It can't happen here! Oh yes it can!

Susan Stubson of Casper has been writing Wyoming-based op-ed columns for many years. Most have to do with her family and her husband Tim who once was a state legislator and ran unsuccessfully for a Wyoming's lone U.S. House seat in 2016. Susan is a fine pianist and I've been on hand to hear her perform. She once sat on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council where I worked for 25 years. You could not find a more determined advocate of the arts and arts education. 

Sunday's New York Times op-ed section featured a column by Susan, "What Christian Nationalism Has Done to My State and My Faith is a Sin." It takes guts to write a column like this for the most Liberal of Mainstream Media. She could have written it for my modest blog and a few Wyomingites, liberals mostly, would have read it and nodded their heads. But a NYT op-ed -- that gets attention. This is an era when getting attention from Christian Nationalists is a dangerous proposition.

She opens her column with an anecdote from her husband's 2016 campaign:

I first saw it while working the rope line at a monster-truck rally during the 2016 campaign by my husband, Tim, for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat. As Tim and I and our boys made our way down the line, shaking hands and passing out campaign material, a burly man wearing a “God bless America” T-shirt and a cross around his neck said something like, “He’s got my vote if he keeps those [epithet] out of office,” using a racial slur. What followed was an uncomfortable master class in racism and xenophobia as the man decanted the reasons our country is going down the tubes. God bless America.

Those of us paying attention during the 2016 presidential election had similar experiences, especially if you were active in the Republican Party. But it goes way beyond that. Those "God, Guns, Trump" signs still adorn pick-up bumpers in the Wyoming capital of Cheyenne. We are 180 highway miles from the Stubson's city of Casper. We are rivals and different in many ways but Susan's description of WYO GOP antics was on full display here during the legislative session. I refer you to WyoFile's coverage of the session to get insight on the debacle.

Read Susan's column and despair. The problem of Christian Nationalism is right out there in the open. Trump turned religion and hate into commodities, one being trumpeted by those who ban books and drag shows across the country. It is magnified when you live in a rural state such as Wyoming. Doesn't have to be that way but that's the course Republicans decided to follow. Wyoming Rev. Rodger McDaniel wondered on Facebook recently if Florida wasn't the Berlin of the 1930s. You know the one, the creeping evil theatre-goers experience when they go to "Cabaret." If you know your history, you see how it happened -- one tiny bite at a time. Fascism isn't a special-effects movie monster -- it's your preacher or priest, your neighbor, your cousin. 

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

This quote has been attributed to Nobel-Prize-winning writer Sinclair Lewis but researchers do not vouch for the exact attribution. But it’s worth repeating in these times. For more of Lewis’s biting critique of life in the U.S., look up some of his other quotes or read “Babbitt,” “Main Street,” or "It Can't Happen Here." For some strange reason, this last one about a dystopian America shot up the bestseller charts after the 2016 election. 

Lynda Rutledge takes us on a magical mystery tour in West with Giraffes

I meant to post this as soon as I finished the book. Here it is.

A runaway teen – Woodrow “Woody” Wilson Nickel -- is fascinated with two shipwrecked African giraffes and signs on with a crusty Old Man to transport them from the East Coast to the San Diego Zoo. The year is 1938. The Depression is still loose upon the land and evil lurks overseas. A road trip with giraffes seems like just the thing.

The book opens with a prologue from the year 2025. A healthcare worker in a VA hospital comes across a deceased patient’s old army footlocker. In it, she finds a porcelain toy giraffe from the San Diego Zoo and a stack of writing tablets. It’s the saga of Woody’s trip. The writer intersperses scenes from the journals with a look at Woody at 105 struggling to write it all down. He writes, talks gibberish, fends off hovering healthcare workers, and imagines a giraffe outside the window. The reader roots for him to get down his story and we know he will as the tale depends on it.

During the journey in a specially-outfitted truck, Woody encounters charlatans, circus freaks, hobos in Hoovervilles, and a budding love interest. His mentor, the Old Man, works overtime to keep the trek on track. There’s a love interest, too, in a young woman Augusta (Red) who pretends to be a Life Magazine photographer and accompanies the giraffe convoy in a stolen Packard.

As I’ve written before, I dig road trips, going on them and reading about them. It was rough travel, suited to the realities of 1938. But I loved reading about it. It did drag in some spots – the always difficult middle section of the novel -- and the journey’s ending seemed a bit anticlimactic. But it’s a trip I’d go on again.

 

A look at the past and possible future in A Gentleman in Moscow and California

I’m reading two books concurrently. One is labeled historical fiction and is Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” The other is a sci-fi post-Apocalyptic novel “California” by Edan Lepucki. Meanwhile, here I am, living in the present tense.

Towles wrote a historical novel I am very fond of, “The Lincoln Highway.” The title grabbed my attention because I live a mile or maybe two from the route of the original Lincoln Highway. A history marker in downtown Cheyenne speaks at length about it, calling it “The First Transcontinental Highway.” A huge bust of Abraham Lincoln marks the high point on the Laramie Range where the highway crests and then shoots down Telephone Canyon, a long, looping downhill run that is an adventure during a blizzard (if the road’s open) and leads you to Laramie’s fine craft beers and indie restaurants if you make it.

An NPR reviewer in 2021 described the book this way:

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

So, it’s 1954 in Nebraska and points south and east. Quite a ride. As an admirer of “road novels,” this is a great one. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge is too although I’ve already written about it. Must mention here that Kerouac’s “On the Road” features a pivotal scene at Wild West Week in 1948 Cheyenne. What we have in miles and miles of asphalt and concrete are roads. Recently, I was pleased to see that Gen. Pershing, commander of all the armies who married a young woman from Cheyenne (a strategic move – she was the daughter of a U.S. senator), commissioned in 1921 a roadmap of the U.S. showing the Lincoln Highway as a priority number one route and the road from Cheyenne to Denver as priority number two. Take that, Colorado! Pershing hated your guts.

“A Gentleman in Moscow” is a very different story. It is a big novel and I just had to have a hardbound copy from B&N.com. It is 1922 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and Count Alexander Rostov has been quarantined at Moscow’s famous Metropol Hotel. He’s not sick. But he has the ability to infect the populace with highfalutin attitudes, a crime in the new communist state, where everyone is equal but some, we suspect, are more equal than others. The count is a snob and what we might call a ladykiller. He’s accustomed to women swooning over him and the pickings are quite slim on the corridors of the commie hotel. Still, he finds a way. Government apparatchiks check up on him and his dwellings and they try to train hotel staff to not call the count Count or Your excellency. To no avail.

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

Lepucki first got my attention through a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times. While most of it is about her new novel of time travel and family, “Time’s Mouth,” “California” is about family and apocalypse. Very down to earth and that’s the way the author likes it:

“I want there to be sex in my books. I want there to be periods and childbirth and feeling bad. There’s a lot of vomiting,” she says, laughing. “I feel like in a lot of contemporary fiction, the characters are not in their bodies in the way that I think in life we are.”

I read that and agreed that there is not a lot of periods and childbirth and sickness in most books. If described at all, sickness often is described romantically, as in the ravings of a sick Cathy in Wuthering Heights or the pining of a tubercular John Keats ("Bright Star" a fine Jane Campion film about Keats and Fanny Brawne). There is shit in “California” and it stinks. But that’s not the main story. A pregnant woman and her husband try to navigate the confusing and dangerous future world where all things fall apart. I’m only 120 pages into my Kindle version checked out from Libby but the author has my attention.

Is it wise to read historical novel and post-apocalyptic fiction at the same time? God only knows, if there was a God and he/she/it actually knew anything.

Your stories will survive you -- write or record them while you still can

I was thinking about this today as I went through some tests at the local hospital.

I like the idea of a National Service Program for 18-21-year-olds. Not a military draft – that didn’t work so well – but a program that puts youth to work doing good deeds. As a college dropout, I found jobs in hospitals. I was called orderly and not nursing assistant or CAN. I was a guy wearing a white uniform that nurses and patients called on when they needed a strong body to perform various tasks: scoot a patient up in bed or turn a patient so a nurse could get at the malfunctioning part of the body, transport patients to X-rays, take temps and BP and fill water pitchers. 

This was Florida so listening to old folks was also a keen skill. Young folks aren’t so good at listening to old people. Too bad – therein those aging bodies are many great stories. So why not put youngsters to work listening to old people’s stories while they also help them get around. Welcome to the Corps of Willing Listeners! They’d get paid a decent wage to push wheelchairs and hear stories. 

If they want to write some of those stories down and turn them into novels, so much the better. Maybe some of them can be made into memoirs for the family, something to remember grandpa by when you see that old face in a photo but can’t really place him. “That was grandpa: he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.” “There’s grandma: she raised 10 kids in a house without running water and an outhouse out back.” “There’s Uncle Jack – he was funny when he had a few drinks.” And so on.

Young people are energetic and smart and impatient. Old people tend to be tired and smart and patient and sometimes impatient because they know they are on the downward slide to the grave. I am 72 and that’s my reality. I love a good story but I can tell when the listener isn’t listening. Today a tech in his 20s took me to X-ray and took pictures of my chest. He saw my High Plains Arboretum vest and we talked gardening while the machines hummed. We talked about the difficulties of raising plants and veggies in our climate. I could tell he's had mixed results and I suggested he drop by the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens and ask some questions of the horticulturalists. 

Writing skills are a key element in storytelling. It's good to be able to tell a story on a blog or written on paper or told in a podcast or any of the myriad other ways we relate info. I have some writing skills so I can tell stories to those people in the future who see my e-photo online and wonder about me. Who is it? Why is he in the photo? What did he do for a living? Was he nice? Did he love someone and did someone love him? How did his kids turn out? I’ll leave behind some stories to inspire or bore to tears but I won’t care, will I? I will be stardust. I hope a few of my stories survive.

Mary Pat Fennessey looks for "Small Mercies" in Dennis Lehane's latest novel

Reading a Dennis Lehane novel is no walk in the park. It is if your park is filled with intrigue, betrayal, revenge, murder, drug overdoses, child abuse, and race riots. You get all of that in his latest novel, “Small Mercies.” It’s a harrowing ride through the Boston South End we read about in “Mystic River,” "Shutter Island," and the Kenzie-Gennaro mystery series (“Gone, Baby, Gone”).

The setting is the very hot end of summer in 1974 Boston. Americans are on edge due to the Saudi oil embargo. Lehane writes that everyone was driving around with at least a half-tank of gas so they didn’t have to spend their time in long gas lines. But there’s a bigger issue in the mostly-white areas of the city: court-ordered busing. Some of the Irish-American kids are going to be bused to a formerly all-black high school in a black neighborhood. Black children will be bused into all-white South End schools. The setting is about as territorial as it gets and a bomb is set to go off.

That bomb is Mary Pat Fennessey. She’s a native of the Southie projects, daughter of an abused household who passes on some of that abuse to her own family. One husband has been killed and the second one is estranged. Her son Noel returned from Vietnam with a habit and he dies from an overdose. Mary Pat only has her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Jules goes out with friends one night and doesn’t come home. A young black man has been murdered and Jules and her friends were somehow involved. Everyone tells Mary Pat to be patient, her daughter will turn up, you know how kids are. But Mary Pat has been pushed too far this time. Irish mobsters try to buy her silence and that tells her one thing: her daughter is dead because she’s witnessed a murder and someone is going to pay. Many someones pay dearly at Mary Pat’s hand.

Lehane does a wonderful job weaving Mary Pat’s vengeance with rowdy anti-busing rallies, the oil embargo, and the poverty and dysfunction of Irish-American Boston. The author takes us on a tour of neighborhoods and the entire city. Even Sen. Ted Kennedy makes an appearance. This is what is happening in Boston in August and September 1974.

The scene seems eerily familiar to a reader in 2023. Lehane makes class resentment very clear through the eyes of his characters. The inner-city white Boston neighborhoods have sent more kids to Vietnam than almost any other place in America. Most young men get drafted because they work menial jobs and do not have college deferments like all those kids across the river in Cambridge. When Mary Pat visits Harvard to seek help from her campus janitor ex-husband, you feel her disdain for the hippies in the city and the privileged white students protesting the war which won’t be declared over for another year.

If all of this sounds familiar, it is. These class resentments have been buildings for decades and politicians and media blowhards on the Right have tapped into it. It’s sad, and the book is sad. It’s a personal story. You feel Mary Pat’s rage in your gut and this reader is both shocked and saddened by her vendetta.

I lived in Boston 1972-73. I missed the fireworks of 1974. If I had been paying attention, I might have felt the city’s aching heart. Dennis Lehane’s gift to us is we get to feel what it was like to live in the Boston of almost 50 years ago. One hell of a story.

I looked at “Small Mercies” as a historical novel. It’s still a rough place in 2023. Real estate web site Upgraded Home talked listed Boston’s 10 most dangerous neighborhoods. South End – Southie -- was number three.

Our advice? If you find yourself in South End, keep an eye out for thieves, don’t get into arguments with people who just came from the local bars, and get a security system for your home.

And then there’s this from a recent issue of Boston Magazine:

In the last few decades, the South End has rapidly gentrified, once again becoming one of the city’s most stylish neighborhoods.

Mary Pat might not recognize the place. Then again, she might.

We say goodbye to our beautiful cat Lacey

Our cat Lacey died yesterday. She was old, 18 or 20, which is ancient for a cat. She was a Holstein variety, mottled black-and-white like the namesake cow. Chris, Annie, and I took her to the vet after she went a week without eating. She was still getting around but losing weight fast. She spent most of her time wrapped up in the cat bed in my  home office. We had watched her snuggle up to the heater vent for awhile and we put an electric blanket at the bottom of her bed. She seemed to like that.

Sometimes it's easy to tell when a pet has reached its end. We've had so many. Annie's Shelter dog Coco had a huge tumor on her head and blood tests revealed cancer. She was still pretty young but we knew she was in for months of pain so we took her for one last walk and opted to say goodbye at Avenues Pet Clinic. We spread her ashes in her favorite pond in the park. Not sure if that was legal but we were crying too hard to care.

Annie found Lacey five years ago at the Loveland, Colo., Animal Shelter. It's a really nice shelter, newer than most in the area. Annie, Chris and I had come to find a kitten to keep Annie company in her new Fort Collins apartment. So many cute kittens. Annie didn't show much interest so we passed by until we got to a large cage with one noisy occupant -- Lacey. A very pretty cat with a very loud voice. She came right up and pressed her face against the cage, begging for a touch. Annie obliged. I read the cat's description: "Dipstick, healthy older cat, declawed, female." As Annie played with the old lady cat with the dumb name, Chris and I found other cute kittens that Annie roundly ignored. We knew which cat Annie was going home with.

As it turned out, Annie left Fort Collins shortly thereafter and moved home to Cheyenne. She brought the cat with her, now called Lacey because that seemed to fit her better and it reminded Annie of the Irish Lace she likes so much. Teddy, our big male cat, was not amused. He's an outdoor cat who prowls the neighborhood and everyone knows him. He's a hunter. Annie adopted him as a kitten along with another kitten she named Bubba. Teddy and Bubba grew up together until Bubba disappeared one night and we never saw him again. We thought it oddly coincidental that a big owl made his home at the top of the neighbor's blue spruce around the same time. Owls are hunters too.

Teddy and Lacey did not get along. Teddy ruled the roost and Lacey was old and cranky. Teddy would whack at her with his big paw and Lacey backed up and hissed like a cobra. With no claws and small stature, she had to be vocal and scary. We also found out quickly that she was deaf. To make up for the silence, she filled the house with vocals. You always knew where she was, and maybe that was her point.

When Annie first took her outside on a nice spring day, she seemed stunned. It was all new to her, this outdoors stuff. She wandered through the yard sniffing at everything. She discovered grasshoppers and it was one prey should could snatch without claws. All that summer, she captured hoppers in her mouth and they bounded around our house for months.

Lacey found a home in my office. I write every morning and she seemed mostly content with sleeping at my feet or in her bed. When I rubbed her head, she looked up at me with those big eyes and seemed a bit surprised that I existed. 

Annie and I looked into her eyes yesterday as the vet administered first the numbing shot and then the kill shot. It was sad to see the light go out of her eyes. Before her spirit flew, she uttered one more meow. 

She had such a beautiful presence in the world. I know I am going to wake up in the middle of the night and hear her. I may hear her over the coming years. I may hear her when the light goes out of my eyes, welcoming me to The Great Beyond, where cats have their voice, their hearing, and their claws, and where I can spend eternity with the pets and people who made this life living. 

Go West, young man -- historical fiction along the open roads of the West

My two most recent reads were “on the road” style of historical fiction novels: “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge and “Gone, the Redeemer” by Scott Gates. I enjoyed both and probably would not have found them if I wasn’t part of the Historical Fiction Book Lovers group on Facebook. These people like to read and recommend some fantastic books that interest me now as I finish writing my second historical fiction novel.

“Gone, the Redeemer” by Scott Gates is a rollicking good journey across the U.S. of 1900 and its pivotal scene takes place in my home state of Colorado. It’s in the first-person voice of army deserter Thomas Sparkman and the reader gets to decide if he is a reliable narrator or unreliable narrator or falls somewhere in-between. Thomas runs into some amazing characters along the way including a manikin (from the Dutch manneken meaning "small man") named James who is escaping a circus, a giant who is handy with his pistols, and an Apache woman seeking her errant husband.

The bad guys are memorable too, notably the uber-capitalist Junior John. Thomas robs Junior John twice and that is almost two times too many.

Denver readers will recognize the streets of downtown Denver, mentions of infamous conman Soapy Smith, the interiors of the Brown Palace Hotel, and the old stockyards.

The author leaves us hanging in a couple places meaning there are a couple of story lines that don't get wrapped up. Also, there are some abrupt endings to chapters where the author doesn't make the most of the tension of the scene he's set up. I got a bit frustrated reading the novel in Kindle format because it's so annoying to go back to previous chapters. But that's my mistake in not going to the library or buying a hard copy, you lazy cheapskate.

The novel's ending, well, it may be a happy culmination of our protagonist's journey from wartime Cuba to his lover in California. Or it may not --- that's the risk the reader takes when he embarks on a journey with a first-person narrator. But it is a journey worth taking.

"Gone, the Redeemer" is published by Blue Ink Press, a small publisher in North Carolina. Lot of good books come out of these presses and they don’t get the attention they deserve.

Next time: I travel "West with Giraffes."

Cheyenne Botanic Gardens celebrates Earth Day

What better place to celebrate Earth Day at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens on Saturday, April 22, 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m.? Tour the Conservatory, enjoy the spring tulip show, have lunch at the Chicago Dog House food truck and attend a series of classes. Bring in and old computer or other electronics for recycling and Blue Peak will provide you with a free Earth Day plant. Fee for the three "Let's Talk About Water-wise Landscaping" series of classes is $20. Please pre-register. 

High Plains Gardening, 11 a.m.-noon: Horticulturist Isaiah Smith will be presenting the steps you can take to turn your yard into a water wise landscape while increasing the aesthetic appeal. Starting with small steps to a full renovation of your existing landscape you will learn how to garden in the High Plains successfully.

Crevice Gardening, 1-2 p.m.: Isaiah Smith will discuss the history and techniques of crevice gardening. Ready to learn more and plant a mountain in your front yard? There will also be tips to how to construct and plant your very own crevice garden.

Turf-grass Management, 2:30-3:30 p.m.: Do you want to manage your High Plains lawn with less fuss and fewer inputs? Director Scott Aker will give you some tips and tricks that could help you have a nicer lawn while using less water, less fertilizer, and less herbicide to control weeds. 

FMI: 307-637-6458 or botanic.org

I'll be volunteering at the front desk from 2:30-5 p.m. to field your questions and then send you to someone who knows the answers. 

 

Saturday Morning Round-up: Pretty Flowers, a Cornhusker Goes South, and Outrage in Tennessee

It’s mid-April and we’re experiencing our usual schizoid mix of warm days in the 70s interrupted by bursts of snow and cold. Humans are confused but bulb plants (amaryllis, tulips, daffodils, crocus) continue their rise into the sunshine. I have some nice yellow daffodils and purple crocuses emerging in my front yard garden. They are getting extra sunshine this spring because we took down the dying blue spruce on the house’s west side so the shade is gone. I’ll plant annuals in the gardens and maybe grow some cherry tomatoes to add some veggies to the mix. I’ve always wanted tomatoes in my front yard although critters may prove to be a problem. Wish me luck.

I volunteer at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens this afternoon. At the front desk, I am surrounded by blooming things, mostly tulips who have already passed their prime and gloxinias which are beautiful but eerily have no scent. The scent of orange and lemon blossoms drift in from the Orangerie. The Tilted Tulip Gift Shop sells the nicest smelling candles, their scents drifting my way even when they aren’t alight. April is when I see the first visitors with sunburns from walking around the lake or strolling through the gardens. They bear beatific looks and sly grins, as if they can’t believe they have survived another Wyoming winter.

My university newspaper, published five days a week and independent of the University of Florida since 1971, is having a blast goading the new UF president, a toady Republican named Ben Sasse. If the name looks familiar, it’s because Sasse retired from his seat as one of Nebraska’s two U.S. senators to take the job. We know Gov. DeSantis played a role in this since he is working overtime to sabotage both the public school K-12 system and the state’s public universities. The Independent Florida Alligator mocks Sasse for ignoring their reporters’ calls and e-mails. He’s kept a low profile since being heckled at a public gathering when he first appeared with his Cornhusker roots and started telling Floridians what to do with their flagship university. It doesn’t look good for him even with his nose firmly planted in DeSantis’s backside. I worked at the Alligator for two semesters in 1976 as a G.A. reporter, General Assignment because I arrived with no specialty such as sports or local government and I knew a tiny bit about everything because I was an English major, the academic equivalent of G.A. Good luck Alligator – we are cheering you on from Nebraska’s superior western neighbor.

Wyoming GOP legislators are no prize but they take second place to their colleagues in Tennessee. The GOP ran two African-American Democrats out of their seats because they had the temerity to join a demonstration at the state capitol. The demo was aimed at gun violence, the most recent murders happening March 27 when six people, including three kids, were gunned down at a Nashville Christian school. The Tenn. GOP like their national leaders have refused to do anything to limit access to automatic weapons. Instead, they send meaningless “thoughts and prayers” to victims’ families and scamper to Indianapolis for the national NRA convention (“14 Acres of Guns & Gear”). I’ll close this out with a quote from U.S. Army special counsel James Welch when hectored by Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a congressional hearing. From the History Channel web site:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” It was then McCarthy’s turn to be stunned into silence, as Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” 

Saturday Morning Round-up: Raging Florida Man, Thoughts on Historical Fiction, and March Goes out Like a Lion

Saturday Morning Round-up

Florida continues to be a highly entertaining place to be from. The legislature keeps passing ridiculous bills and the Gov signs them. Meanwhile, the Disney Mouse continues to be a force to be reckoned with. How long can a leader of a state known for its tourist attractions keep biting the hand that feeds it? If you’ve ever been detained at the Orlando airport, you’ve seen the families arriving from all over the globe to go to Disney World. Hang around the airport long enough, and you can hear Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Esperanto. Overseas tourists bring their families and their money and most could not tell you what the “Never Say Gay Bill” has to do with the Magic Kingdom.

Thursday’s temps in Cheyenne were in the 50s with lots of sun and very little wind. Yesterday was all wind. We’re fortunate to not be in any of the country’s tornado hot spots this week. Some of the photos from Iowa, Illinois and Arkansas are frightening. Chris, a big “Twister” fan, said that the videos from yesterday were so ominous that they looked fake. She contends “Twister” twisters look more real. Thanks for smart phones with great cameras, we get close-ups of these powerful storms. Thanks to drones, we get close-up shots of the devastation on the ground. I keep reminding myself that these videos are real. I keep reminding myself that real people died and were injured in these spectacular storms. I keep reminding myself how lucky I am.

What is a historical novel? That’s a subject being kicked around on the Historical Fiction Book Lovers Facebook site. One person said it was any book that “captured the zeitgeist of a time and place.” I liked that. Others say it is either 30 or 50 years after the event being written about. There is some disagreement as to whether old classics written near to the time it happened should be included. I am an old classic so I realize that some of my favorite novels may not be historical fiction. “All Quiet on the Western Front,” for instance, was written by Erich Maria Remarque just a few years after the Great War he fought in. In the 1920s, it was not historical fiction. In the 21^st century, it is. Vietnam War books and those set in the turbulent 60s can be historical fiction or maybe not. Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato” was published in 1979 barely a decade after his service in Vietnam. It wasn’t historical fiction then but the American War in Southeast Asia was declared over in April 1975 and that’s 48 years ago. Any novels set during that time should be on the HF lists, right? Young people, especially, are reading Larry Heinemann’s “Paco’s Story” and Stephen Wright’s (the writer not the comedian) “Meditations in Green” as great books set in the long-ago time of the 1960s, back when their grandparents were young. I am writing historical fiction novels set in the U.S. after World War I. Two of my grandparents served in that war. It was old news in the 1950s when my Iowa Grandpa told us how he brought his horse to the first mechanized war. It seemed like ancient times to kids listening to their fathers’ WWII and Korean War tales. What are your thoughts on historical fiction?

Take a break from the raging wind and get over to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. Spring is rough around here but you find tropical gardens and friendly people there. I volunteer at the Gardens and will be at the front desk from 2:30-5 p.m. Come on by and say hi.

The land of historical fiction is a great place to visit

I belong to the Historical Fiction Book Lovers Facebook group. I spend a lot of time there suggesting books on various topics. I'm surprised by the number of novels that I've read that are based on historical events or eras. One person in the group asked about Native American historical novels and I rattled off some titles: "Mean Spirit" by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, "Children of the Lightning" by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, and "Ridgeline" by Michael Punke. Hogan's 1990 book is about the infamous Osage murders in Oklahoma in which tribal members were murdered for their oil rights. If it sounds familiar, it's also the subject of the the non-fiction book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. The book's been transformed into a movie due out in the fall. In it, the newly created FBI plays a role in exposing one of the grisliest conspiracies in U.S. history. While I knew about the Osage murders, I didn't know that the FBI blew the case wide open and that it helped propel it to bigger and stranger and unconstitutional things. But they're the good guys in this story. 

"Children of the Lightning" is an excellent novel by Wyoming writer Gear. The setting is the Central Florida East Coast and the Natives who made it their home in pre-Columbian times. Gear is not Native but she did her homework. I did some of my growing up in this part of Florida in the 1960s and 1970s. As I read the novel, I imagined Florida without the condos, tourist traps, and air conditioning. A slice of paradise but one with panthers and snakes, alligators and sharks. A wonderful read.

I reviewed "Ridgeline" for WyoFile in 2021. It tells the story of the Fetterman Fight (formerly called the Fetterman Massacre) along the Bozeman Trail's route in Wyoming. It's told from the POV of the tribes and cavalry with one particularly poignant view of the event through an officer's wife's secret diary. Punke wrote "The Revenant" in which mountain man Hugh Glass gets mauled by a bear and has to find his way home through the Wyoming wilds. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass but it's the imagined bear that steals the main scene. Grisly and scary. In high school, Punke was a history interpreter at Wyoming's Fort Laramie. He's also done his research on Red Cloud's War and has written a terrific novel. 

As I contemplated these books, I thought about books by Sherman Alexie, Debra Magpie Earling, and Joseph Marshall and poetry by Joy Harjo (Muscogee) and Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo. We're also seeing a revival of Native American series and movies. "Reservation Dogs" is an all-Native production that evokes the present and the past on the rez. Humorous and deadly serious. "Dark Winds" is another series featuring Navajo cops created by Anglo writer Tony Hillerman. In "1883," the bad guys are the killers from the Wyoming Cattlemen's Association and the guy in the white hat is an Indian who doesn't wear a hat. We writers like to see characters who defy stereotypes. We also like to see the times portrayed as what they probably were and not the whitewashed version as seen in old Hollywood westerns. 

I've read a lot of books. I have to mention one I'm reading now. "West with Giraffes" by Lynda Rutledge is a kooky tale of a 17-year-old hobo (Woody Nickel) in 1938 who volunteers to drive two giraffes from the East Coast to the San Diego Zoo. It's told from the POV of Nickel at 100 in a retirement home who writes his memoir and imagines one of the giraffes outside his window. 

I love the imagination writers bring to history. That's what fiction is all about. So many novels I admire were once just novels and now can be described as historical fiction. Every World War II novel including "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-Five." Novels about the Old West, the Great Depression, even the 1960s and Vietnam. What was new is now old and that pretty much describes me too.

Nelson Algren lived the writer's life in the 1930s and J. Edgar Hoover was watching

I write a fan letter to fellow writer Colin Asher:

Dear Colin:

Just finished reading “Never a Lovely So Real.” I loved it. Your intro sections read more like an historical novel than standard biography. It helps that Nelson’s origins and his writing life were so real and unpredictable. Overall, I found out so much more about the writer who conducted my creative writing workshop at University of Florida in 1974. Nelson’s reputation preceded him and he took it with him after the 12-week session. Until I read your book, I was content to remember the grizzled old 63-year-old who wandered into the classroom on a hot September night in Gainesville. Now I know better. I’m glad you found his life worth writing about.

Nelson was my first writing teacher. He was a gruff but entrancing presence in the classroom. I only knew him by reputation. As you write it, that was part fact and part fiction, some of it fed by Nelson. I’d read one of his books and a half-dozen stories. His past was checkered but I knew little about it. He’d been friends with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and lover to Simone de Bouvier, a feminist writer found on many women’s studies reading lists. Two of his books were made into movies and he spent some crazy time in Hollywood. His political activities earned him a file in J. Edgar’s commie blacklist (886 pages – one heck of a file).

Remembering that time almost 50 years later, Visiting Writer Nelson Algren was an unsettling presence on the sprawling University of Florida campus. His clothing was more Dust Bowl Goodwill than Central Florida Casual. He wore rumpled shirts, loose-fitting slacks, and what looked like the army boots he wore during his time with a medical unit in France during World War II. He sported a grizzled beard and a cap that looked better on Tom Joad. He was old, probably the worst sin you could commit on a campus known for frats, football and consistent listings on Playboy Magazine’s “Top Party Schools.” Schools made the grade by earning an A-plus in three criteria: Sex, nightlife, sports. Creative writing is not mentioned. Keggers under the palms were the order of the day and nobody really wanted to take a walk on the wild side or meet the man with the golden arm who prowled The Windy City’s mean streets.

Me – I wanted to take that walk. Nelson Algren was the real thing. Here he was, stuck in a classroom in one of the campus’s oldest buildings teaching writing to kids from Daytona and Apalachicola. I looked at him as a weathered sage. We were a wave of youth in the U.S.A. who knew very little about what life was like for most Americans. We wrote stories about surfing and soured relationships. The stories in Algren’s “Neon Wilderness” might have been about Martians for all we knew. Grifters and gamblers, whores and junkies. I wanted to know these people because I desperately wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

Nelson was generous of his time and expertise. He told great stories. One of our fellow students invited us to her apartment where we smoked dope. Nelson partook, noting that he used to smoke it with Chicago’s jazz musicians and the addicts he met when writing “The Man with the Golden Arm.” He even grew his own brand of weed outside his bungalow near Gary, Indiana.

Another night, my pal Big Mike, piled us into his big black station wagon and took us to the strip club where he was a bouncer. Big Mike was a teetotaling Vietnam vet whose studio apartment was piled high with cases of bottled Pepsi because he could never find enough Pepsi in Coca-Cola country. I had a feeling that Algren had been in rougher places but he was a good sport. After his second drink, he demonstrated how he would put his head between the dancer’s big breasts and make motorboat sounds. It shocked me, the idea of this old writer motorboating a stripper. What he might have been saying is this: “Don’t waste any time, boys. Do motorboats when you can. It all goes by faster than you know.” I wasn’t listening then but now know something about the brief span of a lifetime.

In class, Algren was kind to our stories but made suggestions to make them better. I wrote a story about a homeless guy getting evicted from a tent in a mall parking lot. Algren said it needed some work. He handed out his recommended reading list. I wish I still had it. Hemingway was on it along with books I didn’t know: “A House for Mr. Biswas” by V.S. Naipaul, “The End of the Game and Other Stories” by Julio Cortazar, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Good Soldier Svejk” by Jaroslav Hasek, and the collected stories of John Collier. On the last night of class, Algren handed me a slip of paper with his agent’s name and address and told me to contact her. I didn’t see him do that with any of the other students and felt pretty special. I never followed up. I had nothing to show an agent except a half-finished story and late-night journal entries.

A year later, my next writing prof was Harry Crews. I figured he probably knew some of the same people Algren did, ne’er-do-wells and junkies and killers. Algren came from the mean streets and Crews from the mean swamps of the Okefenokee. If you’re curious about how mean it was, read his memoir “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” This was before Crews got sober and didn’t always make it to class, regaling the locals at Lillian’s Music Store which wasn’t a music store. When he did, he told great stories. One night, he read aloud his favorite story, “How Beautiful with Shoes” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, a wonderful writer whom nobody in class had ever heard of, This from Wikipeda: “Steele has been called ‘America's recognized master of the popular short story’ between World War I and the Great Depression.” Crews wrote an Esquire column called “Grits” and had stories and essays featured in Playboy. One I remember the best was “The Button-down Terror of David Duke,” infamous KKK grand wizard from Louisiana. Crews wrote about an ill-fated backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail that ended in a Tennessee town that once convicted and hung a circus elephant for stomping a boy to death.

I was lucky to have two great early mentors. At the time, I didn’t understand it but knew it was important to my imagined writing career. After graduation, I worked in Denver as a sportswriter and edited a weekly alternative newspaper. I was a corporate editor until I decided it was killing me. I wrote a novel and snagged myself an agent in Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency. He helped me revise the book and shopped it around. I told him I was quitting my job and he advised me to get a numbing day job so I could have plenty of energy left for writing. Instead, a went off to get my M.F.A. at Colorado State University. It helped my writing and helped me get published. It also sent me off with a career as an arts administrator at a state arts council and then the National Endowment for the Arts. It cut into my writing time. I’m retired now and have time to think about paths taken and not taken. I write every day and have a short list of published fiction. I have a fine family and a house. Still, Ray Powers might have been right. I’ll never know.

Thanks again. I look forward to reading your other work.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay, michaelshaywyo@hotmail.com, hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com

P.S.: Ordered a copy of “Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters” after reading about it in your book. Couldn’t resist.

I’m no historian but Taylor Sheridan’s “1883” seems bona fide

At the urging of one of my sisters (her first name starts with M), I tuned in to "1883" last night and was up to all hours. My favorite line thus far comes from Sam Elliott, the grizzled veteran of the trails. He hates all of their delays and warns Dutton that it puts the wagon train at South Pass in October. South Pass in October can be nice from a car window in 2023. It can also be the other thing -- a white-out nightmare. Imagine yourself on horseback or in a wagon or on foot, still miles to go until Oregon.

I stayed away from Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” series because its biggest fans also seemed to be FOX viewers. I didn’t want to watch another  “Dallas of the Tetons” or a color version of “Wagon Train.” I didn’t want to see all the old tropes from a John Ford movie. The early part of his career, until “The Searchers” brought some reality to the genre. I loved the old “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide.” I loved all those TV westerns. I was a kid and looking for heroes. I got ‘em by the wagon-load. They’ve channeled my behavior ever since. My politics are a combination of Rowdy Yates and Sister Norbert. They were both enforcers who rode for the brand. Moral and fair. A bit rough around the edges.

I like “1883” thus far. It is cold-blooded in its portrayal of the migration to the West. Cheyenne at this point was 17 years old. It might have been a bit more civilized than Fort Worth, not nearly as crazy as Deadwood. Fortunately for streaming services, Frederick Jackson Turner would not declare the frontier “gone” for another decade. The Duttons will have settled in Montana or Wyoming or a version of Wyotana filmed in Canada. Wyoming would become a state in 1890 and was fairly civilized until MAGA Republicans took over the state legislature. Now all is lost.

But back to “Yellowstone.” I am watching the entire series to keep me occupied until “The Last of Us” returns with Season Two. It’s an odd coincidence but episodes 7 & 8 of “The Last of Us” take place in the winter wilderness of Wyoming and Colorado. The characters ride horses and hunt for their own meat. There are bandits and cultists and killers everywhere. And don’t forget the fungi zombies although they’ve been scarce the last two episodes. The protagonists are killers, as both Sheriff Jim Courtright (Billy Bob Thornton) and Trail Boss Shea Brennan (Elliott) call themselves in “1883.” Ellie proved to be a very capable killer in TLOU Episode 8 and Joel long ago proved he can eliminate those who threaten him or his young charge.

I am thankful when the depiction of killing is put in able hands. My wife keeps asking if we can watch something civilized such as “The Sound of Music” (she is not a “Yellowstone” fan). I say just wait as I’m standing by for the latest body count. That would be “Yellowjackets,” season 2 coming March 24 on Showtime.

Even cyborgs need periodic battery replacements

I’ve been recovering from heart surgery since Feb. 16. It was Valentine’s Day Week and it seemed like a good time for it. Heart surgery has an ominous sound. Thoughts go to quadruple bypasses and aortic valve replacement. I just needed a replacement generator in my chest to stop any signs of ventricular fibrillation which can lead to death. The gadget is filled with microchips and wires that connect to leads that snake down into my heart. I got my first one ten years ago after a widowmaker heart attack that almost did me in. Because it took too long to get help for my stopped-up heart, it sustained some muscle damage which in turn made my heart less effective. Up until January 2013, my heart had been very good to me. In high school, it pumped like a champ as I ran down the basketball court or when a girl looked at me in a certain way. Got me through my adult years until I hit 62 then BAM! Damn…

So the first one wore out and I needed a new one. I am on Medicare and have secondary insurance that pay for the $23,000 gizmo and attendant expenses such as doctor’s fees, OR fees, nursing services, etc. I am lucky to have health care insurance that keeps me ticking. Health insurance is a right and should not be optional. I see that our esteemed GOP state legislators have once again torpedoed Medicaid expansion that would insure thousands of Wyomingites. A widowmaker strikes and you need help? Tough luck, buddy. For the GOP it’s all about the cruelty. They didn’t used to announce their cruelties for all the world to see and hear. Now they shout it from the rooftops.

Back to my trip to the operating room. It’s called the CRMC Cath Lab and it’s where the electrophysiologists work their magic. I was under conscious sedation, like the kind you get for your colonoscopy. In this case, the surgeon applied a topical anesthesia and then pumped me with Fentanyl but not too much. He then cut into my chest, removed the old battery and in with the new. Then he sealed me back up. Before you know what’s going on, I'm being whisked off to recovery.

So how does my electrophysiologist keep track of the signals beamed from my Abbott Laboratories ICD? I used to have a Merlin Home Transmitter the size of the big black phones you used to see in 1940s movies. It sat by the side of my bed and beamed my readings to the CRMC Device Clinic. My new monitor is a Samsung device, smaller than a smart phone, that I can take anywhere. Pretty slick.

My new machine should last 5-7 years, according to the pamphlet that accompanied it. I plan on lasting at least that long. Seven days post-op and I’m doing fine.

Thank you, modern technology and surgical expertise. 

Two years ago I reviewed a nonfiction book about ICDs on WyoFile. It's "Lightning Flowers" and written by Wyoming author Katherine E. Standefer. She needed a device while still in her 20s and then set out to find the its origins. A great tale, whether you're a cyborg or not. 

Night of the Widowmaker, ten years on

Ten years ago on these pages, I regaled my readers with stories of my heart attack. It was an exciting misadventure. Nobody in my family had heart issues and neither did I. I was struck down in the middle of a working day. The scientific name for my affliction is anterior ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction or STEMI. It’s commonly known as “The Widowmaker.”

I didn’t hear the term from a cardiologist until I was recovering in my hospital room. Such finality. It seemed so 19th century. "Night of the Widowmaker" could easily be the title of a thriller novel. Its shock value was too tempting for a storyteller to ignore. I used it hundreds of times in place of heart attack. When I took the time to describe it in detail, tossing in an encyclopedia of medical terms, I could see my listener’s attention begin to wane. Simply described, the left anterior descending (LAD) artery gets blocked by a clot or plaque and the heart reacts.

The signs are there should you pay attention. Chest pain, shortness of breath, excessive sweating, jaw pain. Mine was a belly ache. Since it happened during norovirus season, I figured I was getting ready to blow chunks and/or get the runs. I got neither. It was Dec, 17, 2012, and the eve of my birthday number 62. I might have to lay off the cake and ice cream. I was off work for two weeks so I could lie around and see what happened. After a week, I went to my GP and he thought I might have pneumonia so sent me for an X-ray. He had a perfectly good EKG machine out in the hall but that never entered into the conversation. The X-ray showed congestion and the doc prescribed an antibiotic and bed rest.

On Jan. 2, I headed to work but only made it as far as my front door. I couldn’t open it. I called my wife. She decided to come home and take me to the ER. When she arrived, she saw I was in pain so called 911. The EMTs got there quick, took my vitals, and said I was having heart failure. They bundled me onto a gurney and sped, sirens blaring, to the hospital. Tests and X-rays showed the heart attack and also congestive heart failure. Dr. Khan wanted to get me to surgery right away but held off because I couldn’t breathe. So he stashed me on the telemetry floor and prescribed Lasik to rid my body of fluids. The next day, I had an oblation which opened the LAD and I began to recover.

Then I started telling my story. My heart, left to its own devices for two weeks, lost some of its pumping power. They filled me full of drugs, sent me home with orders for several rounds of cardiotherapy. Six months later, I got the bad news that my heart had only partially recovered and that I was a prime candidate for Catastrophic heart failure. To avoid further drama, I needed an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator or ICD. So I got one. Its battery eventually ran down, so this last Thursday, I got a new one.

The ICD lasts from 7-10 years. I pushed mine to the end so Medicare and my insurance company would agree to foot the bill. Medicare reimbursement for an ICD is 23 thousand and change. That doesn’t include hospital and physician and other associated fees. That will quickly eat up my deductible so my out-of-pocket costs will be manageable.

Someone with a heart condition shouldn’t have to worry about affordability. Someone with breast cancer – my wife – shouldn’t have to worry about treatment costs. My son and daughter, both with mental health and medical needs, shouldn’t have to up their angst to find affordable treatments. Alas, that’s where we are in 2023 in the United States of America.

Next time, I'll explore the status of my heart ten years on.

For some of my ruminations on the widowmaker, put "heart" in the blog's search bar.

Kristin Hannah's historical novel features the brave women of the French Resistance

I’m reading “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. It’s the story of two sisters in a small French village occupied by the Nazis. The elder sister, Vianne, has a child and a husband captured during the Nazi blitzkrieg. The younger one, Isabelle, is the rebel of the family, kicked out of a number of boarding schools and now working for the French Resistance. The sisters live very different lives. They share a hatred of the Nazis and possess strong wills to survive the war. The more compelling story is of the Resistance. The author has said that the novel is a tribute to these brave women. They faced dying during guerrilla raids or arrest which also meant death or a trip to a Nazi extermination camp. I just finished a chapter where Isabelle with her Basque guide takes four downed RAF pilots from Paris over the Pyrenees to the British embassy in neutral Spain.

Imagine traveling undercover to Jackson in a train jammed with Nazis and then hiking over the Tetons to Driggs in late October, struggling up talus slopes and crossing waterways, all the while dodging Nazis on one side of the border or Franco’s fascists on the other side. Or maybe it’s a postapocalyptic jaunt where the bad guys are some of the right-wing goons who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Well-armed and stupid. Rain and snow will fall as you travel. It will be cold and you’re wearing running shoes and a light jacket.

You get the picture. These people were braver than brave. Their country had been overrun. Friends and family members had been killed by the Nazis. They must pay.

I don’t know what I would do. I’ve hiked Wyoming and Colorado mountains in all kinds of weather but I am always prepared. I am in my 20s (used to be), dressed for the climate and wearing good boots. I have five days of food in my pack and one of those tiny stoves. Good topo maps. Pretend I have a loaded Glock at my side, prepared for attacks by Bloaters (“The Last of Us,” episode 5).

Just think about it. The French Resistance had so much less and did so much more.

I’m looking forward to the film version of “The Nightingale.” Dakota and Elle fanning play the sisters. I hope the creators do it justice. You can see a teaser here.

Booth and the Our American Cousin we want to forget

BOOTH

That family name is infamous. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most dastardly deeds in U.S. history. We still live with the consequences.

Booth didn't just rise from the Ford Theater stage and murder a president. He came from somewhere. He had parents, brothers and sisters. As a kid in Maryland, he was a scamp who liked dogs, rode horses, and played tricks on his siblings. He is not a monster, at least he's not in Karen Joy Fowler's amazing historical novel, "Booth." He's the third-youngest of the children of noted actor Junius Booth and his beleaguered wife. A Marylander, he turns into a Southern sympathizer and buys into the kind of political mind-rot our Uncle Jimbo in South Carolina now gets on Fox and social media. 

We know how the story ends. In tragedy, maybe the worst one in American history. An almost-famous actor kills the president and changes history.

One can almost hear the reporters of 1865 interviewing the neighbors. "He seemed like such a nice man. Last winter I saw him playing in the snow with the kids (a scene from "Booth"). A fine actor too. You just gotta wonder what went wrong."

Presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. He seemed like such a nice man. Until he wasn't.

"Booth," an historical novel by Karen Joy Fowler, explores the Booth family history leading up to April 14, 1865, at a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and conspiracy nut, bursts into Lincoln's box and shoots him in the head. The country, part of it anyway, goes into mourning. Unreconstructed Confederates cheer. 

A divided country -- so what else is new? 

Don't get around much anymore, but plan to change that

My daughter Annie invited me to go on the Friday ArtWalk. I used to go every month when I worked at the Wyoming Arts Council. Then I retired and went less often. Then I hurt my spine and needed a walker to get around. Then came Covid and there was no ArtWalk. Then Covid was over and my wife Chris was diagnosed with breast cancer.

ArtWalk was taken over by Arts Cheyenne in 2022 after a ten-year run in the hands of local artist Georgia Rowswell. It's gone from the second Thursday of the month to a First Friday arts event. It includes visits to local galleries, such as Clay Paper Scissors and new arts venues such as the Cheyenne Creativity Center downtown. There's new art to see, lots to eat and drink, and music by local musicians.

I hadn’t been to a First Friday before Annie invited me. She’s an artist too, you see, and just getting involved in the local art scene. Since most of my professional life was spent as an arts administrator where I did a lot of arts stuff, Annie depends on me for insight into that world. I laugh inwardly, not wanting to think about all of the things I don’t know about the art world. I know just enough.

Last night I realized that my social skills are not as fine-tuned as when I regularly had to schmooze with artists, writers, gallery owners, politicians, just plain folks. I was quite adept at small talk and most of the time I was on hand as a professional from the state arts agency and people expected me to say something enlightening. I tried. More than once I had to say I didn’t have an answer and I would get back to them on it. And I did. That’s how I learned. OJT. There are people born as arts administrators, there are those who go to college for it, and there are those who learn through trial and error. I am in this latter category. While in grad school at Colorado State, I helped arrange readings by writers. I had attended quite a few as a fan and someone busily writing fiction while I tried to make a living in other ways. I had no real sense of what it took to put on a reading. I found out at CSU.

I also did my first try at administering the arts. One of my faculty mentors, Mary Crow, asked if I wanted to serve on the Fine Arts Series. I was trying to get to class, teach a couple sections of composition, workshop my own writing, and find way to spend time with my wife and young son. Naturally, I volunteered. The Fine Arts Series meetings were busy and congenial. Its members included undergraduates and graduate students. Also CSU staff including the director, Mims Harris. I stepped into a semester that featured music and dance performances, an annual poster art show, and literary events. I volunteered for the latter. Thus began my journey.

Last night, I felt detached from that world. Early in retirement, I made a choice to spend time with my own writing and not volunteer for arts events. And then all of those other things happened and I found myself out of the loop. There was a lot I really liked about the loop. Educating myself and meeting new people. I liked that. Paperwork? Not so much. Annie has had a few arts-related jobs and is learning. My son volunteers for the local theatre and he also is discovering the joys and sorrows of THE LIFE.

I plan on attending more ArtWalks, readings, book signings, and the annual Governor’s Arts Awards gala. I miss it. I continue writing – that’s a priority. But all work and no play make Mike a dull boy. My advice: stay in touch with your schmoozing self. It keeps you engaged and the mind working, a concern for anyone over 70 which is where I find myself. I could play Wordle or assemble 1,000-piece puzzles. That would sharpen my synapses. I could do any number of things in retirement. An Atlantic Magazine Online piece this week asked "Why so many people are unhappy in retirement." The subhead: "Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero's journey and leave out the crucial last step: letting go." I could only read the first graf before the paywell clicked in. But I got the gist. Nobody wants to let go. Our entire life is based on beingness. We are not equipped to grasp nothingness. So we rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Or we sulk. Or lurk on social media. Or watch Fox News all day and experience the sweet rush of having our brains sucked from our heads.

I will choose engagement. I feel alive then and can delay thoughts of letting go for just one more day.

I discover Donald Westlake's novels and reminisce about John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee

I found Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books and they are fantastic. Always a caper going on. Always sharp dialogue and lots of humor. Westlake passed away in 2008 but I can see he's in the same school as Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich and Jerome Charyn. Maybe a dash of Don DeLillo too. So far I've read two of the volumes, "The Road to Ruin" and the first Dortmunder novel, "The Hot Rock." It was published in 1970. I didn't look that up until I finished but there were clues placed throughout. The cars they drive, the characters' language, ubiquitous phone booths, no personal computers. Its throwback quality didn't bother me. He had a skillful way of incorporating all of that into the narrative.  

What other crime-adjacent novels of that era would show such wit? I thought of John D. MacDonald, for instance, and his Travis McGee character. McGee probably had too much machismo for these times. He could be funny and ironic. He called himself a "salvage consultant" and lived on his "Busted Flush" houseboat docked at the Bahia Mar Marina. McGee's erstwhile sidekick is Meyer, an economist always ready for a McGee caper. He dwells on a neighboring boat named for his hero, John Maynard Keynes.

I worked at a Florida bookstore in the '70s and I brought MacDonald's novels to my mother Anna Shay (R.I.P Mom) and she devoured them. Me too. Travis and his Busted Flush houseboat. I could always see McGee's houseboat through MacDonald's imagination. Back in the '80s, my brother Dan and I visited Bahia Mar and stopped at Slip F-18. We thought about the McGee we knew from the books. Slip F-18 was declared a literary landmark in 1987, a year after the author's death. 

I did my usual Google search for Travis McGee and came up with an article by Kris Hundley on the Visit Florida site (couldn't find a pub date). The second paragraph about the Bahia Mar Marina set the tone for the story:

There's little room left for a boat bum like Travis McGee. 

She described present-day Bahia Mar in gritty detail.

Bahia Mar touts its ability to accommodate yachts up to 300 feet, even squeezing in a 312-footer recently for a month-long stay. The marina's 3,000-foot dock along the Intracoastal sports one mega-yacht after another. flawlessly polished hulls gleaming, white communications domes looming 50-feet overhead, docked so closely together that the uber-rich could step from one vessel to another without ever touching the ground. Not an inch of precious real estate is wasted.

Bahia Mar must have considered the literary landmark plaque dedicated to MacDonald as "wasted space." It now sits in the marina's office. Hundley wraps up the piece this way: 

A boat bum might seem forgotten among such glitz. But inside the marina office, the woman behind the desk said that not a week goes by that someone doesn't wander in, looking for the slip once occupied by Travis McGee. She is not sure what the fuss is about: she's never read the books. 

Made me want to bang my head against the desk. MacDonald and McGee would have had a few things to say about the wretched excess of 21st century Florida. As a self-described "salvage consultant," McGee usually was coming to the aid of a trusting soul who had been ripped by someone who would own a 312-foot mega-yacht. His price was always half of the recovered loot. When the client objected, his usual response was "half of something is better that nothing." MacDonald also wrote the best-selling "Condominium" which tore into the thoughtless development going on in coastal Florida which has not abated in the 46 years since the novel's original publication. 

During his lifetime, MacDonald got great reviews from the likes of Hiaasen and Kurt Vonnegut. Here's what Vonnegut said about MacDonald's work:

“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."

I feel a need to reread Travis McGee, see how he holds up in these fast-moving and confusing times.

Mike Miller posted an updated article on Travis McGee on Jan. 28. It was on the Florida Back Roads Travel site. In it, he writes about how he first came upon MacDonald's character when his father visited him in Florida in 1964 and gave him a copy of "The Deep Blue Good-by." His father was reading the latest novel, "Nightmare in Pink." Miller read "Deep Blue" and was hooked. He's read the entire series, some of them twice, and is a devoted fan. Read Miller's essay to understand what makes McGee tick, and why his books are still in print. 

My mother died too young in 1986, a McGee fan to the end. Mike Miller's father died in a St. Cloud, Fla., nursing home in 1986, the same year MacDonald died. Miller Senior's dying message to his son was "Nightmare in Pink." 

Now that's a fan.

Saying goodbye to a friend, Dick Lechman

A eulogy for a friend from a friend: 

Books, books, books.

Dick Lechman had thousands of books at one time at his Old Grandfather Books in downtown Arvada. He had books in the store, books in a garage, and a few in his apartment and his car. I loved going into the Arvada store because I could always find something I didn’t know I was looking for. A history of World War I, a coffee table book of Colorado maps, an unread early novel by one of my favorite writers. If I couldn’t find anything, Dick would always suggest something. His interests centered on spirituality and religion as befits a one-time practicing priest. But his imagination wandered far and wide. My daughter Annie, Dick’s goddaughter, liked the bookstore too. She was little and liked to get lost in the stacks to discover intriguing books about dinosaurs and unicorns, sometimes in the same book. I never met with Dick that he didn’t have a book for me. I might be interested in it or maybe not. But someone who will gift you a book is someone to spend time with.

After Dick and his wife Mary bought a house in Arvada, I sometimes journeyed down from Cheyenne to play ping pong in his garage/office. Books lined the shelves there too. Dick usually won the games and then we retired to the garage’s book section. Dick also built and installed a Little Free Library in his front yard. I like those and usually stop to peruse the library when I see one. It’s like hidden treasure – there could be anything in there. And often was.

Dick was a writer too, a poet with philosophy in mind. He always emailed or mailed me his poetry. I usually commented on it because I know, as a writer and writing teacher, that every written thing deserves attention. In his poetry, Jesus played baseball and so did his disciples. Amazing flights of imagination. I liked the way he always worked friends and family into his poems – that made it very personal. I didn’t understand all of it but appreciated that he spent time and energy writing it down.

Dick was a conscientious godfather. He always brought Annie books and wrote her poems. He went out of his way to help her when she was in a variety of mental health treatment centers, in Colorado, Wyoming and a few neighboring states. It’s sometimes hard to know what to say to a loved one with mental health challenges. Just being there in a big deal. Yourself, listening. Chris and I always appreciated Dick’s attention to our little bird trying to fly.

Dick was one of the first people Chris and I met when we decided to abandon traditional Catholic churches for something different at 10:30 Catholic Community. Some of us gathered together in a men’s group and it turned out we had a lot to share with one another. We went on jaunts to the mountains. I moved away from Denver, first to Fort Collins and then to Cheyenne, and some of the guys went down to Arizona for Rockies’ spring training. Dick liked his Rockies and so did Mary. We all were committed fans and one of my great memories was attending a Rockies-Dodgers game with Dick and Mary and Dick’s brother and sister-in-law. Summer night at Coors Field. Sure, you might get heartburn from the hot dogs and the Rockies relief pitching. But always the best place to be in summer.

It's sad to say goodbye to Dick. The memories remain. He was a good guy with a big heart. And a fine friend.

Dick was always learning. This is some of his commentary on an Easter poem he sent me in April 2022: Remember that is just Dick's two cents/And each of you have your two cents/So it seems this Easter is better than last Easter./Cuz I didn't understand the resurrection of the spirit till/I was 83 years old.

He was 85 when he passed from this life last week. 

2022 was Dick’s final Easter on this planet. He also commented on the afterlife, saying that he hoped there was no paperwork there. By that, I'm guessing he meant PAPERWORK, you know, the kind we all hate to fill out. He didn't mean the paper of books because that meant so much to him. I do believe there is poetry and books, lots of books, in the afterlife. What would heaven be without them?

Dick loved sports and especially the Colorado Rockies. If there's room for books in heaven, there must be be a snowball's chance in Hades that the Rockies can find consistent pitching and go on to win a World Series. We can all keep praying for that. 

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, captures the city between the wars

I’ve always been fascinated with Paris in the 1920s and 30s. The inter-war period. The tensions of those years add pizzaz to any book. So many writers lived and worked there. A sojourn to Paris was almost mandatory. Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce. Artists, too, notably Picasso. Discovered some others as I read “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” a 2014 novel by Francine Prose. The author tells her story of the 1930s and wartime occupation through the pages of imagined letters, memoirs, and journals by the book’s principals. The two main characters were inspired by real people. Gabor Tsenyi is a Hungary-born photographer who hones the craft of low-light nighttime photography as he prowls Paris streets, brothels, and bars. Lou Villars is a French woman athlete who ends up torturing prisoners for the Gestapo. Gabor is based on the famous photographer Bressai. He is best known for his pics of the demimonde who hung out at Le Monocle, the “Cabaret”–like club that attracted the city’s artists and LGBTQ crowd that dared to be cross-dressing club regulars in the thirties but risked danger when the war came. Villars is based on Violette Morris, a lesbian athlete who came under Hitler’s spell at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The era is an attractive one for writers. Many of those who fled to Paris were survivors of the Great War and facing Great War Part 2 in 1939-45. Some 70 million residents of Planet Earth died in the Great War. It was, as historian Barbara Tuchman and others have written, the war that changed everything. Four-plus years of horror were embedded into the conscience of a generation that was tagged with the term “lost generation.” Survivors may have been lost but not as lost as the millions of ghosts who roam Ypres and Verdun and forever inhabit Europe’s psyche. An entire generation of young people was almost wiped off the planet. Small villages in England, France, and Germany lost every one of its young men. The world never got over it, nor should it.

This showed up in the work of the era’s creatives. Bressai’s famous photo, “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle 1932,” shows a hefty woman in a man’s suit sitting next to a thin woman in a sparkly dress. The look on their faces can be interpreted many ways. To me, they look to the future with a mixture of dread and hope. It attracted the book’s author, was even the catalyst for years of research and writing. Did they stay together? Were they rounded up like other “undesirables” by the Nazis? Prose wondered too, as a similar photo by her fictional photographer is crucial to the arc of the novel. As I read the novel, I decided to look up this photographer and found his work all over the web. He captured a Paris that was both romantic and squalid.

It took awhile for me to get into the novel’s rhythm. It seemed a bit contrived at first. And then I got into the flow of the intermittent narratives. I was both a reader and a writer studying the technique as I went along. Most of the samples picked up where the other left off. But not always. The reader has to do some work to tie together the narrative threads. After a hundred pages, that became part of the book’s charm. Who is speaking, and when, and can this narrator be trusted? Don’t we always wonder if the teller of a tale is trustworthy or not?