Letters to Jenny (17 page)

Let me conclude with a couple of minor things. I discovered last week that on this computer when I mark a word for bold printing, I can set it to blink. More fun. So now my bolds are blinking. Here, I’ll show you:
Bold
. Isn’t that something? Blink, blink, blink! Oh, you can’t see it blink on the paper? Sigh. Well, take my word: it’s a blinking bold word. And I remembered a song that seems suitable: the “Worried Man Blues.” It starts out “It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song …” and I think your mother’s humming it now.

Keep smiling, Jenny. I know it’s not easy, now, but if we concentrate this week on getting your mother better, then we can concentrate on you in a week or two. It’s your turn to be strong.

Jewel-Lye 28, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Right—I’m on my upstairs system now. Alan, who is my daughter’s boyfriend, is working for me this summer, and one of the things he does is figure out computer programs for me, so I don’t have to use up my time for it. So he’s working on the downstairs system, which is the one I usually use for letters. Okay—so you get a laser-printed missive; you’ll survive. Oh—what program is he working on? Well, I needed a good mass file-handler, so I wouldn’t erase good files and save bad ones—your mother will tell you all about that when she’s back—and didn’t have one, so when PC COMPUTING magazine offered me a disk with file handling if I’d subscribe, I decided to try it. It took them a month to send the disk, by which time I’d discovered QDos, which does a nice job. But now that the other program, DirMagic, is here, I’m having Alan put it through its paces, so he can tell me how it compares. So I’m working up here, in my novel-writing study, which is fine.

Yesterday we had the farrier over to trim our horses' hooves. A farrier is a blacksmith who can make shoes and such for horses, but mostly he just trims, because we don’t ride our horses. It’s like trimming your fingernails. Now Blue has been with us eleven years and she’s okay, but Snowflake spooks at the sight of a halter. But we don’t care to leave the halters on them regularly, because they’re free in the forest, and a halter could get hung up on something. So we halter them only at need. So there was the farrier, and Blue got spooky, to my surprise; I did get the halter on her and let her go so I could do the same with Snowflake. Mistake! Blue headed into the forest, and the farrier couldn’t do her. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get Snowflake. Finally I did catch Blue, and Cam—that’s my wife, who made you the Xanth pillow—took her to the farrier. I discovered I’d been trying to put the wrong halter on Snowflake, so I went back to the barn and fetched the right one, with the lead rope. Snowflake came up to inquire what I was doing, so I put the halter on her. Just like that. We got them both done. Yes, I was three times as lucky as I deserved to be. Getting the horses' hooves trimmed always makes me nervous, because I do have to catch them first. Once the halter is on and I have hold of it, they are no trouble at all, and behave perfectly. So that was my little adventure yesterday. If you ever have a pony, you’ll have similar adventures. Monday we’ll go through the same thing with the vet.

Let’s see, I’m writing this letter in Jewel-Lye, but it will be two days into AwGhost before you hear it. So where is your mother? Well, it’s the two-th of the month, so she’s getting her tooths done. In fact she’s getting the things yanked out. In fact she’s so browned off about not being able to visit you that she looks like a baked potato. Especially in the face. She swears that she’ll see you later in the month, though hell should bar the way. So relax; when she visits, you can lend her your talk-board (I forget what it’s called) so she can wish you well despite not being able to open her mouth.

I have the usual enclosures, plus some oddments. There’s
Nothing But Zooms
, which you can watch when you get home: that’s the artistic animation of that formula I told you about, the Mandelbrot Set. It starts out looking like a bug, but the edges are amazingly complicated and beautiful, and the closer you look, the more intricate they are. So enjoy it when; this is your video. I’m also enclosing a block of 20 stamps for you or your mother; they were on a package I received, and I just couldn’t throw them out, so here they are, and if you hate them,
you
can throw them out. And a cartoon about fire ants. And one about Florida politics, with our Governor Martinez as a frog. He’s not a good governor, and this is becoming increasingly apparent. So there’s this princess, kissing the frog—and he just doesn’t turn into a prince. Right: she’s browned off; you can see how brown she is. And a funny excerpt from
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
that you should really enjoy. And a cartoon about the rare baby turtles here—a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, one of the ten most endangered species and the rarest turtle known, laid her eggs on the St. Pete beach, so they’re watching to make sure the eggs hatch, and maybe missing something else. Harpy reading!

Movie-review time. Yes, I know you haven’t seen many original movies recently. But when you get home, you can watch video movies, and eventually everything will be available, so you can see it. I’m just giving you a notion what to watch for. You see, I don’t see many movies myself; I’m too busy to get out. I hardly drive, in fact. The other day I had to move our microbus somewhere, and I’d never driven it before, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the windshield wipers or even how to get the key out. There’s a button you have to push, you see, but it just didn’t do it. Right: wrong button; the real one was hidden around the steering wheel. Sigh. But my daughter the journalist—that’s Cheryl, who is 19 now and in college, only she’s working at the local newspaper this summer—no, Alan is not her boyfriend, he belongs to Penny, who is 21 now—yes, it does get complicated keeping track, but somehow they manage it—she has to review movies for the paper. Now I only go out to see a movie about once a year, and the one I saw this year was
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, which is how I know you’d like it. But Cheryl had to review
Lethal Weapon II
, so we made it a family occasion. I mean, on my own I won’t go out, but for a daughter I will. There’s something about daughters. So Cam and Cheryl and I went to see it. That’s one slam-bang violent motion picture! But it does have some plugs for the environment, and some humor, and one nice sex sequence—oops, Adult Conspiracy! Okay, don’t see that one.

Then Cheryl had to review
Dead Poets Society
. That’s about boys at a conservative prep school. Yes, I know, it sounds dull as monotony. What? You say boys don’t sound dull? Oh—you turned thirteen. Now you know what boys are. Ah, well. As it happens, I found this to be a profoundly moving picture. You see, it shows the kind of private high school I went to, and the kind at which I taught English. What a horror! Don’t ever go to a school like that! But to this school comes a new teacher, who believes that poetry should be appreciated, not inflicted. I kept whispering the names of the authors to my daughter as lines from poems were quoted: Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—as I said, I went to this type of school—(Oh, my, now there’s a song by Crystal Gayle on the FM. I always think of her hair) only now they were being rendered with feeling and understanding. The boys began to catch on to the spirit of it, and formed their secret group, The Dead Poets Society. They would sneak out at night and smoke cigarettes—that’s the adolescent notion of privilege, which you definitely don’t need to emulate—and look at pictures of bare-breasted women—okay, you can do that if you want to—and recite poems with feeling. But later one of the boys, balked from anything meaningful by his stern father, committed suicide, and the school sort of framed the good teacher as responsible and fired him. So it’s a sad ending, except that at the end the boys finally show their respect for him by standing defiantly on their desks. He had taught them to look at things in new ways, you see, such as from the height of their desks. You think that’s stupid? No it isn’t; that was a really feeling conclusion to the movie. Of course it hit me twice as hard, because I know the horror of the conformist education—my whole life since has been a muted protest to conformity—and I really appreciated it. Yes, I left teaching after one year because of similar frustration, and no, they didn’t want me back anyway. I retired to full time writing and have never stopped. So yes, you should see this movie, because you will be moved by it, and it will help you to understand some of what I am made of, if you’re interested. Good, competent, feeling teachers are a treasure, because the system discourages them. Penny brought home a paper with her teacher’s marking on it, and all I can say is the man comes across like an illiterate ass. He writes “don’t end a sentence with a proposition.” No, that’s not a typo, and yes, you can end a sentence with a preposition. Actually, his advice is good, in an unintended way; I’m trying to get Penny to send that example to Reader’s Digest. But he’s making up rules not to be found in Fowler’s (that’s the ultimate authority) and doesn’t know the distinction between “to” and “too”—I mean, this is the ilk teaching a college course?! And if my daughter protests such ignorance—she happens to have been raised in a literate family—she’ll just get penalized in her grade. So as you can see, I have some emotional involvement here. See that movie, when you get the chance.

Am I boring you yet? Not quite yet, but close? Okay, another movie. We live in a conservative Christian community, so naturally it banned
Last Temptation of Christ
, as I think I mentioned before. Well, this week Ron Lindahn, the artist in charge of the Xanth Calendar—yes, I’ll send you one, when I get a copy—sent me a copy of it, so I finally got to see it. Actually I’m not terrifically interested in religion, but I keep an open mind. This was fairly dull, as I expected, but worthy; it’s a more realistic picture of Jesus Christ than you generally see. When he is crucified he has a vision of being rescued, and getting married and having children: of being ordinary, in fact. But in the end he realizes that he can only deliver his message by being crucified, and he begs to go back. Then he is back on the cross, and the movie ends. I think it’s a worthy movie, and that those who ban it are bigots.

Last night my wife and daughter were watching reruns—they seem to prefer them to new material—but during commercials Cheryl flicked through other channels. They say you can tell who is the boss of a household by who controls the remote control for the TV. I don’t even know how to use it! One of the things on another channel was a movie about a man who got seduced by his best friend’s sexy daughter. She was in a bikini and brother, did she have the stuff! Naturally that didn’t interest my wife or daughter; they put it back on the reruns, then left the house for ten minutes. So I struggled with the controls and found the channel—which was now running continuous commercials. Finally it got back to the movie—and wife and daughter returned. Sigh. You say you don’t understand why I should want to watch a girl in an overstuffed bikini? Well, naturally not; you’re one of
them
. But the movie had degenerated into slapstick anyway, no more bikinis. Sigh.

Beautiful flute music on the FM. Life does have some compensations. Okay, next letter I won’t talk about movies. Meanwhile, keep up with your exercises and practice your swallowing. And don’t look at me slantwise through those right-angle-vision glasses! Is Cathy there? I understand you have a therapist named Cathy; how do you expect me to tell them apart? Well, say hit to roommate-Cathy. Did Sue read you “Dead and Breakfast” yet? She sent me a copy. Now she’s in my Jenny Directory too; it’s getting crowded in there with all you people jostling elbows!

August 1989

A young girl learns to finger-spell. A not-so-young man gets not-so-younger. The Tooth Fairy works overtime. And serendipity is discussed.

AwGhost 4, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Okay, I’m back on the downstairs system, with the conventional address macro. I had the day all planned out: In the morning I would answer the woman whose husband left her for the Other Woman after twenty years, and then answer the woman who is pondering leaving her alcoholic and abusive husband after a similar period, and then get on to this letter, and wrap everything up before horsefeeding time. Ha! I had two calls from my literary agent—he’s talking to the folk who hope to make Xanth into video movies so you can see them (well, maybe some other folk will see them too, if that’s okay with you), and I had to note some figures in my computer files because I got statements on seventeen fantasy novels yesterday—yes, Xanth novels are still selling well—, and we had a visit from relatives of the folk who own the property next to us, which acreage we would like to buy so that it can never be despoiled by encroaching houses, and the bunnies and possums and box turtles and all will never be disturbed, so of course we were polite to them but they aren’t interested in selling the property, and well, here it is horsefeeding time and I’m only this far along in this letter. Ever thus! STOP SNIGGERING!