Then you can still carry on a conversation with Cathy and Shannon.”

“Shannon sounds like a girl’s name.”

“I assure you, he is not a girl. Just ask your daughter.” Something in my voice must have rung Greg’s alarms, because he agreed to the compromise.

Mike and Mojo grumbled audibly and said they’d rather watch the game upstairs than have dinner with the Waiters. I forbade this. It was Juliet’s birthday.

Juliet grumbled, too, though she knew that muting the TV was the best she could expect under the circumstances.

On the afternoon of the party, the overhead fan cooled the kitchen and family room; lemonade in crystal glasses and the hors d’oeuvres were laid out on the coffee table in front of the couch. Juliet looked lovely in a pale summer sheath. Shannon wore a tie, a dress shirt–long sleeves and cuff links, no less. Cathy looked prim and uncomfortable in a beige summer suit. Mike and Mojo were planted on the family-room floor, right in front of the TV. Greg hung back and chatted with both Shannon and Cathy, though his gaze hardly strayed from the game. His face registered the Condors’ every run, hit, and error.

After a few minutes, Juliet and Shannon strolled outside to the patio and the garden. I passed the hors d’oeuvre plates to Cathy and made small talk about the kids being seniors this year, applying for colleges and the like, asking about music schools. Cathy spoke in her slow, cultured fashion. “Shannon plays tenor, soprano, and alto sax, all three. I sometimes cry just to hear him practice. He has a gift. I will rejoice when he goes to college. But I’m afraid I will be diminished. Alone.”

Though I could imagine her being a very gracious receptionist, she was clearly ill at ease with me. Spreading a bit of Brie on her bread, Cathy asked, “What will I do with myself?. My job is nice but quite dull. Certainly not like yours. Being a music teacher must be wonderful.”

“I like watching kids improve at things. Training, discipline, and experience. Musicians have to work every bit as hard as athletes.”

“Sports uses the whole body,” Greg offered, then added, “Top of the fourth.”

“So does music,” said Cathy before I could even reply. “Look at the hands of a pianist. Look at Sara’s hands.”

My hands, strong, with long fingers and short nails, are really pretty undistinguished. I laughed and passed the roasted red peppers. “Do you play an instrument, Cathy?”

“I read music. I used to play the piano. We don’t have one anymore.”

I would have invited her to play ours in the living room, but then the whole birthday party would be broken up, Juliet and Shannon outside, Cathy at the piano, and the rest of them mesmerized by the Condors.

My pasta water was about to boil, and though I had the salads all done, this clam-and-artichoke sauce has to be done all at once and served immediately, so I left Cathy on the family-room couch with Greg and went into the kitchen. My family erupted with loud cheers as a Condors batter hit a home run and brought three men in.

I looked over and saw Cathy Waiters smiling. She asked if the Condors had ever played in the World Series. Astonished, Greg told Cathy that this would be their first, assuming they won the play-offs.

By the top of the sixth, we were all at the table, the meal served, and we’d sung “Happy Birthday to You” to Juliet at least three times. I was pleased at the lemony scent, the fresh-chopped parsley, and the whiff of the sea from the clam sauce. Now I was free to enjoy my lovely daughter’s 18th birthday and study her guests.

Shannon Walters was livelier than his mother, but there was a low-key quality about him just the same. Very different from the high school kids I was used to. He glanced over at Cathy often, as if to offer confidence to his mom, rather than the other way around.

Throughout dinner, the phone kept ringing after every base hit–Greg’s brothers calling from Oakland and Seattle. Finally, Greg just put the phone on the table. I wanted to throw it across the room but knew it was hopeless.

And then I heard a knock at the front door. I got up, fully prepared to send away Mojo’s cheerleading girlfriends.

A man stood at my door. Perhaps. 50. Tall and broad shouldered, he exuded a burly confidence. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, and, I realized with a start, he was the image of his son, Shannon. Shock scrambled across my face.

“Hi!” he said. “Dusty Walters. Cathy’s neighbor told me where Shannon and Cathy were off to, and I got your address out of the phone book.” He opened the screen door and shook my hand with a grip a little too tight. “I need to talk to Shannon.”

“I don’t think you can come in right now,” I said. “We’re having a family party.”

“Won’t take a minute,” he said, pushing past me into the living room. “You play the piano, huh? What a waste of time. Are they back there?” He waved in the direction of the voices, and, speechless, I followed him into the kitchen.

Greg, Mojo, and Mike tore their gaze from the TV and stared. But their shock was nothing compared with the look on the faces of Shannon and Cathy Waiters. Cathy blanched. Shannon’s face seized up as Dusty burst in and greeted them.

Shannon stood up. He seemed about to vault over the table, to stand between Dusty and Cathy. He glanced at Juliet. “This is my father,” he said, color flooding his sallow complexion.

The phone rang again, and Greg picked it up. His brother from Oakland.

“Don’t mind me. I just wanna talk to Shannon, but it can wait,” said Dusty, plopping down on the couch. “I’ll just watch the game till you’re done.”

He popped a couple of olives in his mouth, found the remote, hit the mute button, and turned up the volume. The noise and clamor of the game filled the space around us.

Shannon turned to me. “Excuse me for a moment.” He walked to the couch.

“Great game!” cried Dusty without turning around. “Except the bums are losing.”

Suddenly I saw, or thought I saw, the whole tapestry of Cathy Walters’s past: the bright-eyed woman she must have been when she married Dusty Waiters, how he must have seemed to her larger than life. And then how she had lived in his shadow. I understood how Shannon gave her strength and purpose and how she would indeed be diminished when he left home. And yet I knew that she would do everything in her power to help him leave, to help him fulfill his dreams.

As I listened to the drone of Shannon’s voice while he spoke quietly to Dusty, I felt I was in the presence of a kind of heroism. Not gold medals, not triumphs on the court or the mat or the field or the ice, but just as hard earned, practiced, and demanding. I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to protect Shannon and Cathy from Dusty Waiters, but I knew that Shannon and Cathy had been protecting each other for years.

“I said I’ll wait,” Dusty insisted, brushing Shannon off. “I’ll just sit here and watch. Everyone in America is watching the game.” He popped a few more olives. “Hit the ball!” he cried out to the TV.

Shannon went back to Juliet. “Maybe Mom and I should leave.”

“No.” She took his hand. “I don’t want you to leave. Either of you.”

Greg barked into the phone, “Don’t call back–I’ll call you,” then hung up on his brother. He looked at me. Suddenly, I knew the answer to the question “What are we like?” We’re in accord, that’s what we are. No matter the ways in which we are different, fundamentally, we are in accord. Maybe that’s the gift of a long marriage: that you give up a part of your individuality to be part of another person, and he gives up his to be part of you.

Greg strode across the family room and took the remote from Dusty Walters. He turned the TV off. The sudden silence fell upon us like the collapse of a huge tent, billowing out to the farthest corners of the room. It was quiet, save for the hum of the fans. A distant dog barked.

“Mr. Walters,” Greg said, “maybe everyone in America is watching this game, but we’re not. You need to go somewhere else to watch it.”

Greg then tossed the remote over to the counter. He offered his hand to Dusty Walters, said it had been a pleasure to meet him, and in the same fluid movement, pulled him to his feet, clapped him on the back, and escorted him out of the family room, talking nonstop about stats, RBIs, and the inadequacy of the shortstop as he ushered Shannon’s father to the front door. We heard it close.

“Is everyone ready for birthday cake?” I asked, looking at Cathy Walters’s frozen expression. “Cathy?”

We heard a car start up and drive away. Cathy’s face seemed to thaw, and though it would be too much to say she smiled, her features assumed an uncertain ease.

Mojo cleared the plates, and I sent Mike looking for the birthday candles. Greg came back into the room and sat down in my place, beside Cathy. His back was to the TV. Mike handed me the birthday candles and reached for the remote. He popped it on, and the roar from the stands, the crack of the bat filled the room.

“Turn it off,” said Greg.

“But, Dad,” Mojo cried, “it’s the top of the ninth. And they’re down by two runs!”

“Turn it off,” Greg repeated. And this time Mike did so. The fan turned overhead. “It’s a birthday party. What we need is some music.”

Yes, I thought: This is where discipline, training, and experience pay off. In this family, there are no weak knees.

http://www.st0ries.com/

Unleashing the Energy

Most scheduled gatherings of teachers are, in fact, meetings at which teachers yawn their way through lists of informational items announced and commented on by the principal. If any clear communication results from these meetings, it takes place in the parking lot long after the official meeting has ended. In my years as acting principal, I led many meetings that fit this description.

Yet I have also led faculty meetings that were productive gatherings filled with creative collaboration and teacher learning- When conducting such meetings, I felt like a facilitator of unbounded teacher energy. I watched as leadership emerged and creativity surfaced from normally quiet staff members, as teachers launched rich, vociferous conversations around real issues, and, when necessary, willingly allowed meetings to stretch beyond our contractual time.

How One School Got There
One of the most dramatic changes I saw in faculty meetings occurred at Pleasant Hill School in Palatine, Illinois. The teachers and I both knew that the meetings I conducted were top-down and filled with administrivia; at times we spent more minutes deciding whether to have more or chicken salad at the faculty luncheon than we did on analyzing critical data from local assessments. We knew that good meetings, like good lesson plans, should have clear goals, an organized agenda, and a setup that encourages people to interact respectfully. But we wrestled with how to make change. What was the best way to break through a stultifying structure and turn meetings over to teachers?

Then attendance at a day-long professional development session with a talented consultant shifted how we organized our school improvement efforts and conceived of faculty meetings. Realizing that we needed a structure and a modus operandi for faculty to meaningfully participate in our school improvement goals, we formed five standing voluntary committees: Teaching and Learning, Safety and Discipline, Staff Development, Communication, and Budget. Each committee met monthly, and our faculty meetings soon connected directly to committees' work. Reports and recommendations from committees became the main agenda for OUT weekly faculty meeting. Any faculty member could suggest an agenda item for consideration. Unless I had crucial issues that could not be shared elsewhere, my agenda items came last. Faculty meetings became, in actuality, faculty meetings.

Setting Ground Rules, Facing Fear
We established ground rules that made these meetings productive as well as democratic.

We made attendance voluntary; however, if a teacher chose to miss a meeting, that absence was interpreted as tacit support for all decisions made at the meeting.
We promised to listen to one another.
We agreed to take turns speaking.
We committed ourselves to respecting differences of opinion.
We agreed to invite quieter teachers into the conversation, and teachers who spoke often and impulsively agreed not to dominate discussions (this was the hardest rule to keep).
We agreed to say what needed to be said at the faculty meeting, not in the parking lot.
We promised to respect confidentiality.
Personally, I was scared. Giving up control of faculty meetings meant I had to trust teachers and have faith in the process of collegiality. I didn't have time to attend most of the committee meetings. I had to trust that teachers would wrestle with school issues and report about them directly to fellow teachers and staff — always supporting our major commitment to serve kids in all we did.

Slowly as I let go and the committees did their work, teachers took ownership of crucial issues. I heard fewer comments like "she always …" or "they won't let us do that." Teachers emerged as true leaders, able to make decisions and hold themselves and others accountable. Teachers began directing the parade; I only had to stay informed so that I could stand in front of the group and look like I was leading. As Roland Barth has quipped, "Hey, I am the leader. Wait up!"

Complaints still surfaced. Some teachers thought that they were being asked to do "the principals job." Others objected to the multiplicity of meetings. Strong-voiced teachers still dominated the meetings; chronically cranky teachers remained cranky. Our smaller leadership team, consisting of the chairs of each committee, tackled these and other issues. My work as principal continued, and the many problems that were mine alone to resolve remained on my desk. The buck still stopped with me.

Unleashing the creative energy of teachers can be difficult and scary; it occasionally feels like losing control. But at Pleasant Hill, once we gave teachers more control, faculty meetings no longer stimulated naps — they promoted real conversations about teachers' aspirations and shared goals. For teachers to begin their journey, I first had to let go.

Teachers began directing the parade; I only had to stay informed.

We agreed to say what needed to be said at the faculty meeting, not in the parking lot.

By: Rooney, Joanne, Educational Leadership, Sep2006

Symphony for twelve wheels and a coal scoop

Yes, son of Bristol, you can go home again

I became acquainted with Norfolk & Western's class M 4-8-0s at an early age. I was boosted into the cab of No. 467 at Bristol Shop before I was old enough for grammar school. I didn't know what I was looking at, except that there was a lot of heat from that open firedoor. But I was hooked.

Witnessing these rare (though I didn't realize how rare at the time) little creatures going about their business in the yard in my home town of Bristol, Va., and coming and going on the Abingdon Branch mixed train (often called the "V-C" after the Virginia-Carolina Railway that built the Branch, and sometimes called "The Carolina Queen") was as educational as it was fascinating.

Bristol Yard was not the only place I got to watch these engines. My grandfather spent the last 14 years of his career as express messenger on the "V-C", and I made many trips with him on his run. Over the years, I rode behind Ms 382, 429, 495, and several doubleheaders: 382 and 429; 382 and 396 (a non-superheated Bristol yard engine that branch crews hated because it worked the fireman harder -he had to shovel more coal to produce the power of the superheated engines); 429 and 495; and 382 and 429 with the 433 (another Bristol yard engine) pushing. The N&W used the three-engine train to haul rock to a highway project in North Carolina. The 433 was cut in ahead of the mixed train's coaches on the rear, and was cut off at White Top to return to Bristol light. An M was rated for only 325 tons on the 3-percent grade up to White Top, and 10 loads of rock in 50-ton hoppers was roughly 850 of the 975 tons that three of them could handle.

After about 30 of these excursions with my grandfather, one day at West Jefferson I mustered up the courage to ask engineer Joe McNew if he'd let me ride the 429 back north. He said, "OK, but when we stop at White Top you drop off on my side (away from the depot) and go back to the rear end."

So I set up the drop seat on the fireman's side and took it all in as the West Jefferson switching was completed. We stopped to align the split-rail derail for our movement and again to put it back in derailing position. And then we were off.

It was downhill or level through Smethport, Warrensville, Bina, and Lansing, but, as we left Tuckerdale, White Top Mountain loomed ahead, and the 429 began to give out with that gruff, irritated bark (the antithesis of "cracking at the stack") that was familiar to me as the way an M used to describe just what was wrong and what it intended to do about it. Bristol Shop had her valves square, and she was speaking with authority. Fireman D.S. Nichols' work with the shovel had a rhythm of its own -- the chuck of the shovel going into the coal pile in the tender, the hiss of the air-operated Butterfly firedoors opening in response to Nichols' foot on the operating pedal, the clank of the heel of the shovel hitting the firedoor frame to spread the coal, and the loud clack of the door slamming shut after the shovel was withdrawn. Chuck-hiss-clank-clack-chuck-hiss-clank-clack chuck-hill-clank-clack.…

Let the music begin to play
As we passed the flag stop at Nella, the mountain started to get nasty (ruling grade: 2.5 percent) and McNew widened on the 429 -- that angry gruff bark increased mightily in volume. And Nichols' chuck-hiss-clank-clack stepped up its tempo. George Gershwin fans can talk about his song "Fascinatin' Rhythm" all they want, but it had nothing on the music I was hearing that bright summer day, on a half-century-old Twelve-Wheeler walking up White Top Mountain and telling the world what was going on in its own language, to the counterpoint of Nichols feeding his fire -- a symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.

Today, the Abingdon Branch is mostly a bike trail; the Bristol Ms are all gone except the 433 enshrined in the branch's namesake city; the crew members, including my grandfather and Joe McNew, have passed on.

Over the years, I grew to appreciate that these little engines had an interesting history. In 1906-07 the Norfolk & Western Railway obtained 125 4-8-0 locomotives to which it assigned the class letter "M." First to come were 50 from Baldwin numbered 450-499; the other 75, Nos. 375-449, came from American Locomotive Co.'s Richmond Works.

The 4-8-0 wheel arrangement found little favor among American railroads; at the same time N&W started receiving 4-8-0s, the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement, with its deeper firebox over a pair of carrying wheels, or trailer truck, was beginning to demonstrate advantages. But N&W liked to use the weight of the firebox for adhesion, so it raised the firebox over the last driving wheels and lengthened the front end of the boiler, providing a four-wheel leading truck for the weight of the boiler and for increased guidance in curves. The M was little more than an enlargement of N&W's class W-2 2-8-0, with more heating surface and slightly smaller grate area. It shared the 2-8-0's 200-pound boiler pressure, cylinders of 21-inch bore and 30-inch stroke, 56-inch drivers, and tractive effort of 40,163 pounds, less than most contemporary Consolidations of comparable weight. But it was a somewhat better steamer than the W-2, and was considered faster.

No cab deck, controls on the boiler side
The Ms, like all the Ws, had no cab deck behind the backhead. The firebox extended to the back of the cab, and the fireman baled coal while standing on the tender deck.

The engineer sat on a drop seat be side the firebox, and his utensils were arranged more or less conveniently up to his left. The throttle lever hung down over the shoulder of the firebox, and was directly connected to the throttle in the steam dome by an operating rod that passed through the front of the cab, above the boiler, and through a packing gland in the back of the dome. The reverse lever was in front of him against the side of the firebox with the water glass just above, and the injector controls -- a water valve, the overflow valve, and the operating lever -- were in front of him against the outer wall of the cab. His position might have been somewhat cramped, but his visibility to the front was superb. On the fireman's side, there was a drop seat for the times he could use it, a water glass, and injector controls arranged like the engineer's.

Like the W-2s, the Ms were equipped with piston valves arranged for inside admission operated by Stephenson valve gear; the valve rod was in the same vertical plane as the piston rod, evidently to minimize the length of the steam passages between the valve and the cylinder. N&W's use of these modern valves began before the turn of the 20th century. Where other railroads stayed with slide valves until the advent of superheating caused lubrication problems that made such valves obsolete around 1910 or so, the N&W owned 648 locomotives equipped with inside-admission piston valves before the first superheated locomotive hit the property.

N&W bought 100 M-1 4-8-0s (numbers 1000-1099) from Alco and Baldwin in i907; the big difference from the M was the application of a somewhat unsatisfactory design of Walschaerts valve gear, and the boiler check valves attached to a separate dome atop the boiler. The M-1s were all gone by 1947.

The Edwardian era was not a good one for steam locomotive aesthetics on the N&W. Contemporary locomotives on other railroads were beginning to bring pleasurable elements and balance to steam locomotive appearance, but N&W's typical (for the day) big cabs with 12 windowpanes on each side perched on the back end of wagon-top boilers with a drastic taper in the second course, behind a big old headlight mounted high on the smoke-box front doomed the Ms and M-1s from the start -- just like their N&W predecessor classes. They were born ugly and no re-arrangement of details ever made them any prettier; lowered headlights on some of them in later years helped, but not much.

To me, though, an M never was homely. It was home.

The reign of the M as the queen of N&W's freight power was brief; steam locomotive technology advanced rapidly in the era, and size mattered. Sixty-one larger 4-8-0s (classes M-2 and M-2a, b, and c) came in 1910-12 giving the N&W the continent's largest fleet -- 286 Twelve-Wheelers. Then the Mallet floodgates opened. One-hundred-ninety superheated 2-6-6-2s (classes Z-1 and Z-la) started coming in May 1912. It had taken locomotive designers less than six years to develop a machine that could do the work of a pair of Ms, and use a little less coal and a lot less water than the two 4-8-0s while doing it. (The 4-8-0 concept proved to be a dead end as far as locomotive technology was concerned; the M-2s were not as good as other roads' 2-8-2s of comparable weight, and no further expansion was possible with the firebox over the drivers.)

The Zs were just the beginning. The first Y-2 came in 1918 -- the sire of what would become the world's largest fleet of 2-8-8-2 Mallets.

The advent of each larger locomotive downgraded the Ms; local freights, work trains, branch lines and yard service were to be their homes from then on. Of course, by then they'd demonstrated their virtues; they were good steamers, lightfooted, and handled sharp curvature nicely. But by the mid-1920s there weren't enough homes for all of them and the Ws, too; scrappings began then and accelerated through the Depression-riddled 1930s.

Mighty tall assignment for the class M
Many Ms received Baker valve gear in the 1910s. The configuration of the valves directly over the pistons rather than being offset to the outside required the use of a rocker arm to get the motion from the outside of the wheels to the inboard vertical plane of the valve. This, in turn, required the combination lever to be hung from the vertical arm of the bell crank of the Baker valve gear and the union link to be aft of the crosshead, with the reach rod to the rocker arm attaching just below the bell crank connection. The action of the union link and combination lever was thus close enough to be visually combined with that of the eccentric crank and its rod to make a mesmerizing melange of motion.

Eight Ms (382,386,439,447,457,482,493,and 495) received superheaters in 1915. When the 386 and 493 were scrapped in the late '20s, their superheaters were applied to the 429 and 459. The superheated Ms were favored for the more demanding branch line and local freight services requiring locomotives with light axle loadings where a fair turn of speed was desired.

The terminus of the spectacular Abingdon Branch mixed train was moved from Abingdon to Bristol after World War II, and 15 miles of running on the fast Bristol line main was required as both a prelude and postlude to the twice-a-day battle with White Top Mountain (N&W's highest summit, at better than 3,500 feet). Thus, "a fair turn of speed" was desired. The 382,429, and 495 were sent .to Bristol for that service. In the mid-1950s the 382 and 429 were fitted with N&W-designed 20-ton, 12,000-gallon, 12-wheel tenders that had originally been constructed for Y-2 2-8-8-2s (the 495 was scrapped in 1953). Several other Ms without superheaters were assigned to Bristol as yard engines; a couple of them had the big tenders.

"Fair turn of speed"? The Bristol Line CTC dispatchers thought nothing of turning the V-C out of the west end of the siding at Abingdon while the Tennessean, all streamlined equipment and powered by a class J 4-8-4, was getting near the east end of the Abingdon siding, coming in to make its station stop. They expected the M would get over the high-speed hump east of Wyndale and go into Bristol without delaying the streamliner, and it would, too. Wyndale Hill was the last challenge for the fireman who'd already shoveled his way over N&W's highest summit twice. When the V-C was on time, the Tennessean wasn't close. But when the branch train was late, the M's fireman was in for some fast shoveling over Wyndale.

It's been about 50 years now since I got that ride on the 429 over White Top Mountain. Along the way, I've made a few of my own chuck-hiss-clank-clacks firing Southern steam excursions on Consolidation 630 and Mikado 4501 -- the language was the same but the dialect was different. Southern excursion engines weren't gruff; they cracked at the stack, in the traditional fashion of all Southern power -- a sassier sound. And Nichols' proficiency with the scoop shovel was an unreachable dream for me.

The memory of that day is still embedded in my mind, no doubt taking up room in my rapidly contracting cerebral capacity that should be available for more useful things. There's nothing I can do about that. It won't go away, and I don't want it to go away.

But wait a minute. Incredibly, there's an M actually running in 2006 at age 100. One of the 429's sisters, Baldwin 475, is operating on the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania, not far from her birthplace in Philadelphia.

I had never seen the 475 run; in my recollection, it had never been assigned to Bristol, and when N&W sent an M to Bristol, it stayed a while. The 475 spent the last days of N&W steam around Roanoke and Radford, Va., working "the Huckleberry" on the branch from Christiansburg to Blacksburg. But it had been selected to be decorated with brass embellishments and a fake diamond smokestack for Roanoke's centennial, and was sent to Bristol in that livery in 1956 to help celebrate that town's centennial, but hadn't been working.

Would it be possible for me to hear an M's fascinatin' rhythm again? It seemed just a matter of getting to Strasburg on the right day -- timing is everything. I attempted to make her acquaintance in October 2005, but the 475 had developed a leak around the beading of a flue in her firebox and was inside the shop, cooling down so the trouble could be repaired. So I had to be content with riding 2-10-0 No. 90 that fine day. And the 90 was a treat; she's a Baldwin standard Decapod similar to those I had ridden on Georgia short line Gainesville Midland back in the 1950s, and she brought back memories of her own. But she wasn't an N&W class M. I had to go back.

The next time around the 475 was sitting outside the shop, hot and ready to run, shining like new money in the bright November morning sun. Engineer Chuck Trusdell and Fireman Jeff Wienand made me welcome, and I set up the jump seat on the fireman's side.

On the road to Paradise … or Bristol?
Backing down to Paradise provided an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with-this little beast, and renew my thankfulness (echoed, no doubt, by every engineer and fireman that ever worked on an M) that she had efficient boiler lagging to keep the firebox heat from overpowering that cramped space. On the road back to Strasburg, though, I enjoyed the view out of the front of her cab -- only a Camelback or a Cab Forward could have had better visibility -- and remembered the drastic taper of the second boiler course. And when we left Cherry Hill after meeting Strasburg's second train, Trusdell made her talk a bit; for me, more than a half-century melted away. The gruff bark of the stack, the intermittent view of the side rods through the holes in the running board, the dance of the front end of the running board ahead of the air pump, the sound of the firedoor opening and closing -- it was all there. I confess: I wasn't keeping a lookout ahead. I had my ear pointed that way, not my eyes, listening again to that symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.

Now, Strasburg has done some customizing on the 475, because half her mileage is made backing up. The most obvious visual change is the relocation of the injectors from outboard of the No. 4 drivers to aft of them, so they can be operated from controls near the step up into the cab, to the rear of the seats. The independent and automatic air brake valves have been moved back to be more convenient for backing-up operation. N&W had done some modifications on her USRA 10,000-gallon tender to adapt it to hand firing. It had come to the railroad behind a class K-2 4-8-2 that was, of course, equipped with a stoker. (Being that the K-2 was passenger power, that tender has some fast miles on it.) The left side water leg had been trimmed back in order to give the fireman room to swing his scoop. None of these alterations count in the end, though -- she's still what she was 50 years ago when she earned her keep on a roster full of the most modern steam locomotives around.

Because the cab straddles the rear end of the boiler and the accommodations are so cramped, the 475 will never be the crew favorite at Strasburg; she's just not that handy to work, especially compared to that 2-10-0 with its "living room"-sized cab. She's earned the reputation, though, as the best steamer on the property.

The hospitality of Linn Moedinger, Rick Musser, and Trusdell and Jeff Wienand of the Strasburg made it possible for this old guy to put the lie, at least to an extent, to author Thomas Wolfe. You can go home again.

By: King, Ed, Trains, Aug2006

What the heck are you doing here?

Back in the 1980s when Alco locomotives were becoming rare, some railroads scattered throughout the land still rostered one, two, or even several of this manufacturer's products in operating condition.

One such railroad was the Lake Superior & Ishpeming in Michigan's iron-ore country on the Upper Peninsula. LS&I dieselized with Alcos and, although they were supplemented with six-axle General Electric U-boats after Alco stopped building locomotives, LS&I had a large roster of Alcos through most of the '80s.

Being an iron-ore road, the LS&I was also interesting because of its movement of this commodity, and its means of interchanging taconite to Great Lake freighters via its Presque Isle iron-ore dock in Marquette, Mich.

I, like many railfans, made pilgrimages to the Upper Peninsula to watch and photograph the LS&I and its Alcos. The railroad was strict with rail-fans: If you didn't have a little orange pass to be on the property, you would be removed. The good part was that anyone could obtain this pass just by asking for it. And with it you could go anywhere on the property. Well, almost anywhere.

One fine day, I was the proud possessor of just such an orange LS&I pass, issued to me that morning by a dignified man at the railroad's main office in Marquette. He happened to be walking by the counter when I appeared there while the clerk was on the phone. Nice man, I thought.

After taking the routine roster shots of Alcos at the Eagle Mills engine facilities, I made my way to the ore yard and dock north of Marquette. I've always been impressed with ore docks. I remember seeing years earlier a photograph that the late Emery Gulash, my favorite railroad photographer, had taken from the ore dock of LS&I engines switching ore jennies. Gulash was a master of getting to the right location for the right shot.

Soon, three LS&I engines were making their way up the ore-dock lead with a cut of jennies. A boat was poised in the dock, waiting for a load of taconite pellets. I scrambled into my car and made my way to the dock. I knew I could get some great shots from below of the Alcos switching the dock.

As I walked around and underneath the ore dock, I noticed a stairway leading to the top. It seemed a mile high and rather treacherous. Then I read the "No Trespassing" sign at the base. But I have a pass! I thought. I can go up there. Then I, too, can make a photograph like Gulash's.

With nary another thought, I ascended this stairway to heaven, amazed at how high I was climbing. When I reached the top, I was at the top of the world -- physically, as well as figuratively. What a sight of Marquette and Lake Superior from up there. Even the huge Great Lakes freighter docked below looked small from where I stood. I immediately noticed a small office with the sign, "Ore Dock Master" on the door. I figured I had better go and check in. With my first step on the ore dock, I almost fell on my face. Taconite pellets lay everywhere, and it was like walking on a bed of marbles. No wonder they don't want anyone up here, I thought.

The door to the office was partly open, and I could see a white-haired man sitting on the desk talking on the phone. I rapped on the door and came in, wearing a huge smile as a signal of my accomplishment of reaching this destination.

The gentleman, who turned out to be the dock master, looked at me and literally dropped the phone on the desk. "What the heck are you doing up here?" he bellowed. "Can't you read the sign?" With a victorious grin, I flashed him my orange pass. "I got permission," I bellowed back.

"Heck if you do!" the dock master bellowed louder. "Read the back of it."

I turned the orange pass around and quickly read the fine print on the back. At the bottom, in not-so-fine print, was the clear statement, "Does not include access to the Ore Dock."

I was more heartbroken than embarrassed. I had reached railroad heaven and was now being denied access to it. I would have tried to sweet-talk the dock master into letting me stay, but I had the feeling he wasn't the kind of person who might give in.

In the ensuing quiet of the pause, a small voice could be heard. It was the person on the other end of the fallen phone. The dock master uttered some profanity when he remembered the phone, and quickly picked it up. "Sorry, sir. Some darn railfan made his way up here.… Yes, sir.… I don't know, sir."

Then looking at me, he asked, "Your name Babbish?"

"Why, yes," I muttered, getting worried that they even knew my name.

The dock master was back on the phone, then hung up.

"It's your lucky day," he said to me. "That was the president I was talking with, and he remembered you from this morning. Seems you made some sort of an impression on him as he said it was OK for you to take some pictures up here on the dock."

I was flabbergasted. So that dignified-looking person who issued me the pass was the president of the railroad! I'll be darned.

Still in a daze, I received a nice tour of the ore dock from the now-hospitable dock master. I vaguely remember his warning me about my footing on the taconite pellets littering the deck, and telling me to stay clear of the locomotives switching the dock. I then had carte blanche to take photographs wherever I wanted to up there.

It was one of my favorite train-watching moments ever, and I owe it all to the luck of a chance meeting with the railroad's president, and being in the wrong place when the right phone call was on the line.

By: Babbish, Byron C., Trains, Aug2006

The Babylonian Story Of Creation

In the beginning, there was Chaos, a huge, boundless, watery mass. Apsu was the fresh water, and Tiamat was the salt water. Their children brought order to the world. Anu took charge of the heavens, Enlil ruled the air and later the earth, and Ea controlled the waters and the abyss that they believed surrounded the earth. Apsu and Tiamat plotted to destroy their revolutionary offspring. In the fierce struggle that ensued, Ea killed Apsu and laid the ancient deity to rest beneath the earth.

The earth rejoiced in its new order, and Ea returned to his temple at Eridu. There his son, the learned Marduk, was born. Yet, all was not well, for Tiamat raged within herself at the loss of Apsu. To avenge his death, she created an army of 11 horrible monsters, with the invincible Kingu as leader.

Ea summoned the gods to a banquet. As the music flowed, the question of how to defeat Tiamat arose. Young Marduk offered to meet Tiamat in hand-to-hand combat, but he had one condition. If he was successful, he was to have supreme authority over all the gods. Despite their eagerness to see Tiamat defeated, the gods decided to test Marduk's powers and commanded him to make a particular constellation of stars disappear and then reappear. When Marduk succeeded, the gods eagerly accepted this condition.

Armed with a net, the four winds, a thunderbolt, a storm, and weapons the gods had given him, Marduk snared Tiamat before she could use any of her magic powers. Tiamat opened her mouth to engulf the upstart god in flames, but Marduk filled her gaping jaws with one of the winds. As the wind rushed through Tiamat's form, swelling and distending it, Marduk pierced her swollen body with a spear and killed her. Chaos was dead, and order and organization reigned.

The world was ready to be created. Marduk stood above Tiamat's body and cut it in half. With one part, he made the vault of heaven; with the other, he created the earth.

The world again rejoiced in its new order. Then, the gods realized they needed people to sacrifice to them. After much discussion, Marduk summoned the imprisoned Kingu. From his blood, Marduk fashioned the human race. To express their gratitude for the gift of humans, the gods built a shrine and temple honoring Marduk (see page 26) at Babylon, Marduk's favorite site.

NOTE: This version of the creation tale is from Hammurabi's time (c. 1750 B.C.), when Marduk was worshiped as the chief god. It was found on the Seven Tablets of Creation, large portions of which are preserved in London's British Museum. As several tablets are broken, historians must make educated guesses about the missing text. (Similar cuneiform tablets are at right.)

By: Baker, Rosalie F., Calliope, Oct2006

The Great Flood

The tradition of a great flood is common to the literature of many civilizations. While the Mesopotamian story is usually credited as the earliest, it is uncertain whether there was a relationship among the various tales, but geologists have proven that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers did periodically overflow their banks. Perhaps one flood was so catastrophic that it formed the basis for the Babylonian tale known as "The Great Flood."

what reason shall I give for building a boat large enough to hold my family, my possessions, and my animals?" Utnapishtim asked.

"My dear Utnapishtim," answered Ea, the god of the waters, "say only that the god Enlil dislikes you and you wish to live in the land of Ea."

Utnapishtim bolted upright in his bed. Was he dreaming, or had the god Ea come to warn him as he slept? Utnapishtim looked gently at his sleeping wife and then at all their treasured possessions in the comfortable reed hut. "Yes, I must abandon this and obey Ea, for he is just," he thought.

Anxiously, he told his shipwright of his plans for a boat and explained what materials were to be used and what the dimensions should be. All went faster and more smoothly than Utnapishtim could believe.

One day, as Utnapishtim rechecked his boat's fittings, the sun god, Shamash, spoke softly to him: "Tonight the rains begin. Dark shadows will fall, and I shall be gone for many days."

Hours later, drops of water began to fall. Soon the wind began to blow, thunder roared, lightning flashed, and torrential rains beat down upon the land.

The tempest raged for six days and nights. On the seventh day, it ceased, and an eerie silence fell over the land. Utnapishtim looked out from his tiny porthole and saw water everywhere. Tears fell from his eyes as he realized that nothing else had survived. Suddenly, the hull of his vessel scraped land, and the ship came to rest. Utnapishtim let loose a dove. Within minutes, the bird flew back to its master, unable to find a single twig on which to alight. Utnapishtim waited a while, then sent out a crow. When the crow did not return, Utnapishtim rejoiced and sacrificed to the gods.

The gods, too, rejoiced, and assembled to receive Utnapishtim's sacrifices. Only Enlil was absent. Ishtar, the queen of all the deities, held him responsible for the devastating flood and forbade him to attend the gathering. But Enlil defied Ishtar and came anyway. Enlil vowed revenge when he heard that a human had escaped destruction.

"Listen!" Ea exclaimed. "I told Utnapishtim what was to come and how to escape it. But so that you may feel your storm accomplished its purpose, I shall make Utnapishtim and his wife immortal."

Enlil slowly turned to Ea, then to Utnapishtim piously sacrificing to the gods, and relented. Ea sped to earth and led the devout couple to a remote area in the West, to a place beyond the Waters of Death, where they continue to live in harmony and happiness.

By: Baker, Rosalie F., Calliope, Oct2006

Stories within Stories

In her deceptively straightforward fictions, Margot Livesey absorbingly explores the layers of the human heart

MARGOT LIVESEY HAS become known for writing the "literary page-turner." In her novels, character becomes the action that drives a story forward. And the unpredictability of character leads to the twists and turns that keep readers intrigued. But Livesey isn't all about turning pages. She writes close to the heart, revealing her characters' tenderness and vulnerability as much as their manipulations and self-pity.

One of her fans is Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for Three Junes, who said of Livesey: "For her keen wit and wise heart, for her mingling of the tender with the diabolical--never mind her knack for holding the reader in thrall to a suspenseful story--she is a master, pure and simple."

Livesey takes on new challenges in each novel--writing about ghosts in Eva Moves the Furniture, for example, or, in The Missing World, about a woman with amnesia as she regains her memory. It is a persistent ambition of hers, Livesey says, "to find new ways to deepen and improve my work."

On the surface her novels are straightforward, told in dean, succinct sentences in a clear and deliberate voice. But she explores the darker and lighter aspects of the human heart, and as she does so, her stories contain stories.

The Missing World, for example, is a thwarted love story in which Jonathan tries to win back his former lover Hazel after she's struck with amnesia and doesn't remember leaving him. The narrative tension develops as Hazel regains her memory as Jonathan struggles to maintain his lies. Contained in that drama are the stories of Charlotte, a struggling actress with nowhere to turn, Freddie, a laborer with illusions of love, and other assorted characters with stories of their own. This suspenseful tale of one woman's captivity and confusion becomes a meditation on memory, love and loss.

Banishing Verona similarly offers up a suspenseful story line when Zeke, a 29-year-old London housepainter with a mild autism-like condition, and Verona, single and pregnant, are united in the first chapters only to be separated and left seeking one another throughout the rest of the book. The tension develops as the characters contend with their ambivalent emotions and unexpected life circumstances. This love story between Zeke and Verona explores what it means to be part of a family, and how we reckon with the past so that we can live at peace in the present. Livesey offers up no easy answers, no pat solutions--she lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

Some clues to Livesey's use of family themes may lie in her unusual childhood in the Scottish Highlands. "My father was 50 years old when I was born, and my mother, Eva, died when I was 2 1/2," Livesey told fiction writer Carole Burns in an online interview for The Washington Post. "Subsequently my father remarried a woman of his own age, so at the age of 5, I was living with two 55-year-olds who were elderly 55-year-olds. I took refuge with a neighboring family who had four children. I think this early experience of inventing my own family is a major factor in the ongoing preoccupation in my work with what constitutes a family, how we sort out the competing loyalties of family vs. new affections. And I'm aware at this point in the 21st century that many people are in a similar situation of inventing and re-inventing their families."

Livesey, who is also the author of the novel Homework and the short-story collection Learning by Heart, is everything Julia Glass describes and more: a master storyteller, a teacher and a critically acclaimed author. In a recent chat with her near Boston, where she now lives and is writer-in-residence at Emerson College, we explored how she finds and develops her interesting plots and characters.

Critics often refer to your novels as "literary page-turners." How do you keep readers turning the pages in a character-driven narrative?
I think of my novels as being in the great 19th-century tradition where plot and character went hand in hand. So while I do aspire to have deep and complex characters, I also aspire to have complicated and intriguing plots.

How does a novel come to you--in an image, a scene or a character?
I'm usually slow to come up with characters. Most of my novels have come as some combination of idea and image. I picture a baby at a bus stop and I think, oh, I'll write a novel about a banker who finds a baby in a bus station.

Once you have that glimpse into the book, do you draft straight through, or do you take it slow and make each paragraph, page and chapter perfect as you go?
At the moment, I seem to be going back and forth between these two strategies. I write a certain number of pages, then double back to revise, but that may be partly because my writing time is so broken up when I'm teaching.

In The Missing World, you explore issues of memory and morality in the wake of an accident in which the main character, Hazel Ransome, suffers from amnesia. What interested you in a character with amnesia?
When I first started writing the novel, issues of memory were very much in the news, with debates about, on the one hand, Alzheimer's, and on the other, repressed memories. These caught my interest in part because living several thousand miles from my native land, I'm always acutely aware of how my life is held together by memory. The idea of a woman who loses part of her memory seemed a wonderful way to explore the degree to which memory and identity are intertwined.

Hazel's name is interesting in that she's in a kind of haze as she regains her memory. How do you go about naming your characters, and what is the importance of a name?
As William Gass so memorably says, proper names have a special excitement for a writer because we get to invent their meaning. I spend a good deal of time pondering names for my characters and trying to make sure that they're neither too odd nor too familiar. In Banishing Verona, I called my heroine after the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet lived and loved. And I called my hero Zeke because the combination of the Z and the K seemed to suggest the way he's on awkward terms with himself.

Hazel's extinguished memories leave her vulnerable to her former boyfriend. He is taking advantage of her incapacity. What drew you to this particular moral dilemma?
Initially, I'm not sure that I did think of it as a moral dilemma. I read an article in People magazine about a couple who were getting married after their second engagement. The first had been broken when the woman was in an accident and lost all memory of her fiancé. He talked about the oddity of courting her again and of knowing so much more about her than she knew about him. That was what intrigued me, that lopsided relationship. As I kept writing, however, I did become increasingly interested in the moral dilemmas.

The siblings in your narratives have often wreaked havoc on each other's lives. Henry in Banishing Verona, for example, drags pregnant Verona, his sister, across the Atlantic to help save him from hoodlums. What draws you to this complicated family terrain?
Having no siblings and no parents, family is always a challenge for me, and I think I'm still figuring out how to invent these strange tribes. Siblings strike me as particularly fruitful terrain because of what they share and how different they can be.

You have also written several characters with disorders such as amnesia and Asperger's Syndrome. What kind of research do you do?
I first learned about Asperger's Syndrome a number of years ago when two friends had children who were diagnosed with this condition. Over the years, as I learned more about it, I became increasingly convinced that I and most people I knew had Asperger's moments and that this condition was a wonderful lens through which to examine the world. As for research, I went to the library and interviewed people with Asperger's and people who worked with them.

Zeke in Banishing Verona bears a striking resemblance to Freddie in The Missing World in that they are both laborers with extreme sensitivity and social dysfunction.
Yes, there are similarities between Freddie and Zeke, although their origins are very different. I made Freddie a roofer in part to solve the problem I'd created. If Jonathan is keeping Hazel captive, what man can ever reach her? The answer is someone working on the house where she is held prisoner. In Zeke's case, his profession [housepainting] grew out of his character and what I imagined as being possible for him.

You often write using a shifting point of view. What does the narrative gain from this?
I think the narrative gains considerable tension from having more than one point of view. It enables one to leave gaps, to show the blindness and biases of each character, to move the story along in surprising ways. In the case of Banishing Verona, although I adored writing in Zeke's point of view, it was also fairly limiting and, for several kinds of reasons, I needed Verona's more worldly and efficient point of view.

When I interviewed novelist Andrea Barrett, she emphasized the importance of her friendship with you, her reliance on your reading her work and sharing the literary life. How does that literary friendship inform your work?
My process of revision is that I send everything to Andrea and she tells me how to fix it. I try to follow her advice, and then I send the pages to her again and she tells what's better and what's worse. This continues for a while. Eventually, other readers, including my agent and editor, weigh in. I feel deeply fortunate to have so much help.

What do you do when you get stuck?
A) Ask Andrea Barrett. B) Try to figure out why I am stuck. In the case of Criminals, for instance, I originally had only two points of view, those of the brother and sister. Around Chapter 6 I began to feel bogged down. I still thought it was a good idea for a novel--banker finds baby in bus station--but there was something wrong. Eventually I realized that I had been entirely ignoring how the baby ended up at the bus station. Once I started pursuing that line of thought, the novel opened up again.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?
Find readers for your work who know you first as a writer rather a friend. Ask, and try to answer, the question of why readers should be interested in your stories. Look at how rich and various the world is. I know my own imagination is very hack-neyed in terms of coming up with details for characters and landscapes, and my work is vastly improved when I actually spend some time observing people.

Write better sentences.

A LIVESEY SAMPLER
BANISHING VERONA is a love story about two people who spend a magical evening together, and then spend the next few weeks trying to locate each other to find out if their relationship is the love they believe it is. Zeke Cafarelli is a mildly autistic housepainter. Verona MacIntyre, who is seven months pregnant, is a radio talk-show host who flips-flops between wanting to rescue her troubled brother and wanting to save herself. Livesey keeps readers on edge wondering after the fate of these two lovers.

In EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE, Eva is accompanied by two ghosts, a girl and a woman, who ore there mainly in a protective role. But, they warn her, they are unable to change the course of her life, only to offer their guidance.

In THE MISSING WORLD, when Hazel is hit by a car and suffers amnesia, her former boyfriend Jonathan uses the opportunity to bring her to his house and convince her that they are still happily together. But friends and other observers are not so convinced, and events conspire to bring the truth to the surface.

CRIMINALS tells the story of a banker, Ewan Munro, who finds a baby in a bathroom while traveling north to spend a weekend with his sister Mollie, who is recovering from a bad divorce. Mollie is desperate for a baby, and this tale narrates how easily two lives can slip into chaos as the child's parents appear on the scene and events grow more complicated.

HOMEWORK explores a child's capacity for evil when she is sent to live with her father and his lover, Stephen and Celia. Celia believes that Jenny is trying to get rid of her, but Stephen refuses to hear anything bad about his daughter, so Celia is helpless to stop Jenny's assault.

THE MARGOT LIVESEY FILE
LIVESEY, WHO WAS reading Dickens' Great Expectations and Emily Barton's novel Brookland when interviewed, says her reading life informs her writing life "intimately." She advises in an essay that one "learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend."

LEFT MOTHERLESS AS a child, Livesey grew up as an only child and the daughter of a father who taught at a private boys' school. "Living way out in the country," she told interviewer Jill Maio, "there were few other reliable entertainments, and I can still remember the bindings (and the smells) of some of the first books I read: Kidnapped, The Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows. My father had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and as far as I recall I could read whatever I could reach. Most of the lower shelves were filled with authors like Thucydides--he had inherited the Latin and Greek library of his father, who was a minister--but there was also Evelyn Waugh, Colette, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley."

"AS A CHILD," she recalls, "I read a story which claimed that on Christmas Eve animals could talk, and spent several years trying to converse with the family dog, a sweet-natured but mute border terrier."

"I STARTED WRITING the year after I left the University of York in England," she says. "I was traveling for a year in Europe and North Africa with my boyfriend, who was writing a book about the philosophy of science. After a while I got tired of visiting cathedrals and markets on my own and started imitating him. Not having a subject --I didn't know enough to write, for example, a history of the Crusades--I wrote a novel."

THE FIRST SUMMER she came to the U.S., she remembers, "I read [Jack] Kerouac's On the Road and hitchhiked from Dayton, Ohio, to Athens, Ga."

LIVESEY HAS A long-standing interest in megalithic sites--standing stones, circles and cairns. "I find these places mysteriously beautiful," she says. "My favorite site, so far, is Callanish in the Outer Hebrides."

When Zeke met Verona
HERE IS AN excerpt from Margot Livesey's novel Banishing Verona. The novel is a love story, yet its main characters, Zeke and Verona, are seen together in only a few scenes. This scene is the first passage where the reader is introduced to Zeke, who has a form of autism.

He had replaced five lightbulbs that day and by late afternoon could not help anticipating the soft ping of the filament flying apart whenever he reached for a switch. The third time, the fixture in the hall, the thought zigzagged across his mind that these little explosions were a sign, like the two dogs he had come across in the autumn, greyhound and bulldog, locked together on the grassy slope of the local park. He had given them a wide berth; still, he had felt responsible when on the bus next day a man turned puce and fell to the floor. By the fifth bulb, though, he had relinquished superstition and was blaming London Electricity. Some irregularity in the current, some unexpected surge, was slaughtering the bulbs. He pictured a man at head office filling his idle minutes by pulling a lever. Meanwhile, hour by hour he emptied the upstairs rooms, slipping the bulbs from bedside lights and desk lamps.

He had just replaced the fifth bulb when the doorbell rang. Often, if he were up a ladder, Zeke didn't bother to answer the knocks and rings of late afternoon; the owners of the house, the Barrows, were away and the callers were never for him. But now the pallor of the sky, the flashes of light and dark, the weariness of working alone, all conspired to make even the prospect of rebuffing a smartly dressed double-glazing salesman, or a disheveled collector for Oxfam, a pleasure. Last Friday, in a similar mood, he had found a boy on the doorstep, thin as a junkie, pretending to be blind. He had the dark glasses, the cane, the fluttery stuff with the hands. You're a painter, he had said, sniffing slightly. Zeke had given him fifty pence. Later he had looked out of the window and seen the boy sitting on a wall, reading the newspaper.

He set aside the wallpaper steamer and went to open the front door. On the doorstep a woman, minus collecting tin or clipboard, filled his vision. He hadn't replaced the hall bulb yet, and in the dim light her features took a moment to assemble. He made out abrupt dark eyebrows above a substantial nose and plump, glistening lips--the opposite of pretty.

Briefly, Zeke was baffled. Then he went through the steps he'd learned from the poster he'd been given at the clinic. Eyes wide, a glimpse of teeth, corners of the mouth turning up rather than down--usually these indicated a smile, which could, he knew, mean anger but often meant the opposite. Yes, she was smiling, although not necessarily for him. Her expression had clearly been prepared in advance, but he admired the way she held her face steady at the sight of him, and of his work clothes. His jeans and shirt were so paint-spattered as to be almost a separate entity.

"Good afternoon." She stretched out a hand and, seeing his, white with plaster, faltered, neither withdrawing nor completing the gesture.

"Hi," he said, hating the single stupid syllable. She was tall for a woman, his height save for the step, and dimly familiar, though not as herself. As she began to speak, he realized who she reminded him of: the bust of Beethoven on his father's piano, something about the expansiveness of her features, the way her tawny hair sprang back from her forehead.

"I'm the Barrows' niece," she said.

From Banishing Verona: A Novel by Margot Livesey. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2004 by Margot Livesey. All rights reserved.

Margot Livesey usually starts with an idea and an image, and from there crafts novels that have been praised for their blending of "the tender with the diabolical."

By: Johnson, Sarah Anne, Writer, Oct2006

Who is David Cameron?

What the Conservatives' bright new hope can learn from Gordon Brown

THE new Conservative leader, David Cameron, goes to his first conference with the best ratings his party has had for 20 years. Most polls say that his lead will widen if, as seems likely, Gordon Brown, the chancellor, takes over from Tony Blair as Labour leader. Even on issues on which Labour has traditionally been strong, such as health and education, the Conservatives are now ahead, despite the fact that Mr Cameron has no discernible policies on either.

This must be gratifying for him, for it vindicates the strategy he set out when running for the leadership a year ago. Voters, he argued, were so hostile to the party that they disliked and disbelieved anything it proposed. Unless people could be persuaded that the Tories were decent and well-meaning, they would continue to regard the party with a deadly mixture of indifference and contempt.

Cuddly conservatism
Mr Cameron has tried to change voters' attitudes by taking swipes at carefully chosen targets. The Conservatives are seen as too close to business? Attack shops selling provocative clothes for children and call for corporate social responsibility. Self-interested? Go to the North Pole and fret about global warming, preferably in the company of a furry animal. Too authoritarian? Suggest that louts need love and understanding. Stick to warm slogans such as "trusting people" and "modern compassionate conservatism", and hope that the electorate's growing disillusionment with a fractious government that has been in power for nearly a decade would do the rest. Intellectually vacuous, perhaps; but also politically successful.

However, transforming the Tory image from selfish and mean to cuddly and green is not enough. Successful oppositions do not just wait for governments to collapse. They accelerate the process by showing that they are ready to take over. Mr Blair did this when he won the Labour leadership in 1994, and the contrast between him and the exhausted Tories created the conditions for Labour's landslide in 1997. This does not mean Mr Cameron should set out now precisely how much a Tory government would tax and spend in 2010, or provide a detailed blueprint of how it would run the health service. What he must do, though, is define a clear philosophy and identity that will give voters a sense of what they are voting for and help shape Conservative policies. He also has to persuade voters that he leads a confident and united party.

And he should move soon. By next summer, Labour will have a new leader. Until then, the government will be drifting and wrapped up in its own affairs. Mr Blair will have little authority and Mr Brown will have to wait as patiently as he can before attempting the difficult task of renewal in office. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, can use his husky-hugging popularity to get his way against opponents within his party. This opportunity will not last long. Mr Cameron's moment is now.

He needs to do three things. First, he must sketch out his ideas about what government should and should not do. Like most Tories, he seems to believe instinctively in a smaller state; but since public finances will be tight for the next three years, pledging tax cuts would be unrealistic. However, a Conservative Party that is content with public spending running at 42% of GDP is not doing its job. Mr Cameron should make it clear that his long-term aim is to see government intrude less in people's lives and take less out of their pay packets.

One way to make the state do less is to hand the job of delivering more public services to providers from the private and voluntary sectors. Mr Blair has tried to occupy this ground, but since Mr Brown seems less comfortable on it, Mr Cameron should try to make it his own. There is no reason why this approach should look conventionally right-wing. Mr Cameron should explain that such changes would give choice and power to people who currently have very little of either. Mr Blair, of course, has done that over and over again; but so what? As Labour's espousal of market economics has shown, stealing the other party's clothes can be a successful strategy.

Second, Mr Cameron needs to follow up on his intention of making his party, once a club of (near-) dead white males, look as though it represents modern Britain. That means pushing through organisational changes and tightening his grip on how the party chooses its parliamentary candidates.

Third, he should use the limited opportunities that the leader of the opposition has to dabble in foreign affairs to appear more statesmanlike than he has so far. He has already had to postpone his plan to pull out of the centre-right European People's Party in Brussels. This pledge might have seemed a good tactic to win the affections of the party's Eurosceptics. But he has found it impossible to deliver, and his dithering has irritated those he was trying to please almost as much as those who thought it a bad idea to start with. Mr Cameron should ditch his pledge altogether and acknowledge that the best way to exercise influence in Europe is from within its biggest political group, rather than from the fringes.

Opposites detract
He needs to counter the perception on the other side of the Atlantic that he is anti-American. The fifth anniversary of September 11th was the wrong moment to make a speech criticising Mr Blair's close relationship with the White House. Even though Mr Cameron spent part of the speech attacking anti-Americanism, he appeared to be trying to profit from Mr Blair's unpopular stance. An uncomfortable sense that he was moving in the wrong direction may be one reason why he has persuaded John McCain, a Republican front-runner for the American presidency, to address next week's conference.

If Gordon Brown and David Cameron face each other as party leaders, it will be a curious match, for they are, at present, opposites. Mr Brown is all substance and, sadly for his polling figures, no style. Mr Cameron is, so far, all style and not enough substance. If he can acquire a little of the dour Scotsman's intellectual seriousness, he will be a real contender at the next election. And that, for Britain, would be great: competition, as this paper occasionally points out, is a fine thing.

Economist, 9/30/2006

The Deporter

By Dinesh Vora

The mayor of Lincoln, Nebraska in USA was under tremendous pressure to get rid of huge pigeon population corrupting the city with pigeon drops. All the efforts failed and mayor was fighting for his political life.

Suddenly a man shows up with a Red Pigeon on his head and says, "Mayor I will charge you one million dollars to get rid of them all with my magical Red Pigeon but absolutely no questions asked. If you ask any question I will punish you with a bill of ten million dollars."

The mayor agreed. The guy climbed up the tallest building in town, made romantic pigeon sounds, chanted a Mantra and set his Red Pigeon free. The red pigeon started whirling around the city and what do you know, thousands and thousands of pigeons followed this Amitabh Bachchan of Pigeons. The Red pigeon flew towards Pacific Ocean and came back without any followers. The pigeons tired of flying that far fell in stormy waters, disappeared in this ultimate romantic experience of their life.

Hurrah, the city was without the dirty pigeons. The mayor, smiling ear to ear, could not resist the temptation of knowledge, saving and promoting his career further. He fell on his knees to this stranger and pleaded, "Here keep ten million dollars instead of one for deporting all pigeons to the ocean. but, please, please tell me do you have any RED Mexican."

ARIA Loses Sanity, Keeps Grip On Charts

Weekly chart positions are the music industry's traditional currency, the coinage that eases the way to increased radio play and media attention.

But what would happen if that currency was devalued? That's a question Australian industry insiders are pondering as a chart data stalemate between the country's main labels body and its largest music retailer rumbles on.

In May, the Australian Recording Industry Assn. (ARIA) announced it was no longer using sales data from retail group Brazin to compile its singles, albums or digital charts.

In most other markets, losing one retailer might be inconvenient. When that merchant's stores account for around 30% of recorded music sales, the impact is clearly more significant.

Nevertheless, ARIA chart and marketing committee chairman John O'Donnell insists the charts remain "robust and solid" without Brazin.

In Australia, Brazin operates 392 stores under the Sanity, HMV and Virgin brands. Although "official" figures are not available, local wholesalers credit Brazin with a market share of between 28% and 32%.

Other music merchants do not charge ARIA for data, but Brazin CEO Greg Milne confirms that ARIA was told, effective May 19, that it would have to purchase the company's sales figures via Sydney-based research firm GfK. The latter collates Brazin's sales data to produce its in-store charts. Milne declines further comment.

Sources put the annual fee sought for the data at between $200,000 Australian and $300,000 Australian ($147,000-$220,500).

O'Donnell confirms the sum was "a pretty substantial figure," but adds that paying for data "is not something we'd entertain."

O'Donnell insists a weighting system ensures chart credibility. "It's still a chart of record," he says, "that we stand behind in reflecting the sales around the country."

Without Brazin's outlets, ARIA is collecting data from 850 music stores, including the JB Hi-Fi chain, which industry estimates give 18%-20% market share. It also collects data from an unspecified number of mass merchants, including the 700-plus Woolworths chain.

Around 750 outlets in that sample are operated by members of the Australian Music Retail Assn. whose chief executive, Ian Harvey, backs the ARIA charts. "[They are] representative of retail activity across Australia each week," Harvey says.

According to Harvey, payment for data is not an issue for other AMRA members, in part because ARIA pays the association an undisclosed sum annually to help with operating costs.

However, other sectors of the music biz remain concerned about Brazin's exit.

Music Managers Forum board member Colin Seeger says the body is "aware of the lengths ARIA goes to for a credible chart." But he adds, "If there is a perception in the public that it's not [credible], we have a problem."

One major-label source suggests the current impasse could mean a lower chart profile for development acts—particularly contemporary rock acts—that are usually championed by Brazin's chains.

Managers and labels of such acts admit to being apprehensive. Sydney-based Black Yak co-founder Sebastian Chase calls the Brazin/ARIA situation "a dilemma that has to be overcome."

Black Yak/Warner act the Whitlams' March 20 release "Little Cloud" dropped out of the Top 50 album chart published June 5 from No. 35 the previous week. The band's earlier albums had longer chart runs.

Acknowledging that "different stores have different biases in their customers' taste," Chase agrees there is a possibility the chart slide may have been accelerated by the Brazin/ARIA standoff.

Some observers had been waiting to see how Brisbane-based alternative rock quartet the Butterfly Effect's sophomore album, "Imago" (Roadshow Music), fared in the ARIA listing. At first sight, ARIA's weighting system seems to be working—in charts for the week ending June 24, "Imago" entered at No. 1 on the GfK-compiled HMV midweek chart, No. 2 on the ARIA listing.

The knock-on effect of a relatively low chart position leading to less airplay on chart-focused stations would concern many acts, although Butterfly Effect's Brisbane-based manager Dave Leonard takes a measured view.

"The issue doesn't worry us so much," he says. "Our sales come from the following we built up through touring rather than radio airplay."

However, Leonard adds: "I have no doubt in my mind that we'd have had a No. 1 debut if Brazin sales had been counted. The album was well-stocked at Sanity and HMV, and was No. 1 on both their [midweek] charts. But we had no product in department stores, because they only stock top 20 product or bands that had top 20 success."

Ironically, ARIA could have expected the charts to be under the spotlight for different reasons. In April, it launched a digital chart and O'Donnell—who is also managing director of EMI Music Australia—says digital data will be incorporated into its main charts Sept. 1.

The trade group also recently announced a sponsorship deal with cell phone maker Motorola (billboard.biz, Feb. 2) tied to a new national chart show on radio network Nova, and began supplying free printed charts to retail for distribution to customers.

The amount of sponsorship was not disclosed, but Leonard suggests that ARIA "could have reached a compromise and paid [Brazin]" with Motorola's money.

Regardless, O'Donnell says negotiations with Brazin will continue. "We have a good relationship with Brazin," he insists. "They're an important part of our business; we'll work with them in the future and hopefully rescind this."

30%
Amount of recorded music sold at Brazin's 392 Sanity, HMV and Virgin stores

By: Eliezer, Christie, Billboard

Three Keys to Success

How setting goals and taking action can help you get what you want

How did Erin Matson become a statewide organization president and Quan Hoang become a director, both before age 30? The same way you can--by developing three habits of success.

Habit Number 1: Set Goals
What traits do very successful people have in common? Do they have more talent? more money? No. What they have is a goal-setting habit.

Whether you dream of training dolphins, getting a scholarship, or opening a restaurant, goals are the stepping-stones that make your dreams real. Here's how to get started:

* Define your goal. Write it down. Make sure it's specific. "Play Division III basketball in college" is a more specific goal than "Be a basketball star."

* Assign your goal a deadline. Use a real date, such as "by Dec. 31, 2006."

* Make an action plan. Brainstorm the steps needed to achieve your goal. Arrange the tasks in a logical order. Give each one a deadline.

Habit Number 2: Take Action
A key difference between a person with good ideas and a successful person is action. Completing a task--even something small, such as reading a chapter or picking up a job application--puts you a step closer to success. "Once you start, keep going, even if things don't go as planned," says Judy Galbraith, author of What Teens Need to Succeed "Successful people achieve their dreams because they don't give up."

A disappointment can turn Out to be a positive step forward. "I [was] turned down for paid jobs at women's organizations," says Erin Matson, 25, state chapter president of the Minnesota National Organization for Women (NOW). "That's why I got involved in NOW as a volunteer. Now I'm not just a worker--I'm a leader."

Habit Number 3: Ask for Help
Successful people aren't afraid to ask for help. When Quan Hoang directs films and commercials, he can't do it alone. "I need the help of actors, producers, and writers," he says. "I always surround myself with the best of the best."

Get the support you need by forming your own "dream team," a group of people who believe in you and will help you succeed. Your dream team can include friends, family, teachers, counselors, coaches, neighbors--even people you haven't met. Wait … people you haven't met? How do you do that? Just pick up the phone or send an e-mail.

"I often call or e-mail interesting people and ask for 15 minutes of their time," says Matthew Axelrod, 25, who advises the U.S. secretary of defense on North African military policy. "Sometimes we develop a good relationship, and I always learn things that help me." Here's how to ask for help.

* Introduce yourself. Be brief and honest. "I'm a high school student, and I want to write a book."

* Explain in a meaningful way why you want to speak with the person. "You published your first book when you were 20. I'd love to do that."

* Ask for help. "I'd like to hear how you found a publisher. Are you available for 15 minutes?"

* Thank the person. Also think about how you can return the favor or help someone else.

Why wait another day? Do one thing now that moves you closer to your goal. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be able to enjoy your success.

By: Bachel, Beverly K., Career World, Sep2006

Entrepreneurship is a proven way to ensure that the only person who will control your destiny is you

Yusef Qasim hangs with the likes of MTV's DJ Skribble and Damien Fahey of Total Request Live, rap group Crooklyn Clan, and Tommy Lee. Is Qasim in the entertainment biz? Not exactly. He's a senior at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Conn. He's also an entrepreneur. His clients exchange their bling for Qasim's brains.

Qasim founded DigitalEffex and eXoStream Communications, companies that design and host Web sites for a variety of entertainment-industry clients. Because Qasim makes his clients look good, his company and his rep have grown: He's been on promotional tours across the United States and to Germany, Mexico, and nearly every country in between. He's living a life that doesn't seem too different from that of the guys he represents.

How did Qasim end up with a gig that connects computer savvy with superstars? He had a good idea and wanted to be in control of his work--while maybe doing a job better than he'd seen others do before. In essence, he wanted to be an entrepreneur.

What does entrepreneur really mean? Webster's Dictionary says an entrepreneur is "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or an enterprise"--that is, one who is self-employed. Look around you. Entrepreneurs are everywhere: the dog walker in your building who works for herself, the mechanic who fixes your parents' car, the funky skate shop owner, the college student making Web sites for Tommy Lee--all are entrepreneurs.

THE ENTREPRENEUR'S MIND
Entrepreneur may sound like just a fancy name for a business owner, but it's a lot more than that. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking--an attitude that separates the folks with great ideas from those who have great ideas and the desire and energy to make them happen, no matter what obstacles may stand in their way. Starting any new business is a risk, but it's one that the entrepreneurial mind welcomes.

"An entrepreneur is anyone who is willing to take a risk in anything," Qasim says. "I like being in every situation; I'm always trying something new--it's a crazy lifestyle, living on the edge.… I definitely know I'm an entrepreneur."

"Entrepreneurship is thinking about how to achieve your goal and managing and using any and all resources available to you to do it," says Steve Mariotti, founder and president of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Mariotti's organization partners with 600 schools in 14 countries to teach low-income teens skills they can use in the business world.

TURN PASTIMES INTO PROFITS
Since childhood, Geneva Johnson and her family have enjoyed making hand-painted ethnic ceramics.

"In 2003, we decided to turn our little hobby into a business," says Geneva, 16. Today, the Johnson family--including Geneva's brother Jeremiah; sister Christina; and mother, Pamela--run the Hamilton Gallery in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. Geneva does most of the market research and marketing for the company. She created the business plan with help from NFTE. The "little hobby" has turned into a profitable business in which the Johnsons sell such items as hand-painted African-themed plates, vases, and statues for $50 and up.

As a child, Geneva says, she never dreamed she'd have her own business. But being an entrepreneur means enjoying the flexibility to work with the family she loves and creating a lasting business that will be passed down to other family members when she goes to college.

What advice does Geneva have for other entrepreneurs? "Choose something you're passionate about and [would do] even if you weren't getting paid," Geneva says.

SMART USE OF RESOURCES
"Using your resources creatively." That's how entrepreneurship is described on the Web site of the National Education Center for Women in Business at Seton Hall University. It's a fact: You need money to start a business. Most individually owned new businesses start up with an average of $6,000, according to Jeff Sloan and Rich Sloan of StartupNation.com. Entrepreneurs can apply for small-business loans or look for investors who believe in the potential of their businesses. But many first-time entrepreneurs don't have much money; that's where creativity comes into play.

Quoc Le is a living example of using resources creatively. The 22-year-old from Phoenix, Ariz., founded and owns Ares Network, a Web-hosting company. At age 16, Le started his business with every penny he had--a big risk for a kid with no business experience.

"My family isn't rich, and I started with only $200," says Le. "No matter how much money you have, you have to know how to use it wisely." That's exactly what Le did. When he needed a server to host his site, he converted his own computer into one. And instead of renting an office, he works out of his parents' house. Le's advice to budding entrepreneurs? "Instead of asking your parents for a PS2, use the money for investing in a business."

Doris Quan wasn't rich either when she started her, graphic-design business. "My business partner and I grew up in working-class communities--my family were immigrants from Hong Kong," says the 34-year-old founder of Martini Designs in Seattle. Five years ago, Quan and her partner, Martin Rincon, launched the business with just the two of them and little else. "I don't believe it's about how much money you have to start with. We started Martini with one … laptop; it [cost] about $3,000. Now we have [about] 40 computers in the shop. It's something you build."

On a $3,000 foundation, Quan and her partner built a business that today is worth about $2 million. They started out in Rincon's home office; today, they create innovative designs for clients such as Nintendo, Pokémon, and Microsoft out of their 4,500-square-foot headquarters.

"An entrepreneur is someone who can turn any opportunity into a business," Quan says, warning that entrepreneurs also must love what they do. "Fuel your passion. Don't be afraid to do what is in your heart: The rest takes a lot of tenacity. There has to be a reason [besides money] to do what you love."

START WITH THE RIGHT IDEA
If you think all entrepreneurs have to have big Donald Trump--like ideas, think again. "Entrepreneurship doesn't always have to be about reinventing the wheel," says Shelly Chenoweth, executive director of Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas, a group for budding biz kids in the Midwest. "Sometimes it's just about finding some needs out there in your community that aren't being met."

Chris Christoudias did just that. Six years ago, he "saw that a lot of companies didn't understand how to use the Internet to help their business." Christoudias, who defines an entrepreneur as "someone who sees a need in the world and builds the solution to fix it," decided he was the one to help businesses use the Internet to their best advantage. The 28-year-old from Salem, Mass., had just earned his degree in computer engineering from Tufts University, outside of Boston.

"I really got a lot of gratification out of understanding how electronic pulses drive the screen and computer that sits in front of me," he says.

Christoudias was smart and figured out a way to enjoy those pulses for a living. With his graduation money and a grant from Tufts, he founded Digital Bungalow, an interactive agency that helps companies by building Web sites for them, setting up their online stores, and promoting their services.

"It was definitely a lot of fun, but not easy," Christoudias says of following his passion a an early age. But, he says, "I felt comfortable starting a business because I was so young and had so little to lose." Digital Bungalow has grown from employing one person, to four, to 15. Christoudias's goal is to get Digital Bungalow to the point where it no longer relies on him to exist.

And, in true entrepreneurial form, he has a Plan B. "I actually see myself doing something I've wanted to do for a long time: be a high school or college football coach … and, of course, find another company to start."

THE FIRST STEPS
Today, several organizations like NFTE are willing to give a leg up to budding entrepreneurs. About 550 colleges and universities teach entrepreneurship, and at about 49 schools, it's possible to major in entrepreneurship.

At Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., for example, undergrads in any discipline may also enroll in the school's Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, a four-year curriculum covering topics such as finance and operations--the tools people with good ideas need to run successful businesses. The program requires that students complete an internship and build a business plan before graduation.

"Entrepreneurship is just as much a state of mind as it is a body of knowledge," says Paul Buller, founding director of the Hogan program. "I don't know if you can teach it all that well if people don't really have it inside them to achieve.… We look for students who are not only academically capable but who really have a desire to make the world a better place."

ENTREPRENEURS NEED…
Business owner Chris Christoudias shares his top 10 necessary qualities for becoming an entrepreneur.

TIME: "It takes constant focus."
MONEY: "Only because it can help give you more of number one."
LISTENING SKILLS: "The best lessons you learn are ones you learn from others."
VISION: "Know where you are going before you leave your doorstep."
A PLAN: "The only way to measure your progress is to have an initial plan."
PATIENCE: "It takes time to get things to happen. Persistence and patience will get things there."
A NETWORK: "It's OK to not know how to do something as long as you know someone who does."
COACHING ABILITIES: "Teaching a man to fish will do more than giving a man a fish."
AN ABILITY TO DELEGATE: "An entrepreneur must be a general, not a foot soldier."
A GOOD TEAM: "No entrepreneur ever succeeded alone."
HOT LINK
Want to start a business on your own? Let the U.S. Small Business Administration's Teen Business Link be your first stop. Chart your path to success, and read about teens who have successfully put themselves to work! www.sba.gov/teens

LAWN-MOWING MOGUL
A few years ago, Cory Gaston, of Lawrence, Kan., thought he wanted to be an excavator. But when he realized that a 14-year-old hauling cement might not be taken seriously, Cory opted for a slightly less "heavy" job and started mowing lawns "to start to build a good reputation."

Today, the 17-year-old has built that good reputation with Gaston's Lawn and Landscaping. After building up slowly for a few years, he's mowing between 20 and 45 yards per week. He earned nearly $10,000 last year--while balancing work with football and school. "My favorite part is that I take pride in what I do," he says. "I started my business for both the money and the idea of being my own boss, which gives me the ability to make my own decisions and to have a flexible schedule."

What do his friends say? "I take some grief for working so much," he says. "But when kids find out that the lawn mower I was able to buy is worth more than their car, their attitude changes!"

So you want to be an ENTREPRENEUR?
The experts agree: Entrepreneurs are people who own their own businesses--but that's just the beginning. Being an entrepreneur is about being independent and a freethinker and really loving what you do. So if you answer yes to any of the following questions, being an entrepreneur might be right for you.

* Do you have a hard time listing just one job or career when you're asked what you want to do when you grow up?

* Do you do things before being asked? Are you self-motivated? Being an entrepreneur can be hard work--Bill Gates didn't get where he is by sitting on the couch.

* Is it really important to you to set your own rules instead of following someone else's?

* Are you so passionate about something--cooking, landscaping, doing magic tricks, designing Web pages, working with numbers or money--that you would do anything to do it for a living?

* Can you deal with knowing that your hours might vary each month, or your paychecks may be sporadic? Usually, the boss gets paid last and works the hardest!

* Are you a good problem solver? Do you look at things and say, "Hey, there's an easier way to do that, and I think I know how"? There may be a business opportunity right in front of you

By: Esposito, Jennifer Chase, Career World, 2006

Funny Business

It's all about teamwork on the set of the WB's What I Like About You

You might be able to work your TiVo like nobody's business, but have you thought about what it takes to get your favorite programs on the air? Each episode is the result of weeks of work by an entire television production crew, working together. If you love the tube--and if you don't want to wear a stuffy suit to work!--you might enjoy a job in the TV production industry.

Scott Weinger, a writer on the WB sitcom What I Like About You, certainly enjoys his job. His favorite part? Not just getting his words on television but also watching the show about two very different sisters, played by Amanda Bynes and Jennie Garth, with the live studio audience each Friday. Weinger, formerly an actor on Full House, explains with enthusiasm, "It's like putting on a play, like there's a big audience full of hundreds of people, and it's exciting."

Producing a half-hour show also comes with a lot of hard work. A team of people--including writers, producers, editors, costume designers, and camera operators--takes each episode from an idea in the writers' room to the homes of viewers. It takes more than a week to shoot a TV show and get it ready for broadcast. Once the show is filmed, it goes into post-production, which happens when editor Kenny Tintorri hands off his cut to a post-production house for sound mixing and color correction. And finally, the show is aired. Tintorri, who used to be an editor on Friends, sums up, "It really is a team, and I think we're a good team."

ASSEMBLING THE TEAM
Producer Drew Brown hires the majority of the 80-person crew. "I think the most important aspect of my job is assembling a group of people who work well together," says Brown. So what makes a good production team member? He or she must be willing to accept a freelance lifestyle. Though that can mean freedom, it can also mean a lack of job security because television shows are canceled all the time, and work is seasonal, not year-round. A typical workday will probably not run from 9 to 5, so a production person needs to be flexible and committed to the work.

Good communication skills are a must. Although some of the staff members work five days a week, other crew members, such as camera operators, work part-time. So it's essential that everybody get in sync quickly.

Next on the list: being a "people person," a trait that the head of craft services, Jaimy Johnson, definitely has. Johnson's job is to feed the cast and crew. Often, he's the first person to greet actors in the morning. As he explains, "I definitely set the tone. It's usually lighthearted." Case in point: When busy executive producer Caryn Lucas comes into the kitchen in search of mustard, Johnson sees an opportunity to lift her spirits: "We have the most gorgeous producer. Unbelievable!" he teases. She leaves with not only the mustard but also a huge smile.

Another helpful character trait is the ability to keep a cool head. Costume designer Kara Saun, whom Brown recruited after seeing her designs on the reality TV show Project Runway, says, "You have to work well under pressure … because it's very, very fast-paced."

Production coordinator Sharonda Starks, who processes invoices for everything from camera equipment to wardrobe needs, adds, "This business is rush, rush, rush, wait."

But the most important trait is the ability to work as a team. Saun notes, "I have a really great, together crew." Her team includes a seamstress, two shoppers, a costume supervisor, and two set people. Together, they create each character's fashion ensemble for the episode.

Good costumes help the actors feel comfortable. "When they really feel that they look good, you can usually tell," says Saun. That means the actors can focus on other things, like learning their lines, which are constantly rewritten as the script is crafted.

WRITING THE SCRIPT
The writers spend their mornings brainstorming, writing, and rewriting in their offices away from the set, always staying a week or two ahead of the shooting schedule. Sometimes Lucas sends the writers into separate rooms to work on different projects because timing is so tight. For example, one group might focus on a story idea while another rewrites a script.

What happens if the writers can't agree on an idea? They defer to the highest-level person in the room, whether it's Lucas or a senior writer. Weinger, One of the newer writers, explains, "If everyone was equal, then there would be a lot of gridlock."

Next, the producer, who at any given time is working on up to seven episodes in different stages of production, makes sure that the story can be executed within the show's budget. For example, Brown might ask writers whether a plot can be carried out over the course of a single day, rather than several days, so there won't be a need for as many costly wardrobe changes. But Brown works closely with Lucas and points out, "At the end of the day, it's about the show that Caryn wants" because as the executive producer, Lucas leads the team, and it is her vision that drives the show.

THE STORY UNFOLDS
Each Monday morning, the cast and the crew assemble for a table read of the script. The network and the studio executives give their input on anything from story lines to budget concerns. All the departments take notes on what they need to gather for that week's episode, including Saun, who starts shopping with her team immediately after the reading. Then Saun's team takes photos of each actor in different outfits, and Lucas approves her favorite looks for each character in a meeting with Saun each Wednesday.

The second draft of the script is passed out on Tuesday, followed by a rehearsal in the afternoon. The same process is repeated on Wednesday. Weinger explains the importance of these run-throughs for the writers: "You'll have a joke that you'll think will be so funny, and then it's just not as funny when you see it on its feet."

SHOOTING THE SHOW
After Wednesday's run-through, the writers put together a shooting draft, which is the script that will be used for the taping on Thursday and Friday. All sets, props, and costumes must be in place by Thursday's taping, where anywhere from a third to half the script is shot without a studio audience. The actors arrive early for hair and makeup. The camera operators arrive in the studio for the first time all week, ready to shoot the scenes.

On Friday night, the cast and crew play to a live studio audience. "[The audience is] great for the actors. It gives them a lot of energy," says Weinger. And the writers have the opportunity to see how an audience responds. "If something doesn't work, you have to make sure that you keep pushing to make it funnier," he says. So the writers will continue rewriting lines even through the taping, which explains why the taping of the half-hour sitcom can take more than three hours.

At the end, the tapes go to Tintorri. As the show's editor, he plays a part in making the show funny. Tintorri makes sure that the timing of the jokes--which have been sculpted by the writers, actors, and the director--is effective in the final cut. After all, as the saying goes, timing is everything in comedy. "I know how I want the characters to respond to a joke … because that's what editors can do. We can shape the joke." Tintorri, who also makes sure that the recorded laughs from the studio audience are in the right places, stresses, "When the jokes are there, I make them hit."

THE LAST LAUGH
Although the paychecks can be quite sizable as you climb the ranks (and pretty paltry in the beginning stages), the What I Like About You crew members agree that the rewards of television production go beyond money.

"I like seeing something being built, basically. I'm taking all these little parts, and I'm building this show," Tintorri says. "It's the satisfaction of seeing it done, seeing it all put together, and [hearing] people laughing at it. If the laughing was good, then I'm happy."

Brown echoes that sentiment: "There's a real satisfaction in seeing something you've contributed to in any way, shape, or form that will live on forever, that people will watch for years and years."

Who's Who in Television

CAMERA OPERATORS set up and use video cameras to film the action of a television show. They control the way the shot looks on tape, such as how close the actors are to the camera, or where they are framed in the picture.

COSTUME DESIGNERS gather clothes for each character to create a look for that role. They're responsible for continuity, meaning that each actor's clothes must look exactly the same from take to take.

CRAFT SERVICES prepare and present meals for the cast and crew during the shoots.

EDITORS pick and assemble the best shots to tell the story the most effectively and at the right pace. They must be able to communicate well with directors and producers and meet tight deadlines.

PRODUCERS hire the crew, keep the show on budget, and handle the day-to-day operation of the shoot. They must have good communication skills to keep the crew, network, and studio informed.

PRODUCTION COORDINATORS take care of details. They order equipment and make sure invoices get processed and the crew is paid. They also oversee PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS, entry-level workers who do whatever is needed--running errands, finding props, logging tapes, and doing assorted administrative work.

WRITERS create scripts. Many start as a writer's assistant and climb up the ranks, where they can make well into Six figures. All must work well under pressure and have the discipline to keep revising.

By: Sundel, Jenny, Career World, 2006

A Day in the Strife (of a tenderfoot scawler)

By Terry W Sako

Short Story


Y’all think it’s just kicks and kornflakes being a writer? Well it ain’t. So listen up.

Saturday morn

I sit opposite my word processor screen staring at the last line, or more precisely, the last period in a sentence. The period representing the decease of creativity and the birthing of another go-round with writers block. I am again the walking-wounded in the war of the words, a casualty to mind cramp.

I hit Save—wondering: Save what? Then Close. In a funk, I watch the computer screen go blank, it and my brain a Zen of oneness.

Hands in pockets, chin on chest, I amble out the front door and head . . . nowhere—just like my attempt to be a writer. I live in farm country and in my aimless wandering on my acreage, I happen upon Winnifred.

She’s my cow.

As I walk by, she gazes at me curiously. "What’s with the long face?" she says. "No pun intended." Winnie can talk. I know you find that hard to believe, but it’s true . My family and neighbors insist that she is just chewing cud, and her lips are not moving to form words. But . . . I . . . hear her speak—and it looks like I am the only one that does. Mr. Ed and Wilbur all over again. The only drawback is that her tongue is twice as acerbic as a mouthful of lemon juice.

"I got a case of writers block," I reply dourly, as I head her way.

"Is that all? Just be thankful it’s not bovine spongiform encephalopathy?"

"Say what?"

"Mad cow disease." She rolls her eyes in exasperation. "It’s in all the papers."

"Oh . . . no. It’s just that lately words and ideas are sparse."

"Just like the grazing around here." Her tail swishes flies as she continues, "Writers block may stem from many factors. One of them being stress. How’s you and the missus getting along?"

I shrug. "Hunky-dory."

Winnie snorts. "Hunky-dory? That’s the best phrasing you can come up with? Maybe your writers block is a blessing in disguise."

"You’re not helping."

"Moo-ve your butt back inside and get moo-tivated. Write something, sell it, and make some moo-ney to keep the cupboard full. Lately, you’ve been looking at me and licking your lips, and that’s making me nervous. I do not wish to end up as Chateaubriand."

"Yeah, but it’s kinda tough when—"

She glares at me, her ears flicking. "Moo moo and boohoo. You think it’s a cakewalk being a cow? Try being on your feet 24 / 7. . . . Now go milk that mind of yours."

"You’re awful bossy."

"See! You’re getting better already. You’ve just uddered a double entente." She claws the ground like a bull about to charge. "Now, hoof it."

I dejectedly head back to the house.

"And refill the trough for God’s sake. Do you think me a camel?"

Saturday afternoon

Chewing greedily on a chicken drumstick, like Henry the VIII, I hear the dreaded question.

"How’s your book coming along, sonny?"

The only drawback to family gatherings is that there is conversation.

"Now gramma," my wife says, "I told you earlier that Terry is having a minor bout with writers block. Remember?"

"More like a knock-down and drag-out, kick ‘em in the teeth, Pier 6 brawl," I murmur.

My Uncle Elmer, sitting to my left, puts in his two cents. "Writing. Harumpf. Pure applesauce. Seems like a big waste of the Lord’s time."

I smile wide, deliberately letting him see the masticated maw of bird meat covering my chompers and gums. "Just something I want to do Uncle Elmer."

He frowns—thumbs hooked around the straps of his bib overalls, red wool lumberjack shirt beneath—then proclaims, "About as practical as teats on a bull. Women write! Not men! What’re you gonna do next, embroider doilies?" He hee-haws, showing teeth that haven’t seen a brushing since the dawn of man, then growls, "Pass the gravy."

Fighting the urge to fling the boat at him, I graciously hand it over.

"What’s your book about, dear?" The question comes from my Aunt Minnie, sitting to my right—hair up in a bun, granny glasses, and Victorian dress.

"It’s based on my experiences in the Vietnam War, barely out of my teens and scared poopless."

Now, dig this. She’s totally surprised. "You were in a war?!"

I nod my head in affirmation, wanting to mention the fact that she used to send me cookies overseas. But, why bother?

"Oh my," Aunt Minnie declares. "Why would you want to write about something as awful as war?" She pats my hand. "Why don’t you write a nice po-em instead?"

She looks down to shovel the mashed potatoes heaped on her plate like a small hill.

"Good idea. Maybe I could do Iliad II: The Sequel. This time ‘As ascribed to Jethro.’"

My attempt at wit elicits no response from her. I look across the table at my wife and shake my head. She winks and smiles at me. "Honey, someday you’ll be a famous fictional writer."

"I’d settle for being a famous functional writer."

"Poppycock! Seems like a big waste of the Lord’s time."

The last, of course, from Uncle Elmer.

The witching hour

Through the open window the fall breeze rustles the curtains, and a ghostly whisper riding the current wakes me.

"Em ot emoc."

And on the night table, the alarm clock digitally flashes its message:

12:00

12:00

12:00

Scary, huh?

I sit up and give forth with a shuddering yawn, then look at the unworldly message hanging in the bedroom air in frosty form, and read it backward.

Come to me

I fluff it away then look over at my wife, dimly discernible in the glow of the night-light. She snuggles under a thick comforter, a mound of sleep. Her breathing a metronome of pleasant slumber. Her rest is always deep, and in the cockcrow she perpetually awakes with a smile.

I lay my hand on her form and gently shake her, sorry for the intrusion. "Sheryl Lynn, wake up."

She murmurs something I cannot make out and then her head pops out of her cozy eiderdown sanctuary like a sprung jack-in-the-box. "Whaazit?"

I breath out a long sigh. "She’s back."

She flicks on the light and stretches luxuriantly, adorned in p.j.’s. "Then let us arise and go pay the piper, shall we?"

"You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to," I say reluctantly. "I’ll face her alone."

She pats my shoulder, looking at me earnestly. "Dearest, you know you are totally intimidated by her—despite the fact she has been dead for over thirty years. In her presence, you quiver like the belly of a Hula dancer. . . . You need me there for support!"

I roll out of bed, joints howling in protest, and grab my garb. "You’re right, I do."

My wife rises and pulls on an oversized, pink terry cloth robe and slips into huge, fluffy slippers adorned with Eeyore heads and tails. "Tell me about . . . what’s her name again?"

"Mrs. Moosejaw. She was my high school English teacher and was a martinet when it came to grammar." I fought a shudder to no avail. "Back then she rode my back like a broncobuster. When I began writing my novel she suddenly began preternaturally appearing at random to offer comment and critique" I grunt in exasperation. "It’s like I’m in tenth grade again, sitting in her class and worrying about my grade."

My wife laughs.

"It’s not funny," I tell her. "The last meeting she said I wouldn’t know a gerund from a gopher."

"What’s a gerund?"

"It’s a verb that acts like . . . never mind. Let’s get this over with."

We walk outside the where the sky is cloudless, and where the Harvest Moon hangs wondrously, a hug orb aglow, mastering starlight. Rows of corn, husks curled and yellowed from enduring the long summer heat, stand tall awaiting the John Deere. Cats meow from hidden hideouts, and a solitary bat wings it way overhead doing swoops and turns like some maniacal carnival pilot. Crickets complain about the nip in the air.

And at the end of a long, sloping driveway she stands, the littйrateur of an offbeat student reunion.

Halfway down I motion my wife to hang back, and walk reluctantly to the thrumming and humming white specter. Turmoil fills me like hydrogen pumped into a dirigible. With an index finger, that is skeletal bone and cobwebby, she beckons me to bend over, then she hisses ghoulishly into my ear, my lobe forming tiny icicles.

I listen, then straighten, and with a Halloween pumpkin grin she disappears into mist.

After a moment’s contemplation, I walk back to my wife and meet her eyes.

"Well?" she breathes.

"She said that before my writers block, my work abounded with a definitive kind of sense."

"And that is?"

"Nonsense."

End of story.

A Bus Driver From Hell

By Dennis Domrzalski

CHAPTER 19

About two miles up from where Dave had crashed, we came into a decent-sized town. It was pretty big for Arkansas, big enough to have a public bus system that had at least one bus. We arranged with a gas station owner who had a place on the edge of town to store the bikes there until the storm stopped and the roads were cleared. Then we set out to see the town.

Dave wanted to walk the two or three miles to the downtown area where there figured to be a few restaurants. We had skipped breakfast in order to deal with the creative writers and were starving. It was cold, windy and snowing—weather that I normally would have been thrilled to walk in. But riding for a couple of hours in that wet snow had drenched us, and the wind blasting those wet clothes turned me into one continuous shiver. Dave shivered, too, but he wanted to walk and shiver some more because, as he said, “Shivering is the body’s way of warming up. We ought to be boiling in a few minutes. Let’s use this as an experiment to see if that theory is true . Could be a scientific breakthrough.”

I reminded him that the ride to Carbondale had made me the champion shiverer of all time and that the result was a frozen solid human.

“True, but you always screw everything up. You probably weren’t shivering enough. And besides, you keep acting like it was a bad thing. You would think that you’d be happy and proud to have been through something that no one else has and survived it.”

I wasn’t, and was way too cold to walk three miles, soaking wet, in a blizzard. The hell with what the brave pioneers and the fearless mountain men and the drunks in the neighborhood had done in the name of adventure, I was miserable. The situation called for common sense, not a reckless, health-threatening quest for adventure plodding around in a blizzard in wet clothes. The intelligent thing to do would have been to sit down on a curb and drink whiskey.

But I lacked the confidence to say no, even though I knew my way was better. Dave said we should walk, and that’s what we did, until we saw a brick bus barn with a bus waiting inside to begin its run. Dave hadn’t been on a bus since November and I hadn’t been on one for a few weeks and, my God, we went goofy at the sight of it. A bus! Just like in Chicago! Who would have thought that there were buses anywhere else? Oh, I knew that hick towns like this one were served by interstate bus lines that took people from one nothing town to another, but this was different. This was a bus that took people to work, stores, taverns and to their mistresses and paramours. We imagine ourselves as so many things in life—cold, heartless cynics; big time drinkers; grizzled survivors of life—but all it takes is a reminder of home to turn us back into the giddy, excitable kids that we really are.

A bus!

We ran for it, and slipped and slid and fell and got up and fell again and got up and repeated it over and over until we got inside that barn, and holy smokes! It was warm! It was hot! The bus barn was heated!

We banged on the front door and banged and banged some more until the driver, reluctantly, opened it. We heard the pffffffssssss of the opening doors and we stumbled up the steps, laughing, and we dug into our pockets and plunked our fares into the box, and the instant we turned to face the rest of the bus we went into the bus passenger mode that we knew and loved. We squinted our eyes and stared like we were going to kill someone, and looked like we wished that everyone else in the world was dead—just to protect ourselves in case someone considered us targets. We got the urge to smoke and rip up seats, and we schemed to get off somewhere other than our real stop, in case someone was thinking of following us home. We scrambled to the back and plopped ourselves on the seats over the wheels and soaked up what little heat there was and realized that a view from a bus window was one of the best there is.

The driver, a fat, balding guy who wore greyish-blue bus driver’s uniform pants with grease stains all over them, was waiting to start his run. We were the only passengers. It wasn’t the kind of bus we were used to. It didn’t have that “bus” smell of smoke, dirt, vomit and exhaust fumes that we were used to. This one stunk of disinfectant. None of the seats were ripped, the floor was clean, the advertising posters near the curves in the ceiling were all in place and there was no graffiti. With the exception of the noseprints and fingerprints we put on our windows, the thing sparkled. I found it depressing, but Dave had an explanation.

“People in hick towns don’t have anything to do. There’s no intellectual stimulation or sports teams to cheer for, and so all they can do is clean things, that is, when they ain’t ruining their health by drinking, marrying often and square dancing. They’re neat freaks. We shouldn’t get mad; we should pity them.”

That made sense, and I was about to go tell the driver how pitiful his life was, when the bus pulled out of the barn. The snow was thick in the sky and on the ground, and the visibility was limited, but that didn’t matter to our grease-stained driver. He speeded along like he was on a dry highway on a sunny day.

“Another quaint thing about small-town life,” Dave said, “this guy’s probably so dedicated to his job that he can’t wait to pick up passengers. He’s trying to get to people as fast as he can. And he’s driving like a maniac on the verge of killing himself simply because he knows there are people waiting to get on the bus. You’d never see this in Chicago.”

The run started on the edge of town and the bus whizzed by a few vacant stops before we got further into town and saw up ahead at one stop, a group of four people huddled together, their backs turned to the wind and snow. We assumed our bus riding postures, that is, we sprawled across the seats and glared at the front door.

“This’ll be great,” Dave said, “they’ve probably never had people from Chicago ride their bus before. Get ready!”

I was, and—zoom!

The bus raced by those shivering people. As we passed they shouted and shook their fists at the bus and kicked the snow and stomped and then hunched over again and huddled together.

We figured the driver didn’t see them, what with the blizzard and limited visibility. There was another stop ahead, with even more people and with several children stomping their feet on the ground, a universal sign of humans trying to keep their toes from going numb. Same thing, though. The bus raced right by them. A knot of glove-clad fists rose and shook as one from the huddled crowd. We heard their angry shouts and we flinched as the snowballs they threw smashed against the bus’s windows.

There was another stop ahead where an old guy in a wheelchair was flagging down the bus with feeble waves of his arms. The driver didn’t stop. A woman with an infant in her arms—hospital bound, we figured—was waiting at the next stop. Forget it. The bus sped by. It was the same at every stop. Freezing, shivering people huddled together, and the driver raced right by them. It was crazy, and we wanted answers. We got out of our seats and started for the front of the bus.

“Stay in the back of the bus!” was the crisp demand from the driver. He had spotted us in his rear-view mirror. “Stay in the back of the bus!”
That made no sense to us. The only reason for such an order is if the bus is full, or the passenger is a urine-soaked bum or a member of an ethnic or racial group that the bus driver hates. The driver got angrier when we stood next to him and started asking questions.

“Move to the back of the bus!” he shouted, while plunging the gas pedal to the floor. “Get to the back of the bus! Make room for other passengers!”

“But there ain’t any other passengers on this bus,” Dave said. “Are you crazy?”

That got a response. The driver slammed on the brakes, a move that caused the bus to swerve on the snowy street and into a line of cars parked along the curb. When the bus eventually stopped, the driver got out of his chair and staggered toward us. He was about six-three with a huge belly and a hateful gaze that topped anything we’d ever worked up.

“I said get to the back of the bus and get there now!” he screamed. “You either get to the back of the bus or you get off the bus. Which is it?”

“Neither option is acceptable to us,” Dave said.

“Don’t you dare talk a foreign language to me, punk. You talk English on my bus. You got that?”

“I said we ain’t moving to the back of the bus and we ain’t getting off. Besides, why should we move to the back of the bus? There’s no one else on it!”

“Because it’s the rule, and on my bus passengers obey the rules. Now move!”

We refused.

“Have it your way, punks. ‘cause if you don’t get off now, you ain’t ever getting off for a long, long time.”

“All we got is time, pal.”

“Fine.”

He got the bus going again and continued on as before, speeding by bus stops crowded with freezing, snow-covered people.

Dave tried to start a conversation, but the guy refused to talk. Nothing we tried—demands that he speak, threats of reporting him to his bosses, appeals to his sense of public service and fantasizing about having sex with cousins, worked. Only when Dave pulled a bottle of whiskey out from underneath his coat did we get his attention.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that you twos gonna be riding this bus for a long time and that should be at least an extra fare. But I’ll settle for that bottle instead.”

It was a deal. After four or five big swallows, he cradled the bottle between his legs, gave the bus some gas and started talking.

“Enjoying the ride, boys?”

“Not really,” Dave said. “It’d be better if there were other people here. How come you’re not stopping to pick up people?”

“Cuz if I stop this here bus and open them doors, you know what’s going to happen? Got any idea, boys? Give it a shot.”

“The world will end?”

“Ha,” he said while swallowing more whiskey. “You boys is smart asses. But youse is stupid smart asses. Boys, let me tell yas, if I stop this bus and open them doors, my bus is gonna get cold. And you know what happens when my bus gets cold? Them people are gonna bitch and moan and complain that the bus is cold. I got the damn heat on and opening them doors is gonna let the heat out and the cold in. Ever listen to these people? ‘The bus is cold. How come the bus is so cold? The bus is always cold.’ All they do is bitch. You can’t never please them. I keep telling them that the bus wouldn’t be cold if I didn’t have to open the doors and let them on. But they don’t understand. They can’t figure it. So the hell with ‘em. I ain’t gonna sit here and listen to them bitch about the bus being cold. So I ain’t picking them up.

“And you know what else happens when they get on? My floors get dirty. They trudge all that slush and slop in and then they complain that the floors are wet and dirty. So I ain’t letting them on. That’s it.”

“Well, why don’t you let us off?”

“Ain’t gonna do it, boys.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I open them doors to let you off, my bus is gonna get cold and someone’s gonna complain. Maybe even you two. And if there’s one thing I’m sick of, it’s hearing complaints about my bus. It’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, too stuffy in the spring and not comfortable enough in the fall. I’m either too talkative or I don’t talk enough or I drive too fast or too slow or I turn too sharply or stop too suddenly or I don’t call out the stops or I call them out too loudly or I’m too friendly or not friendly enough or that the fares are too high or that the bus doesn’t go enough places or that they’ve waited a long time or that I passed them by last month or last year or that they can’t find a seat or that the windows won’t open or that the windows won’t close or that the seats are too hard or too soft or too slippery or that the back doors are too hard to push open or that the ride is too bumpy or that they missed their stop or that the bus smells or whatever. They’re never satisfied.

“I’m sick of it all. Just sick of it. I hate the complaining and the complainers. And if I let you two bubbas off of this bus, you know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna complain that it’s too cold outside, that I let you off too far from the curb or the sidewalk or that you’re late for work or something. It ain’t gonna happen, boys, because you’re not getting off. You’re gonna ride this bus until I say so.”

“Sounds like you need a vacation, pal,” Dave said. “I think the stress is getting to you.”

“I do not need a vacation!” he told us in a vein-popping shout as he careened the bus off a parked car. “What I need is an empty bus. No damn passengers at all. I hate people. Why can’t they build buses with no doors so no one can get on? This would be a great job if I didn’t have to deal with people. I really enjoy driving the bus. It’s picking up the people that makes me sick. Now shut up and sit down.

“And I’ll tell you this. I’m going for the world’s record for a bus driver refusing to pick up passengers. I’ll go years, the rest of my life if I have to, without picking up passengers. I’ll be the envy of all of my fellow bus drivers all over the world. If we had it our way, we’d never pick up passengers. Do you have any idea how much fun it is to drive a bus with no people? Without having to stop? You keep to your schedules! You’re never late on a run! You know what people do? They throw off your schedules. They want to be picked up and let off. On and off, on and off. Stop here. Stop there. Stop, stop, stop. And when it’s all over you got some crazed boss telling you that you’re late on your run. And it’s all because of people! So I say screw the people. Let them walk or skip or run or ride a horse or a bicycle or drive their cars or whatever. But they ain’t getting on my bus. No sirs. This bus driver is keeping to his schedules. Do youse realize that since I stopped picking up people I’ve had a perfect record? This bus has been on schedule, on time, exactly. I start my runs on time, and I finish them on time. Not one late run. You show me a bus driver anywhere in this world with a record like that. Perfect! I’m the world’s best bus driver. But do any of them people care or cheer for me or celebrate or say, ‘Hey, great record. We’re proud to have a bus driver who keeps to his schedules?’ Nope. Doesn’t happen, boys. They don’t care about me. All they want to do is get to work or school or to the taverns on time. They don’t give a damn about my time.”

He swung the bus in a wide turn onto a highway and speeded away from town.

“How long,” Dave asked, “have you been refusing to pick up passengers and why on earth are you driving on a highway away from town?”

“Three years, Bubba. I ain’t picked up a passenger in three years and I’m driving on this here highway because there’s no people on this road. None, anywhere. It’s beautiful.”

“If you haven’t picked up anyone in three years, why do they still wait at the bus stops?”

“Because they’re stupid. You would think that a human being with just a few living brain cells would see the pattern and stop waiting for the bus. But they don’t. And there’s another reason why I don’t pick them up. Would you want stupid people on your bus?”

“This whole situation is stupid, ridiculous and unbelievable,” Dave said. “And your behavior is obnoxious. This is a public bus system, right? Funded by the public?”

“Yep.”

“So that makes you a public servant, pal. Those people are your bosses. How the hell does this bus system pay for itself if you don’t pick up people and get their fares? How do you stay in existence?”

“I don’t need fares, because we’re funded by the city and the county. Taxes pay for this bus system, Bubba. Property taxes and sales taxes. We just take the money from all them good citizens.”

“They just let you? Don’t they complain and put up a fight? Don’t they try to stop this or get you fired and get better bus service?”

“Yeah, they’ve tried. They’ve started campaigns to end the taxes that pay for this system, you know, to try and punish me. And they’ve talked to the mayor and the city councilors and the county commissioners and they get nowhere. And you know why? Because the mayor’s my brother and one of the councilors is my daddy and two of my cousins are commissioners and some of the other commissioners own the garage that does the repairs on this bus and I take it in for service constantly, even when it doesn’t need it, and the prices are way too high on top of it and we make money and those people can go to hell. Ha! We’re in control. We got these people and we can do whatever we want.

“You know how many times I’ve had the engine replaced on this bus so far this year? Forty- seven! That’s right. Forty-seven times. That’s a lot of work and a lot of money for the garage. And guess what? They just keep using the same two engines over and over. We take one out and put the other in and then take it out and put the other in. They bill the city for brand new engines. But there ain’t no new engines. And there’s nothing wrong with them, either. They’re perfect.”

“That’s thievery and it’s arrogant,” Dave said. “This is the public’s bus system and you’re a despicable creep. A jerk. A disgusting vile person. Who do you think you are?”

He screeched the bus to a stop, got up out of his seat, took several big swallows of whiskey, pointed his huge belly at us, wagged a finger in our faces and said in a voice that escalated from a slow, hateful whisper into a furious, foamy-mouthed scream:

“I’ll tell you what I am, Bubba. In this town I am the bus! And I want everybody to know it. I am the bus! There might be others out there—doctors, lawyers, cooks, gas station owners, exterminators, but dammit, I am the bus! Now say it with me and shout it. I am the bus! Sounds good, doesn’t it? Say it again. I am the bus! They can laugh all they want. They can think that I don’t have a good job, that I’m not educated, that I got no talent, that I’m just a big slob, that I got nothing. But I’m telling you this. I got something they don’t. I am the bus! And no one can take that away. I am the bus!”

He calmed down after drinking, in one long swallow, three-quarters of a half-pint of peppermint schnapps that Dave opened and offered him. Two more short slugs finished the bottle and the bus was on the highway again.

But only for a few minutes. He pulled into the driveway of a broken-windowed, shut down, backroad diner. There was a trailer house in back with a light on. He stopped the bus, beeped the horn, opened the front door and started to leave.

“Where you going?” Dave asked.
The driver patted his belly, grabbed his crotch with both hands and, acting like he was about to embark on the noblest cause ever, announced:

“I’m going to fill my belly and satisfy my honey, if you know what I mean, boys. Satisfy her real good. Like no man can satisfy her.”

“Wait a minute,” Dave complained. “You mean you’re going to eat and have sex while there are passengers on your bus? You can’t do that. What about us?”

“Oh no, boys. I believe in sharing, but not everything. I draw the line somewheres. I know you guys have needs, too, but no sir, you’re gonna have to find some things on your own, boys. I’ll share my honey with youse, but not my food. That youse are gonna have to get on your own.”

“No, dummy. You can’t just leave us on the bus while you go in there. That’s rude. It’s selfish. It’s disgusting.”

“I can leave you here boys, because remember one thing, I am the bus! Now shut up and wait for me.”

He left the keys in the bus and the engine running while he went inside the trailer.

What an opportunity it was for us, I thought.

“Dave, we could just drive this bus back to town and get rid of this goof. And we could pick up some passengers, too,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“We could do that, yes. He was dumb enough to leave the bus running. But we ain’t gonna. It would be too easy. And besides, this guy makes me sick. We’re going to punish him. We’re gonna drive him crazy.”

“Isn’t he already crazy?”

“Slightly. Actually, a lot. But we’re going to finish him off. We’re going to melt this guy’s brain. I got a plan.” By the time we finished smoking cigars about thirty-minutes later, the driver was back out, patting his belly, grabbing his crotch, picking his teeth with his fingers, burping and smiling.

“Ah, my honey. She sure can—” Sensing that he was about to get explicit, Dave pulled out another bottle of schnapps and tossed it at the driver. He caught it, opened it and drained half of it in one gulp. Then he noticed the cigar smell.

“You fellas know there’s no smoking on the bus! I oughta put youse off right here. Right now and here. That’ll show youse to smoke on my bus.”

“But if you do that you’ll open the doors and let the cold in,” Dave said. “You can’t put us off.”

“You Bubbas is right. No more smoking on the bus.”

He put the bus in gear, turned it back onto the highway and headed toward town, to, as he said, “Pass up more idiots and splash old people.”

Before he could finish his demented laugh, Dave spoke:

“Hey, it really smells from smoke in here, driver, open the windows or give us some air freshener or something. It stinks. Can’t you even keep the bus smelling nice and fresh? You palooka.”

That put the driver into a teeth-grinding mode. I complained about the smell. He put the gas pedal to the floor.

“Open the windows,” Dave shouted, realizing, of course that we could open our own windows. Dave made a move to open a window. The driver spied him in the mirror.

“Leave that window alone!” he shouted.

“No, it stinks in here,” Dave said. “You got a stinky bus.”

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Open it, but just for a while and only until the smoke clears.”

Once the window was open I started complaining.

“Hey, it’s cold in here! Turn up the heat or make him close the windows. What kind of a bus are you operating? It’s cold in here!”

“It’s cold in here!” Dave shouted. “What kind of a bus driver are you anyway? Why don’t you make us close the windows?”

Dave then opened every window on the bus.

“It’s cold in here!” we shouted.
“Close the windows!” the driver shouted. “Close them, now!”

We did, and when they were all closed, Dave lit up a cigar. The driver, in a rage, jerked the wheel and nearly ran the bus off the road.

“It’s too hot in here,” I shouted, “turn down the heat or make him stop smoking or open the windows.”

“It stinks in here,” Dave yelled. “This cigar smoke stinks.”

He jerked the wheel again and the bus ran into a ditch.

“Can’t you drive, fool?” we complained. “What kind of a driver would drive into a ditch? We’re going to complain to someone about this. Open the windows. It stinks in here.”

He managed to get the bus back on the road. By this time he was swearing to himself and pounding is fist on the steering wheel.

“Open the windows!” we demanded.

“Open them yourselves!” he yelled. We did and then complained about the snow falling inside the bus.

“These seats are getting wet. What kind of a bus are you operating?” Dave yelled.

“Shut up! Stop complaining!” the driver shouted as he slammed the bus into a tree. “Shut up!”

“Hey, your bus is banged up. What kind of a bus is this? We don’t want to ride in a junky bus,” Dave said.

“Shut up!” the driver screamed again. “Shut up!”

“You’re so tense. You’re so unfriendly. I can’t stand this,” Dave said as he threw the driver another bottle of schnapps. “Drink this and calm down. Who wants a hyperactive bus driver?”

The minute he finished the schnapps, I started in:

“You disgusting drunk. Lay off the booze. Who wants a drunken bus driver? I’m going to complain to the authorities.”

The driver slammed the gas pedal to the floor.

“Lead foot! Lead foot! You’re going to get us killed!” Dave complained. The bus screeched to a stop and we were thrown out of our seats.

“Easy on the brakes, pal,” Dave said. “We want a smooth ride. This is ridiculous. We’ll never get to town on time if you stay here idling on the side of the road. What kind of a driver are you?”

The driver took a crowbar from underneath his seat, got up and stumbled toward us.

“Stop complaining! Stop complaining! Stop complaining!” he shouted, as he raised the crowbar to hit us. “I can’t stand people like youse. Complain, complain, complain. Stop iiittttt!”

He started to swing the crowbar, when Dave asked him calmly:

“You know what I can’t stand about you, Bubba?”

The question interrupted the swing.

“What? What can’t you stand about me?” he demanded.

“The fact that all you do is complain about our complaining. All you do is complain, complain, complain, complain, complain. You’re nothing but a complainer. You complain about everything.”

He reversed the swing and slammed the crowbar into his forehead instead of mine.

“Shut upppp!” he screamed, while flinging himself into the walls time after time. “Shut uppppp!”

He had descended into madness. After laughing for a few minutes, we carried him to the back of the bus where he drooled, stared out the window and shouted insults at imaginary people waiting for buses.


CHAPTER 20

It was snowing harder than ever when we drove the bus back into town—a situation just perfect for the grand, heroic deed that Dave planned, which was nothing more than stopping the bus to pick up passengers. We knew what it was like to stand freezing on a street corner in a blizzard and have a half-empty bus race by because the driver was a jerk. We too had been slopped by the splashes of screwball bus drivers who ran their vehicles through puddles without regard for the people standing on the corner. But we also knew the comfort of a warm bus on a freezing day and the compassion of a driver who stopped no matter how full the bus or how badly behind schedule he was. We knew how those people at the bus stops in that town felt and we were determined to make the situation right, to make up for the past jerkism of the madman driver.

We were going to be the best bus drivers ever. We were going to pick up every one of those people and let them off exactly where they wished. Dave steered the bus onto the main street, and as we approached the first stop, which was loaded with people, we were giddy.

“Can you believe it?” Dave shouted, “This is the first time in three years that this bus has stopped to pick up people. This is a turn of events! A change in the world! A victory of good over evil! These people are going to be so happy, so thrilled, so crazy with happiness. And do you realize how grateful they’ll be? They’re going to love us! This is a great day!”

I was just as excited at being able to do something good and decent, and in that excitement I raced back to taunt the madman and to let him know that good had triumphed. I got his attention and shouted in his face that we were about to pick up passengers and do the right thing. I laughed. His response?

“They’ll be dying to get on this bus. You oughta triple or quadruple the fares. They’ll pay. And youse can stuff that extra money in your pocket and buy liquor with it.”

What a sick and despicable human being, I thought to myself. To raise the fares now! When those people were suffering and in need? Could there be a more vile mind on the planet? We needed money, sure, and we could have explained away the increased fares as a maintenance surcharge for the bus. They would have paid, so desperate were they for a ride. But I had morals, a sense of right and wrong. To raise the fares right then would be wrong. In a day or two, after we had gained their trust and had been hailed as heroes, yeah. But not now. Not me.

I raced back up front and Dave pulled the bus slowly and carefully to the first stop.

“Get ready,” he said with a giant smile, “this is going to be great. These people are going to be so happy and so thankful. You be the official greeter. Welcome them aboard!”

Pfffffssssss. The front doors opened. People charged onto the stairs.

“Kind and happy people,” I said, “welcome to the bus. Bask in its warmth, in our kindness and take comfort in our reliability. Know for sure that we will speed you safely to your destination. The jerk who ran this bus before is ruined, never to rise again. Good has—”

“Keep your big bazoo shut,” sneered the first passenger up the stairs, a frail, snow-covered woman about seventy years old who poked me in the ribs with the metal point of her umbrella. “How come it’s so cold on this bus?”

“And how come it stinks?” grumbled someone else coming up the stairs.

“Why don’t you two have uniforms?” asked another. “You look like slobs. Where’s the old bus driver?”

The old lady refused to pay her fare.

“I’m a senior citizen,” she bellowed at Dave’s demand for her money. “I get reduced fares.”

“But reduced fares ain’t the same as no fares,” I said.

“I’ll pay a fare when you get some heat on this bus and some decent seats,” she snarled back.

Others got on and grumbled that the fare was too high or that the bus looked funny. Several shook off snow on us. One demanded to know why there wasn’t a radio playing, and another complained that there were too many people on the bus.

Next thing, everybody was complaining that the floor was slushy and wet, that they didn’t get their special seats and that we had stopped too long to pick them up.

Towards the end of the line a snow-caked teenager climbed up the stairs. He passed the fare box and sheepishly explained that his buddy behind him would pay. The buddy trudged up the stairs and said the same: the next in line would pay.

The third teen said the fourth would pay and the fourth said the fifth would pay and the fifth said the sixth would pay. And by the time the sixth was climbing the stairs, the first was walking out the rear door.

“Here’s your fare,” the sixth said as he pulled a whipped cream pie out of a brown paper shopping bag and smashed it into Dave’s face. By the time we could recover from the shock, all the teens were out the back door.

The passengers laughed and told us how stupid we were for falling for one of the oldest bus pranks around.

“The old driver was never that stupid,” someone said. “He never would have picked us up.”

Dave cleaned the pie off of his face and warned me not to laugh. He pulled the bus away and headed for the next stop, figuring that the people there would be nicer. But Lord, the howl that went up from our passengers, who filled about a fourth of the bus, when Dave announced the next stop, was crazy.

Why were we stopping for other people, they wanted to know. Just keep going, they said. Everyone was late and stopping for others meant further delays. They were unanimous: Don’t stop.

“We must,” I told them. “It’s the decent and right thing to do. They’re human beings. They’re out there freezing and shivering.”

“Well that’s their fault,” said the old lady, “for being so stupid to stand out in the cold all this time when there were no buses that stop. We don’t want idiots on this bus.”

“Yeah,” cried a guy. “Why didn’t they just wander on home?”
“But you people stood out in the cold just as long,” I said. “If they’re stupid, so are you.”

“Don’t talk that way about us,” said the old lady. “Doesn’t apply. And unless you want it cut off, keep that tongue in your mouth. Now pass them up.”

“We can’t do that,” I pleaded. “It’s wrong. You people have got your seats on a warm bus. You have to think about others now. You stood out in the cold, too. Just tell me, if you can, because I know you can’t. What makes youse so different from them?”

Oh, I knew I had them—knew that they had no way out; that they would have to answer honestly and dig deep into their souls and come to the conclusion that for making those statements they were hypocrites.

“Just tell me the difference!” I screamed.

“We stood at a different bus stop,” said a woman.

“How can you be so stupid and blind?” a child asked. “Why don’t you just use some common sense?”

They laughed and howled, hooted and jeered. Oh, they were having fun. I tried a different argument.

“You have your seats. You’ve got yours. Think of others,” I said.

“Well that’s just it,” said one guy. “We have got our seats. We’re happy, so why care about anyone else? We’ve got ours and why would we want anybody else to have theirs? And do you realize that the more people you let on this bus the less comfortable we’ll be? So pass them up.”

Those final three words became a chant.

“Pass them up! Pass them up!” they screamed. It went on and on and drove us crazy. But Dave was determined to stop and help the shivering masses.

“It takes a bold, courageous person to stand up to the reckless and ignorant masses," Dave told the passengers. “It takes a hero to do what’s right in the face of opposition and ridicule. We are heroes in our own minds, if nowhere else. If there’s no one else left on the planet willing to do the right thing, at least we will. If we’re the only two left, we will be! If we’re just two against several billion, so what! Damn everyone. Bring it on. The world will know that David P. Nadolski did the right thing and that he dragged his friend along, too. We are bolder than brass, and even bolder than that. We are the boldest of the bold! We will pick up more passengers! And maybe even the hungry and the tired and the sick, and who knows, maybe even fat people! We shall not be stopped!”

He pulled in to the next stop, the doors swung open, and it was more of the same—griping, grouching and complaining.

Why didn’t we have newspapers or books on board or hot chocolate or decent whiskey and why where there so many people on the bus and why were we late and just where was the old bus driver anyway?

It was depressing. But Dave pushed ahead, thinking that there had to be some decent, grateful people at the next stop. He was wrong. People threw stuff at us, threatened us with guns and knives, demanded our money and were furious that some seats were already taken. The final passenger at that stop was a guy who oozed hatred.

“Who do you people think you are?” he asked. “And what do you think you’re doing?”

“We’re trying to help,” I said, “to give you people rides. To right the wrongs of the jerk who drove before. To treat people with the respect and decency they deserve.”

“Well, by stopping this bus you’ve screwed up my life. Big time, Bubbas. Big time. You two has ruined everything for me, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“How could we have ruined your life by stopping the bus?”

“How? Because, for the past three years when this bus hasn’t stopped, I’ve had an excuse to not go to work or to at least come in late. All I say is, ‘Bossman, the bus ain’t stopping. I ain’t got a car and so I can’t get to work.’ The boss knew that the bus wasn’t stopping to pick up anybody and so everything was fine.

“Now that they know the bus is running again, they’re gonna expect me to show up on time. So you’ve ruined it, and I hate you for it.”

“And me too,” said someone else. “I could always tell the wife that I’d wait for the bus in the taverns. And since the bus never stopped, I could wait there and drink for hours. But now, if she finds out that it’s working normal again she’s gonna start nagging at me and wanting to know how come I’m spending so much time in the taverns. You all make me sick.”

There were others with similar gripes, and it was obvious that we were villains, not heroes.

“You people are so selfish,” I said, hoping to shame them.

“You damn straight we’re selfish. And so what?” said one woman, who appeared to be going through her child’s pockets for money. “That’s the way we are and we’re happy about it. Now get us where we’re going and don’t stop no more.”

“No, we’re going to stop at every stop until we find some decent, honorable people in this town,” Dave said. That was enough for those people. They started shouting that they wanted the old driver back. Soon they were on their feet and crowding their way to the front of the bus with the old driver in their arms. They started pelting us with newspapers and magazines and snowballs and began demanding that we leave the bus.

When Dave refused, the mob dragged him out of the driver’s seat, installed the old driver in his place, ordered him to open the door and threw us off the moving bus.

“Do people always act that way when you try to do something nice for them?” I asked Dave.

“Not usually this bad. This is crazy. I don’t think anybody will ever believe this.”

Before the bus had gotten too far away, it stopped and all of the passengers tumbled out, many of them screaming and shouting at the driver, who in turn was screaming at them.

As we got to the crowd the bus doors closed and the driver sped away, trying his best to spin the tires in a puddle and splash those people. We walked up to the old lady. She was angry.

“He kicked us off the bus. Lord am I mad! What a jerk! It’s cold out here. Sonny boys, I’m plain tired of dealing with fools,” she said.

We were, too. And blizzard or not, we sprinted to the gas station to get our bikes.

'Duped-Net' 2006 - Episode I -'The Big Brawl'

By Terry L Vinson

This is the city, Testicle Flats, Texas. I was born a ward to the state in this grand city and I’m proud to serve and call it home. I live here. I work here. I also get my prostate gland checked here at least once per calendar year. I carry a badge (and occasionally head lice).

It was Monday, May 23rd. It was cloudy and warm in Testicle Flats, with a good chance of the wet stuff by this afternoon (though hopefully my newly purchased ‘adult diaper’ would absorb the seepage). We were working the day watch out of J.P.O.L.D Division (Juvenile Punks on the Loose). The boss is Captain James Kirk. My partner’s Bill Melater. My names Munday. Sergeant Jake Munday.

8:03 AM – Captain Kirk informed us of a possible school yard riot at Dustbowl Elementary. It seems a kickball game had turned violent. Bill and I stopped by Rube Cobb’s coffee shop for our usual morning cup of Joe and a donut or six before heading on over to the school grounds. As is normally the case whenever my partner has had less than the required seven hours of shuteye (in this particular incidence, he said he’d stayed up late in order to watch a ‘Surreal World’ marathon on VH-1 and had not hit the sack ‘til almost a quarter past two in the AM), Bill managed to spill half a cup of boiling black java onto his crotch. As is par course in this thrice-a-week ritual, I asked Bill (wiping fresh tears from his eyes) if he desired medical attention, to which he whimpered ‘I’ll live’ while limping out to the cruiser. With each pothole we encountered, my partner’s feminine whimper grew ever louder.

8:18 AM – We arrived at the scene of the alleged brawl, the upper elementary/middle school playground at Dustbowl Elementary School.

We were met and first spoke to a Misses Emelda Hops, a seventh grade teacher at the school. Misses Hops is described as a slimly built black female whose advanced age is virtually impossible to gauge (in his written report under ‘Physical Description’, I noticed Bill simply wrote ‘Skeletal Remains,’ while in the ‘age’ block he scribbled ‘older than Aztec clay’. Crude, but nonetheless strangely accurate).

Unfortunately, Misses Hops was unable to either answer nor fully comprehend my questions at that time, as Bill had accidentally jarred the hearing aide from her right ear while attempting to shake her hand, and my size thirteen Buster Brown shoe had shattered the tiny hearing tool (obviously constructed of cheap plastic) into approximately one-hundred sixty-nine separate pieces. We attempted sign language for a few rather awkward and frustrating moments, in which time Bill accidentally poked Miss Hops in the right eye in true ‘Three Stooges’ fashion. Holding a fresh bandage over her bloodied orb, Misses Hops then brought over a few of the involved parties.

8:27 AM – We spoke to involved party #1, listed as Pete ‘Boogers’ Pickman, age thirteen. I asked Pete what had transpired. Pete informed me, while digging his left forefinger deep into the recess of his oversized right nostril (a rather nasty habit Bill later referred to as ‘scratching his brain’), that a female subject by the name of Lori Petticoats had purposely kneed him in what he referred to as his ‘jewels of pride’ and that her actions had initiated an altercation between all the boys and girls accompanying the playground at that time.

As I listed names of some of the other involved parties, Bill pulled Pete to the side in an attempt to lecture the boy on ‘personal hygiene’. Moments later, Bill rejoined me wearing a disgusted expression while cleaning a chunky, brown-colored, sticky-type substance from the lens of his glasses.

8:35 AM – I spoke to suspect #1 in the case, a Lori Jean Petticoats, age seventeen (‘Going on thirty’ Bill would say with a rather perverted sneer), a ninth grader at Dustbowl Middle School (she later admitted to ‘flunking’ the sixth grade twice, thus her advanced years). Lori Petticoats is described as five feet one inches tall, approximately one-hundred ten pounds, with long, silky blonde hair; piercing blue eyes; tender, budding breasts; thick, ruby lips; shapely, slender thighs and a perfectly toned midriff. After pulling Bill from her trembling body after he’d insisted on a thorough, ‘by-the-book’ strip search, I asked Lori if she’d enjoy a piece of cinnamon candy from our cruiser. After receiving only a fearful glare in response, I began to question her concerning the aforementioned brawl, to which she’d been labeled a prime suspect.

Despite my intense determination in forcing answers from the young woman, Lori refused to cooperate, and sprinted from the scene mumbling something to the effect of ‘old pervert’, which I took to mean that possibly an unknown adult subject might have been involved in this incident. I quickly dismissed the implications of an alternate meaning to such a remark.

8:42 AM – Bill pulled me to the side with an intense look drawn onto his haggard visage. Moments later, I realized the true origin of his pained grimace. He’d released the mother of all ‘air biscuits’. Bill then confessed to waking up to a hearty breakfast consisting of Great Northern Beans (‘shaded purple’ from age, he’d said) and a four-day old Burrito Supreme. We fast-walked from the contaminated area, with Bill frantically shaking his right pants leg as if to discard a loose particle of unknown origin.

Once breathable air was again obtained, Bill informed me that he wished to interrogate the final involved party, listed as Larry Beltway, age ten. Bill said he had a strategy that was foolproof in obtaining the answers we required to solve this rather perplex case. I agreed, though reluctantly. Bill had been my partner for just over eleven years, and I trusted the man with my life. We had shared many a tense moment on the job and many a case of cold Milwaukee’s Best off it. Bill and I held no secrets from one another (with the possible exception of that brief affair I’d once enjoyed with his loving spouse of twenty-some years, Lorriane, though I considered that nothing more than a temporary hiccup in our trusting, faithful relationship…simply ‘water under the bridge’ as it were). The man was, after all, the Godfather of my oldest son, Gibby, as well as my youngest, Gabby. In all truth, young Gibby bares a striking resemblance to my long-time partner. Same pointy nose; thick, slug-like lips, and a frighteningly similar beaver-like overbite. Come to think of it, as years go by, young Gibby is even developing Bill’s slightly hunched, bow-legged physique.

All sentiment aside, Bill’s interrogation techniques had been, through the years, highly questionable. Bill had the rather sadistic tendency to punch first and ask questions once the sedation had worn off. I’d have to watch him carefully. With that in mind, I performed a quick ‘frisking’ of my partner and quickly disarmed him of a pair of brass knuckles (complete with razor-sharp ‘knuckle’ tacks), a serrated bone-knife (pulled from his left sock, which was caked in dried blood) and a garrote wire he’d wound around the base of his penis like a coiled blacksnake (this was immediately placed in a ‘detox’ baggie and placed in the trunk of the cruiser for safekeeping and/or disposal by fire).

Moments later, and much to my horrid astonishment and chagrin, Bill had lodged his left knee against the youngster’s throat, and pressed the barrel of his snub-nosed thirty-eight snugly against the boy’s right temple. Despite this amiable (if not somewhat deranged) effort, the boy simply wouldn’t spill (except in his jeans). The youngster then half-walked, half-crawled back to the school building, a pronounced urine stain clearly visible on the underside of his blue jeans.

8:56 AM – After a short briefing, Bill and I were about to bust everyone on scene (including Misses Hops) out of sheer frustration, when Misses Hops introduced us to an eye-witness to the entire, rather ugly incident.

The witness was introduced as Ward ‘Pigpen’ Sewermeyer, age six, a first grader at Dustbowl elementary. Due to his age, we doubted the validity of his testimony. Due to his body odor, we barely avoided up-chucking on our own shoes. Simply put, the kid reeked. He smelled of decayed feces, stale urine and Gouda cheese, and that was merely his bare feet. There were large, tumor-like substances hanging from the kid’s nostrils like meteorites hung in spider webbing. Bill later described them in his written report as ‘booger stones’. Aptly put, I must say. I saw my partner’s eyes begin to water…heavily. Needless to say, our interview with ‘Pigpen’ Sewermeyer was conducted from a distance, and downwind.

‘Pigpen’, while constantly and consistently digging at his own backside with both hands, informed us that it was actually Pete ‘Boogers’ Pickman who had instigated the brawl by calling Lori Petticoats, the opposing pitcher at the time, a ‘flat-chested, crab-infested female impersonator who smelled like rotten fish and threw like a girl’. ‘Pigpen’ further stated it was the ‘throws like a girl’ remark that had sent Lori over the edge. Thus moments later, he stated that Pickman was rolling about on the playground, screeching in a very high-pitched, feminine voice while cupping his badly injured groin.

As young Ward Sewermeyer concluded his statement (while sniffing his fingers), Bill thanked him for his cooperation (actually, Bill screamed thanks to the boy from approximately forty-five to fifty paces away while holding a hanky over his nose).

9:12 AM – We rounded up our suspect, Pete ‘Boogers’ Pickman, in the boy’s bathroom, performing what he referred to as his ‘daily facial pastry’. In laymen’s terms, the boy was popping zits on the bathroom mirrors, followed by his own warped, borderline demented take on ‘finger painting’. As we had entered the boy’s john with our guns drawn and our butt-holes sufficiently puckered, Pickman had already spelled out ‘Flat-foots suck’ on three adjoining mirrors. Though I easily shrugged off this obvious insult to my lifelong profession, I was forced to mace and then cuff Bill to a bathroom stall in order to save young ‘Boogers’ Pickman’s life.

9:17 AM - After ordering Bill to remove the leg irons and body chains from the suspect (I decided they simply weren’t necessary for the ninety-one pound perpetrator), we placed Pickman into the cruiser, thanked Miss Hops for her cooperation (Bill again attempting sign language but only managing to accidentally shoot her the ‘finger’ instead), and departed Dustbowl Elementary School for the station.

9:29 AM – The boy’s from juvenile were given custody of ‘Boogers’ Pickman, and Bill and I spent the rest of the morning prying and scraping slimy, green-colored ‘gifts’ the little delinquent had left in the backseat of the patrol unit, some of which had actually been molded and shaped into miniature sculptures resembling disembodied sex organs. Despite the depravity of the boy’s work, there was no denying his artistic flare. With a tint of awe in his tone, Bill had labled Pete Pickman 'a true prodigy of grossness.’

5:11 PM – Following another productive day of serving the fine people of Testicle Flats, I dropped Bill off at his house. As usual, Bill invited me in for a ‘cold one’, to which I gave my usual ‘I’ll take a rain check’ response. As inviting as a cold brew sounded after such a trying day on the force, I had my reasons for declining my partner's kind offer.

As I pulled away, watching Bill stroll through the front door to his modest, ranch style home, I saw Lorraine Melater standing naked behind the open blinds of their bedroom window. Her prematurely graying hair was a mutated bird’s nest. Her cottage-cheese coated arms flapped about like twin circus tents caught in a sudden monsoon. Her predatory grin (minus several front teeth) was hideous, as were her enormous, vein-infested breasts, which literally hang down past her (hairy) knee caps. She attempted to woo me with a ‘come hither’ gesture, and I immediately drove off with tires squealing. As was normally the case after viewing Lorriane in the buff, I was forced to pull over and toss my cookies. After all, our affair, however passionate, was a mistake. A potentially fatal error that might have cost me a life-long friendship with a man I respect and trust with my very life every day in the concrete jungle known as Testicle Flats.

Besides, it’s hardly easy to accept that I was once desperate and/or horny enough for a ‘roll in the hay’ with a woman who resembles a bloated, dimply, freckled, pasty-colored Krispy Kreme donut gone horribly to seed.

In a word: Yeeeech.


END OF REPORT

COMING SOON: Duped-Net 2006: Episode II, 'The Big Stakeout'

A Dog Named Angie

By Barbara Sue

When you are part of a large family (9 children) there always has to be a dog somewhere. Our dog was called Angie. She was part collie and other parts unknown to us, who loved her from the start, and did not care what her heritage line was.

Angie was very good with all of our family, especially the youngest children. She loved to play soccer with the girls, pushing that ball along with her body, sometimes scoring more goals than my sisters.

Her claim to fame involved baseball. My brothers played baseball in our big back yard. They had 3 bases set up, one by the corner of our garage, 2nd base was in the middle of the yard in front of our big tree, third base was at the corner of our neighbors garage to the left, and home plate was home base where it all started. The boys taught Angie how to hold the bat between her teeth in her mouth, how to swing the bat to make contact with the ball, and how to run the bases. She took to baseball like you wouldn't believe, and many people did not beleive our stories of our games with Angie. Only when they saw her in action did they believe. Angie got this toothy grin on her face before she stepped up to the plate. At first we thought she was smirking at us, but we soon came to realize that she was grinning at everybody who was watching her. This smiley, toothy grin of hers also made her well known in the neighborhood, as we never had to ask her to do this in public, she always did it when meeting new people or when playing competitive games with us.

The first time she waddled up to the plate, or strutted as my brothers called it, she picked up the bat, swung it from side to side a couple of times, then stood at the plate. She always let a couple of balls go by before she found one to her liking and then she swung that bat, hit the ball, dropped the bat and run to first base, hesitated, then ran off to second, we were so amazed that we let her get to third base before she held up. From my brothers she had seen them come a little of the bases and go back and forth, like they were trying to steal a base, she loved this. Sometimes she would go round and round in circles, just a little of the base, then run back to the base, or she would lay down on the base and fake it, as we called it. The first time she made it back and crossed the plate because someone elses hit had brought her in to score, she jumped up at the catcher and licked her so hard she fell backwards.(the catcher fell) Then Angie ran to the base where the hitter was and body slammed him also. So a good time was had by all, those playing and those watching...

We even had a dog hat especially made for Angie, the logo on the cap was, A, Dog . It was red and it was well loved by her..

Over the years with us all, Angie learned to play basketball, she wasn't too good at baskets, but she sure could guard her man, or woman, and make it very difficult for them to shoot a good basket. Especially when she grinned at them.

She loved croquet and ruined many a good wicket, but they were replaceable. Our Dad had put 2 golf ball holes in the ground, one at one end of the yard, and the other and the other end. Angie was the best golf ball retriever in the neighborhood. We all knew she wanted to try and swing a club, but it was deemed too dangerous for her to do so, with the younger children always standing around and wanting to play also.

She loved to be hooked up to the small wagon we had, and pull the smaller children in the grass-she never seemed to get tired of this. As long as she was a part of our family she acted like a member of the family would act. Another thing she loved to do was take the bubble wand, dip it in, the with the wand between her teeth, swing back and forth making bubbles for everyone.

She participated in the back yard little pool parties we had, using 4 or 5 small plastic pools.(we needed that many in order for everybody to share)She loved to put her front paws in the water and splash anyone who happened to be in the pool she chose to play in. Never once did she jump into the pool, it was as if she knew she might hurt somebody.

Angie was our guard dog, she also had a snarl look she could put on her face on command, and anybody that didn't know here would think she was guarding us. She was our play friend, we could always choose Angie to be on our side for a sporting event, because she could pull her own weight and more, by distraction also.

She was a good babysitter for the smaller children.She knew what they were allowed to do and would let them know whan they were doing something she thought they shouldn't be doing.

We had her for 5 long fun-filled years before she left us. What a sad day for all of us when we knew it was time to let her go. We never forgot her, and at every family cookout, social gatherings, or looking at old picture albums, Angie's name always comes up and she brings a smile to our face, especially when we all compete to mimic the grins and snarls she used to make and how much we all still miss having her around.

Thank goodness we have the memories and the picture of her, even that tattered, torn cap that reads: A. Dog.

'Toon Trauma - She found her roots, and they were blonde...

By Jill Christine Carpenter

It's been mentioned to me a time or two that I tend to treat my little drawings and doodles like they are real. That's just silly, of course, because I certainly know that these little 'toon people and various critters are merely ink and paint, or pixels on a computer screen, and aren't real at all.

The problem is that THEY don't know that they aren't real, and I've never had the heart to tell them. However, it has occurred to me that if I died, it's very likely that they'd find themselves in the care of folks that might not believe in mollycoddling 'toons. So, I decided to sit the little Jillster 'toon down and tell her about her history before she hears it from strangers. She's been with me the longest and I felt she had a right to know.

When I told her that she was a 'toon and not a real person, she gasped in shock. I explained that her father was actually a Speedball pen holder with a crow quill tip, her mother was a Kolinsky Russian Squirrel watercolor brush, and that she was born on a small sheet of 140lb Arches cold press watercolor paper. She screamed at me that I was just telling lies ('toons can be sooo overly dramatic sometimes). It was quite upsetting.

So, I showed her the Kolinsky brush and that the golden hair color was the same as hers. Then dug out the old crow quill pen, dipped it in the ink bottle and drew some lines...they matched her lines. She was seriously peeved and couldn't seem to get over the shock.

I told her that being a 'toon wasn't necessarily a bad thing and explained about comic books, and Garfield and Calvin & Hobbs, and Charlie Brown, trying to make her feel better about her 'toonliness. She then threatened to join the 'Toon Union (Local 106) and go on strike. Even talked about getting a lawyer.

So, I showed her the paper shredder. She's quiet now. Sulking, but quiet.

I'm sure glad 'toons aren't real, otherwise life could be difficult around here.

Now I should probably explain to my computer mouse that it really isn't Mickey's cousin...but then again, maybe I should leave well enough alone.

Super Success Stories

Erin Matson, 25
Youngest president of a state chapter of the National Organization for Women, Minnesota

TAKING ACTION: At age 7, she advocated for her first cause: whether or not to declaw the family cat. “I’ve always [taken] action for things I believe in. I went on to write articles about sex discrimination for my high school newspaper.”

SECRET OF SUCCESS: “I set my alarm clock on weekends. Yuck!”

Liz Funk, 17
Youth organizer

TAKING ACTION: When Liz couldn’t find a group in her school that promoted a positive body image for girls, she started one. This group went on to help her stage a successful protest of MTV in Times Square in New York City. Ironically, the protest was aired on MTV.

SECRET OF SUCCESS: “I don’t watch TV, and I study like a maniac.”

Amita Kulkarni, 18
Youth Council chair, American Red Cross of Northwest New Jersey

TAKING ACTION: “Through my volunteer work with the American Red Cross, I’ve become passionate about [preventing] measles and HIV/AIDS. I [now] want to pursue a career in medicine. I’ve learned that people my age really can make a difference:’

SECRET OF SUCCESS: “I prioritize everything I do. And if I don’t have time, I won’t commit.”

Matthew Axelrod, 25
Country director, North Africa and Egypt, U.S. Department of Defense

TAKING ACTION: Axelrod credits his high school public speaking club for helping him develop the skills he uses daily in his job.

SECRET OF SUCCESS: “I help other people out. That way, they’re more likely to help me if I need it.”

Career World, Sep2006

Working For Kids

A dedicated staff keeps the Audubon School running strong.

On a late fall morning, 1,000 elementary school students pour out of Public School 128M, also known as the Audubon School, onto the streets of New York City. A fire alarm buzzes in the air as students walk quickly and calmly out onto the sidewalks to their appointed meeting spots for the fire drill., In a busy intersection, a dozen teachers stand in formation to stop traffic so that students can cross the streets safely. The drill is over in less than four minutes.

Such organization among staff and students is a testimony to how well everyone works together to keep the Audubon School strong. The school provides a safe, pleasant environment in which students are engaged in learning. Everyone works toward the common goal of encouraging children to become lifelong learners.

Walking through the bright halls' of the school, the Audubon team's success is evident. The building is filled with enthusiastic children who are engaged in their work.

THE FIFTH-GRADE CLASSROOM
The fifth-grade students are busy editing their memoirs. "We're working on verb tenses," one student explains as teacher Suzanne Friedman circulates through the room, guiding students in their work.

The classroom is a bright environment for learning. The walls are covered with tips: "How to Select the Right Book" and "What Good Readers Do." Neatly' written essays are displayed with Friedman's notes of praise attached.

Teaching may be the first career that springs to mind when one thinks about jobs in education. But Friedman didn't consider teaching as a career until she was in college. Her main interest was writing. She was an English and linguistics major at the University of Pennsylvania when she began working with middle school kids in a creative writing program. "When I was a child, I was in a creative writing program. It inspired me to do a lot of writing on my own," Friedman says. "I wanted to give that back." That experience inspired her to join Teach for America, a program that trains college graduates to teach (www.teachforamerica.org). Graduates agree to work in urban and rural public schools for two years.

Friedman worked in a school in the Bronx before coming to Audubon School. In the meantime, she earned her master's degree in education. Teachers need a bachelor's degree and teaching certification. Most public schools require teachers to have master's degrees within five years of starting work.

As a teacher, Friedman gets students excited about learning and helps them master the skills required of fifth-grade students in New York. She works with other teachers to plan lessons and to share ideas and resources. "It's a pretty collaborative school," Friedman says, citing an example of a recent unit she planned with other teachers about the 50 states. "We get together on the weekend and make things together."

Weekends? Yes, teachers work on weekends and even over the summer. Friedman's team spends weekends creating the projects they'll assign in class, and brainstorming ways of making the lesson more compelling.

"Teachers go home and think a lot about the students. [The workday] doesn't end at 3:30. School takes over your thoughts, and you think about your kids," she says. For example, if a student is not performing well, that issue will be on her mind even after work hours. Grading students' work, planning lessons, updating bulletin boards, and taking professional development courses also happen outside of classroom hours.

"After the students leave, teachers have a lot of responsibilities," Friedman says. "I'm often here until 7 or 8 at night." She's quick to add, "I want to be-here. [My students'] education is the most important thing to me."

ACTIVE LEARNING IN PHYS ED
Lifelong lessons in health and wellness are taught inside the school gym, where Ruben Betancourt oversees five periods of physical education and health each day. His curriculum promotes regular, fun physical activity for all students, no matter what their abilities or athletic talents. "Today we're doing an activity with scooters on the floor, which [is] fun. There's no standard to base it on except your own. Everyone wants to participate."

Betancourt connects students and staff alike to larger health initiatives, including a community wellness program that features after-school fitness activities, nutrition education, family events, and staff workshops on topics such as yoga and tai chi.

The results of Betancourt's work can be seen outside the gym too. "It is believed that a healthy body promotes a healthy mind," Betancourt says, adding that physical activity is a good stress reliever and makes students more productive.

Friedman agrees. Her fifth graders do well in class after they've had a period of physical education. "They come in very alert, having had the chance to be physically active," she says. "They're ready to learn."

A former reading specialist and fifth-grade teacher, Betancourt chose to become certified to teach physical education in part for his own health. "I found myself getting a little stiff, and I wanted the movement," he says. "So I opted for the gym."

LEARNING IN THE LIBRARY
Classroom lessons find a whole new dimension in the school library. Jennie Delaney, the librarian, shows students how to use library resources to help them with their projects. The fifth-grade students have been preparing for a social studies skills test. Delaney has helped them read maps, find books about history, and separate facts from opinions in their reading.

"[My] role is to support the classroom teacher," Delaney says. "I allow [students] to become familiar with what this library is like and what a public library would be like in terms of how the books are categorized and where they're located."

Delaney's library is a cozy room where small groups can work together on projects or where individuals can lose themselves in a book. "I've rebuilt this library," Delaney says with pride. "When I took it over 13 years ago, it had been neglected: and it was a mess. Slowly but surely … we've managed to turn around the collection completely." The library boasts a collection of well-kept and up-to-date books, bought with both a yearly stipend from the state and grant money for which Delaney applied.

Although Delaney is eligible for retirement, she's ,in no rush to leave the school. "It's like family," she says. "We get very attached to the new kids who come in, and they to us."

TEACHING TECHNOLOGY
Most students today probably can't imagine school without computers. Starting in the earliest grades, students use computers as tools to help build skills in areas such as reading and math. Later, more sophisticated software helps them create projects such as presentations and spreadsheets.

Virginia Liz-Ferreira trains the school community to use the latest computer hardware and software. "My role is to motivate children and staff to use technology to its fullest advantage in enhancing curriculum," she explains. When teachers gain confidence with the newest technology, they can then help students build confidence in using computers to learn.

Liz-Ferreira, who has a bachelor's degree in business administration and a master's degree in bilingual education, is also the go-to person for computer maintenance. The school does not have a network administrator on staff, so the role "comes down to 'Miss Liz' and a couple of teachers who are really savvy," she says. The self-appointed technology team keeps the systems running smoothly.

Students see Liz-Ferreira every day in their classrooms and in the halls, but they don't see a big part of what she does. School budgets are limited; outside funding helps the school get the up-to-date technology it needs. "Technology becomes obsolete quite often. I seek grants or funding sources from many different areas," she says. Liz-Ferreira explains to funding sources why the money is needed and how it will be used. Teachers seeking a grant for a specific subject area will ask Liz-Ferreira to weigh in on how technology will be used within that curriculum. As she says, "Technology is not a subject on its own but enhances other curricular areas."

ADDRESSING SOCIAL ISSUES
When Rose Occhino was a child, she saw the movie Boys Town, which inspired her choice of career. "It showed children who were having behavior problems due to life circumstances. I was struck by the injustice of it," Occhino says. "We need to help the child who is going through these circumstances."

As a bilingual social worker, Occhino helps students who are struggling in a variety of circumstances. Each school year, she evaluates about 50 children with behavior or academic problems. She talks with the child's family and teachers to determine the cause of the problem. "Social workers look at how the community and family affect the child," she explains. Once her evaluation is done, she recommends a course of action or special service to help the child.

Audubon's student population is 90 percent Latino, and 95 percent of parents speak primarily Spanish. Occhino is fluent in Spanish, so she can communicate effectively with the people she's helping. "Counseling … is much more effective in someone's native language," she says. "If a child has to struggle to find a word in English for how he's feeling, he shuts down."

THE TEAM WORKS
Every morning, Betancourt helps the principal with the morning line up. He pitches in around the school wherever his help is needed. "No job too big, no job too small!" he says. This "we're all in it together" attitude helps make the school so successful--as does the staff's shared commitment to the children. "As large as we are, we're very nurturing, and [we know] all the kids," says Delaney. "Everybody in this building is focused on the children."

School Jobs
A professional is available in every school to meet any academic, physical, or emotional need a child has: curiosity about computers; a skinned knee; difficulty getting along with others; a broken desk; a healthy meal. Which job might be right for you?

HELPERS

Dietitian(a)(b)
Guidance counselor(b)
Librarian(a)(b)
School nurse(a)
School psychologist(b)
Social worker(a)(b)
Speech pathologist(a)(b)

EDUCATORS

Reading specialist(a)(b)

Teachers(a)(b)

Art/music/drama
Bilingual
Elementary
English as a second language
Physical education
Secondary
Special education

MANAGERS

Building manager/custodian
Principal/assistant principal(b)
Secretary
Technology coordinator(a)(b)

KEY

(a) Bachelor's degree required
(b) Master's degree required

By: Flounders, Anne, Career World

The Tale of Prince Hardjedef

An ancient Egyptian document, known today as the Westcar Papyrus, tells the fictional story of what happened when Khufu asked his son Hardjedef to entertain him.

Hardjedef told his father about the magician Djedi:

Djedi lives in a village near the palace. He is 110 years old; every day, he eats half a cow and drinks 100 jugs of beer. He can rejoin a head that has been cut off a body so that a dead animal lives again. And he can tame a wild lion.

Fascinated, Khufu asked his son to bring Djedi to him. So Hardjedef sailed to the village, where he found Djedi relaxing in the courtyard of his house. The prince greeted the old man politely, and invited him to visit his father.

Back at the palace, Khufu was eager to watch Djedi at work. A goose was brought, and its head was cut off. The body was placed on the west side of the room, and the head was placed on the east side. Djedi muttered a spell. Immediately, the body waddled toward the head, while the head rolled toward the body. The two halves met, and the goose lived again.

Djedi repeated his trick first with an ibis (a large, long-legged wading bird) and then with a full-grown bull. Finally, a roaring lion was dragged into the room, and the magician tamed it so that it became as gentle as a kitten. Impressed, Khufu rewarded Djedi with a house, a daily ration of food and beer, and a tomb.

Dr. Dig says:

The Westcar Papyrus, stored today in Germany’s Berlin Museum, probably dates to the 12th Dynasty, like many uncovered Egyptian documents, it was named after one of its first owners, a Miss Westcar of Whitchurch, England.

By: Joyce Tyldesley

Where Do I Go With English?

WHAT COULD AUTHOR AND ARTIST Dr. Seuss, filmmaker Martin Scorsese, Supreme Court Justice Clearance Thomas, actor Renée Zellweger, and astronaut Sally Ride possibly all have in common? Five little words: bachelor of arts in English.

Although those five people took very different career paths, each reaped the benefits of choosing a college major that let them explore their love of literature and writing while gaining the valuable communication and critical-thinking skills that employers in just about every field require. As you'll see in the following four job profiles, whether working at a Fortune 500 company or for a Hollywood studio, English majors can literally write their own ticket.

LITERARY AGENT
YOU MIGHT NOT SUSPECT THAT LITERARY AGENTS DEAL in numbers, but for Jennifer Repo, a literary agent with Joelle Delbourgo Associates, a few stick out in her mind:

50--the number of book ideas Repo receives each week from writers looking for an agent; 1--the number of clients :she'll take on out of that 50; 1 in 10---the chances she'll sell any given book idea to a publisher.

"It's typical to get a lot of rejections, and it's something that I had to learn to be OK with," Repo explains. "That's why I've [come] to really love working with authors and supporting them."

Repo spends much of her time poring over the submissions she receives, looking for something that catches her eye-Once she identifies projects she wants to represent, she works closely with the authors to fine-tune their ideas,

"I love the creative process of seeing something on paper and knowing that with a few changes it can actually be appealing to a large audience," says Repo, who does everything from tweaking a title to reworking the structure of an entire book. Her ultimate goal is to persuade a publisher to take a chance on her client and publish the book. "My background in English helps me identify good writing more easily. Plus a lot of people refer to the great writers of our time, so knowing their work is important," she says.

Understanding the ever-changing publishing market and knowing what editors are looking for are big parts of Repo's job as well. She has carved out her own niche for the types of projects she likes to represent--health, memoir, women's issues, and self-help. "I try to match my clients' projects with editors who have the same kind of taste, I wouldn't send an editor who loves crime fiction a novel about William Shakespeare," she explains.

Like Repo, most literary agents end up working in small agencies of about two to five people. The majority of these agencies are located in New York City. Some literary agents work solo. Others find jobs at larger agencies of 10 or more people in New York or Los Angeles.

TECHNICAL WRITER
IF YOU'VE EVER READ INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO DOWNLOAD music onto your iPod or send a text message from your cell phone, then you've come in contact with technical writing. And though their words may not end up on the bestseller list, technical writers are responsible for important documents, from instruction manuals for technology and training materials for scientific equipment to virtually all written, communication about computers and software.

"Even though I came to this career with an English degree, I also had a big interest in computers as a hobbyist, playing games or setting up stuff and coding," says Tim Elhajj, a technical writer for Microsoft, where he writes white papers, or documents that explain to customers how to use different software.

Because his writing is meant to instruct readers, Elhajj needs to know the software he's writing about inside and out and be able to explain it in understandable, straightforward terms. "Sometimes I do nothing but write, but a bigger part of my job is doing research," he explains.

The technology boom has created many more technical writing jobs, and there are no signs of a slowdown anytime soon. In fact, growth in technical writing is predicted to out-pace that of any other writing field.

Elhajj loves his job, except when he's stressed about deadlines during key crunch times. But that's just part of working in a fast-paced industry. "The technology changes so quickly, so you have to have a desire to keep learning things over again and seeing what new innovations are out there," he says.

SCREENWRITER
MEGHAN MCCARTHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MOVIE BUFF. So it seems only natural that she'd use her degree in English to write for the big screen. "I get a kick out of the fact that I make up stuff for a living, and none of it would exist if I didn't put it down on paper," she says.

As a screenwriter, McCarthy comes up with ideas for movies and television shows, developing characters and plots that she pitches, or presents, to studios or movie producers, hoping they'll bite. "Usually the first thing a studio will do is hire me to write a treatment, which is a 10-page prose version of the story, just to make sure everyone is on the same page," McCarthy explains. If they like what they read, she'll be hired to write the full-length screenplay, which takes her between six and eight weeks.

Often, however, studios will hire a screenwriter to work on a screenplay--and then never produce the film. For many screenwriters, this can be frustrating. Still, it can be a rewarding career for those who simply love to write.

McCarthy loves that screenwriting allows her to exercise both sides of her brain--the right for coming up with ideas and the left for getting them down on paper in the strict screenplay format. "There are a lot of structural rules in screenwriting, but there's still plenty of room for you to develop your own voice," she explains.

How does her English background relate to her job, McCarthy says, "It's helpful to have an understanding of the story structure and what the audience is expecting out of any given genre."

As is the case with many jobs in Hollywood, screenwriting is a tough business to enter. Without a strong passion to make it, many would-be screenwriters give up if they don't find success right away. "If you're wiling to stick to it and develop your craft, you'll find success," McCarthy says. She excelled at writing in high school and participated in an honors program that introduced her to playwriting and screenwriting.

McCarthy landed one of the few spots out of thousands of applicants for Disney's prestigious Writing Fellowship Program. In the two-year fellowship, McCarthy learned insider tips about the business of moviemaking.

Some screenwriters choose to work with a partner, while others, like McCarthy, go it alone. But either way, most screenwriters spend a lot of time by themselves, either researching their ideas or hunched over a computer, typing away. As a result, screenwriters have to be self-motivated. "No one is coming over to your house every day and saying, 'Shouldn't you be turning off the online game and get to writing?' So being able to manage your time is important," she explains jokingly.

But McCarthy wouldn't have it any other way--she loves the freedom her job gives her. "I'm working here at home; I can hang out with my dogs. … What could be better?"

COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
CHRIS DAVIS DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT FINANCE and investment when he answered a help-wanted ad in the paper for a communications specialist at Merrill Lynch. But he had something the financial experts at the company needed--excellent writing skills. "It's easier to teach a writer about business than it is to teach a businessperson how to write," Davis explains.

Davis, whose official title is vice president of investment communications at Merrill Lynch Business Partners, writes a variety of articles and communications materials for his company's clients and the media. His work, which includes articles about common investment mistakes people make and commentaries on the stock market, is published widely. Communications specialists, also known as public relations specialists, usually work for businesses, nonprofit organizations, or governments. To be successful, they must not only communicate well but also have a strong understanding of their audience.

Like many jobs in the media, communications specialists work in a fast-paced environment, something Davis thrives on. "Every day I'm coming in and learning something new. … It's pretty rewarding," he says.

Davis, who has a bachelor's and a master's degree in English, started off teaching. When he realized that a teaching career wasn't a good fit for him, he made the switch to business. He is thankful his English background enabled him to seamlessly change careers.

"Being able to write well and communicate effectively has been my job ticket. And it's not just a matter of knowing words. … It's expressing ideas clearly and influencing people through the written language. It's an incredibly valuable skill to have," Davis says.

HOT LINK
Are you considering continuing your studies in English in college? Esther Lombardi, an English major herself, has written A Note to an English Major: Contemplating a Career just for you. Visit classiclit.about.com/od/allabouteducation/a/aa_englishmaj.htm.

Where Can YOU Go With English?
The path for English majors veers off in many directions. That's because it's one of the most flexible areas of study out there. The study of English sharpens your brain to be a skilled writer, speaker, researcher, creative thinker, and analyzer. Combine these skills with your other interests, and you can be sure your career story will have a happily-ever-after resolution.

Business
* Account supervisor

* Advertising copywriter

* Corporate communications specialist

* Financial researcher/writer

* Investment banker

* Marketing assistant/manager

* Market researcher

* Salesperson

Science
* Health educator

* Science writer/editor

* Technical writer/editor

The Arts
* Actor

* Filmmaker

* Graphic designer

* Museum curator

English: Direct Route
* Author

* Editor

* Film/television screenwriter

* Librarian

* Public relations specialist

* Teacher

* Web content provider

Social Studies
* Journalist: radio, television, print, Internet

* Lawyer

* Lobbyist

* Paralegal

* Policy analyst/researcher

* Public affairs coordinator

By: Reber, Deborah, Career World, 2006

How to Get Over Therapy

By Sara K. Penrod

Before your appointment, complain to your best friend about it. Tell her you don't want to go to that stupid psycho and whine about how your mother is crazy—not you—for forcing you to go.

When your mother comes to pick you up after school, drop your backpack in the trunk loudly. Slam the car door and slump sullenly in your seat. Make sure to keep your arms crossed across your chest. When she asks how your day was, shrug, say "Okay," and refuse to elaborate.

When you get to the psychologist's office, sit on the edge of the chair in the waiting room so everyone knows you don't want to be there. Pick up an outdated copy of Time or Newsweek, but then put it back down—you don't want the psychologist to think you're concerned with recent events. Pick up an obscure science journal you've never heard of and pretend you understand the articles about the replication of amino acids and how a couple of scientists artificially produced a fifth state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and this new stuff) for a total of 2.7 seconds by directing an extremely fine laser beam through a stream of gas.

When the psychologist emerges from his office, pretend not to notice. Continue to try deciphering scientific jargon but glance covertly at him over the top of your magazine. When he says your name, slowly close the magazine and put it back on the table. Then look up at him like he's from a different planet.

Follow him into his office and sit down when he tells you to have a seat. Be sure to sit on the edge of the chair as usual. The black leather will squeak, and you will want to relax. Don't. You don't want to make him think you're getting comfortable with him or his office.

He will ask how you're doing, what's going on. If you must answer him, for God's sake don't tell the truth; you'll both know you're lying, and that's okay. Better yet, don't answer. Shrug and mutter, "I dunno" so he can barely understand. If he presses the question, continue to evade answering. He will then resort to the silent treatment to try and intimidate you into talking. Obviously, don't let him out-silence you. While you sit, jiggle your foot and think about how juvenile it is for a 40-something psychologist to be using the silent treatment. Stare out the window at the gray cat prowling along the side of the vintage clothing shop next door.

After ten minutes, he will get impatient. He'll say, "I don't think this is what you want to get out of therapy." Consider telling him: I don't want to get anything out of therapy, I don't need therapy, especially from some nerd like you, so leave me alone, thank you very much. Don't, of course, say anything. Just shrug.

He will lean forward in his chair and say, "What do you want to get out of coming to therapy?"

You'll want to laugh at how clichй he sounds; imagine him with a Sigmund Freud mustache, smoking a cigar. But don't even allow yourself to smile.

He'll say, "Your mother says you're depressed."

Say, "My mother says a lot of things." When he asks what you mean by that, ignore him. Stare up at the drop ceiling and attempt to count the dots on one tile. When you lose your count, notice the silhouette of a dead cockroach in his fluorescent light.

He will attempt to use the silent treatment on you again. Think of how your mother always tells you, "If you try something once and it doesn't work, you're only wasting your time if you keep on doing it." Don't share this thought with the psychologist. Instead, scrutinize his office. Pretend you are a detective examining it after he has been murdered (Don't ever tell anyone else you pretend like this, though; they'll think you're childish and stupid).

Try to read the newspaper article framed and hung on the opposite wall, the one with him standing among a bunch of bonsai trees. Squint at it over his head. Try and figure out if someone could be killed with a bonsai—clubbed in the head with its terra cotta pot, perhaps. Settle on death by choking on a bonsai shoved down his throat—it seems like Hannibal Lecter, and you like it better anyway.

Count the plastic dinosaurs on his shelf—several T-Rexes, some diplodocuses, a couple of triceratops, and a bunch you can't identify. Remember that there are twenty-seven in all. Make a mental note to yourself that none of them fly, and try to psychoanalyze that.

Wonder what a crate of toys is doing in the corner of his office, since he doesn't do play therapy. Look at his bookshelf, and don't be surprised when you see Karl Jung's Religion and Psychology next to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time next to a recent Danielle Steel bestseller next to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

When you run out of things a detective might notice without getting up from this chair, resort once again to counting the holes in the ceiling. You will get to seven hundred thirty-four before the psychologist interrupts you. Jump so that he thinks you've forgotten he existed.

"What are you thinking?" he'll ask.

Say, "Nothing." Swing your foot from side to side, kicking the legs of the chair. Let your ankle hit the wood hard, even if it hurts. Don't, under any circumstances, make eye contact.

He'll say, "Surely you're thinking of something."

If you're feeling particularly brash and brazen, tell him you were counting the holes in the ceiling until he interrupted and made you lose count. If not, tell him you spend most of your time thinking about not thinking. He'll frown at this and ask what you mean by that. Tell him, as usual, that you don't know.

The whole session will proceed like this—you refusing to tell him anything and him trying to extract information from you. Both of you will be happy when the clock on his desk chimes the hour.

Wait with your arms crossed while your mother makes out the check. Pretend not to notice when your little sister drives a Tonka truck over your foot. Exhale loudly when the psychologist asks your mother when would be a good time for her next appointment. Tap your foot against the taupe Berber carpet.

When your mother writes down your appointment in her date book, hurry out to the car. Don't hold the door open for your mother and sister, even though they are only a few steps behind you. Let it slam shut in their faces.

Sit in the back seat of the car. Let your sister have the front even though children twelve and under should not be allowed to sit in the front seat of a car with a passenger-side airbag. Pull your car door shut with just enough force to close it all the way. Put on your seatbelt. Think if you're going to die before you get drunk or have sex, you want to kill yourself, not give the task to some ritzy housewife whose SUV plows into your car because she's too busy talking on her cell phone and feeding the kids in the back seat to steer.

Roll down your window all the way, even if it is December and raining, so that the cold wind and raindrops sting your face. It is the only way for sure you have not died and gone to hell.



When you get home, tell your mother you're not hungry for supper. Take the cordless phone out of the living room and sneak it downstairs. Go in your room and lock the door even though your mother goes ballistic every time you do that. Crouch behind the dresses in your closet and call your best friend.

When she answers, say, "God, I hate therapy." She'll know it's you.

"I know," she'll say. "Me too."

Say, "Aw," sympathetically because you know her therapist is an idiot who just gives her more and more ineffective medications to take.

She'll ask you what the psycho said. Laugh. "Nothing out of the norm. He was trying to delve into my psyche, and I sure as hell wouldn't let him. You know." Say the "delve into my psyche" part with exaggerated bravado.

"Stupid psychos." She'll say this with utmost sincerity and seriousness, even though you know most other people would find this statement ridiculous. Shrug, even though she can't see you, because this is an inside joke. Think that if other people can't figure it out they don't need to know what it means.

"And this guy is such a living clichй," tell her. "He has all his diplomas framed on his wall, and he wants to dissect my mind." Think of the frogs you dissected in seventh-grade science class. "He looks like Freud with lighter hair—I'm surprised he doesn't smoke cigars and make me lie down on a couch." Force another laugh, even though this isn't funny.

She will laugh too. She is the only person who really appreciates your dark humor, and eventually—after hanging around you far too long—she will start making the same kind of jokes you do.

Tell her how ridiculous it is that your mother makes you go to therapy. "I was doing just fine before she had to get involved in my life. No, I was doing better. And it's not like any of the other ones have helped—I've been to—" review their faces in your head and count them on your fingers, "four, not including this guy."

"Four?" she'll ask, incredulous. "You've been to more than me." Even your best friend will never know everything about you.

"Yep." List them. "The first time was when I was five. I was playing out in my front yard while some guy from the power company was working on the power lines. He got electrocuted. Fell down dead right in front of me, but he was still twitching."

Your friend will be unsure as to whether she should laugh or be grossed out. "Twitching?"

Say, "Yep. I guess it's from the electrical currents or something." Pause because you know that you should before moving on. "The second one was when my parents got divorced, and the third one was after my mom found out my stepmother verbally abused us when we went for the summer." Say the "verbally abused" phrase with your mother's indignant tone of voice. "The fourth one was in seventh grade when I just stopped doing my schoolwork because it was all totally pointless."

"God," she'll say.

Upstairs, you'll hear your family getting up from the table. Your mother will call you to come clean up the kitchen. Tell your friend you have to go because your mother wants you. Hang up quickly, and sneak the phone back into the living room on your way to the kitchen.

After putting all the dishes in the dishwasher and all the leftovers in the refrigerator, go to bed early. Stare up at your ceiling and think of the geometry homework you haven't done. Force yourself not to care. Your dreams will be of insane psychotherapists out to kill you.

A Dog Named Angie

By Barbara Sue

When you are part of a large family (9 children) there always has to be a dog somewhere. Our dog was called Angie. She was part collie and other parts unknown to us, who loved her from the start, and did not care what her heritage line was.

Angie was very good with all of our family, especially the youngest children. She loved to play soccer with the girls, pushing that ball along with her body, sometimes scoring more goals than my sisters.

Her claim to fame involved baseball. My brothers played baseball in our big back yard. They had 3 bases set up, one by the corner of our garage, 2nd base was in the middle of the yard in front of our big tree, third base was at the corner of our neighbors garage to the left, and home plate was home base where it all started. The boys taught Angie how to hold the bat between her teeth in her mouth, how to swing the bat to make contact with the ball, and how to run the bases. She took to baseball like you wouldn't believe, and many people did not beleive our stories of our games with Angie. Only when they saw her in action did they believe. Angie got this toothy grin on her face before she stepped up to the plate. At first we thought she was smirking at us, but we soon came to realize that she was grinning at everybody who was watching her. This smiley, toothy grin of hers also made her well known in the neighborhood, as we never had to ask her to do this in public, she always did it when meeting new people or when playing competitive games with us.

The first time she waddled up to the plate, or strutted as my brothers called it, she picked up the bat, swung it from side to side a couple of times, then stood at the plate. She always let a couple of balls go by before she found one to her liking and then she swung that bat, hit the ball, dropped the bat and run to first base, hesitated, then ran off to second, we were so amazed that we let her get to third base before she held up. From my brothers she had seen them come a little of the bases and go back and forth, like they were trying to steal a base, she loved this. Sometimes she would go round and round in circles, just a little of the base, then run back to the base, or she would lay down on the base and fake it, as we called it. The first time she made it back and crossed the plate because someone elses hit had brought her in to score, she jumped up at the catcher and licked her so hard she fell backwards.(the catcher fell) Then Angie ran to the base where the hitter was and body slammed him also. So a good time was had by all, those playing and those watching...

We even had a dog hat especially made for Angie, the logo on the cap was, A, Dog . It was red and it was well loved by her..

Over the years with us all, Angie learned to play basketball, she wasn't too good at baskets, but she sure could guard her man, or woman, and make it very difficult for them to shoot a good basket. Especially when she grinned at them.

She loved croquet and ruined many a good wicket, but they were replaceable. Our Dad had put 2 golf ball holes in the ground, one at one end of the yard, and the other and the other end. Angie was the best golf ball retriever in the neighborhood. We all knew she wanted to try and swing a club, but it was deemed too dangerous for her to do so, with the younger children always standing around and wanting to play also.

She loved to be hooked up to the small wagon we had, and pull the smaller children in the grass-she never seemed to get tired of this. As long as she was a part of our family she acted like a member of the family would act. Another thing she loved to do was take the bubble wand, dip it in, the with the wand between her teeth, swing back and forth making bubbles for everyone.

She participated in the back yard little pool parties we had, using 4 or 5 small plastic pools.(we needed that many in order for everybody to share)She loved to put her front paws in the water and splash anyone who happened to be in the pool she chose to play in. Never once did she jump into the pool, it was as if she knew she might hurt somebody.

Angie was our guard dog, she also had a snarl look she could put on her face on command, and anybody that didn't know here would think she was guarding us. She was our play friend, we could always choose Angie to be on our side for a sporting event, because she could pull her own weight and more, by distraction also.

She was a good babysitter for the smaller children.She knew what they were allowed to do and would let them know whan they were doing something she thought they shouldn't be doing.

We had her for 5 long fun-filled years before she left us. What a sad day for all of us when we knew it was time to let her go. We never forgot her, and at every family cookout, social gatherings, or looking at old picture albums, Angie's name always comes up and she brings a smile to our face, especially when we all compete to mimic the grins and snarls she used to make and how much we all still miss having her around.

Thank goodness we have the memories and the picture of her, even that tattered, torn cap that reads: A. Dog.

A Reckoning of Angels and Trees

By Little Miss Aki

Diligence in matters of temperance, patience, and desire for glory is what drives most men to madness. They become connosieurs or quacks, slaves or kings, loons or men of honor.

In personal travels, as a connosieur, Men of Honor are hard to come by. The existence of a few in this world is a tribute to the human desire to always set itself higher in the chain of life. Raising themselves by their bootstraps, Men of Honor drag themselves above the average, and then above the above average, always striving for the heavens.

These Men of Honor, perhaps are fallen Angels trying to get back into good graces with some Almighty God. Perhaps they seek to leave their legacy behind as one of legend like King Arthur and Constantine. They are the stars the average mortals watch and covet and wish to catch in their nets late at night.

True Men of Honor rarely are Kings, or merely become rulers of others by the request and necessity others force upon them. Those who know these Men are not only blessed, but are silhouetted by the glow of these great people. They cling to the coat-tails of these warriors, these strong and moral people, in hopes to gain a step up above the average.

In the end the good, the bad, the average, the glorified, are all trying to reach some kind of spiritual satisfaction in which they can nod and pat themselves on the back.

The Kings, the Warriors, the Men of such vast Nobility, do not sit back and relax at the end of their goal. They give a glance from the mountain top they have scaled and then get back to work. No time to enjoy the view, there is still a long way to go.

As a person who has loved these people as bystander and friend and lover, I can safely say that they are not good for my own health. The worry and care I have for their well-being (for they keep none for themselves) is like watching a child walking a tight rope 100 feet off the ground on a windy day. You are certain of their failure and yet still they take a step forward into that uncertainty, as though destined to prove you and everyone else staring upwards, wrong.

I am a different person from those around me in that, though I am Average, I do not gasp in awe when I see the unthinkable. I freeze from my physical to my soul and my mind roars out towards the Heavens don't you dare let him fall or you will have me to deal with. Many times, this is sufficient for my blood pressure as I watch these wonderous folk march onwards against the odds. Do not let them fall. I am a support beam, I am the person who runs out under the great corporate buildings of glass on Black Friday, arms outstretched, to catch the brave men diving from the 14th floor.

I am the tree that catches the few Angels of our time as they lose their footing and tumble earthwards. I set them on their feet and give them words of encouragement and then go back to worrying that they will fall again. I worry more that when they do fall, I will not be there to catch. I will be a second too late and stare dumbfounded at the mangled body on the pavement, still clinging their briefcase and wife's photograph.

No. I am not a paramedic. I am not a police officer, fire fighter, tax collector, or otherwise. I don't have any truly special talents, anyone can do what I do. I just have the gall and desire to do it first. And I know personally one of these Noble Men who eternally climb against the grain, the odds, the wind, and destiny herself to a higher tomorrow.

Their drive, their stamina, it confuses me. Why do they go to such lengths? Irregardless of the reason, I remain loyal and faithful in all ways to assisting in their goals, trying desperately to get them to let me help. They are very stubborn people. Disregarding their own safety, running out under the 14th floor along side me, catching who they can, resuscitating who may live. I am not nearly on their level, but in my own way, I am a distorted reflection.

I am the tree that gives them shade. I am the pool of water they look into and see their reflection peering back in honest reality. It is the only way I can tell them

Yes, you are doing the right thing and I am proud to love you even if you do not even know my name.

It could be me, but I would say there is a shortage of these people in todays world. More and more of shade is not used, more often is that still lake left unvisited and the Noble characters of whom I speak are too high to see and they will not be back.

That is why I cry at night.