Open Windows

Glancing across the street, I see something that makes me stop for a moment: the nice house, the two-story home with the new roof of black slate tiles, has all of the windows standing open; it’s ninety-some degrees outside, the warmest day this week and all of the windows are open on the west side. The sun passed the zenith a couple of hours ago, that home will soon be hotter than you-know-what. Are they nuts?

Then I stop to wonder what kind of stink must have occurred to make folks leave their house wide open to the August heat. Did a kid drop a bottle of that doe urine that hunters use to attract deer during the hunting season? Happened to us out at the warehouses where I used to work back in the day. Stuff could evacuate a place faster than tear gas, and it’s perfectly legal to use too! Maybe someone left the fresh fish out on the counter overnight? Truth is I don’t know, but it is my business to look into the strange and unusual in the neighborhood; the community association pays us to do just that.

From the list on the wall, I look up the numbers for the family. Contact numbers the boss calls ‘em, phone and cell numbers for me to pester the folks at their workplaces. The boss don’ never call, he has that phone-phobia, same as a lot of folks have, especially men. I have it too, but must put it aside on the job when the boss tells me to call folks. It isn’t like there is anyone else in the guard shack for me to delegate a phone call.

The numbers produce no response. The family is out of town or out of touch, but now I have to leave my air-conditioned office, get in the scorching hot security vehicle and go check. I realize that it sounds stupid to drive across the street. By the time I get the Jeep started and well before the a/c kicks in, I’ll be there. The startup is a waste of fuel too at a time when this country needs me to waste gas about as much as Hitler needed a bar mitzvah back in his day. That ain’t a very good simile of course, a good bar mitzvah might have done little Adolph a world of good in his growing years, you never know.

I check the Weather Channel web site, and yup, the town shows 95° with a dew point of 44° and humidity at 17%, comfortable actually. The boss won’t likely get out of his cool house on a day like this, so I take the chance and save the country a few cups of gasoline for future generations. The gated community I work for is dead quiet in the afternoon. The children are inside playing their video games as the final days of their summer break tick away right underneath them.

Their parents, both wife and husband in most cases, are at work. Making good salaries that will be eaten up by deductions and payment plans. The toys purchased by the payment plans line the alley parking stalls all over the community. I get to see them each night on patrols. Bass boats, ski boats, luxury campers, ATV’s, snowmobiles on trailers, and Harley’s for the annual trip to Sturgis, all add up to several millions of dollars’ worth of stuff that gets used maybe once or twice a year. Yet they all go to work in Corporameia, that dreadful village of corporate minions out to destroy each other and squeeze every last drop of blood and sweat from the employees. I know because I used to be there with them.

As I walk around the house, I see that every window on all sides of the house is open, though all of the blinds and curtains are pulled down allowing me no way to look inside. I also think back to those ten years of moving up the ladder after starting at the very bottom.

I don’t have to worry about that in my current position. The boss isn’t going anywhere as the Community Association hires the lowest bidder for the security job and no bid will get lower than the boss’s. The big national firms like Pinkerton’s and Wackenhut can’t match our costs because the boss provides no benefits, no retirement plan, and not very much of himself. Markus, Frenny, and I trade off working afternoons and nights. The boss takes the position each weekday morning for two or three hours until everyone he needs to wave at has gone to work. The weekend mornings are left open because no one in this very self-righteous and hypocritically-proper community wants us to see the results of the Friday and Saturday night Bacchanalias that take place without fail at one house or another. That takes away the only interesting shifts; we get to work the others.

I get to read a lot on my shifts because the boss doesn’t want us to be anywhere without the security vehicle and keeps a tight lid on the fuel budget, which means the vehicle doesn’t move much and therefore neither do we. I have taken to hiding a bicycle behind the security office and making patrols around the neighborhood that way. They have a very nice trail that winds through the woods behind all of the homes for some 8 miles. They all paid for it when they bought the homes, but no one uses it. They have exercise toys inside the homes for that kind of thing. The maids keep the equipment dusted so that claims of workouts can be made. I’m not sure why that is important, but it seems to be. In spite of this, the people of this neighborhood are in good shape; probably from all the ‘running around’ they do on each other. Sorry, bad pun there. Along with the dust-free exercise equipment, the families all maintain gym and golf club memberships. No one can see and visualize your naked body when you work out at home, you see, and of course you don’t get to do the same to the other guy’s wife from a home gym in the basement. Of course, in the summer that all changes as the backyard pools are cleaned and filled.

In the summer time we are not allowed to patrol behind the homes. As I have mentioned, I take the bike trail anyway, and I know why they don’t want us going behind the homes while the pools are in use. Swimming seems to be the last thing on these people’s minds. I could make a fortune with a digital camera and a few contacts in the blackmail trade, but unlike the people I guard for a living, I’m not that given to courting Mammon, or money as we call that old demon. After that first trip, I learned to keep my eyeballs in the boat as they say at the Academy.

Years ago, I gained acceptance to the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The plebes there all learn to eat while staring down at the plates only. This is a form of eye discipline that comes in handy when living in officer country on the bases later in life, just as it does in this community. That way a junior officer doesn’t have to worry about which back door the captain of the vessel in port is visiting while his wife is at work. Keep your eyes in the boat and you avoid seeing a lot of sin. Not that playing the blind monkey part makes the sin go away of course. Keeping the eyeballs in the boat does help when meeting Frenny though.

Frenny is a college kid and only works one night a week; we have never heard his real name. Markus and I each work three nights. Fortunately, Frenny is a lazy kid as most of us were at that age and does not violate the behind the homes rule. He also has the advantage of being homely enough that none of the rich-kid daughters have any fantasies about the young security guard. Markus and I could both serve, but to carry out such a thing would involve long jail terms and sex offender registration should we be caught. The ‘child’ would not be harmed emotionally, the children raised in this neighborhood passed that point years ago with what they have grown up with.

Like me, Markus served his country, he for somewhat longer than I. Markus retired as a chief warrant officer after 22 years in the Army. At just over 40, he has a lot of life left in him and is too wise to mess it up with one of the kids in this neighborhood. I served 8 years and left as a captain from the Marine Corps after an IED in Iraq gave me a few extra scars and a medical discharge. Both of us get payments from the government for our service, but a man has to do something with his time. I would like to think that I too am wise enough to stay away from the physically attractive gals around these parts. Since that first bike ride on that first summer evening last June, I can swear on a Bible that I haven’t looked in the backyards. A man just doesn’t want those images playing in his mind if he wants to keep his heart pure, that much I can tell you.

I completed my first partial circuit of the house and did notice a smell wafting out the leeward side of the home, but not one that I could identify. (The inevitable privacy fence kept me from going the whole circle around the house.) Freshly killed human bodies have a distinctive smell that I could recall from my days in Fallujah, but this was not that smell, thank God. The smell could come from something like a dead rat, and in this neighborhood I could see why the family would want no trace of it to linger. However, that same reason would prompt the family to call the very plain white vans from ServiceMaster’s division that no one talks about around here. The division that discreetly cleans up the bodily fluids from the fights that didn’t happen in this neighborhood; or cleans up the mess from the orgies that the local religious leaders are sure wouldn’t take place in ‘that’ gated community.

Markus and I have seen the vans a lot; we even know a few of the drivers by their first names and can talk about their family members by name too. The vans service the neighborhood for a stiff fee (Sorry, another bad pun there.) and the drivers and crew keep their mouths shut, at least until their kids are through college. Nope, Markus and I never see those vans either. If the mess is particularly bad and the vans leave late, as one did this evening from that city councilman’s house up yonder way, we mark it down as a delivery from Ollie’s Overnight Freight and leave it at that. The boss knows about Ollie and his overnight deliveries, and will tag on an extra charge of his own.

I’ll say this for the boss; though he may not lead by example of long hours and hard work he does share the bonus money equally. Some months the vans are here so much that we make more in bonus money than we do in our regular paychecks. In spite of my bad pun, I have always assumed that the vans take away no bodies from these little clean-ups. The police are never called to these things, but for all I know they receive something extra as well. The house is quiet; the neighborhood is still, and the boss has stayed away just like I thought. I am about to knock on the door when another plain white van honks to be let out of the gate. A quick jog, the day is quite comfortable even at 95°, the dry days of August have arrived at last, and I sign for another delivery from Ollie. Busy fellow that Ollie; this summer must be some kind of record for him.

I checked the office real quick to make sure that no one has called, but all is quiet just as it usually is in this neck of the woods. Still, something is creeping me out about this house. I strap on my Beretta M9 and a magazine pouch. Not standard issue for the job, the boss won’t spring for the bonding and insurance that goes with firearms. If the balloon ever went up in this neighborhood we could go into any of the homes and find all manner of fine rifles and shotguns to defend the walls with; some of them even get taken out and used once each fall. A fellow down at the end of Palisade Avenue even showed Markus and I his collection of legal machine guns and told us how to get at them should we need to. I surely do hope we never need that much firepower around here.

Markus and I have become good friends on this job and often work the nights together even though we don’t have to and don’t get paid extra for doing it. Come to think of it that is a fine idea. I go back to the office and call Markus as the first of the ‘working’ folk start coming home. I don’t have to let them in or out, a sensor under the road is tripped by a sender on their vehicles and the gates open automatically. I do keep an eye out for duress situations, but these folks are not quite up to that level of wealth.

“Hey bud! What’s going on out in the land of modest wealth and immoderate sin?” Markus has picked up the shop number from his Caller ID display.

“Funny you should ask, I just signed ‘Ollie’ out again. Mark, you see anything odd about that house across the road here last night?” I ask him.

“Yeah, all the windows were open all night, even though it got down to the low 50’s, and I didn’t see any cars leave in the morning,” Markus reports. “I asked Frenny, but you know him, he didn’t see anything. For all I know the house has been that way since your last day.”

This was Tuesday, Markus had Monday, Frenny Sunday, and my last day had been Saturday, and I didn’t notice anything odd on that day, but then again Saturday had been pleasant both day and night.

“You would ask about it though, because that house gave me the heebie-jeebies for some reason yesterday, Joe,” Markus continued.

“Yes, I got that same feeling right now,” I said. “You want to come up while I go knock on the door?”

“Sure, be right there!”

I knew that ‘right there’ meant at least an hour, Markus and the rest of us too for that matter, couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods close to this one. But I also knew that he would drop whatever he was doing, probably working on those infernal RC airplanes of his, and be here as quickly as his 2011 Dodge Challenger 392 SRT8 in Green with Envy (the actual color choice on the order form!) could make it without getting yet another speeding ticket. Markus had a weakness for a fast car, and this car was his latest fling.

My passion is my Hummer, kind of a thing from my Marine days. They wouldn’t let me drive them back then; the company commander always had a driver from the enlisted ranks. Rank may have its privileges in the military, but getting to drive the Humvees wasn’t one of them. I have one of the diesel H1s, not those wimpy H2’s or H3’s. I realize that it’s a terrible guzzler of precious fossil fuel so I try to make up for that by driving it as much as possible.

Captain Joseph Fellowman is my official handle on the medical papers at the VA, and yes the last name of my birth did cause the first classmen at the Academy to exercise their humor a bit. Markus would be Chief Warrant Officer Markus DeLapage, pronounced mostly in the French way though his New Orleans forbears had managed to mangle it a bit like the old commandant’s name, LeJeune, had been. I guess we are supposed to call my old base Luh-jern now instead of Leh-june as we said it back in the day. I have an hour or so to think of ridiculous issues like that before Markus arrives.

I kept an eye on the house as the residents returned from their day jobs to start their summer evenings by the pool, or in the pool, or in each other… sorry about that, got carried away there.

As the incoming traffic slows, and right about 50 minutes later Markus rumbles in and parks next to my Hummer. As I look at the two vehicles, I kind of realize why the boss might be reluctant to give us a raise. How many security guard shacks have two vehicles like these parked outside?

“Evening there, Joe!” Markus is cheerful as usual, and armed for bear, which ain’t.

“Got one for me?” I ask. He reaches back into his car and hands over one of his Winchester Marine model shotguns, fully loaded with buckshot and slugs if I know Markus. The model is not named for my former service branch, but for use in a saltwater environment. The guns gleam with stainless steel set off by the black polyurethane stock. Markus also carries a Beretta M9; old habits die hard it seems.

I look up and down the road, the houses look dark and curtains are still drawn to block out the late evening sun. The temperature will drop quite a bit soon. Tolan City isn’t in the desert, but the area is dry enough that the day and night temps can differ by as much as 50 degrees in late August. I look because I don’t want the residents to see us both armed for bear and going over to one of ‘their’ houses, and then leap to the conclusion that those two crazy vets are going to knock over their little community. Like everyone else, they watch the latest Hollywood fair and sure as Osama bin Laden is gone from this earth; some studio has put out a movie with a PTSD suffering vet going postal at some point in the recent past.

Markus has finished his survey as well; Army or Marines, we sooner or later learn to think alike in the ground forces. Not that ‘Flyboy Jones’ as I call Markus when he is being ornery had to spend much time walking the sands of Iraq. He flew the Apache for the Army, blowing up stuff from the air in a heavily armed and armored warhorse. Wonder if he could get ahold of one for tonight? This house is still creeping me out.

Markus nods his head as though understanding my feeling. Most likely he does at that.

I jack a round into the chamber just before Markus does the same. We watch the movies too, but we know that it doesn’t do any good to chamber a round when the enemy is already shooting. Across the street, I go to the door and wait while Markus makes another quick check of the backside of the house. Markus is tall enough to look over the six-foot privacy fence, the height limit according to the 40-page covenant the owners all sign. The privacy fence limit is absurd in any case; they all stare over at the neighbors from their second and third story rear balconies. Nothing has changed out back, so I knock on the door which to my surprise swings open. I move off to the side and bring out a flashlight. The evening sun shines in enough that we can see nothing to either side of the entryway that it illuminates. Markus shines his light to the right across me, and I do the opposite. I see a body lying on the floor, but it has too many matching legs to be a human. The family dog has passed.

Markus looks at me and we trade sides with our flashlight beams. There is a dead dog on his side too. From what I can see, the dog on his side looks almost desiccated. The weekend didn’t do that. What is going on here? Against my better judgment, I don’t call the cops right now, but go inside with Markus backing me up. We both turn off our cell phones and security radios. Inside, I break to the right and begin searching with my light; Markus I know will be doing the same to the left.

Dust is what I see the most; this house has not been used as a home for some time. How could we have missed that? The answer is that we didn’t. Vehicles have been coming and going at regular hours for months, perhaps years, or at least as far back as I can recall. We meet on the back side of the first floor in the kitchen. Normal appliances, normal furniture, but all covered in dust. Footprints in the dust go downstairs, but none go up. I cover those stairs while I signal to Markus to take a quick swing around the second floor.

He whispers to me when he returns, “the same as this floor,” by which I take it that I would find normal bedrooms and baths all covered in dust.

We descend the stairs.

The basement is different. There is no dust. We can see the entire basement from the bottom of the stair. My first guess would be that someone has turned the place into a game processing station. Stainless steel counters, grinders, walk-in freezers, but no ranges, ovens, or deep fryers. They didn’t cook down here, but they did process meat. Markus turns and covers me while I look in the freezers, or he turns so that he doesn’t have to see what we fear. I don’t know which. Ah, well, rank has its privileges I guess.

No corpses stare at me from the freezers, human or otherwise. The shelves are bare, but the freezers are running. This makes some sense as the hunting seasons will be getting underway shortly. Perhaps the meat has been consumed. Later I will desperately wish this thought had not crossed my brain.

We return to the ground floor and head out back to the garage/shop building the houses are allowed to have behind the pool and below the wooded hills surrounding the community.

We do the same procedure as we did at the front door of the house, but this time there are no dead mutts. The garage has an unusual inner door though. Once again those fears creep up on me. Markus reaches over and pats me on the back. This time we go in touching so that we don’t startle each other and fire off a round. The sense of creepiness comes from this place. I cannot tell what is making my hair stand on end. In a movie this would be the moment the scary music would start.

“Would you please stop humming that music!” I bark at Markus in a whisper.

“Sorry, it seemed kind of appropriate,” Markus whispers back.

I throw open the door.

The room is divided into two. A cool room separated by plastic see-through strips to keep the cool air in, and a loading dock with a van parked in the bay. Pallets of canned goods are ready to be shipped. I see the labels of several popular canned meats and entrées. We walk in a crouch over to the cool room.

Dog carcasses, skinned and hanging from the racks, hundreds of them, greet our eyes as we scan the room. Markus steps back and makes a mess all over the clean floor. I feel a strong urge to do the same. No one is here. It’s a good thing. Markus and I might have dropped the muzzles and lit ‘em up at that moment.

Outside I pause to do to an innocent bush what Markus just did to the floor. We make no jokes at each other’s expense; this doesn’t seem the moment for it. I begin to wonder where the bonuses are coming from, and suspect why there have been so many plain white vans this summer.

“Guess you better call in the cops, Joe,” Markus tells me. “I’m not sure I can speak straight to ‘em right now.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. “Do you suppose the boss is in on this?”

“Nah, he’s dumb, but not that dumb,” Markus looks around the neighborhood. “Like you and me, he probably figured this bunch was just behaving worse than usual. I know it’s easy to think that about the folks in this neighborhood.”

I agreed with his assessment and I dialed the number for the local cop shop. Didn’t look like an emergency. The vans that left earlier in the day, when no guard was on duty, were probably making their deliveries now and would be back in the morning as usual. The vans we saw leave late this evening were probably the service vans, the real ones. The boss would see vans coming in and would make his little notes for charges by which house they went to; the night guard would see only some of them going out, but since the boss didn’t talk to us much, we had never compared the numbers. Someone had set up one foul operation just across the street from us.

After the cops arrived to bust the place, performed their forensic NCIS thing, and then set up a little meeting for the owners, I walked back to the office and quietly removed all the cans from one of the cupboards. Better that the kid didn’t know what we had been eating.

The Value of the Given Word

Two men walked down a hallway in an upscale apartment building. The men wore suits of an American cut, less than immaculate, but well dressed. Taciturn by nature, the men eschewed polite banter. They kept watch without appearing intrusive to the few people passing by. A tenant in apartment 5b saw them through her peephole and put them down as employees of a corporation requiring the suit and tie, a legal firm perhaps, one with an older gentleman as the CEO. The men did not wear sunglasses inside, because such things made no sense outside of Hollywood or a spy novel.

Glimpses of shoulder harnesses for firearms did not go unnoticed by the pedestrian traffic. The men made little attempt to hide the hardware, but did not advertise either. At the door of the last apartment in the hall, Harris, a black man wearing the grey pinstripe, knocked softly and waited. Burton, the Caucasian of the pair wearing the navy suit, stood patiently but watchfully off to the side.

No answer came in response to the summons. Harris raised an eyebrow and knocked once more. After a few seconds, the men drew their pistols and let themselves into the apartment with a key Harris pulled from a pocket with his off hand. The door opened on a neat apartment with no human occupant in sight.

A search confirmed the unoccupied state.

“What do you think?” Burton produced a ring of keys and small plastic tabs with numbers imprinted on them.

“Unknown, check the usual place.”

Burton unlocked the dial to a small safe embedded in the concrete wall of the lesser bedroom.

The only two-bedroom apartment in the building, the building manager would occupy this space by design. However, the owner hired a manager with a family of six children and in a gesture not in keeping with most building owners in the city, gave them a 4-bedroom suite on the ground floor. This apartment let for half the going rate to the man Burton and Harris expected to find waiting for them at the appointed time. The man had never before missed his meeting.

“Not here. Beginning search procedure.”

“Got it. Gun safe in the bedroom closet.”

“The package is intact?”

“Yes, fully marked and ready for transport.”

“Why the gun safe?”

“We may never know, Mr. Burton. Calling it in.”

Harris pulled a basic cell phone from his suit pocket and pressed a single button. “Subject not present, package recovered. Returning to base,” Harris paused to listen. “Roger that.”

“Cleansing?”

“No, he’s there!” For the first time that afternoon, Harris looked surprised, for him a rare display of emotional pyrotechnics.

“Return home?”

“Yes, with all due speed.”

The man missing his appointment staggered into the bottom level of a classy, but at this time closed, nightclub on the city’s Left Bank, an attempt to capture the cache of the Paris district of the same name. He fell rather than sat into a booth in front of a largish man, a football player a few years out of his retirement from the NFL. He carried a dirty, but otherwise respectable briefcase tightly clasped to his chest.

The big man looked with concern on his colleague.

“I have it all. All of it,” he babbled. “You don’t have to send them. I recovered all of it.”

“Harris and Burton are there now, Carson.”

“You didn’t have to! I’m good to my word. I don’t know what happened to the regular package, but I got all of it back! Every dollar, you can count!” He banged the briefcase on the table. A few corners of the bills inside showed in the crack of the case, as though packed in a great hurry.

The big man opened the case and looked at the disorganized mess of currency inside.

“Mr. Bean! Run this through the counter, please.”

A man walked out of an office a few yards away, took the case without a word and returned to the same office.

“Why did you not wait?”

Carson Keane, the runt-sized, plain looking man now lying in the booth almost fell asleep before he could answer.

“I haven’t slept since last Tuesday. I lost the package, all of it. I don’t know how, but it wasn’t there when I checked. The product was gone and the money too. I went out on my own and made back every dollar. I’ve worked non-stop to make it up to you. My word is all I have and I won’t diminish its value.”

“Carson, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, not now, the money is all there!”

Bean returned to the table with a slip of paper.

“Carson, you have almost $6,000 too much here. There is no need for the extra amount.”

“I…I, may have lost count. I’m not even sure what day it is. But, just keep it. Don’t send them to kill me!”

“Carson, we are not the Mafia, and you are not some kind of dope dealer. Why are you acting this way? Harris and Burton meet you each month at the appointed time to escort you here. They are armed to protect you, not to hurt you.”

“But, I lost the package! My word has no value if you cannot trust me.”

“Harris found the package in your gun safe, Carson. Why did you store it there instead of the safe we provide?”

“I don’t know…” and with that admission, Carson Keane did the honorable thing, he passed out on the bench.

Harris and Burton arrived in the nightclub in a more dignified manner. The men brought their package over to the boss.

“What happened to him?” Burton asked.

“Panic. He spent the last week making up for money he never lost. Did you see anything missing in his apartment?”

Harris and Burton looked at each other for a moment, picturing the apartment search in their minds.

“The books, boss. He sold his rare books to make up the package shortfall.”

“We’ll never get those back. Those folks don’t let nothin’ go unless they want to,” the boss craned his neck toward the office. “Bean!”

The requested man appeared once more without a word.

“Take this money to our bank. Invest it for Carson in something he can’t touch for a while, on your way out call Dr. Peetz and ask her to stop by.”

Bean left as silently as he arrived the first two times.

“I’m quiet, but I swear that man has never spoken in his life,” Burton remarked.

“Oh, he talks. I hired him because he does so little of it. I like to talk and I like quiet people around me,” the boss said as he leaned back in the booth.

“May I speak, boss,” Harris asked meekly.

“Of course you can talk! I already got Carson acting like I’m some kind of Don Corleone. Don’t you start!”

“Boss, your theatrics are getting out of hand. You got us going to the sales reps like some kind of duo from Pulp Fiction. Is it any wonder that Carson panicked?”

“He got his money from the bank a little late one evening, and went to the wrong safe. You want them to pay in cash and you pay us to escort them here so no one robs them. We look like some kind of drug dealers,” Burton complained.

“We are drug dealers!” the boss protested. “Just legitimate ones… and I like to put on a show.”

Burton poked Harris and nodded toward the door. A job was a job and these days not a sure thing. If the boss wanted to run his licensed pharmacy like some sort of movie drug kingpin, who were they to complain.

Such a Nice Couple

The wife had spent a bit of time staring across the alley at our neighbor’s house. You know the one, the house in the neighborhood that is just a little bigger than the others with a few more toys scattered about the property. Not kid toys to be sure, but the big boy’s toys that get used only once or twice a year. The giant 5th-wheel camper with three pullouts, the fishing boat powerful enough to pull two skiers; that’s the kind of toys, I mean. That house where the prosperous couple with no children live.

They didn’t grow up wealthy or have some hefty inheritance as far as I know. Instead they both work in good jobs at the corporate headquarters of our local big employer. You know that one too; that big employer that most little towns look for, court, and marry for life. Although sometimes the marriage ends in divorce and the factory or plant moves over to China or Mexico and leaves everyone in the bread lines. Loyalty isn’t what it was back before the big depression. A company can look out for only its own self just as a man might do.

The one, Jen, likes the short form of the name, works in accounting. The other, Jamison, tends to the long form of his name and works as a division manager for Big Employer. We don’t know exactly what they earn of course, but the signs point to plenty and to spare, which may be why the wife suddenly called down a curse on them this afternoon.

No, not a voodoo sort of thing like those folks do down in the Mississippi Delta, but a more subtle and expensive sort of curse: She wanted us to pray for them to be blessed with a baby. A baby? Whoa there, doggies! How mean can you get?

I guess that would be a little bit of hypocrisy on my part. After all Mabel, that’s the wife, and me had a couple or four or five of our own as I seem to recall. I like to kid around, because us old folks can do that. I even remember the kids’ names four days out of every six. Mabel has to help me sometimes; I can’t always separate the greats from the grands when they all come over to visit me in the home. Wait until you get to 96 and see if you can sort ‘em all out as well as you did back in the good old days.

The evening is fine and I decide to dance with Mabel to the music on the sound system. It’s getting kind of hard to find our music anymore. Thank God for the satellite receiver; I don’t believe two old folks like us could cut a waltz to this hip-hop thing they do now. Fortunately, I have a CD player with my new stereo system. We can buy CDs of all the old greats we listened to back in our day. The grandkids are starting to enter college, except for one or two in the military, and we tend to laugh at our children. Not the little squiggly kind of laugh like that cartoon fellow on the television set does either, but the big bwaa-ha-ha kind of evil laugh that the best bad guys do. Now the kids get to see how much it costs to put someone through college like we did.

“I see that Junior’s kid landed with Colonel Crowe’s old outfit,” I call out to the wife.

“Yes, Michael called after it came on the news last week,” she hollers from the kitchen. “He figured they must be the unit landing down there since they left just a couple of weeks ago.”

She is confused again, calling the kid by my name when I know that it’s Junior. We’ll get it straightened out when we dance together to the radio this Friday night. There are still a few stations on the AM dial that play ‘our’ music. Ah, the band music of those days.

The kids made it through the Depression mostly because they had not been conceived by that time. My dad had a good job, a necessary job, and he had done nothing to misplace it. They like to ‘lose’ jobs nowadays, like you can lose your car keys or something. He had to take a big pay cut, most everyone with a job did, because the company sales went way down for a few years, but he kept the position. He and mom tightened their belts and brought us kids into the living room to do the same thing to us. Misery loves a companion after all! My mother tightened her belt so much that I thought her top half was going to pop off and roll down the stairs. Times were tough for everyone, but we made it all right. As the Depression faded into frugal memories, the kids got their jobs back or got new ones and moved off to have children of their own.

The wife and I got to have some fun again, for a little while after our wedding, until someone went and decided to hold a big war. According to the papers everyone got involved too. Our country had fighting going on all over the planet once old Hirohito decided the war just couldn’t go on without us any longer, like it had been doing. The frugal times didn’t come back quite so much, but we had to give up all our metal junk and had rationing. You might think rationing sounded bad, but we had all just endured years of depression. The rations seemed almost like a time of high living and general plenty to most of us. Of course at that time we didn’t know how much better it was going to get here in the 1950’s.

Now the couple across the way there didn’t have to grow up during the depression. So I doubt know they know what penny-wise is. They can live on less, they just choose not to. It’s all a part of this new prosperity we are enjoying after the big wars. I guess the second one over in Korea wasn’t a big one as some people call it, a World War, but just a police action or some such. I don’t know of any police that went over there, but a lot of young men did just like their older brothers did a few years earlier. For some reason, the two wars left us in good shape financially, as a country I mean. I was too old to fight in either one.

Heck, the wife likes to remind me that I was too old for the First World War, although it seemed to be a European kind of ‘world’ war from what I could tell. I must admit though that I seemed to get old at about the right time. Living out your 80’s during a time of national prosperity is pretty good timing, praise the Lord God Almighty! The old folks who spent their last years in the Great Depression had it pretty tough at times. When the family cannot afford to keep a fellow and he is too old to go back to work or stand in a bread line, then I guess he does what a few of them did: let the good Lord know that now is a good time to come home and sit down to wait for it. Jesus told John that suffering would come, and boy it surely does at times!

As a bit of a historical piece myself, I have seen the great changes in the land. I remember the days of outhouses and chamber pots, cooking in wood stoves, and eating everything on our plates since there was no way to keep it. Now we have airplanes and cars, refrigerators and gas ranges, radio sets and television sets, and this telephone that the wife is using to fire up the ol’ prayer chain. I guess she really does want to inflict a little bundle of financial damage on that couple!

I wonder if she remembers how much those kids cost us. Could be that her memory is fading like mine is. Don’t tell her I said that though; she thinks her memory is just fine even though she called the firstborn son by my name the other day. I done told her that his name is Junior, everyone knows that!

Speaking of kids, I wonder if those folks across the alley know how to go about makin’ some. Not sure that I can help them with it now. As I recall, it started out as an inexpensive and mostly fun sort of hobby that somehow got completely out of hand along the way. After the fifth kid came out, I began to wonder if we might not be doing it wrong. I asked the pastor about that, but he seemed to think that the kids would keep on coming until God saw fit to stop ‘em. I talked to the Lord about that and he seemed to agree with me that five was perhaps a bit more than enough. The wife claims I just got too old, but who’s going to believe someone that hangs stretchy brown stockings all around our tub so that a man just about hangs himself each time he takes a bath?

Uh, oh, the phone calls are finished. I make a break for the back door, but I fail to get enough steam up and get caught before I can make my escape. That’s one problem with having a wife 30 years or so younger than me; I try to run but she can catch me every time. She’s 53 and still quick.

“Where you going in such a hurry?” she asks.

“I was a goin’ to see if those folks wanted a baby before you get ‘em one with your prayer chain and all, young lady,” I know enough not to say ‘old’ anywhere near her.

“I spoke to Jen yesterday, dear,” she says. “They have been trying for years, but still no baby.”

“Aha, they just know how to do it right. I knew we were doing something wrong back in the day!”

“We did everything right, my love,” the wife gets in a good one. “Just think how many kids we would have if you hadn’t gone off to those wars.”

“Wars! I was too old for the wars. I have grandkids in school!”

“We shouldn’t have got started so early in our marriage if you didn’t want kids in college already,” she says while leaning into my chest. She knows I still like that even at my advanced age.

“We didn’t start that early,” I complain.

“Bosh! You couldn’t wait,” she tells me. “We didn’t even make it twenty miles out of town before you pulled into a motel. You called that resort in San Diego and told them to hold our room until the next day.”

“An old man would never do such a thing!” I correct her, must be those memory problems of hers again.

“Oh poo! The twins were born nine months to the day after our honeymoon…” she pauses, “You haven’t been telling folks that you’re 80 again, have you?” she smacks me one on the chest. “You’re 44 and I’m 37, and it is NOT too late for us to have another child!”

While we straighten this out, we dance to our music on a new record player with two speakers. What a marvel of technology!

“But I have scars; I must be really old to have scars there,” I try to set her straight, but she won’t have it.

“You have scars ‘there’ because you didn’t keep your fanny down like that nice Sgt. Fisher told you to in boot camp, my love,” she sets me straight instead.

Indeed, I had served in the Pacific with 2/8, that’s 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment for you civilian fellers. The ‘old man’ Major (later Lt. Col.) Henry Crowe had led us through Betio and Iwo, and then I had been called back to go over to Korea just a few years later. I never told the wife, but the resort where we spent our 20th anniversary had been close to Camp Pendleton so that I could report in to Sgt. Fisher and let him know that his training didn’t take.

Actually, the wounding of my poor buttocks had been a mistake on the sniper’s part. I had been temporarily assigned to the Army to ferret out a supply thief and had a desk job in a tent for a spell. I don’t know what happened on his end, but I got up suddenly, for no reason that I can recall, from my chair at the desk in the rear, and got it, well, in the rear, instead of in my cranium. The boys on the perimeter had taken care of the sniper, but my war was finished. The armistice got signed before I even left the MASH unit.

A couple of jovial doctors by the name of Pierce and Honeycutt had a grand old time with me and my wound. I can’t say that I blame them; it isn’t every day you get a Marine with hole in both butt cheeks. Their little joke about running the still through my rear end and putting a spigot on my hip got a little old, but I can’t help that it still makes me laugh. Sorry about the bad pun there.

“So you say this is just a nice couple trying to have a baby and we should pray for them?” I ask the wife.

“Yes, very nice,” she says.

“Noticeably insincere, cunningly evasive… that kind of nice?” I know this is going to get me in trouble.

“Nooo,” she laughs. “Where did you come up with that awful thing?”

“Pierce and Honeycutt, of course,” I admit.

“I think we better put that spigot on your hip to keep you out of trouble, love,” she isn’t supposed to know about that!

“Have you been writing to that mean ol’ Hawkeye again?”

“Yes, and he spills the beans every time he writes,” she confesses.

“I thought he died last year?” I said, confused that Pierce would still be writing letters to us after his death.

“Hawkeye isn’t dead, dear. It’s 1959, we had our anniversary last year in San Diego, and you brought me to meet that nice Sgt. Major Fisher and his lovely wife,” she straightens me out again. “We danced at the 1st Marine Division Ball on Camp Pendleton, and you proposed to me again.”

“Did you accept again,” I asked mischievously.

“I said that I would think it over,” she pokes fun at me and laughs as we dance to the record playing.

The sound of the music is good, coming as it does from the jukebox I got at the auction with my back pay. The war is finally over for me and my wonderful wife met me at the dock in San Diego with our children, all five of them bouncing around and making a ruckus ten times their size. Little John is four this year; I have missed a lot of his growing up. The twins, Michael Jr. and Mary Ann are seven already. Mark in the middle is 6, and Millicent is 5 as we somehow managed to have them almost exactly one year apart each time until the war came late in ’42.

Six months after my return, I suddenly realized that we had made that most common of parental blunders and named all of our kids with the same first letter.

“Good heavens! How you do come up with stuff!” My wife-to-be gazes in wonder at me, “Did you see all that from just one kiss?”

“I saw our lifetime ahead of us, darling one,” I say. “You know we have all of it to live after the wedding.”

“June 25, 1938,” she sighs. “A date that will live in my memory to the end, dearest love.”

--------------

“What did the old guy want, love?” Jen asks.

“He misses his wife terribly, I think. He wanted to tell us that we can’t have kids because we are greedy,” James replies.

“Are you greedy?”

“Yes, greedy for you, dear one!”

“James.”

“Yes, Jenson.”

“You would think even an old guy could see that we can’t have kids in the way he means because we are both men,” Jenson says.

“I agree, my love,” James looks at the old man holding no one, dancing in his kitchen to a music only he can hear. “He sure does cut those old dances though. You have to give him that!”

Settled and Coming Back

Whoo, long time gone! Well, Toledo Ted has been on hold for a year now while I went through the wringer. The first edit of the novel sits on my hard drive, and notebook drive, and at least one backup, but I have done little but look at a few notes. I knew that much work was required, but I could give little. A similar problem ended my first college try - lack of funds.

As expected, and it does make a certain amount of sense even in my not-quite-grounded brain, with no income I could not stay in Sidney in a house with payments. With more than $1,000 due each month for mortgage and taxes, my bank account was like a tub with a large drain and no stopper. I held out for a miracle, God showed me another way.

In 2001, I moved into my new house and after the moving in was done, said that I would not move for at least ten years. On April 16, 2012, eleven years to the day after my closing date, I looked at my tax returns and knew then with no miracle from God that I would have to move, and in fact should have moved some months previously. I still maintain that God has a wonderful sense of humor, eleven years to the day, yeah buddy! Even I can laugh at that timing.

The housing market in Sidney recovered as the main employer began hiring again. I sold my house at a good price, but that very market also determined that the downwardly mobile could not afford a lesser home in that same town. With my real estate agent we looked at every home available in my price range, and we looked at some frightening places too! As of now, most of them are rented out at steep rates. Sidney is booming and I had to leave. I like to say that I lived in a tough neighborhood... to go broke in.

As I put my house up for sale, one neighbor bought a Jeep to play with. Another went to the lake in their long fifth-wheel camper with the boat trailing behind, almost a road train. A neighbor across the street bought a new boat and then sold his house and moved into the McMansions across the way. Construction projects went on all around my house from the hail damage, most were upgrades: I sold all my rifles to make the insurance deductibles. As I sit here crying into my blog, I had to laugh at it all this morning.

The stress of selling, buying, and moving this summer came crashing down on me in October as the seasonal change began in the daylight. The depression from PTSD tends to go through good periods and bad, more of a month to month basis than a day by day. I am affected by the seasons, though I do like autumn most of the four. It seems a bit unfair at times that the season I like best would also be one the PTSD tends to hit me harder. How do I describe this thing, this post-traumatic stress disorder?

Describe a new restaurant with people waiting in line to get in so good is the food produced by the chef, and I am likely to literally take a step back in terror. Lines are something most folks put up with to eat in their favorite restaurants. Both can trigger panic in me. Guests to my home are an invasion, and we speak of people that I know and love, not strangers. Dining in a friend's home for the first time, I may not be able to eat so anxious am I. Yet, I will go home and make up for it in a comfort food binge. Anxiety over imaginary situations beats me during idle moments, if I give free reign to my imagination. I can be anxious about being depressed, or turn it around and give in to depression over my anxiety. How can a person live this way?

Growing up in a church, I often wondered that same thing. Some persons it seemed were always on the prayer list with this ailment or that surgery. They got by in the same way I have discovered I'm sure. Day by day, prayer and trusting in God. Which brings us to the laughing. With all of my crying breaking out this morning, my electric griddle refused to give up my fried egg. That's what I had to laugh at! I don't believe that I have it so bad, if a stuck egg is such a noteworthy event in my snivelling.

Marine veteran of Grenada-Lebanon, survivor of a terrible auto accident that cost my friend Mike his life, terminated suddenly from a company I helped grow for almost 20 years, of course I have PTSD, or as I sometimes call it post-traumatic distress. I mean, why wouldn't I? I'm like that damsel I wanted to rescue in my youthful dreams of love and marriage, only it's me that needs the rescueing. I can laugh or cry over this thorn in my side, to use the Pauline expression, and if I have the choice I'll take laughing. Sometimes the tears catch me by surprise and I have to laugh later as with the little basement flooding that came up the other day in my new home.

Yes, with the proceeds from my house sale, I was able to buy an older home in a smaller town that isn't booming. The creditors have been satiated for the time being, though the howling and snapping is never far from the phone. The good news is no mortgage and the taxes are much lower across the state line. The house is much smaller, but I had to sell quite a few things to get by anyway, so there was less to fit in. The cats have made their adjustments, and most of the wailing and moaning stopped after a week or so. The cats remained mostly quiet after the move.

Is it time to take up Toledo Ted again? Something in this experience must be what God would have me to write. I choose to give God the glory in my weakness. I may not be able to hold down a regular job, but I can write. Perhaps my affliction is the only way God could keep me at home and writing. I don't have all the answers, but at least I can feed the question pawing at my jeans right now. He wants his kibble and writing to you is secondary. Without the cat I would probably sit too long and get too comfortable writing.

God bless you,
Bucky

A Long Time Gone

Good Monday morning on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Yes, I must apologize for my long absence. The holidays came and went. I gave away the only present I received this past Christmas. (A little detour into crybaby land there.) December is usually a tough month for many people and I am no different. The short days tend to get us down as the winter solstice approaches and some of us have one of those days in the month too. Not just a run of the mill bad day, but an anniversary such as Tolkien wrote about in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins had a couple of days that tended to haunt him each year. I didn't understand this until life laid a couple of 'em on me. December 4th is the anniversary of a bad auto accident and at that time each year I tend to get depressed more easily than at other times. You probably have days or times like that too. If not, praise God!

Back to the self-publishing experience. Last week, the cover art was completed... and I haven't brought myself to look at it yet. Part of the reason for that is that I have not done my part in rewriting the novel yet. I have gone through another period of what Twain called 'having nothing in the tank'. Whether this comes from the post traumatic stress or from God's own timing I don't know, but I do tend to get impatient and frustrated with it. Now the middle of January is here and I hope and pray that it is time to get underway once more.

Of course, when I began this new path in life, I would not be subject to the career hazards of writers. You know, the writer's block, the down times, and others. I would crank out book after book, dominate the bestseller lists, and just generally be above all the things that other authors have to contend with. You can see the fall coming in that one a mile off! Yep, I have proved to be a human writer just like every other. There are times when I despair of publishing anything at all. Times when I am ready to write and times when nothing comes. Times when I trust in God, and the times when I want to shout, "Hey, are you up there? Remember me!" I know that writing takes practice, but days may pass with only reading and no writing accomplished. Is that my fault? Perhaps not, it may be that times such as these are simply part of the process of moving from one season in life to a totally different and new season. I worked for nearly twenty years in a big corporation where assignments and duties were given to me, deadlines were set by higher authority, and I was not the one calling the shots. Now I have the freedom of the self-employed writer... and the pitfalls as well.

Learning a new life is never easy. Things from the old life cling. Some need to be let go. Believe it or don't, I tried to use project management early on in this writing thing. Plan a schedule, stick to it, draft the charts, estimate the times, and all that crap. Phoo, none of that worked. I hated the project management stuff in my old job; so I drug it with me to inflict on myself in this new one. Every time I say or think that I want to have thus and such done by this date it is like turning off a switch. Like a recovering alcoholic, I have found that I just need to pray and then take it one day at a time. Interesting comparison there, but perhaps not so far off the mark. Coming out of Corporameia or Cubeville, to use the Dilbert term, requires a recovery period like, say, the rest of your life. I remember even today the dread of Monday morning that started on Sunday afternoon. I can't believe how long I worked under that stress too! Now when things get tough the temptation is to go back? Yikes!

Lest this be all about bad news, I did start an experiment before Christmas to work out six days per week. The experimental part is to see if this will help in writing. Certainly it will help my health in general. I'm no Tebow. He is a young and fit athlete; I am no longer young, haven't been fit for a while, and could never claim to be an athlete. However, I use an ad-libed step workout with a small ladder and a step. A couple episodes of Home Improvement are used to set a workout length and to take my mind off the dreadful boredom of exercising alone in the basement. While it's not exactly Pilates, I think the workout has done wonders for me already. I can't speak to the writing effects yet, the jury is still out on that one. Let me take a look at that book cover...

Yours in Christ,
Bucky

The Editor's Letter

Good Saturday to you! The edited manuscript arrived with a letter from the editor, as opposed to your normal letter to the editor from the local newspaper. This letter gave the editor's overall impression of my work and made suggestions about the plot lines, the characters, dialogue, and structure of the novel. I have some work to do, but again, as a first time author, this was expected. Other interesting problems that I carried throughout the book included: grammatical errors, punctuation, a lack of wases and wereses, and that dreaded passive voice.

The most interesting to me is how I learned through three years of college to avoid using 'was' or 'were' like they were some sort of transmittable disease. In academic writing this is a major rule, but the editor made liberal use of the two little words. The story is set in 1893 and narrated by one of the characters in 1958 so using wases and wereses does make it much easier. It seems such a small thing, but when telling a story don't you use was and were all the time? I know I do. Speaking of that college writing, I had at one time trained the passive voice out of my writing, but it crept back in somehow. I'll have to blame it on the blogging.

Larger issues have to do with my trying to write too much into the novel. Is the novel an epic journey as Ted is tossed out of England and ends up in the West, or is it the story of the coming together of the team to fight crime, or even a story about the changing West from Old West to the Industrial Age? Now that the editor kindly mentioned this, it does make clear the dilemma. I have so many ideas, but not all of them can fit in the first book. I wanted Ted in his home much more quickly, but added in more stories to the journey west. Some of it must wait for future novels, I'll get the team together in Sidney quickly and focus on the incidents that add up to someone trying to knock off my new state marshal. A major rewrite, but not an impossible task. I just need to give up some of my precious words. But I get to write new ones too!

Compliments on my dialogue and characters though, except for the overuse of he said/she said. Not a problem there, I had no idea how often that should be put in, so I went kind of whole hog on it. Time to go in and trim that porker down a bit! Good questions from the editor on the likelihood of some events in the story. If the editor is confused by something, no doubt readers would be as well. More work to do on explaining some things better. So where do I stand on getting the book to the reader? For that, I came up with one of those crude western analogies.

Imagine for a moment that I am a cattle rancher. I want to serve a nice steak, my novel, to a diner who is the reader. The diner comes into a restaurant some miles away, but I have no way to get the steer made into a steak on the plate. Through some stumbling about in the world of publishing, I have found a butcher for my steer. This butcher is the editor.

My first submission turned out to be three steers, but the butcher only needed one. I must decide which steer will be the first steak and store the other two carcasses for later use. The butcher then started trimming away the parts that don't belong on a steak. Too much fat is the redundant paragraphs, sentences, and phrases where I said the same thing too many times over and over again, redundantly, like hammering on the same nail until the wood is all dinged up, and pounding the same point home too many times, and you get the picture. Other parts were missing, like trying to serve up a steak with an odd hole in the center. As I rework the steer(novel), the future submissions will become a nice steak, the broiling of it, and the addition of the nice side dishes such as the book cover, descriptive blurb and so on to make a satisfying meal for the customer.

The story ideas are good and the characters are loveable. Learning can be difficult when a person is at that point of feeling pretty dern stupid. No, the editor's letter didn't make me feel that way. Like many new authors, I want my first work to be just by-golly, wow, perfect! The kind of skipping past the learning and getting better part we tend to want in this 'get it shipped the next day and pay for it later' world we live in. More good news: I can take much of this criticism and put it to use on the other book that is nearly complete as I have most likely made many of the same mistakes.

Enjoy the Thanksgiving Saturday! Bucky

The First Edit Impression

Good morning! The first copy of the copy edited manuscript arrived this morning. My first impression is pretty much as expected: a lot of marks and comments. That is good news. I would have been deeply suspicious had the editor simply said something like, "It seems okay to me." Like all writers I have read many books, and though I do not want mine to sound exactly the same as all other novels, if that is even possible, I can tell that from the reader's view the novel needs a lot of work before publication. Of course, part of me wants to get a 100 on the test, a slap on the back and a "good job", a new 'star' in the writing world comment, on my first try, even though the other part of my mind says that it ain't nearly there yet.

Now the work begins on my part. Accept or not to accept suggested changes, corrections of my grammar and syntax to be implemented, including that ol' dreaded passive voice, and then a review to hopefully read a novel that reads like a novel. I thought that I once had that passive voice thing fixed in my writing, but it seems that I've gotten sloppy again somewhere. Regarding grammar and syntax, I will never claim to be a pro in those areas. In college writing I depended heavily on Word's correction features. Note to self: check the settings in Word again, they must have reverted to the defaults at some point.

The edit took exactly the time quoted when I turned the manuscript in to CreateSpace. How long it will take for me to return it to the editors for a second round will be seen as I get started today and continue through the holiday weekend. I used to hate being on call or working through holidays back in the corporate world. This is different in that it's an 'I want to' instead of a duty that came to me through assignment or the short straw.

I am excited to have the manuscript back to see what a professional editor thinks. A quick glance at the comments section shows both likes and dislikes, and the occasional verbal head smack on my part. The "you know better than that" goes without explicit statement, but I'll take the hit! I read one comment wherein the editor confused who spoke to whom. That is my fault and needs to be fixed. I am glad to know those things before I attempt to publish. If I confuse a professional editor, I really have screwed it up!

Further impressions and notes as the manuscript review continues!

God bless you on this Thanksgiving weekend,
Bucky

Sticking to the End

A cool Saturday afternoon on the high plains, even colder (in a manner of speaking) out east where our Cornhuskers got stomped by Michigan this afternoon. No entry last Saturday, deer season began out here and I was out in the field. On the other hand, there has been nothing to report on the book publishing. The four weeks to edit my copy for the first time should be finished next week just before Thanksgiving. I expect that this first round of editing should look a lot like those tests that I didn't study for back in the day: lots of corrections and comments. The only difference will be that I never took a test 98,000 words long!

I have heard nothing on the book cover design yet, but that is not a concern at this point. The editing will probably take a few more months (multiple rounds at a month or so each) and the next book should go in soon. Whooee, that is one odd shade of lipstick! Sorry, watching an old Budd Boetticher western, Decision at Sundown. The actress was married to the director, so I suppose that explains how she can get away with orange lips in his movie.

So, how can I help my neighbor? I don't refer to the persons living in the house next door, but the one out there like me. You may know him or her; a job lost to the recession a couple of years ago; the savings from bank accounts, IRA's, or 401k is about gone, and yet, like me, he or she hopes this new career will work out. Now the time has come to put our work out there, to see if we can make it without a big corporation paying us every two weeks. I'm there with them. Do I stumble at the end? Cave in to the temptation to seek work with an employer once more? These questions seem rather melodramatic to me, or maybe that should be, 'of me'. Trusting in what God has called me to do seems so much easier.

Using my retirement funds and savings to live on, risking my house, and paying to publish a couple of novels that I do not know will sell seems a bit like a poker player who hasn't looked at his cards going all in. Did I 'write' a straight flush or a hand full of junk cards? Actually, that's not a bad line; maybe I have learned something in these three or so years of working on this writing thing. Praise the Lord for this new life! The thought of going back to the old corporate job, no matter how good the pay, just makes the blood run cold.

Have a great week! I plan to write my first impressions of the editing job as soon as it arrives. Until then: trust in God, have a great Thanksgiving, and just believe!

Bucky

A Bit Slow This Week

The first work, The Rumble of Wheels, is going through the 4-week editing process. After what looked to be a nothing week, the promotional text and author bio arrived today, or perhaps yesterday. I don't recall checking the Member Dashboard yesterday though I try to do that on a daily basis. I will plead one small excuse. The roofers were here yesterday. My advice: do not try to write in your home office when the house is getting a new roof. The cats and I looked pretty much the same at the end of the day: hair standing on end, claws out, and big, staring eyeballs; you know, sort of like people do after the latest Paranormal movie.

Promotional text is a purchased package of descriptions for the novel and the author. The Createspace specialists make very short, short, and extended descriptions such as you might find on the dust jacket flaps for a book cover, or on the back book cover of paperbacks. I downloaded the descriptions and they did a far better job than I could manage to do in the questionnaires. The author bio even sounded interesting. The book description sounded like something I would buy at the bookstore. Hope they get it in sometime soon. I want to read this one! An odd feeling to be sure when I realize that I wrote the thing.

The work on the first of the Tribulation Warriors novels continues. I did not turn it in this week as I realized that through a bit of mucking around in it I had, well, mucked it up. The logical flow of events between Rome, Virginia, and Wyoming had become confusing even to the writer (oops, that's me!).

For your enjoyment, the promotional text for my first novel, and a bit about some fellow who thinks he can write.

Title: The Rumble of Wheels
Author: Bucky Denzil
This is a working draft of your promotional text. Please let us know what changes need to be made. Should you choose to revise on your own, please adhere to the character limitations next to each description. The sections that do not have a character limit included do not have a restricted word count.

Sentence Description (200 characters, including spaces) A unique work of Christian historical fiction, The Rumble of Wheels by Bucky Denzil relates the story of Toledo Ted, who becomes the new state marshal of western Nebraska.

Short Description (2,000 characters, including spaces) The Rumble of Wheels by Bucky Denzil tells the story of Theodore Lagenfells. When his English aristocratic father dies his elder brother becomes the titled heir, and with the help of four thugs, arranges for Ted’s passage to America to avoid any trouble. Just in time for the Panic of 1893, Ted lands in Boston and is recruited by Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, which has mysteriously been keeping track of him. Ted ventures out to explore the new country on horseback, but gets lost in the white birch forests of upstate New York. Exhausted, he promises his life to Jesus, and following the south shoreline of one of the Great Lakes, he arrives in Toledo, which is far short of his intended destination. From then on, he is dubbed Toledo Ted. Training for his job takes him to Chicago during the Columbian Exposition, and although posted to Denver, he never quite makes it to Colorado because of his habit of leaving the railroad to explore.

In Omaha, Governor Crounse arranges with the Pinkertons to hire Ted as the state marshal for western Nebraska, and sends him off to Sidney. Everyone seems to know Ted will be arriving in town, and Sam, a civil war veteran, preacher, teacher, and bounty hunter, gathers together some deputies. A team that includes Zeph De Beers, who is heir to a diamond fortune and originally from South Africa; Long Rain, a local farmer, farrier, and gunsmith who comes from the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho; and Bo, a farmer and blacksmith who tinkers with just about any machine or technology. However, the reader soon learns that someone wants Toledo Ted six feet under. Could it be the mastermind behind the recent train robberies? Or Jayne Crowe’s father, Big John, who is opposed to Ted’s interest in his daughter? Feelings can linger a long time in the West. Does the threat to Ted’s life have something to do with the Wyoming range war? Faith-filled and fun to read, this Western thriller is guaranteed to keep readers gripped until the very last page.

Extended Description

Narrated with a few anecdotes and comments by Long Rain, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, The Rumble of Wheels by Bucky Denzil tells the tale of Theodore “Toledo Ted” Lagenfells. Set in late nineteenth century America, the story opens with Toledo Ted, the new state marshal of western Nebraska, clinging precariously to a cliff face while he wonders how long it will be before Zeph, one of his deputies, doubles back to check on him. Birds are eating the seeds he gathered in his britches, and he can’t help but laugh—carefully. Following yet another stage robbery, Zeph had galloped after the crooks while Ted turned his horse, Artos, up the bluff to cut off the gang’s escape route. However, the dust from the prairie brought Artos to an abrupt halt, and after a short flight, Ted found himself in this predicament. Trying to swing a leg up only causes him to almost lose his grip several times, and he is sure it is only a matter of time before he drops into what he is certain is a vast ravine below. “Are you busy down there, marshal?” says a voice from above. Ted wonders if it might be God speaking to him, until he identifies an amused Long Rain, who happens to be another of his deputies. When Ted dares to look down, he discovers the ground is not too far away. A big ledge breaking up the cliff stands a mere foot higher than a fully outstretched Ted, who lets go with a grateful sigh, sending the birds fluttering in every direction. Flexing his hands to get some feeling back into them, Ted can see Zeph on the stage road below. The gang has made a successful getaway yet again. As Long Rain waits for his orders, Ted wonders what would happen if the quiet, yet capable Indian ever met up with his bombastic and inept brother in England, the new Lord Lagenfells, who is behind the very reason Ted landed in America in the first place. As time goes on, it’s obvious someone wants to end the new marshal’s life, but who could that be? The mastermind behind the robberies? Ted shows an interest in Jayne Crowe when he visits the Fair Breezes Ranch, a misnamed ranch if ever there was one. Does her father, Big John, want him killed? Ted doesn’t know, but when he finds out, it all has a lot to do with betrayal. “Toledo Ted is much like us,” says the author. “We pick up names we don’t like, are often wrong in our assumptions, and have friends and a God who cares about us.” Humorous, compelling, and full of dramatic action, The Rumble of Wheels is a fun and entertaining read.

Back Cover Text (250 words or less)
Everyone in Sidney seems to know that Toledo Ted will soon take over as the new state marshal for western Nebraska. He has quite a history. Born Theodore Lagenfells, he’s the second son of a late English lord. Unfortunately, with the help of a bunch of thugs, he was shipped off to America when his brother inherited the estate. Arriving in Boston in 1893, he was hired by Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, but on his way to Chicago to learn his job, he ended up in Toledo, completely lost, and turned to Jesus for guidance. Having a tendency to wander off, Ted eventually found himself in Omaha, and this is when Governor Crounse asked him to deal with the lawlessness in a town that has run rotten long enough. Meanwhile, a motley crew of deputies eagerly awaits Ted’s arrival, but it soon becomes apparent that someone wants the new marshal dead and buried. An action-packed thriller, The Rumble of Wheels shows God has a sense of humor, and will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.

Denzil “Bucky” Buckle served in the U.S. Marine Corps before joining the workforce as a dishwasher, cook, truck loader, dock foreman, security guard, cable installer, cabling systems designer, and finally a network administrator. Just before getting the boot after nearly twenty years with Cabela’s Inc., Bucky earned a BS in Information Technology. Raised in Nebraska, the author shares his life with two very particular and well-fed cats.

Author Biography (1,000 characters, including spaces) Raised in the panhandle of Nebraska, Denzil “Bucky” Buckle failed at studying nuclear engineering before he served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Grenada and Lebanon. He then joined the working world as a dishwasher, cook, truck loader, dock foreman, security guard, cable installer, cabling systems designer, and finally a network administrator. Just before getting the boot after nearly twenty years with Cabela’s Inc., Bucky earned a BS in Information Technology. He has written a Christian daily devotional for more than five years and is the author of The Rumble of Wheels, a Western thriller filled with faith, fun, and adventure. As long as the litter box and feeding duties are taken care of on a regular basis, Bucky is allowed to live with two cats.

First Person Author Biography (1,000 characters, including spaces) Raised in the panhandle of Nebraska, I failed at studying nuclear engineering before serving in the U.S. Marine Corps in Grenada and Lebanon. I then joined the working world as a dishwasher, cook, truck loader, dock foreman, security guard, cable installer, cabling systems designer, and finally a network administrator. Just before getting the boot after nearly twenty years with Cabela’s Inc., I earned a BS in Information Technology. I have written a Christian daily devotional for more than five years and am the author of The Rumble of Wheels, a Western thriller filled with faith, fun, and adventure. As long as the litter box and feeding duties are taken care of on a regular basis, I am allowed to live with two cats.

First Person Author Biography (140 characters, including spaces) Raised in Nebraska, I worked for 20 years with Cabela’s Inc. & earned a BS in Information Technology. The Rumble of Wheels is my first book.

A Week of Questions

Top o' the morning to ya! All about questions this week. A questionnaire for the promotional text creation. Another for the copyediting, and still anther that I cannot recall the purpose of. The week became rather busy, so maybe there were only two questionnaires. The questions involved...wait for it... what is the book about? I did find it easier to write a summary, but still... Kind of hard to summarize a novel in only a few sentences or paragraphs. I guess the Cliff Notes version will have to be written up by someone who is a lot better at it. Other questions had to do with me. Aha, that was the other one - cover creation.

What does a person write about himself? Looking at the many novels I have in my library it becomes obvious that a 20-page biography is out of the question. There is so much to tell, but quite a bit may not be all that interesting to someone looking for a new book to purchase for that long flight back home. I tried, just for fun, to write up a paragraph in the manner that is seen on books in the store. I'm paying up front for this cover creation service; should I be trying to do their job for them?

Both numbers arrived this week. The ISBN assignments and the LCCN. A writer has the option of accepting the free ISBN assignment from Createspace or purchasing one through another service. The number can only be used for this publishing project. You cannot use the same number for a hardcover edition with Harper Collins for example. (Of course I'm hoping for a hardcover deal too!) I saw no reason not to simply accept the free ISBN. The LCCN has a fee and is not necessary for publishing. Of course I want the Library of Congress to catalog my first novel. A kind of vanity thing perhaps, but I paid the fee. Once assigned by Createspace, the writer simply acknowledges the number. It ain't like you can ask for a different one.

The link to upload the file became active this week too! This is the file, the novel, the ticket to fame and loot. Okay, so right now it isn't exactly a page-turner. A lot of copyediting will be needed first. My written voice will not make the bestseller lists without a lot of help from editors. Not a problem, just uploading the file seemed like a milestone in the process. No special formatting involved. Createspace accepts many formats and software. I used Microsoft Word 2010 and the docx file type, but the text is the main thing. After that, the wait begins. 4 weeks to edit a 98,000 word manuscript, and then back to work for me.

In the waiting time, I will be starting the process for the second novel, the first in a different series, and updating the blog on that as well. I wrote both novels at the same time simply because my mind seems to work that way. Some sort of attention-deficit thing perhaps, but I didn't do one novel in order and then start another as some writers do. To use an old-timey IT reference: you might say that some writers are serial printers and I am more of a parallel printer type.

Cover proofs, promotional text, and other things will probably arrive in the waiting time too. I did select a book size from the standard sizes. If a writer included photographs, I could see specifying a custom size (with a fee). As my work is simply the black text on the white (cream-colored actually) page novel, I looked on my bookshelf; found a size I liked that matched one of the choices, and selected the check box. There are many more options, some with fees and some at no cost. Look at books that caught your eye in the store or library. You may want to pay more to get exactly what you want.

At one of our local library's dead book sales, I discovered that a title on the spine makes a big difference too. If you don't have that big name to put on the spine like "Stephen King" or "James Patterson", the title becomes even more important. I don't recognize "Loewen", but Lies my Teacher Told Me, with the first word in big red letters over a scenic background grabs my attention. I use that book as an example because even on the shelf above my writing desk it stands out quickly. The little things are important.

Have a great week and God bless!

Bucky

Publishing the New Way

Three years and a bit in the making, I began the process to publish my first novel this week. Not the traditional process, mind you, but the self-published way. The more traditional method is to seek an agent or publisher, send a cover letter, wait, and hopefully an agent will respond wanting to see a full proposal. I visited many a website researching this method and couldn't help but feel pretty much unwanted. More than one literally said, "Don't call us; we'll call you!" I had thought that an old Hollywood cliche, but I now stand corrected.

Of course the first thing to note about self-publishing is that you don't have to literally print the book all by yourself. The publisher I selected offers many options for editing, describing, marketing, and illustrating books. One thing I did not see was an option to print my book in a nice hardcover format. As a first-time author, I may not have seen that going the traditional way either. Having not used this blog for too many postings yet, I decided yesterday that I would give you a week by week log (on a weblog no less!) of what goes on with this process.

On Tuesday, I signed up for an account with Createspace, the publisher mentioned earlier. The following day I received my first call. Bryan, led me through some initial setup on the web account and I created a horrendously difficult password that, alas, I had to write down - a major no-no from my days in the IT department. I'll get that memorized as soon as possible and destroy the paper copy. Later in the day the Createspace account notified me to take the next step and enter my personal or business account information for receiving royalty payments. Unfortunately, the payments won't begin until after the first book is published. There are no advances in the self-publishing world. I guess self-publishing means that I get to trust in God to take care of my "self" until the book starts selling copies.

During the initial consultation, Bryan asked a few questions and set up a meeting with the next level, the publishing consultant, who would call me. The phone meeting with Sarah took place on Friday and the first thing I discovered is that I am a bit of a disaster when it comes to verbally selling my own book. Listening to my verbal synopsis of the book, you might wonder whether I actually wrote the thing! I suppose that after using more than 98,000 words to write the novel, I am allowed to have a little trouble describing it in a few hundred words. In any case, Createspace offers services to take care of my shortcomings in that area as well.

Among the other services I selected, including cover design, interior layout, book description, marketing, Library of Congress Control Number, and others, one service stands out - copyediting. I had thought that traditional publishers would be all over this, but I read in one book that this is no longer the case. Strangely, the book listed something like seven different editors who apparently don't do the kind of editing a first-time novelist really needs. Remember the Jack Nicholson part in Wolf? Yeah, it kind of led me to believe that publishers did that kind of thing. Anyway, Createspace does offer basic and comprehensive copyediting. Although I believe that I have the talent to be the next bazillion-copy, best-selling novelist - just like every other first-time author - I can read my copy and tell that it needs something to make it read more like the great novels you can find in your bookstore.

Finally, I started two projects on the member dashboard. One for the first novel, The Rumble of Wheels: A Toledo Ted Adventure, and another for my second novel. As this process moves forward, I will do weekly updates each Saturday until the publishing date. Next week I am to expect contact from the design team assigned to my book. The damage thus far: just over $3,000 for the options mentioned above. A more experienced (or less verbally and graphically challenged) author might need to purchase less to get started. As a first-timer, I decided to risk more to get the professional help I need (pun intended).

The grace of God be with you this week!

Bucky

Rules for Recently Rib Racked

A few hours ago, I found out that my old high school chum, Jim, had cracked a rib while doing an Endo on his bicycle. This came as no small surprise to me as none of my memories from 30 years or so back had indicated that Jim would be one to become involved in full contact bicycle gymnastics as a hobby, or even as a serious sport. In thinking of his new condition, various dark and humorous thoughts immediately sprang to mind. As only the truly sadistic sod would try to make a friend laugh during such a time, I jotted down the following rules for the friends of those having suffered a recent rib or torso injury.

1. Under no circumstances should the patient’s friends, or soon to be former friends, gather to exchange jokes and laughs with the patient. Jokes are banned for the first six weeks of recovery. Patients may find friends who have never before shown a talent for joke telling to be suddenly overcome with an urge to share the latest joke, even to the point of making up new jokes on the spot. This should be strongly discouraged. As soon as I heard the bad news from Jim, I immediately thought of a joke about a fortune teller and a kumquat; never mind that I cannot recall jokes on a normal basis and have never made one up as far back as anyone can remember. As the patient nears recovery he or she may notice this strange condition among his former friends drying up to the point of vanishing entirely as soon as the first good belly laugh is observed. This is of course assuming that the patient hasn’t by this time evicted all but those friends possessed with the humorous demeanor of an undertaker or hanging judge.

2. Sneezing is out – as in all the way out. In fact this would be a good time to discuss with the patient’s primary physician the possibility of nose removal or of simply blocking up the sinus cavities with Jell-O or Silly Putty or some such substance. As the mere mention of sneezing can cause an urge to sneeze to start a tickle in the nasal passages, all talk or writing about sneezing, sniffles, allergies, pepper, talcum powder, dust, or pet dander should stop immediately.

3. Allergy season must be cancelled at once. No patient suffering from rib or torso injuries should be allowed to participate in allergy season.

4. Sneeze-causing pets must be shaved immediately or dipped in an industrial-strength depilatory. It is a well-known fact that pets will immediately shed at least one coat upon sensing a patient with rib injuries or torso sutures in the area.

5. If a sneeze has become inevitable, it is the responsibility of all of the patient’s friends to assist in gathering up all sutures, staples, and assorted body parts ejected by the blast. Children should be restrained from chasing down and playing with the bouncy parts if at all possible. The patient is excused from this as he or she will be, as the physicians like to say, “Holding on for dear life” with all available limbs and appendages.

6. A sack should be kept handy to prevent small children and those with weak constitutions from viewing the facial expression of the patient who must cough or sneeze while recovering from rib injuries. While the sack does little to prevent the ejection of various dangly body parts from unsuppressed sneezes, the expression of the suffering patient my cause others to “seize up” or have nightmares.

7. If possible, spouses should refrain from ‘cheering up’ the patient with various comedy routines and Three Stooges rip-offs until a later date.

8. Persons bringing old Bill Cosby tapes as get well gifts should be immediately clubbed. CD’s and DVD’s should be the minimum technology allowed. What century do they think this is anyway?

Denzil “Bucky” Buckle – by whatever name or derogatory term you knew him from his former life, served five weeks in Mercy Hospital in Dubuque, Iowa in late 1998, including one simply smashing week in the Intensive Care ward. His observations of recovery and hospital time have been published only in his blogs and fondest nightmares. He took up writing as a profession after getting the ax for nearly 20 years of mostly loyal service to Cabela’s Inc., a major outdoor sporting goods retailer. His first novel, The Rumble of Wheels: A Toledo Ted Adventure should be completed within the month.

Beaten and Thumped!

You might think that Nebraska was playing the Cornhuskers today so much damage did the team do to itself, but you would be wrong. Texas beat Nebraska as well, and the officiating crew did its part to help.

Of course when 'your' team loses, it seems that all close calls go against your side, but one catch ruled as out-of-bounds did prove to be a blown call. Unfortunately, that one catch was one of the few that Nebraska receivers could hang onto this afternoon. The Nebraska Stonehanders gave away 8 dropped passes, no less than 4 of which could have been touchdown catches. This is one that not only got away, but was given away wholesale.

Texas played a great game and probably should be ranked in the top 25 again in this week's polls. Nebraska will fall quite a ways down in the polls as the team proved quite unable to sustain its number 5 ranking. A Cornhusker team chant of "We're unworthy!" might be appropriate as the losing was a team effort all the way. Fumbles continue to plague the team, along with the dropped passes, which might point to an all-around stone hands problem team wide. On a 5° day that might be understandable, but the weather laid out a fine football climate in Lincoln on this day. The Nebraska Cornhuskers simply blew it.

As an armchair coach and analyst, I naturally have all of the answers. As my old frosh team football coaches would be glad to tell you: It's because the Nebraska team played just like I used to...poorly.

Bucky

Corporameia, the Land of Corporate Silliness

I will be out of the office today and returning someday. Just kidding, my office is in my home, so I am not out of it very much… except for when I am just plain “out of it” as they say. An errant out of the office message from a friend serving his time in Corporameia brought back memories of my days in that land of corporate silliness.

Back in the day, we had to send the ubiquitous Out of the Office or OOTO message every time we left the corporate headquarters to work in another location, or simply to be out of the office for vacation or illness or even feigned death. To my knowledge, I was the first one in our company to use the acronym, OOTO, to save typing time. That little grape is one that should never have rolled out of the wine press. Had I realized the ugly little raisin that misplaced grape would become, I would have tossed it back in to be smashed.

As with all well-intentioned, but ill-advised acronyms, this one grew completely out of hand, or OOH, you might say to save words. Little OOTO soon unleashed the cruel and twisted creative spirit of acronymitis within the company. Out of the Office messages with OOO for Out of Office; OOT for Out of Town, OFTD for Out for the Day, and even OOFSA for Out of freakin’ stupid Acronyms began to circulate in a perfect maelstrom of acronym inflation. Now in most cases the resulting stream, or is that scream, of creativity would be fun to watch. But the lowly OOTO message became automated.

As the company progressed through the various software packages such as Groupwise and Outlook, the ability to place an automatic OOTO response on every incoming message turned the monster loose. While it became one of those corporate requirements from on high to have an automatic OOTO response, no one thought of what might happen if a few people all left for a conference at the same time. All that was needed was one innocent message to one of the absent group, and a whirlwind of automatic OOTO responses would bounce endlessly between e-mail accounts until the server shutdown or all inboxes were filled.

To combat this menace of OOTO reproduction, the e-mail recipients would create Out of the Office folders and rules to place all incoming OOTO messages safely away from any useful notice. As the department grew to an unwieldy size as with many corporate IT departments, the OOTO folders came to be checked less and less. Soon, bosses could be found wandering the halls of Corporameia, that land of corporate silliness many of us have come to find ourselves in, asking such amusing questions as: “Where are all my people?” A corporate Good Samaritan would stop from time to time and ask them, “Have you checked your group’s OOTO folder?” The boss would then retreat to his or her office to wade through the countless OOTO messages to find out that the entire department had scheduled an offsite team-building session to discuss better communication with the boss.

Ah, I’m glad the endless days in Corporameia are behind me now!

Bucky

The Physical Danger of Writing

My former employer caused my first mid-life crisis by becoming... my former employer. There's nothing quite like the loss of a long held job in your 40's to cause a good, full-blown mid-life crisis. The second crisis came not so much from that sad event, but from what I decided to do with it. Who knew that taking up writing for a living, at least I hope the 'making a living' part starts soon, could be so hard on the body?

After a year and a half of reading, researching and writing, I have got into the wrong shape. The shape of a pear or cantaloupe is generally not considered to be "in shape" for fitness purposes. As the aches and pains of the sedentary lifestyle had started to weigh on me, literally, I figured that I might as well trade them for the aches and pains of starting a workout program. Time to dust off the old Bowflex and exercise bike in the basement!

First discovery: pedaling a stationary bike in my unfinished basement is dreadfully dull; not quite as dull as writer's block is, but pretty dull just the same. The second workout was simply grabbing some old A/V components off the basement shelves and getting something to watch and listen to while pedaling away.

Second discovery: getting past the second workout is a victory. Almost anyone can do that first workout. The couch-potato body is taken by surprise; plenty of energy is available from all the stored carbs; and the most serious ache waits in the future. The next day of course, the invoice from that first workout comes due. Getting out of bed, walking, and other simple tasks become agonizing as the body complains about the unexpected exertion from the day before. That second workout, usually two days later, is the one where you truly get started on the program. Waiting longer than two days runs the risk of having another "first workout" and going through that same agonizing "day after". It is before the second workout that many of us decide to stop the program before it really gets started.

Third discovery: computer games are of dubious value to the body in taking a break from writing. The mind gets a chance to relax, but the body stays in front of the computer in that same ergonomically erroneous position as it does when writing. The cat is of no help in this at all. He sleeps for hours beside the computer monitor, gets up, stretches and takes off at the run. I sit for hours at the computer, get up, try to stretch, and fall over from sitting in one spot too long. My breaks must be frequent and involve some sort of activity. Filling the pet dish or cleaning the litter box are both cat-approved break activities.

Fourth discovery: The cat is of no help in working out in the basement either. The look he gives me is that same blank stare you might give your brother if he were to park his brand new Ford Fiesta* in the monkey cage at the zoo... and walk away leaving the doors open. If I had six cats, I could only imagine them calling to each other,

"Hey Felix, come check this out! Our liter box maintenance staff is pedaling for all he's worth and getting nowhere at all!"

"Why do you suppose he does that, Mort?"

"Dunno, but I think we need to stare at him until he stops."

Cats, I've noticed, feel no social pressure to workout or stay in shape, but are fascinated by my efforts for as long as it takes me to workout, or about fifteen minutes at my present fitness level.

Bucky

*Ford Fiesta chosen at random for its alliterative value. Not a shameless plug to get a giant corporation to sponsor my blog!

I Lost My Job Yesterday!

Good morning! Today is the first day of a new life for me! What happened yesterday still hurts, that will heal with time and a good dose of listening to the Holy Spirit. I have sat up and laid awake trying to think of the reason why I was selected to be among those let go, but that is a useless exercise; I may never find out the true reason or reasons. I have read and reread the company announcements and compared what was said with those I know lost their jobs and just cannot reconcile any one set of criteria, other than the number. Those of us let go are "honored" to be one-third of ten percent, usually I don't do that well in raffles and prize drawings. If a raffle awards 3.3 percent prizes, I usually don't get anything!

Today, I start anew. I slept in, though that will not continue, I read the Omaha World-Herald, and I studied the Bible for longer than I usually do in the mornings. At 0724, when I am usually on the way to work, I am just sitting down with a cup of coffee to start writing. Today, I plan to list my writing projects for at least the next 3 months, some will take longer than that, but starting them is the main thing; I am going to work on some cabling down in the basement to get ready for my new Internet service, and work on some cleanup. I also need to make a trip to the bank, which unlike most days, I can do at any time. As I move forward, and past this perceived humiliation (heavy emphasis on perceived), I will no doubt find many advantages to self-employment. While I don't enjoy the golden parachute of the CEO's and other executives, you may note in the article that a severance package has been offered. I have a parachute, even if not a golden one! However, one of my first thoughts about that is ... God is my strength and shield! I will not of course refuse the severance, but I will trust in God first.

How God works in seemingly quiet ways! During my cold about a week ago, I rebuilt my office in another room. A lot of work for a sick person, though a cold is by no means incapacitating. The good thing is that now I am set up with a lot of desk space, two pc's, and a couple of printers. I did mess up on one printer though. I thought only of the advantage of having the power switch on a strip near at hand... and then plugged the power strip into my little UPS. Needless to say, the first time I fired up the laser printer last night, the UPS gave an angry "squeep!" and started to shut down. That will be another little project for today.

Did I mope about last night? You bet... while making chocolate chip cookies. There is something very comforting about baking or cooking something after a traumatic event, and that activity really helped me last night. Oh, boy! Talk about the outpouring of support! We all hate to see this happen to anyone, and I only hope that I can respond as well when someone else needs this kind of support. I pray that no one else loses their job at Cabela's or any other employer. Sidney will no doubt see some very serious conversations around the water coolers, bakeries, and coffee shops today. Today, my recovery begins, the town and others may take a bit more time, and I will do my best to write supportive and encouraging words for all. I want to thank all of you for the notes of support, and all of those who stopped by yesterday to lend a helping ear.

A note on the "perceived" humiliation. We are taught from early in our lives that a job is the thing to have. A grown man, and now grown women too, support their families and themselves through having a job. A job loss was then, and is now, a traumatic event for a family and for a man (this one in particular) or woman. However, I did nothing wrong and this was not a firing for some cause. While it seems humiliating to be singled out in this way, I need to get past that and see this for the wonderful opportunity and message from God that it is. Not that long ago, I did ask God to show me beyond any doubt when He wanted me to start writing. The sign may be painful and unexpected at the time of my receiving it, but there is no doubt in my mind that it has arrived and cannot be missed. Ouch! Yes, Lord, I hear you loud and clear!

May God strengthen those who need Him on this day,

Bucky

Running on and on today

Good Saturday morning to you! Wow, the prices at the retail stores are really biting hard these days. It doesn't seem to matter which store; they are all biting the wallet hard. The question that must come to mind is: if the prices of many things continues to rise, will my paycheck see a similar rise? Probably not. We will get some letter from one of the company officers about how we must control costs in order to stay competitive in this tough economy. The number one cost they are referring to will of course be employee pay raises. However, we cannot give out pay raises and price increases all willy-nilly or you could get a boom town kind of thing going where everyone earns a lot, but everything costs a lot too. As you can tell, I don't have the answers to the economic troubles. My understanding of economics and how it all works is not going to win any prize. Like you, I read the news and magazine articles and trust those with titles and/or letters behind their names to explain things to me. Is there a possibility that some or all of them are misleading me, deliberately or otherwise? Yes, that is one of the reasons why my faith is in God. When a person is among what some would call the "little" people, or others might call the middle or working class, we simply don't have a lot of personal knowledge of the large institutions that we hope are managing the even larger things well, like the economy, for example. Now hold up a sec, isn't God even larger, or more powerful, or more unknowable than any human institution or activity? Yes and no. Certainly God is all-powerful, but unknowable? Imagine if the federal government had a direct message pipeline to your heart or mind, a pipeline that you knew was trustworthy, wouldn't it be easier to know the workings of that institution? We come to trust God with everything that we have, and He accepts us just as we are when we first believe in His Son. The institutions of this world do not know our thoughts, and would probably want to change some of them if they did know. While the powers of this world seek to control us as a population, the real power in the universe wants to have a personal relationship with each of us... on an individual basis. How incredible and wonderful is that?

I am going off the deep end today. I read about the passage of the rescue or bailout package through our government, and like many am left wondering what it all means for me. The fact that a new car loan might be easier in a month or so doesn't mean that I should run out and buy one. While I ponder the potential effects of the latest move by our government, I wonder if there is a book that I can read to better understand the institutions and bureaucracies of the government. God gave us a wonderful handbook into His desires for us, His love for us, and His Son, who came to save us. The Bible is a fairly imposing book for length and complexity, and yet is also short and simple. Compare that with the Code of Federal Regulations, the rules our government and its citizens are supposed to abide by. Don't run out to buy one, Title 47 covering telecommunications is more than twice the size of the Bible and comprises only a small part of the CFR. God's handbook looks much simpler when compared to the rules handed down by our government, and for content the Bible is hands down much more valuable.

Actually, if everyone obeyed the Bible, we wouldn't need the CFR at all! A person who loved everyone else would not try to drive a truckload of hazardous material through a town. A person who loves doesn't try to embezzle from an institution. A government wouldn't need extensive rules to govern if all of us faithfully obeyed the two important commandments as stated by Jesus: love God with all of your heart, your mind, and your strength. And equally important, love your neighbor as yourself. That is not an exact quote, but you will recognize the words from your reading in the Gospels.

What other news do we have today, since I am going on at such length this morning. My cold is finally letting me live again, though a sniffle and hack or two remains today. Our favorite football team, the Huskers, stands a good chance of breaking another long streak as the 5th-ranked Missouri Tigers come to Lincoln. Missouri's team has not won at Lincoln for like, 30 years, but the decline of our college team may be evident today. Even with a new coach, it will take some time for Nebraska to regain a place among the top teams in the nation. So which is more important, the news about the economy or the football team. In most households in Nebraska, the football game will take precedence until sometime on Monday, after the game is well discussed of course. Perhaps in this case, a sports diversion is good for us, the news about the economy will take a lot of explanation and pondering. I haven't had the courage to check my 401K balance in the past two weeks; call me a coward if you will, but I figure there isn't much that I can do about it anyway. The time to move money out of stocks would have been about a month ago, long before I had any knowledge of the "panic". The worries of today are more than enough for me; trying to gaze into the economic crystal ball only leaves me with a headache.

Alright then! I think I have rambled on enough for one day. Let us think on the glory of God today!

Bucky

1st Essay - American Literature Class 2007

The Nature of American Literature
American literature is a form of writing that in its early form records the thoughts and experiences of the explorers and inhabitants of the New World and especially the parts which later came to be known as the United States. The two distinct groups of people, one which discovered the New World and the other who lived there already, met each other in the various ways one might expect. At times the groups met peaceably and established a relationship where each learned from the other; at other times the meeting produced exploitation or immediate hostility. The root works of American Literature set the stage for later works from those authors with the leisure to write more than journal entries or reports of their activities. Defined by the meeting of two quite different cultures, the early American literature uniquely records a period of history where heroic figures behaved both courageously and despicably, causing a great nation to form, and destroying, by intent or accident, many tribes of native peoples.
The first recorded arrival of explorers in the New World from Europe in 1492 comes from the accounts of Christopher Columbus (1492) and those in his fleet. The descriptions of wonderful lands and beautiful inhabitants begin from the first meeting.
“All that I saw were young men, none of them more than 30 years old, very well built, of very handsome bodies and very fine faces…” (p. 39)
The descriptions of the native peoples continued later with the arrival of other explorers
The pastoral descriptions of Giovanni da Verrazano (1524) tell of a beautiful and generous people:
“Among them were two kings, who were as beautiful of stature and build as I can possible describe.” (p. 32)
Verrazano may have unwittingly set the tone for modern advertising in his narrative of meeting a friendly people in the region of Newport, Rhode Island.
The explorers often described great beauty while at the same time enslaving or destroying the objects of their description. Much of the destruction came through accident as the discovery and study of communicable disease would not occur for some time. Sadly, other destruction and enslavement happened quite intentionally through the dehumanization of the native tribes. Those who would endeavor to communicate with the natives began the evolution of the hero figure from domination and destruction to coexistence and even acceptance.
One of the first larger than life heroes established the first English colony at Jamestown in what would be known as Virginia. Capt. John Smith lived a life of adventure worthy of the epic heroes in later romantic works of fiction such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer. Some of the events in Smith’s life, such as the tale of Pocahontas, have come under scrutiny in later years as perhaps embellished or fictional works designed to lure more colonists to America. However, the independent and self-reliant hero character, which many view as personified in John Smith, reappears countless times in American Literature to this day. The educational importance of these works is in the background descriptions of settlements, indigenous tribes, and even actual historical characters included in the settings of the stories. The well-researched works of literature record conditions of history in an agreeable fashion for the reader to learn, in contrast to the dry, academic tomes of historians, anthropologists, and archeologists which may confirm or refute the descriptions of literature.
Too much credit has perhaps been given to the pioneers pushing the frontier back from the first coastal settlements. Accounts of a fictional nature have served at times to demonize individuals, tribes, or an entire race by portraying them as villains. Accounts of explorer’s and settlers attitudes and actions in some cases cast a different light on the tales of the brave, but struggling settler or explorer in constant danger of life and limb.
“You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets in which smallpox patients have slept, as well as by every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race. I should be very glad if your scheme of hunting them down by dogs could take effect.” (Amherst, 1732, p. 232)

This quote, taken out of context, seems shocking in both its hatred and underhanded means. The reasons behind the attitude are not clear; perhaps vengeance for loss or hostility may have brought General Amherst to such a hardness of heart. Compare the suggested use of biological warfare then with our horror of the potential for biological terrorism, or the use of weapons of mass destruction, in the present time. The reader of American Literature does not like to see both sides display the same vile methods; one side, the hero, must be above the perception of evil, though he or she may employ devious methods in a good cause.
The roots of American Literature illustrate how differences between groups of people can turn to hatred and violence. However, the heroic figure of another type emerges in early American Literature. This heroic figure does not stand against the tide, but swims through and emerges on top of it. A very real person, Samson Occom, a Mohican, learned English and Christianity through the efforts of missionaries in the colonial time. Occom learned the language and doctrine of Christianity so well that, upon being called to minister at the hanging of a fellow Mohican convicted of murder, he spoke a sermon which became a colonial bestseller. Samson Occom founded what became Dartmouth College.
Two types of heroic figure, one who encounters obstacles and stands or fights with courage, skill, and daring, and another who does not fight, but rises through acceptance and education. Both types of hero will be seen many times in American Literature. In what might be seen as a spirit of atonement, the heroic figure, male or female, may have a dark past or commit an act of sin or evil of which he or she repents. The heroic figure will then strive to learn or fight, perhaps both, to emerge victorious to gain independence over the evil in the world. The heroic figure in the form of a real person, such as Christopher Columbus and Capt. John Smith, gives way later to the fictional heroes of Cooper, Irving, and Hawthorne. The hero figure becomes one of skill in the wilderness, acceptance and savoir faire among both colonists and Indians, strength in moral dilemmas, and respected by all.

Saddam

A major figure in our lives has passed from the scene today, Saddam Hussein. Whether you loved, hated, admired or were disgusted by him or his actions, he is no longer upon the earth with us. Of course, the world, that is the non-Muslim world, and especially the U.S. and Israel will be threatened with jihad because of this. However, since we have been living under jihad for the past 50 years or more, we may not notice the difference. Millions will take to the streets in the Arab world to make noise and burn effigies of whomever they feel (or have been told) has caused their problems. The appropriate response is probably a state funeral since, like it or not, he was the leader of a country. To commemorate his passing, I suggest buying and reading a copy of Nonie Darwish's Now They Call Me Infidel at Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

Bucky