As my wife recovers from heart surgery, she’s just heard from someone in her friend group who’s made her own email announcement. She’s known her very well, since the last century.

“Friends, I guess it’s my turn for some health news of my own. My doctor recently discovered a lump in my breast which has led to a biopsy, and now to surgery.” Ugh, it’s awful — awful how common breast cancer is for women, opening them up senselessly, no matter how conscientious they are, to mortality.

She goes on to say thanks in advance to this friend group for supporting one another in their health “journeys.” All she asks for is the opportunity to love and be loved in return. Very sweet, very gracious.

Here’s the wrench:

“If any of you are the praying type, however, I would ask that if Trump had your vote, that you keep your prayers to yourself. I don’t need any bad karma around me at this time.”

Oh, vomit. You have cancer. What’s wrong with you? Why do you bring Trump into it? Are you in a cult? Breast cancer isn’t your worst enemy already?

You know what? My wife is one of only two heretics on this email list, she calls herself homeless for all the good it’s done to be a democrat in the past 10 years, yet she’s never voted republican. All sides repulse her, just not equally.

When she read it to me, I said some words out the back window. Then I chilled and just puzzled out loud: what do you do with someone who sprinkles her life altering news with Trump shit?

She wants heretics worshipping at a different church. There’ve been a lot of dem moms making videos saying, “Same, Lindsay,” holding babies, defending Lindsay Clancy, the baby killing mom, and many who seem to love DSAs (Communists), and who hate Jews lately. We had black and white baseball leagues, redlining, diner counters, and drinking fountains. Why are they Jim Crowing their brains?

Does she really want to fight cancer like that? Maybe she does have worse cancer than breast cancer.

There is help. I made a dumb little list here of resources.

Two black columns had just risen in the last ten minutes straight up from the shoreline birch and firs. The old resort was on fire. It had burned to the ground before and been rebuilt. A man in his mid forties stood watching, hands on his head.

Magnetized by fearful flames, he also studied the home’s charisma, its white windows, red-stained but charring pine siding and semicircle stone and mortar front steps, with two embedded steel cables stretched through iron cleats on the house corners, then straight back at sand level to winches wrapped around a stump and tree out back. Cables had held the Waffle Iron house from creeping down farther toward the lake edge since the 1950s. It crept a couple inches a year, anyway.

Tadhg Lafferty held witness. He bounced on tiptoes, head back, hands protecting his face from the heat, moaning, “I can’t do. Nobody’s coming, nobody’s coming,” dropped his fists and shook them at his thighs. “Come! On!” No sirens sounded, nor calls or texts pinged his phone since his 911 call five minutes ago. He slid it in his pocket and took off from the lakeside door of the engulfed Waffle Iron house to the small, mansard-roofed barn. Yellow, crunchy moss covering the thick shingles of the two-story construction accelerated tongues of fire coming up under it. Its lower-level far side faced the barnyard, higher near side faced the house with big red folding doors accessible to tractor, hay wagon, and augur by a steep grassy ramp.

As he fretted, it collapsed. With rips, tears, and soft squeaks, the barn roof fell in on its hayloft, issuing a hot sigh through the big accordion door, and smoke rings from upper windows.

“Ah, dammit, god. Somebody.”

Tadhg scrambled around the smoking hulk, jumped the two-by-four fence to the concrete barnyard slab, and hustled to the water tank, used for just one animal in those days, and unscrewed its hose. Its skinny jet of water only reached a bit over the stonework to the shingles, so he aimed lower and wet down the wooden casement windows, hoping to save them.

“Nobody’s coming!” he shouted, checked the bars on his phone, dialed his little sister Cece, and dropped the squirting hose. He subvocalized, “Cece’s house, not my house. Not my house.”

Cece answered, “Wait, what’s going? how are you there?” She braked, scaring her kids, wheeled about and drove back with her family near Thunder Bay to the American border. “What are how are you what’s burning, Tiger?”

“The Waffle Iron and barn. They caught, goin up! I’s just by here. Where are you guys?

“D’you call 911?”

“Yes I called 911,” Tiger said.

“Call 911!”

“I did! Nobody’s coming. How long does. Hose doesn’t. I can’t. Wait. See if..”

Tiger jogged down to the end and stopped. The sliding access door on the end, seven by ten feet, for loading animals, for the Bobcat to take out manure, made of reinforced wood, had been smashed clear off its rollers and flipped out in one piece on the ground. Its entire rolling track had flown off by an irresistible force inside. It lay amidst old white mortar chips all round.

“Cletus is gone, yup, Cletus’s gone. Hello?”

Cece had flipped her phone onto the floormat beneath the carseat. She just punched the gas with four kids in tow, and tore back toward the border crossing.

“Shit!” Not knowing where Cletus was, Tiger dropped to pounce position and ducked inside the dark lower barn. Clapping hands, “Hey buddy, hey boy,” he scooted inside ten feet, peered down the shadows, then dashed back outside, eyes peeled lest he be run over.

“Definitely made a break. Def’ly gone. Wouldn’t be here.” Hands on hips, he swiveled his neck and scanned the rimmed circle of trees, then up the driveway at Highway 61 — empty, no sirens — “How long they fken take?” then took grim inventory of galvanized hardware, tubing, rusty pulleys, rail, and big cement drill bolts that lay beyond the prone door in dandelions and quack grass.

Facing the scorching barn, he shot a sigh: “I can’t do.” He jumped the fence and flew back to the stainless watering tank in the barnyard, the hose on the ground, but the creosote treated barn was going black and becoming a total loss.

“Ken Hell!” he spit, a bit-off, family go-to epithet that always slid past Mom’s censors.

Tiger rubbed his eyes and coughed, holding his right side, and ran back to the circle and up the well-trimmed driveway with its spinning pinwheels along it, brightly painted mailbox and wooden figurines of voyageurs in coon-skin caps, moose, gulls and trout nailed to trees, all made by seasonal residents in craft classes that had ended a decade ago. His sloughing tennis shoes kicked sand and padded onto the tarred north shore drive. Tiger scanned the road for their family’s last remaining large animal. They still kept chickens, dogs, and cats.

Years ago, back at Six Hills Farm outside St. Paul, they had unloaded their beautiful quarter horse gelding, Myllamo, after he had scraped Bobby’s old girlfriend Bizzy off on a tree branch in front of everyone sitting at the picnic table in the front yard for Sunday brunch. Knowing nothing about horses, she lunged at leaves, slid passively off backwards, and broke her arm; then broke up with Bobby, who knew even less about horses. But he might have talked to teenage sister, Cece, who knew all about Myllamo’s sneaky bastard ways, had grown into a strong horse girl, and would lay into Myllamo with nose slaps or flank whips such that he never tried anything with her.

Sixteen steers, three cows and calves, they sold to slaughter in 1980. The seven buffalo, except the bull, to a Wisconsin farm after a highway incident when they got out and stopped traffic. The bull, Cletus, a sheriff deputy shot twice with a rifle, head and shoulder. It was August, the rut, Cletus was all horns in every animal’s ribs, shoving white-face steers and female buffalo into barbed wire, following the girls and drinking their pee, sighing, little tail switched up, and running at horseflies.

Outside Lake Elmo, northeast of St. Paul, the farm sat a quarter mile up from a 50-mile-an-hour turn, blinded by trees.

Animals get out and wander. It happens. Final straw, though, it was for Robert, Sr., who worked in Minneapolis as the state’s leading psychiatrist, and he ordered the bull shot.

Fire and rescue had come because Cletus had stopped traffic, popped a tire and torn the grill off a Jeep Grand Cherokee. On being shot, he stood still, then surprised onlookers and tried to lie down, but fell off the road.

Tiger intervened. Flying off the afternoon school bus in a panic, he ran to the commotion, jumped down in the culvert where Cletus lay wide-eyed, and stopped the final kill shot. Vet yelled, “Watch out!”

“He’s mine!” In a bit, Tiger hunched down by his head, talking low to Cletus, who would eventually top 2,000 pounds, Cletus’s black tongue stretched out. Tiger spat, “Who said you could shoot him? Gotdamn.”

“Your dad.”

“Why?”

Silence reigned for seconds while cars and trucks idled with more slowing down to stop behind them. Fire truck lights rotated. Buffalo cows and calves listening to some inner radios turned, clopped over, and stood watching their bull from the shoulder, licking their noses, curious.

“Fuck’n hell, dude.”

“It’d be mercy now, come on, guy. He’s not coming back to ya.”

Tiger could find no blood, though he did not touch his prized creature. He just felt around the grass. Cletus’s respirations seemed average pace. He blinked his eyes, scared, whites showing bloodshot as usual, pupils black and narrow. He inhaled mightily, huffed out and licked his nose in that prone position but seemed alert, unfazed, starting to heave, roll, and hop to his feet again, just six years old.

Deputy said, “He’ll bleed out internally. I’m sorry but can’t have ‘em just everywhere on the highway.”

“Leave him alone.”

Cletus rolled, let Tiger brush his forehead, stood his back legs up, his fores at the knee, and waited, rump raised. Tiger glowed a beatific smile at his little sister.

“Watch out, Tiger.”

The deputy who shot him stepped back behind his car door, slung his rifle behind his shoulder, saying, “See? I said he’ll get ya.”

“Leave ’im alone, I said.”

Tadhg and Cece were senior and junior in high school, though two years apart, Tiger having been held back a grade due to epilepsy. Cletus stood, turned and hopped to his females who shuffled down the culvert and up into the mown Lafferty soybean field. Cece, filled with joy, grabbed her backpack, jogged up to the granary, and back with a pail. Brother and sister eventually got ahead and lured the buffalo back inside the barnyard gate over several hours of tedious stops and starts with little mounds of molasses-flavored corn grain. Buffalo will not allow herding, and though grain was not in their diet, they loved it, and would follow a pail tapped by fingers whose holder cooed, “Come on, buffies, come on.” Cletus limped the whole way with bullets inside him, behind his females. Father never sought to take the shells out of him.

Animals, or ammules, as their father called them when he still liked them, had grown to an ungodly responsibility for Robert and Moira at Six Hills farm by 1980. Over years, a pony had been killed on the highway, as well as a dog. Another dog was hit, shoulder broken and eyeball popped out, but he lived, half blind.

After Moira died of a stroke in 1998, Robert began the sell-off. When he died in 2004, the family sold the farm, Cece took over the Waffle Iron resort, and moved the 2,400 pound senior citizen, Cletus, up north, at Tiger’s pleading. He had to help build and finance the fence upgrade, but once he promised that to Cece, Tiger got his way.

And now the house and barn crackled in flames.

Fire trucks finally screamed in the distance 20 minutes after Tiger’s 911 call. Flames in the house and barn had already spread, risen, devoured, held the resort for minutes in consummation, and had begun to slightly diminish. The barn had collapsed or it might have been saved. Its lower stalls were intact. Only the house’s fireplace, chimney, and front steps looked perfect.

Tiger heard crinkles in his head, felt pangs in his carotids, and saw a halo around the sun. He jogged quickly to his car, hopped in, gunned it up the driveway, and left on 61 as trucks rounded the last bend and slowed, lights and sirens wailing. Arms straight at 10 and two o’clock, he stared ahead as two firemen watched him speed by. In the lupines and brush 100 yards east lay a young figure with half a shirt missing.

How’s it going? Anything happening, rivaling reality? You wearing your heart on your sleeve, to be pecked at by daws?

Well, I have written some new fiction for the next chapter in The Waffle Iron yesterday and today. What is it .. about a thousand words. Pantsing it because what else can you do after a dry spell?

I’ll post it this weekend. Writing this blurb bolsters me from chickening out by strapping my fingers to a public announcement, thereby shaming myself out of cheating you. So, I’ll say it here: it’s gotta hit by Sunday morning. Gotta.

Yours,

Hotspvrre

.

Hi. Sorry I haven’t published here in a while again. Something needed to trouble me, and I got troubled. And here it is. I set out on this piece to consider writing about the psychological cycles of emotion, their sources and destinations. Not only would I cover mad anger; I would cover joy, jubilation, victory; catastrophic failure; shame, depression; competence and a good night’s sleep, perhaps. And I’d cover falling in love, the cooling lava of staying in love, a wanting to be as near to your lover without sewing yourselves together that you can be; all the pinwheels and tilt-a-whirls. But for today, this is mad anger.

your faithful scribe,

Hotspvrre

“I want my scalps.” — Lt. Aldo Raine, Inglourious Basterds.

This is an assay on mad anger, a resource I have in some supply, and I want to try to peel it clean and label it.

Since age three, I was told to calm down, quit breaking things, why are you like this, you’ll end up in prison. Breaking inanimate objects is the mark of a stupid boy, a thick one. Come now, be sweet.

“Gol, Teddy has a hard head,” was said of me. I tore up my room over and over. What caused that? —some neurological, chronic electrical misfire, delayed cognition, or universal fear of lost control?

I don’t expect to close the investigation, but to drive my sentences out until there isn’t much road left. This piece isn’t just about me.

Thresholds. Everyone must know, anger bursts from a broken tolerance threshold, one repeatedly violated. Repeated violations train a threshold to expel gases in exactly the same place.

I would shake and growl as a boy. Once with my brother Johnny, I pretended to be the Wild Man of Borneo entering our Catholic school playground through the chain link fence. I growled and drooled, spun free, and sent kids scattering — what a panic, panic being great fun.

It’s not to say I was lopsided, lacking a full complement of personality. Boyhood could be filled with wonder at the night, wild, hilarious, face-pulling fun. I simply had another red-black side where restraint cracked often, like an allergy.

Smoke beyond smoke. Seething. Frustrating beyond the antennae of perception. Converting to frenzied shakes so hard they rattled the teeth. Fits and tantrums. I sounded like a vet clinic full of huskies. The body, an internal combustion engine, satisfied its tension by blowing up. Clench. Release.

Minnesota has been through summer’s hottest spell, so it’s apropos to lose one’s temper at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I have much better control, and I’m not in prison.

Recent fresh insults in July about my character exhumed my 2016 cancellation. Our house is torn up for renovations. Amidst insults and concrete dust, my wife had urgent heart surgery, and I spent several weeks hovering over her, worried she might not pull through, which spun me out. She did pull through, thank god.

Ultimately, we hardly control ourselves, like a tiny Blaupunkt in a Kugelschreiber, the ball point inside a pen, pummeled by forces out of our sphere.

So, after a week of 15 hour days at her bedside, ever after walking tentatively to the hot parking ramp at sundown, calming and shuddering, I felt incessant ripping in my head, of losing all comfort and comprehensibility in a little world.

I turned over film scenes, as one does. I sampled the 100 Nazi scalps speech by Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds.

Taking the trash out to the alley in the rain, I quoted another movie. “Thank god for the rain .. to wash the trash off the sidewalks.” —Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver. It’s hard to convey the simmering rage in these scripts, so you might not know those channels. For me, they pull a thorn from my foot with great relief, like the Spinario sculpture, the Boy With Thorn.

Firstly, that is the role of art. The best art rustles, disturbs, heals, solves an internal quagmire we don’t even know is there.

As I tiptoe on warm wet cement, I think, there’s that clench and release, that extrication, but why conjure Travis Bickle and Aldo Raine? What’s going on?

Anxiety is a blockade against losing control of all we know.

I suppose some people do yoga. I make red fists.

I saw an artwork today by Ilya Repin, 1885, and it did a similar thing to me. It showed the moment, 1581, in which Ivan the Terrible grips and cradles the son he has just killed in a fit of rage — art as a warning. It’s terrible. He cannot take back what he’s just done.

When I was young I stamped like Rumplestiltskin in fits, I hollered and smashed inanimate objects as I struggled to perform tasks. They could be shoelaces, zippers, snaps, belts, trash that was tossed and missed the can. Square pegs and round holes, or stripped screws on toy compartments holding dead batteries no longer replaceable, so the toy was useless. As I grew up, simple machines grew trickier: fitted sheets, Windsor knots, the backing up a farm tractor to fit a trailer hitch precisely, guitar string progressions, lines from which I refused to accept modification in order to play them smoothly. I made fists, clenched my neck, and vibrated with a wolf howl.

Piled up clouds of torment.

“Smile, honey,” Mom said. “You have such a nice smile. People will like you if you smile.”

Granted, these are my petty portrayals.

In his Inglourious Basterds’ speech, Aldo Raine tells his conscripts, “And I want my scalps. And y’all will git me 100 Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of 100 dead Nazis.”

Brad Pitt’s menacing delivery, like many internal monologues by Robert DeNiro, shivers my timbers with such satisfaction of justice about to be served, that I felt I owed it a revisit with some delineation. The rising action about to climax.

Recently, while chatting with a teacher friend I haven’t seen in years, at a memorial service, I learned a new fact that confirmed a superstition I’ve held since 2018. He shared that a representative of our statewide teacher union had spotted me back then during professional development, teaching, 250 miles north of here. I knew that this rep. had spotted me, she said I looked familiar, she asked me who I was, and I was fired three weeks later, with six glowing job reviews.

That revelation of having been hunted punctured my tolerance threshold, and my redness flowed out, and here I sit on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in 2026, studying it.

I said to him, “Are you sure? Are you positive?”

“Yes.”

I sighed holding a crunchy plastic Ice Mountain water bottle at our dear friend’s memorial, I sank to a crouch in a shaded warm pavilion with lovely chicken wings and watermelon, I touched my knees, and rose up with a laugh, a holy shit, and soft exculpation. It was a memorial.

So many downed and arcing wires went silent in the storms of my howling skull. What is this force that drives us to seek justice long denied? Has it a name? I thought of calm before vengeance. I thought of the power of knowledge about justice, without need of vengeance. I thought to take action. I thought no, to put ice to my neck. I thought of the pen in my journal. I just breathed, and softly snickered the way Johnny and I used to: ts-ts-ts-ts-ts.

Well, I am not going to prison over vengeance. I don’t feel new or old pain about it, even though I am owed half a million dollars in lost wages since then.

Do you know this vindication? Does anyone? A murderer acquitted? Who knows this head-rush, this consummation floating down from an indifferent, all-seeing eye? My carotids coursed. And Aldo Raine spoke to me again.

In a film sense, I want my scalps.

Excerpt from Inglourious Basterds

My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m

puttin together a special team.

And I need me eight soldiers.

Eight - Jewish - American - soldiers.

Now y’all might of heard rumors

about the armada happening soon.

Well, we’ll be leavin a little

earlier. We’re gonna be dropped

into France, dressed as civilians.

And once we’re in enemy territory, as

a bushwackin, guerrilla army, we’re

gonna be doin one thing, and thing

only, Killin Nazis.

The Members of the National Socialist

Party, have conquered Europe through

murder, torture, intimidation, and

terror. And that’s exactly what we’re

gonna do to them. Now I don’t know

bout y’all? But I sure as hell, didn’t

come down from the goddamn Smoky

Mountains, cross five thousand miles

of water, fight my way through half

Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin

air-o-plane, to teach the Nazis

lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got

no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers

of a Jew hatin, mass murderin maniac,

and they need to be destroyed.

That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch

we find wearin a Nazi uniform, they’re

gonna die.

LT.ALDO

(CON’T)

We will be cruel to the Germans,

and through our cruelty, they will

know who we are. They will find the

evidence of our cruelty, in the

disemboweled, dismembered, and

disfigured bodies of their brothers

we leave behind us. And the German

will not be able to help themselves

from imagining the cruelty their

brothers endured at our hands, and

our boot heels, and the edge of our

knives.

And the Germans, will be sickened by us.

And the Germans, will talk about us.

And the Germans, will fear us.

And when the Germans close their eyes

at night, and their sub conscious

tortures them for the evil they’ve done,

it will be with thoughts of us,

that it tortures them with.

He stops pacing, and looks at everybody.

LT. ALDO

Sound good?

ALL

Yes, sir!

LT.ALDO

That’s what I like to hear. But I

got a word of warning to all would-be

warriors. When you join my command,

you take on debit. A debit you owe

me, personally. Every man under my

command, owes me, one hundred nazi

scalps.

And I want my scalps.

And all y’all will git me, one hundred

Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of

one hundred dead Nazis...

or you will die trying.

I lost my way around here.

Anyway, the cement guy has come and gone, the drywall guy come and gone, electrical come and gone, and the carpet guy will come in a couple weeks. Our plumber has had to replace the laundry tub drain, the basement privy sink drain, and now the master bath tub has been discovered to be leaking. It’s been leaking. It may have been leaking since 300 AD. We don’t use our basement because it stinks of cat pee whenever it gets wet. Chloe has been gone since 2008. She was 20. Also, the master lav-sink drain in the basement ceiling is duct taped together. Like everything here, sins keep spreading. I have a 50:50 chance of making plumbing worse, so I never touch pipes. I would like to stay married.

In our kitchen we have a weird dustbin built into the kitchen floor. Never used it. The idea was to pop its lid and sweep the floor into it. Electrical (guys) gutted all of Emil’s wiring from the rafters, running new lines and conduits to our first level outlets. Did I mention Emil worked for NSP (Northern States Power) for 40 years? Made me wonder if he knew anything about wiring. Electrical ran a steel conduit in the basement rafter between the floors, which suddenly pushed up the bin. I’ve never removed the silver bin, because it was likely soldered into place by 50 years of peanut butter and bacon grease. When I suddenly could not open the back door for bumping into it, because it was no longer flush with the floor, I said, “What’s going on now?” lifted the clean dustbin out, and set it on the floor to stare down into the hole in the matrix.

Well, whatdoyouknow! — a leather jewelry box was stashed in the dark subfloor behind it. My thoughts raced: this is a set-up; it’s a booby-trap; it’s nuclear codes; it’s a jewelry box. It’s got a Schindler’s List inside it. (Our forbears were German immigrants who built the house in 1940.)

Most of the following are subject to verification by a gemologist or metal guy: $2 bills from 1953, a gold watch, lots of cuff links and tie pins, and inside a ratty envelope from Commercial State Bank of 6th and Washington in downtown Minneapolis, a diamond that looks to be about a carat in size.

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This is a hell of a find. But I don’t want to find things now. I’m trying to lighten up. I can’t part with things. I’m torn to bits. They’re endowed. We had a quilt and civil war picture of a swarthy doctor from my wife’s elders, and it took her years to send it out of state to a historical society. If I see a photo of anyone’s precious things, even unrelated, be it a quill pen, baby booties, gold NSP tie pin that says “40 years of service,” quick! Get me a smelter so I can melt it down before my grubby fingers turn it into people, and then the people start chatting, and I want to learn if I love and miss them now.

Memories, even borrowed ones, lay on me like sod. My wife is going through cool pictures of her grandma’s people. We just got back from walking a cemetery over the weekend, searching for a marker of my great-grandparents. Couldn’t find them. I need a break from memories, especially borrowed memories. But as the Talking Heads sang, “These memories can’t wait.”

I just want to shrink them down like Shrinky Dinks, and tuck them under my brain’s floorboards. I am so tired!

I want fresh, new, linen language, of kids and other people breathily laughing and chatting in my face today. I want words that flap all white and pastel on a clothesline in the breeze, and they smell like hay.

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Please interact, and share and stuff. Thanks for reading! I feel so heavy. This is just me trying to get a weight off my mind.

Your faithful scribe,

Hotspvrre

“I apologize,” [cough rattle!] I offer in repeated sequence, like “Deadwood” character, Andy Cramed, who moans incessantly at death’s door, with Calamity Jane snapping “STFU!” to which he says, “I apologize.”

Andy does recover. And so will I, lest I take another loop down the low side of the road.

I’ve had lifelong asthma, allergies, and bronchitis, smoked my brains out until the nineties, and despite a few slips on cigars, have stayed off since then, despite their constant smouldering, sexy appeal. My asthma has always been well managed, with no attacks, on meds. Only in recent years have I caught pneumonia (twice now since Christmas) or had CT scans or X-rays for it. They found calcified granulomas which never go away, like bone in lungs, I guess. That’s all. Digging out of a wet spider web. Anyway, I don’t like to spin it into more, but I’m not being faithful to readers who support me, and are owed some check-ins, and I’m sorry. Ope! I apologize.

It’s very hard to think straight. I’m having a hard time concentrating, which then brings depression, or as my Ojibwa kids up north said, “Got that crippling depression, Mr. Olson.” Distance from this substack doubles and triples emotionally, when I don’t write to you. I’ll try to just be friendly and personable with posts when I want to crawl away.

Even tonight I’m coughing and rattling. Less. I’ve been coughing every minute for weeks, almost drowning inside myself at night. Okay, I am getting better.

I’ll be back. I super appreciate you for hanging in here.

Thank you. Thank you for supporting new fiction!

Love,

Theo

Tiger: “Shite. You shite.”

Freddy: “Spazz. You’re a spazz. That’s your gift!”

Tiger was born rough, and fell prey to epileptic staring fits. It will be discussed later.

We have told how Tadhg viewed Coolidge’s call to self betterment, as well as the older children’s takes. As for youngest, Cece was not pressed by her parents on which gift had poured into her cistern of consciousness, if any, talent or genius. She simply cast her beautiful eyes to one side, thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know, Mom, but I’m persistent!”

It turned out Cece would have it all: genius, talent, education, and persistence. She became Doctor Cece. She sat in the college stacks for 10 years. But as a young girl, Tiger remembered her listening to dinner conversation and forgetting to eat, mashed potatoes coagulating inside her poochy cheeks, still there half an hour past dinner and into a TV show. He would poke her cheek and say, “Chew your food. What’re you doing?” Not only was Cece sometimes hypnotized, but fabulously gifted, and senseless to her comportment; she was tall, nearly six feet, pink-complected, had wide set green eyes with rounded canthi, a broad forehead, long golden brown hair she kept in pony— or pig-tails, a modest bosom, small tummy pouch, and long legs. She covered her wide mouth for no reason when she laughed, a velvet jewelry box of oblong pearls, untouched by braces. In laughter, her upper lip dipped over her two front incisors, but remained fullish.

While Cece and Bobby heralded the best of each parents’ looks, Bríd, shorter than Cece and thicker, clocked in mischievously, even devilishly cute, animated eyes with tighter canthi popping light to the world during her excited, panting laugh, further squidged by zigzag ridges where her temples met her cheek bones. Her hair short and auburn, her mouth was Moira’s, like a looped ribbon bow, a violin f-hole, with a pale mustache.

The age of charged feeling, which so drenched youth in America after surviving World War Two, permeated growing up for the rest of the century. Bred to be hard driving, hungry for solutions, and forward thinking, America bathed in spoils, then blinked. The professoriate worried; the infrastructure stalled.

Lists are for statisticians; they do not help a mind optimized for concentric haloes of passion; just stacks of facts, and fail to tether events to spirits. Lists offer linear, cultural citations, footnotes — just lines of code, 1s and 0s. And concentric waves of passion are for poets, priests, addicts and their fried synapses, true believers, mentally ill, and communists.

Children of chatty, fertile women, of union cops and train men, Moira Keane and Robert Lafferty rode the greatest generation crest all the way upshore to middle class. Via Robert’s contented pride to aid Everyman in psychiatry and health care, and Moira’s demoralized ego bent on compensation, her knack for sales, numbers, inventing, prayer and drinking, the children’s odds at maintaining rational, sober thought were dinged. Desperate. Besides Cece in medicine and Toby in insurance, the rest flowed toward ecstatic thinking, ministry, and the arts.

Both parents struggled against guilt branded into them. In pictures, old widower, Grandpa John Lafferty, wandered across the lawn in black suit and hat, looking at his jumping grandkids, cranky or sad. Children could see old John chuckle at Robert, gesturing broadly while walking through the livingroom, hat in hand, griping that Robert had everything, the GI Bill, two parents who had clawed for food, middle class, and what did he do? Turn it to crap. He wasted his education and time, married a drunken, crazy culchie, lived in hell on Franklin Avenue in two broken-down homes, no one picked up fallen sticks, he let his children wear shoes on the sofa, break their chairs, rip the upholstery in his cars, and no one followed the real Christ because Moira was a fallen woman. “Unrepentant, with that child.” No one knew what child or fallen woman meant, but Robert sat compliant, shoulders rolled forward, and silent to the constant drubbing, though he stood four inches taller than his father.

Once, teen Bríd said, “Dad’s a doctor, you know!”

“Doctor Hokum,” Robert’s father snorted,“Doctor of what? The mi-ind?” Grandpa Lafferty grimaced, pink neck cords popped out, pronouncing “mind.” He would look at his dead cigar. “Bunk. He could’ve been a real doctor, but no.”

Robert wore the verbal lashings like a twenty year old shoe. When it turned to badgering, he stood, patted Bríd on the shoulder, and said, “Gwan now, Bridget.” He never asserted himself, “Pa, I am an MD.”

Unlike Robert enduring mental abuse, Moira, the only girl among boys in a home with no father, grew up slapped backhanded, whipped with switches by her mother, and running a half mile to her aunties to escape, who comforted her. Though Moira had answered her mother’s prayers for a girl after six straight boys, she was said to be an accident, told she was a sinful child going to hell, that she ruined her mother’s life and drove her father to drink, although he fell down an elevator shaft and stove his own head down his neck. There was some talk he had been pushed as a message for reneging on a debt. After the odd whack, grandmother would tell Moira she was lucky her father had passed because he would be appalled, and flay her legs for coming home late, hair mussed, “reeking of cigarettes and boys .. Mother Mary.”

Moira went to confession so often, her sins stayed fresh until cleansing, except that she confessed the many minor venials and held back the mortals, particularly one: having sex at age sixteen. Once her virginity was officially gone, on purpose, she confessed to the younger, nicer priest — the one who would not yell at her, “You did what?” or slam his fist on the kneeler — about having been raped at age thirteen by an older boy in the church pantry downstairs. Not that this required penance at all; Moira unfortunately believed she had as much raped herself. For sins, there was a bowling-alley-machine order to divulging confessing. Rack them, release. New sin in, old one out. One off to heaven, another in the chute to admit. About the rape, the priest told her, she must examine her conscious, and pray ceaselessly.

“Conscience,” she whispered outside the wooden box, gnashing her teeth, then hissing giggles. These hideous transgressions, being touched by boys’ privates, dinged and scarred her so hard, she resolved that many more sins were coming, and all she could do was absolve her last batch before committing the next. Her single Aunt Mayme, who lived vicariously through Moira’s fun and perils, consoled her for the beatings, called the sacrament of atonement a sin mangle, for processing life’s temptations, like the clothing mangle in the diningroom, a hot press for starching shirts. “Moira, sweetie, praise God, we have Saturday night confession, and Mass on Sunday. Just try your best, don’t lie at confession, that you have no intention to be better. Try to be better.” Moira always sighed in blessed relief. She assured Mayme, “But I never go to confession thinking about the next sin.” There was only a sin, and a delay telling the sin. She would eventually admit it all. She really meant to be a good girl, and five Our Fathers and twenty Hail Marys for penance kept and protected her on the walk home, while she tousled her damp black scapular around her throat. It was five blocks plus a busy street. Although expected to kneel in church to perform her penance, she walked straight out the side door, dabbing holy water, hinting at dipping her knee, and crossing herself, head bowed. Heading home, she tried to finish the last, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen,” just as she opened the back screen door — a nice little prayer, Hail Mary — but if she came close to finishing the penance early before the door, from too snappy walking, she paused praying, and counted footsteps to fill in gaps, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, crossing the street. If too slow, entering the yard, she prayed like a 45 rpm record at 78 rpms, breathing prayers in and out. Irish kids inherited the whispered cadence of inhale-exhale talk. Inhaled speech can be heard on any Irish street, a kind of tipping the hat, jerking the chin aside, and inhaling “hhhyep” for hello, as in popping the seal on a jar of jam. Always. Suck it in: “Hhhyep.”

Anyone: I am adding this piece tonight but though it’s edited, it’s not heavily edited, and I might pull it down tomorrow. Life has been .. but anyway .. a guy has to have some standards, and though I know standards are here somewhere, I can’t remember where I set them down. Yet, here I post.

As always, thank you for reading.

Yours truly,

Hotspvrre

The olds, Toby and Bobby, drilled the youngs, Bríd, Freddy, Tiger, and Cece, about the “Land of a Thousand Dances” which included the Pony, the Watusi, and the Jerk, and the essence of living precisely in the greatest epoch, bathing in a reservoir of quintessential heroes, words, music, and fashion the size of the Hoover Dam. You’ll never get it, you guys, chatty Bobby would say, shaking his head, staring at a chunk of cantaloupe on his fork. There could be none to match it, which was true, and is true anyway, ascribed to any era. Even the most tedious, stablest decade of peace, recession, and stagnation led by gaseous presidents, still stood apart, arguably. The mid seventies were yellow Formica countertops, macrame plant hangers, shellacked carrots and asparagus in relief on the wall — and the younger set, the nine to sixteens, babysat by Scooby Do and H.R. PufnStuf — did not argue. Nothing new was coming for them. A lot of Catholic children went shaky, their deepest faith welded to sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, prog rock, nostalgia for dying space travel, anything sun-toasted and mellow, only to watch adults who did not touch, now hugging and saying sorry constantly; the family clogged by sad sorries; Elton John said, sorry seems to be the hardest word; everyone conscripted into Big Pathos and Sorrow, but for what? Kids could not know; Children lacked long souls; they did not scramble for champions, nor know which tidbits were rightly humiliating.

They asked themselves, “What is gone? What did we miss?” What was it their elders adored but learned to deplore, bury, and start over with? And if this was the youngs’ time, who were their touchstones? Where was the fulcrum they sat on, spanning their persons, from idols to graven images; from Freddy on down to Cece, their ideals comprised of all the artists exhumed from fifty to twenty years past (the 1920s and 1950s), and held high as permanent, lifting them up to those heroes: “But what is our fault? why are we to blame? Which humiliations are ours? So gullible were we, such embarrassing depravities.” These bequests of dread might later be affixed to Stephen Stills’ gaudy fur coat, Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, Nixon’s fall, Ford’s pardon, Carter’s Chiclet teeth and rolled-up sleeves, to the deaths of Freddy Prinze, Donnie Hathaway and Minnie Ripperton. Haunted by a fashion airport through the late seventies of invisible arrivals and departures, the youngs glanced at each other over the diningroom table, at elders, Toby and Bobby, then back at each other.

Bríd raised fists to her eyes, kneading out fake tears like a baby, enlisting Freddy, Tiger, and Cece to copy her. The whole table guffawed and mewed, with clown tears. Despite the mockery, truth was, it was sad; the humiliations and lessons about tarnished glory, stuck. Tiger called this era the nothing and nobody times.

“It’s the Nothing Times,” he said.

“Everybody knows, this is nowhere,” Bobby sang, copying Neil Young.

Then their dad, Robert, stood up and sang in his deep baritone, “You’re nobody till somebody loves you,” and he started clearing plates.

Moira, wagged her finger, eyes closed: “Now that’s a real era.”

Toby slid down to one knee with hands upraised, silently mouth-mimed Dean Martin at his father’s back with big arm gestures.

Freddy jumped out of his chair trembling, holding onto an invisible cane, like a centenarian at Shady Acres.

Robert: “You’re nobody till sooomebody cares.”

Moira: “That’s real music.”

Cece clasped her hands under her chin giggling in the locked tray high-chair, then yelled, “Get me out, get me out, I wanna dance!” She slid down under the seat, thin as a stick of Fruit Stripe gum.

“No, it’s not!” Bríd said. “It’s dinosaurs.”

Freddy clutched his heart in his hand, stumbled away from the table, and flopped on the livingroom sofa. “You consarned kids these days. Yar gonna put me in an early grave.”

Tiger ran out and leapt onto Freddy’s helpless back, saying, “How old are you now, Grandpa?”

“Oomph! I’m eleventy twelve.”

“That’s not early. You can die now! That’s not an early grave!”

“Ack, get off of me,” and Freddy flipped Tiger flying onto the carpet. The back of his enormous head whacked the leg of the coffee table, and he grabbed it laying face down, open mouthed, grimacing, not crying, one arm trying to tear into Freddy’s leg before he got away.

“I didn’t do anything. Offa me, I said,” Freddy shrugged.

“You always say, ‘Nee nee, it’s over, quit your crying.’”

The heart of every child lay open and ready for consciousness to be poured down the cistern of his nature, adding to his impalpable divinity, with the portable imagination of his grandparents’ grandparents, to blow forward through rings upon rings of future descendants, their hopes and dreams, passing through his unborn ambition, thus setting a fine centerpiece for a soul, say, that might be found on a dinner table set for one hundred deceased guests. As such, amidst a consciousness 150 to 200 years old, the party hostess seated in the middle can hear all her guests and ghosts, they can hear her, and in fact are all one person.

PERSISTENCE

Every Lafferty was sworn to better himself while maintaining inner harmony, no matter how jagged the discord that strife toward betterment rendered him. But how? They had to reconcile between others and self, and between the divine and crude, or base self. How earnestly each child answered the call, wrestled with, or sniffed at it, was seen in his perseverance, impulsivity, or inaction, notwithstanding plain soft-headedness. By basic descriptors, each child could be tagged: 1) Tobias the wise, 2) Bobby the artist, 3) Bríd the holy clown, 4) Freddy the troubadour, 5) Tadhg the spastic, and 6) Cece the doctor.

Framed in the diningroom like a brick in the wall of collective conscience was a quote by Calvin Coolidge. Along with The Angelus, the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila,and St. Patrick’s prayer, everyone knew Coolidge’s admonition.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

He who paused there mouthing the words of the dusty wall plaque wondered, if beside determination, he had talent, or genius. Education was a given. But if nothing else, he still had persistence. All kids hedged bets that persistence stuck around if God had left them dry without a gift. Tadhg tucked back one cheek in a depressed smile, and worried he had not even that.

Tobias felt forged in fire, with a tinge of each gift, no heaping portion of talent, genius, or education, but forever sensed in himself a lack of primacy or authority. When told he was the oldest child, to buck up, and diaper, nap or just supervise the youngers, he would serve, but say, “I am not the oldest,” which brought a shout from Moira, “Shut your mouth!” “No, I’m not!” “Go to your room!” “No!” “Right now!” and Toby would tuck in his chin, wheel about, run upstairs, and slam his door, then open it and yell, “I am never coming out!”

Bobby peacefully watched the clashes, with his mouth open. He would offer to help babysit, and Mother would say, “You hush too.” The second oldest had watched Tobias from toddlerhood on, and heard Toby’s name all day long, told his big brother was important and had responsibilities galore. Bobby subsumed that he was second, sensitive, and would forever scratch for crumbs of love. However, he took the Coolidge quote to mean that, outside of Toby’s gifts of whatever, Bobby had been gifted talent in vision, art, and perception. Compared to Toby’s huffing and stamping, Bobby sat, adorable, mopping up coos, pinches, and kisses. All the aunties slobbered over Bobby’s sweet nature, and good looks. He carved a soap cake in grade school into a bust of Lincoln, was lavished with praise at school about its uncanny resemblance to the sixteenth president, its intricacies, he set it on his bedstand, and Freddy bathed with it, softening his eyebrows, and ruining it. In high school, when not sketching bulls and matadors poised to duck and stab, or women’s figures in blue drafting pencil (his take on Picasso’s blue period), he could be found next to Moira at the dishes or the bills, a devoted sentry.

Bridget’s take was, Coolidge was great for the olden days, for blinking and yawning old gray-beards. Mother would ask how Bríd took it, then sing Que sera sera: “when I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Here’s what she said to me.”

Bríd sang over her: “I’ll be depressing, I’ll be so bored, there’ll be no fun for meee! Mom, Doris Day! So saaaad!” She strutted like a rooster with thumbs hooked in her jumper straps. Everyone roared, slapping thighs.

“Tch, the dickens,” Moira mused, eyebrows mismatched, two heights, clucking her tongue and grinning.

Bríd lived along that twentieth century hot wire of passion, an empathy for all perceived oppressed, like many in her generation, inebriated emotionally, in a life alternately pensive and bursting impulsively, from sacred to profane, reacting, like her mother. By her seventeenth birthday visiting Collegeville, Minnesota, she had got pregnant by a boy named Flint, they were married, she miscarried the baby, he was killed while hot dog waterskiing in front of the family cabin, and she entered a convent.

Long ago in the middle west of America, a mother sent her little fit boy to calm down at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in Wisconsin. “Calm down,” Mama said. She held his arms and shook them. Terence had fits on the floor, fits doing nothing, fits staring off, arms all hard.

Mama shook his arms.

Sometimes Terry howled; about spaghetti falling off his fork, so he fell off his chair; about his airplane stuck up high, so he climbed on the fireplace. A jar of ashes knocked off and smashed. Mama sent him to his room.

“I hate you,” he yelled, and tore down the curtains. Terry was sorry, but now he was mad, hot, and shaky. If Mama got mad, fine. If she spanked him, fine. Everyone else could throw a fit, too.

“I don’t know what to do. You are making me crazy,” she said.

“Well, you make me mad every day,” Terry told her. So she sent him to Wisconsin. He wore his blue hoodie over his face, over his blue overalls with golden buckles that had never been dirty.

The minute she dropped Terence off, he smelled the manure and grass and heard bumblebees, and it was messy and wide-open and he liked the air. He took his hood off so they could see his face.

Grandpa and Grandma gave him plenty of chores to do while they went to town to talk about the farm. He did them. It was raining and smelled like clover. He fed the chickens, shoveled out the ponies’ stall, Ginny and Taffy, pushed the wheelbarrow of manure out to the yard, and he picked up rocks and sticks. His boots were muddy. So were his overall knees.

It stopped raining so he sat on Grandpa’s drain pipe by the barn. He put a dandelion in one of his golden buckles. An orange kitty climbed onto his lap, stretched his paws up and pulled the dandelion to his face. Then the kitty bit it. Terry smiled and patted his soft sides.

The sky was breaking open blue with curly white clouds. He look at the river far down the lane. Raindrops made circles that sailed away. He stared into the deep woods rising on the other side, and wondered what lived there. Far above the woods, the big gray bluff high as a mountain rose up in the sky.

“I’d like to climb that bluff,” Terry said, “catch some treasure like a bunny, and bring it to Grandpa.” But he was not allowed to climb the bluff, there were Thingies in the woods, a deep pond, and the river was fast.

Terry walked down the lane. The kitten stopped following him and licked its paw. Grandpa’s boat at the shore was locked to a golden chain.

He shook the chain and it jingled. He remembered what Grandpa had said.

“Stay here. Promise, my boy?”

“I will, Grandpa.”

Grandma had said, “If you finish, you can peel potatoes and put them in the pot. Then you can read your books.”

He thought, “So many rules. Grandpa, Grandma make rules. Mama makes rules. I never make rules. Bedtime, take a bath, go to bed, change my clothes, pick up the dog messes, take out the trash.” Mama even kept him in the yard because she was scared he would get hit by a streetcar.

Terry knew where Grandpa kept the bowl of keys, so he fetched the golden key, unlocked the boat, and paddled over the river. When he reached the other side, and pulled the boat up on shore, he thought, “That was not fast water. That was easy.”

The woods were very hushed, nothing to be afraid of. The blue and yellow air smelled like needles and pinecones.

The woods grew soft and green up the hill, with only little bars of sunshine. Then the hill rolled down, up, and down again. He looked up for the sky and bluffs, but could not see them yet. He said, “Maybe? Okay, next light spot.” Finally a path led down to squishy wet grass, and a pretty, dark pond.

Terry sat down on a rock, and a frog in the bulrushes jumped in with a plunk. He could not see it. He swirled his fingers, and the water was much cooler than the river.

“So thirsty,” he said to himself. He licked his hand, cupped a little water, pushed golden dots out of it, then took a sip. Delicious. Suddenly, Terry felt very sleepy so he laid on his back, folded his hands behind his head, and stared up at the dark treetops. A big white bird flew over. He crossed his feet, filled his lungs to the top, held his breath, then went, “Opp!” and let out a long sigh.

When he woke up it was getting dark, and he was afraid that he would scare his grandparents by going away. Terry hopped up to his feet and ran back the way he came, up, down, up and down the hill.

But running from the woods, he could not see the river. Just fog. Just clouds. Just the gray bluffs rose up high and disappeared.

“This is not right at all,” he told himself, turned around and faced the dark woods from which he had just come, and stopped, touching his throat. “This is not right, it’s not right.”

He wheezed, he sneezed, he stared at the air for a few minutes without a single idea, then scratched his hair and shook his head. Now the woods disappeared. So did the bluffs. “Kitty, where are you?” he said, and tried to cry, but only a “wheagh” and a whimper came out, so he quit. Lots of small white homes on the hill showed little lights in their windows, so he decided he must knock on a door and ask someone for help to get back to Grandma and Grandpa.

At the first house, he climbed a stone wall to approach the front door. An old blind dog heard him coming and dashed around the corner. Woof-woof. The dog tripped on a shovel and hit its head on a wagon. He said, “Good boy, that’s a good boy,” but it got up and chased him over the wall. At the next house, he was sweating and crying a little bit, but no lights were on in the windows. He gave a knock anyway, and the door opened a crack. Terry stepped into the doorway. “Hello? Is anybody here?” An old lady under covers in a bed by the fire yelled, “Get out of here! Leave me alone! Scat! Get out!” So he ran outside.

As Terry came to the third house, it was dark and empty. He shouted “Hello, anybody?” but no one was home, no one had cooked, the fireplace was cold, and the glasses all dusty. He did not like that, so he left to go sleep in a pile of dry hay with a pitchfork in a little barn. He looked up to the bluff and it was still foggy, disappearing, far away. Turning to face the valley, he could not see the river, he could not see the dark woods, and he could not see Grandma and Grandpa’s farmhouse.

“I’m sorry,” he told the air. “I won’t do it again. Send me home. I want to go home.” He was very hungry. He held the pitchfork in his hands, lay down in the hay, and peeked around. The sky outside was purple and murky. He shook the fork points and jabbed the air to be fierce. He said, “hiyeah!” Terry pulled up his hood and strung it tight until only his nose poked through. Then it was morning.

He jumped up with hay all over him. “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m sorry!” he shouted, running down the hill. Terry passed the empty house with the dusty glasses, he passed the old lady’s house who said, “Get out of here,” he passed the house with the barking blind dog. This time, the dog stayed curled up on the front steps. Terry stopped and said, “You’re a good boy.” The dog wagged his tail, lifted his head and said, “Woof.”

Terry ran down fields, over stones, and into the woods. He remembered the pond. The frog jumped into the water with a plop. He kept going, filled with big breaths and strong legs, a little scared, and a lot of sorry about breaking rules. He kept trotting through the wooded hills, shady valleys, up and down, and finally came out of the trees at the river.

No boat! Looking across the river, he saw the boat pulled up onshore at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm.

“Oh no, now what? Get in the water.” He waded in slowly, carefully, and paddled across. He thought, “Take my time, keep going.” In a minute, his feet touched bottom again. It felt nice to walk up the other side, even soaking wet. Terry walked up the lane to the farmhouse, but no orange kitty came out to greet him. Thank goodness, though, Ginny and Taffy stood in the barnyard. The ponies stopped chewing and looked up at him. They seemed smaller. The paint on the barn was chippy and peeling.

When he reached the farmhouse, Mama banged open the front door and rushed out to hug him, crying.

“Where have you been?”

He said he broke the rules, he’s so sorry; he fell asleep on the other side of the woods, in the barn, with a pitchfork. But he never climbed the bluffs.

Mama’s hair was gray. She said Grandpa and Grandma moved into town where life was easier for them. They had given up looking for him two years ago. Mama had moved in and taken over the farm, very sadly. She held him at arms’ length and could not believe her eyes. He was taller than her.

Terence told her he had learned his lesson, he was very sorry about breaking the jar of ashes on the fireplace, and would never run away again.

The next day, Mama made a list of rules for Terence. When she looked to give it to him, she found him up on the roof, fixing a leak. Instead, she threw the list in the fireplace.

“Do you want a sandwich, Terence?”she offered.

“A sandwich? Yum!” He climbed down off the roof, and had lunch with Mama. The little fit boy never had another fit.

Well. That’s a boys’ tale — bit of fairytale, bit of bouillabaisse. I hope it was all right. I needed a break from the Laffertys. I thought a kids story would take me one hour this week. (People who write novels never know how hard it is to write a kids’ story.) It ended up taking me — from start to finish, Monday, April 13, to now, blather-drafting, painting my kid stuck into several corners, killing side steps, then rewrites, slash-outs, drawings, reading it aloud to my wife, then going back to make tweaks — the whole week. Hassle, but fun. Definitely fun. If you have any questions or feedback, please say! I’d love that.

Your neighborhood scribe,

Hotspvrre

LAFFERTY AND KEANE FAMILIES

Family branches came and went, flourishing and withering. For every tale of a corporate big wheel, or a middle class family with seven children, all college educated, there were castoff Laffertys (Robert’s side) and wastrel Keanes (Moira’s side) who were poor clerks, childless gays, single eccentrics, drunks, indigents living rough outdoors, mentally incompetent, or nihilists. None were welcome who were not earners. In fact, an atheist millionaire in the family stood a 51 percent chance at family slathering him with showers, weddings, and chocolate fountains at receptions; the other 49 percent of Lafferty attention went begrudgingly to its fervently devout, but lunatic or homeless children on the fringes.

Late twentieth century America saw its share of young people who wanted to redistribute wealth (except for their own), end its empire they saw as perverted, stolen land, and deserving of razing and burial. Buried or not, Laffertys and Keanes had sprouted 100 first cousins in the postwar boom. Later, Generation X did not regrow itself, and so, far-flung, forgot each other’s faces, except in Christmas card photos. Grandchildren born and weddings held in the seventies and eighties gave way to boomer funerals in the 2000s. There were exceptions to these generalities across the clans, where, among ragtag eccentrics who miraculously found a spouse, some might have one or two children, and among childbearers, a tiny number raised a classic family of eight or nine weeds who became seeds of future grandchildren in the 2000s ready to fill God’s loving, hardwood church pews. Mostly, the clans flowered from the sixties to the 2000s, then fizzled out. Which line of Keane and Lafferty second cousins was next to sprout and flourish, even if meagerly replacing their mothers and fathers, is up to their remaining scribes to record. If any chronicler with an ear and turn-of-phrase reconstitutes the story of that branch, good on them; it is none of our business, but the tale will be thin as a cracker compared to the grandeur and flame-out of this one. But who is comparing?

WHERE TO START

Start at the beginning of the end of the middle; it does not matter; all time happens at once, it is said, but before we lose our minds, we kneel to narrative, and throw a dart at the middle.

THAT’S A LAUGH-ERTY

The basket hit the roof with a crack, and the cat flew up in the air.

Robert Lafferty owned two side-by-side homes in 1971 on Franklin Avenue, a busy, oil-stained and smoky, south Minneapolis street, homes split by an uphill, steep driveway filled with used cars worth hundreds of dollars, only some drivable. In any given year, he owned one or two Beetles, and the odd Volkswagen bus.

Nine-year-old Freddy and renter neighbor over the driveway Jean Forsyth had strung twine in a loop from their consecutive upstairs bedroom radiators, for stability, to trade snacks and comics; this, after they had tried to play telephone with plastic cups pierced by roofing nails, put them to their ears, and shouted — “Can you hear me?” — “Yes!” — but could not decipher between open air, and twine acoustics. Since it failed, they hung a picnic basket by coat hanger. Freddy jammed their cat inside the basket with a can of tuna to keep her focused, and gave the basket a heave-ho over the driveway, saying, “Red rover, red rover, the cat’s coming over!”

The basket swayed, came off, and fell a story down onto the Beetle roof with a bonk and no bounce. All physics absorbed by the cat, it ejected straight up, toes and tail sprung, tuna in its mouth, yet air-bending its trajectory to advantage, landing clear of the Volkswagen.

Freddy and Jean watched from their windows, fixed. The cat sawed air, away and across the backyard.

“Oh ho, that was ace!” he said.

“Freddy! Hope she’s okay,” Jean said.

“Eh, she’s fine. Now what?”

“Dunno.”

“Let’s put Cece in it!”

“No.”

“Could it hold me?” Freddy asked. “I’ll shinny over.”

“You better not.”

He was out the window, hanging off the sill by fingertips, snapping and jerking on the jute line, then hiking back inside the window. “It’ll hold! Let’s get Tiger.” Tadhg was inbetween Cece and Freddy, seven years old, and desperately wanted to belong, to be a member. Having fetched the basket and a carabinier from the garage, Freddy put Tiger in the basket on the radiator, and shoved him out the window.

“Now pull, Jean, pull! I’ll pull the other line.”

“No, I’mana fall!” Tiger whined, and grabbed the sagging twine overhead.

“Oh no!” Jean cried.

“It’s not tight enough. Don’t grab it, Tiger, let it go!” Freddy said. “Pull, Jean!”

“It won’t,” she said.

“Bring me back!”

Freddy: “I’m .. tryin’ .. I’m.”

Snap. The jute line went twang, and the frayed ends shot in beautiful serpentine loops. Tiger squealed as he dropped onto the Beetle roof, ricocheted and bounced off the stucco house, then down the two-foot space between car and house onto cement with an “Ow!” and cranked straight up at Freddy. They both gawped silently. Tiger began whimpering more in release from death’s terror than butt pain. He looked up at Freddy again, and they both laughed, Freddy enthralled, and Tiger teetering between crying and laughing.

“But you’re fine, right? You’re fine? Sh-sh-sh. Don’t cry, don’t be a baby, you’re fine!”

Jean: “Is he okay?”

Freddy: “He’s fine.”

Tiger: “I’m all right!” He felt jarred from tailbone to his nose, all turbinates tickle-burnt, and as he climbed out and rubbed his bottom, he sneezed rapidly three times. “’Choo-’choo-’choo.”

It was Sunday brunch after Mass days later when Tiger told everyone of the rope bridge and fall, and no one seemed surprised or interested. From Tobias, Bobby, and Bridget, it was more a smatter of “Really?” “Nice one.” “That’s a laugh-erty.” “Compared to Toby and me riding the tractor tire down the driveway onto Franklin. At midnight. Getting honks and sweared at.” Tobias: “Sworn at.” Five year old Cece laughed, tucked in, too big for her high chair, but she liked the wooden tray that swung overhead and trapped her by the stomach. Bridget, who went by Bríd (pronounced brēj), said, “You guys always have a death wish.”

Moira: “Don’t say ‘death wish,’ Bríd. Things you say out loud come true.”

“Eh, Mom.”

“They do.”

MOIRA THE INVENTOR 1975

At Sunday brunch (the inviolable cornerstone of family ritual) for years, the family mowed down twelve to eighteen Eggs Benedicts. Moira later claimed she invented the Egg McMuffin, and she should have been paid royalties for it. She also claimed to invent Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. Since she fiddled with inventing, not by chemical or electrical, but rather mechanical engineering lines, there always seemed a smidgeon of truth to her boasts, which included a cigarette roller with a leather strap, ice melt for the driveway made from reflective silver paint sprayed on sleeping bags, a refrigerated candy rolling table for caramel, convertible heels for high heels, and a squeeze bulb air brush for makeup powder application with interchangeable nozzles taken from cake frosting tips. Freddy and Tiger followed her lead and tried pulley systems for bed making. Drawings looked good, but they were hollered at and shut down for drilling holes in the plaster walls.

Moira’s claims were blown up, especially after a couple Manhattans. If sober, if skeptical children pushed her to prove she had invented the driveway ice melt, she would bend fingers into claws and scream, “Yes I did! It works. And so does the cold table. The prototype is down in the basement.”

Robert would say, “Moiraaaa.” After some cross chatter, he bolstered her, “Your cigarette roller was the best one I’d ever seen. Perfect little spikes. Why did you let it go?”

But if a little oiled up on bourbon, and her oldest, Tobias, doubted her reflective paint ice melt, she caved.

“Come on, Ma, get out of here.”

She would slump, roll shoulders forward, take a sip of her “invented” soup, curried carrot, and tighten her mouth bitterly against weeping, “This is just why I can’t break out. No support. I can’t get started.”

“Ope, here they come,” Bríd would say, meaning tears.

Robert: “Come on, sweetie.”

One Mother’s Day, Freddy pulled out his guitar and, to cheer up Martyr Mom, picked out, “A Caper A Day” set to “A Daisy A Day.” Instead of “I’ll give you a daisy a day,” he sang,

“I’ll buy you a caper a day, dear,

I’ll buy you a caper a day,

I’ll keep you rollin’ in bills, babe,

to cover the caper a day.”

He was eleven. Bobby said, “Where your bills coming from, bucko?”

“I’m gonna cash in on Mom’s Egg Moiras,” he replied. They were so popular, with quick Hollandaise sauce, Laffertys brought them to family potlucks. When Egg McMuffins hit McDonald’s in 1975, Moira said, “See? Stolen. Do you see that? My idea, doggone it. There should be a payday in there.”

“You should get a million dollars, Mom!” nine year old Cece announced. “If we get a million dollars, we’ll move on up to the east side.”

Bríd chimed in with The Jefferson’s sitcom song, “Fish don’t fry in the kitchen, beans don’t burn on the grill.”

“That’s after my time,” Tobias said.

“Aw!” Bríd complained.

“Nope, can’t jibe with that,” Bobby said.

“Can’t jibe with your jive, you baloney, stinky, hippie jive, haha,” she shot back. The youngs drum-rolled on the diningroom table. Tiger backed two spoons and clattered them between head and hand, then yelping, “Ow.”

Everyone admired Freddy’s guitar picking so much, they stopped to listen. Irish children hazed each other, pulled funny faces, and scoffed constantly, except on hearing poetry or music; then they shut up. All Laffertys but Tadhg played instruments. Guitar: Tobias, Bobby, Freddy. Piano: Bríd, Freddy, Cece. Flute: Bríd. Violin: Freddy, Cece. Mandolin: Freddy. Freddy played everything. Tadhg played refusenik, except for baseball. He opposed the hobby of music as “hard work for dummies,” and a time passer on par with crocheting.

Okay, that’s a lot. That will do. Thank you for reading. I sure do appreciate your supporting my new fiction. I’m trying hard to outdo myself, as if it were a snap to rise up and say something unimpeachable. This is all liquid to me. But it’s just a goddam story. I apologize for the hiccupy delivery. It’s near weightless dust in my head. Volition is tough!

Your faithful scribe,

~Hotspvrre

Before the stroke that shut her up, the final words their mother, Moira, told the youngest, Cece, were, “Do not split up the resort. You hold it. Promise. And see to Dad.”

They were a spitting candle, a dynasty of majestic and ruined property, of a Cadillac and a spate of junkers, of classically educated children with time on their hands.

While several youngs flourished, like Cece, a doctor, like P.R. mogul Freddy, insurance adjuster Tobias, and voice actor Bridget, they were busy, and could not be bothered to preserve the Lake Superior landmark; while others might like to have been told of Moira’s bequest, they had failed to launch, so did not qualify for divulgence, for honesty. No money. Artist Bobby Jr. had a houseful of his own kids, and any means came from his wife’s family. Second youngest Tadhg (pronounced Tīge), managed two houses for vulnerable adults with his wife, and so scraped by, a social servant, wiping bottoms.

This tale concerns American primogeniture, succession not backed by a crown, so no enforcement; but also, the will to prosper, knowing poverty in no way lessens it; it only sharpens a taste for more; ultimately, it concerns sense making, the distance between oneself and the ideal, along a sliding scale — how can a poor Lafferty reconcile himself against the grandiose self he trots out; what happens when he cannot tolerate secrets, and keep his big mouth shut about them.

Everyone loses a war on two fronts: especially against his brother, certainly against himself. Combatants cancel, like simplified math terms, slashed out. The best approach, to survive, is not to fight at all. The Laffertys imploded.

Raised on southside Minneapolis along a gritty belt line, Franklin Avenue, Robert and Moira uprooted for the country north of Saint Paul. Younger kids saw both The Big Smoke and the Big Corn, characterized by a silo near their land painted as a lush ear of corn.

A GLIMPSE OF THE GREAT GHOST

“What was that?” the man driving down Highway 61 blurted to his wife, slamming the brakes. She answered, “Huh? What?” Lumbering behind the mottled undergrowth, his head bobbing left and right, the pale beast covered in white ashes from a fire, caught himself being watched, and with gargantuan power, tucked over his narrow haunches, lunged up into the shadows and disappeared, bushes closing up behind him.

“Wild. Wow. It’s gone.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Moose? Not a moose. It was white.”

Poof, it vanished. The couple slowly accelerated and left the scene. Once gone a mile down the highway, a slight person trotted across the blacktop following the chalky creature. The north shore drive returned to its former state of snapped-off birches, rock faces dribbling spring water, and purple and pink lupines.

This was excerpt number three. Thanks for reading.

Yours,

Hotspvrre

Just finally finished Moby-Dick, the Whale, by Melville, after months, and I’m diving into Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Moby-Dick kept me at bay (argh, water metaphors), for a hundred pages with its dizzying detail of whaling, sea going culture, “monomania,” and death wish of Captain Ahab. The Idiot has immediately uncorked a strange, Bartleby-like protagonist that I recognize. Prince Myshkin is marked with awkwardness and baffling behavior from the get-go, and I can’t help but chase after his welfare.

Now, reading George Saunders recent posts, he assigned everyone Chekhov’s story, “The House With The Mezzanine,” on Gutenberg and it destroyed me with its characters’ clash of attitudes between a philanthropic, do-gooder girl, and “the disease of the century - pessimism,” which rendered the protagonist so pathetic as he stomps around, grouching. Huh, who do we know like that? Who’s a grouch?

See, I need someone to talk to, and I can’t afford an MFA program. And what do I need from that, anyway, except immersion again in the canon?

Most recently, I found myself fascinated again — I have been my whole life — with thought process — process is the key — my conception that two personality types dominate, those that favor experiencing life sequentially, such an image as making sense of magnatiles.

clicking together in chains on a floor, and those that favor experiencing life concentrically,

as in spheres of expanding cognition. No reason for inclusion of the inferno, but I favor looking at cognition concentrically. Someone recently, oh, it was Steven Pinker, talking about the collapse of reading versus rise of watching video. He mentioned a Flynn effect, or reverse Flynn effect, the sinking of test scores concomitant to the rise of computers. I didn’t know whether he was alarmed or happily surprised by it because Pinker so often finds good in everything, but I know I was alarmed! Then I forgot about it — then remembered it — thinking of sequence versus concentric cognition. Obviously, stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and we commune and elevate as society around oral stories, which unroll in sequence. But we absorb stories concentrically, I think, like waves in a pond when a pebble hits. We love performances of struggle, of heroes and wild animals.

Anyway, thinking about the reverse Flynn effect took me to neuro-phenomenological frameworks, a connecting of personal self to the universe through a sphere model of consciousness. Disclaimer: I never studied this stuff, and am only muddling along trying to grasp something that is probably just personality in scope. I wonder how the brain embraces new information.

Anyway, as I give two cents’ worth to these concepts, back to Chekhov’s Mezzanine. The protagonist cannot abide the innocent landowner older girl’s drive to bring medicine to the poor, from her wealthy position, and he rebukes her bitterly from his cynical and dissolute, landscape artist perspective. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, yet he slums around these girls every day, waits for them on their stoop, and finally invests himself whole-heartedly, but lest I reveal too much, he learns a lot.

Anyway, I know someone like that. I’ve had all those arguments and pissing matches. Argh, the ending was hard!

Thanks for reading this tidbit from The Waffle Iron. Sometimes I think writing gets completely in the way of storytelling. Just now, I had the thought, What if you could read my mind, and I could just unroll it? Without guile. Would I be so careful? No, it sure wouldn’t be this cryptic. I’m just telling a story — a story with multiple lead characters elbowing for center stage. As before, I’m offering a slice at a time, as I work out far ahead at marrying several drafts and word-processed bits into one braided loaf of a novel. It doesn’t have to be this putzy. Well, tell that to my other self.

See you!

Hotspvrre

The old guy limped along the north woods highway for hours past sunrise, bleeding from his leg down to oozing, difficult to dry when 2,400 pounds pressed on a four inch ankle. He stopped, lifted, and shook it for bother, then looked up, hearing the descending sough of tires slowing on blacktop. He lumbered into the ditch of cool purple lupines against his legs, and shadows of undergrowth jutting from the wet, spring-fed rock face. As the car rolled alongside him and the window came down, he turned away, and crouched. With a tremble in his rump, he launched up into the dark, vanishing, and the bushes closed up behind him. Powdered ash whitened him from snout to mane and down his back like a ghost colossus.

“What was that?” the driver asked his wife, incredulous because it jarred the puzzle of this clime. “What, where,” she answered looking up from her phone. “It’s gone,” he said.

Time was, and what a time it was, the Laffertys lived their splintering lives, raveling along, on top of America in Minnesota, at the toss of the twenty-first century, greater than Britain’s nineteenth century, the Medici reign, a moment rivaling Rome’s and Greece’s. Laffertys would nod, “It was our time.”

Signs might show America past its peak, spun out from a surfeit of comforts, but the Lafferty’s dissolution — who could explain that: an enigma, a pickle in a haystack, of children born with antlers locked, of ambition driving the unit apart, novelty wounds which at first brought winces of surprise, later so commonplace they cemented into scars.

Ayyooo, readers,

Popping up to bring you some fiction. Above was an excerpt of a new beginning to The Lafferty family’s Waffle Iron saga. For your infotainment, I am just wrestling over here with hand pain and general addlement, trying to keep my excuses, explanations. Lots of doctors for Theo this week. Sucking up everyone’s health care. Only 1/10th of it probably will pan out as necessary (“good thing you went!”), the rest, vanity. I’ll have you know, none of it is lip fillers. Just butt lifts. Talk to you soon! Hotspvrre.

Dear readers,

You are angels for reading this.

Because of my nervous stop-starts to this novel, which I’m tentatively naming, The Waffle Iron, and now finally some sturdy stuff (progress) over the last couple weeks, please, may I update you? What I have now feels fine — irreproachable. That’s the best news. You’ve seen me apologize, seen all my angst and nonsense, a few drafts of gobbledygook. There’s nothing like a writer who can blab about writing, but deliver nothing.

2,750 words of progress now.

That’s what I have. I am loath to share it, or say more, along the usual publication habits, for fear of instant regret and deleting it, as I’ve hated almost everything I’ve put here the past few months, for the most agonizing suspicion, chiefly — depression — what else — that I have a lot of nerve — that I might be hollowed out, I don’t feel well, and nothing will bring it back. But as I don’t know yet if that’s true, I keep writing in my journal — it’s nice — and word processing. I’ve got a beginning. I’ve got a skeleton carved. I’ve got a mind map, several maps, data sheets, spread. Of course, lots of drafts that I had the audacity to publish, which confused some of you.

Saturday, March 14 evening, just before the blizzard.

I’m tacking on a bit more to this. Last week I went in to a neuro clinic for blood draws and an EMG, electromyography, to measure the electrical supply to my limbs, to explore why my hands (and legs now) are cramping and weakening. I also can’t remember anything, which is kind of important to a writer. First thing Friday, I got a call that my vitamin B12 is low. It’s been low. One thing low B12 can cause besides hand pain, cramping, and muscle wasting, is dementia. Nice. I was on B12 in 2022. Now I have to get weekly injections, plus take 1000mcg tabs a day. The rest of the test results will be back Monday, but so far, at least I don’t have “anything serious, like ALS,” doc said. I hope to get back hand function without agonizing pain, and to see brain fog blow away. Also, I’m going to see a vascular doc about my left wrist pulse being dead from a blood clot caused by an arterial line placed a year ago by anesthesists during spinal surgery at AbbottNW Hospital. I have no pulse there. Sorry. I am trying to haiku this, because it’s so, I don’t know, mercy farming, and gross. I’d rather dish you up some fresh chapters.

Amidst anxiety, I’m working on the book every day, stepping out, looking straight down on it, having fun with irony, and enjoying cataloguing, dovetailing, and assembling pieces. When not writing, I’m slow reading poetry, plus Moby-Dick, and I have Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on deck. Not sure what I think of the first 100 pages of The Idiot. Moby-Dick’s first 625 pages (ha!) are dazzling me with nautical details, and “monomania,” a word Melville bandies about with Captain Ahab. It’s so lush, mind numbing, and at times, funny. It’s a tome. Not sure if I could have handled it and liked it at age 20 when my profs poo-poo’d it, said, “Don’t bother.” Different era, those guys. But I’m a different era from you.

Back to the book. I am spanning 100 years in the rise and long fall of family in-laws and outlaws, their drive, quirks, coverups, anger, and estate settlement fight. Also, there’s something about a beast.

Thank you for reading! I don’t know how to share my progress, the way I used to. Totally gunshy about divulgence. Maybe .. excerpts. If anyone has ideas about that, could you tell me? I would appreciate feedback.

Your faithful,

Hotspvrre

Ten years ago today, well, leap year 2/29/16, while teaching vulnerable teens at my riot-marred, drugs-and-gun-toting hellhole (objectively speaking), St. Paul’s Como Park High School, I posted, “Anyone care to explain to me the school-to-prison pipeline my colleagues and I have somehow created, or perpetuated, or not done enough to interrupt? [If not], you seriously owe us real teachers an apology. Actually, an apology won’t cut it.” Then I explained what ruined adult authority. “Phone and iPad devices, used for social media and gaming. There have always been rules for devices, and defined levels of misconduct. Since we now have no backup, no functional location to send kids who won’t quit gaming, setting up fights, selling drugs, [pulling] whoring trains, or cyber bullying, we’re screwed.” Whoring train referred to an incident, so-called by kids, with our school football team lining up, and paying for blowjobs.

Then my Como Park coworker, Kristy Pierce, a behavior aide, reported me. Black Lives Matter head, Rashad Turner’s own mother, Viola Turner, chimed in too. Later, another behavior aide, Chauntyll Allen, called me a racist on recorded mic at the

district board of education. She posted a thread of smoke including that her boss met me (false, she’d never seen nor met me), and “Should have seen the look on his” [my] face” when told I would be at her school. (How did that happen ?😝)

St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Josh Verges texted that he mined my blog and gave it to lone black school board member Keith Hardy, whereupon it ended up in the hands of Black Lives Matter.

My co-teacher was a black woman, Katrina Jacoway. My principal, Theresa Neal, a black woman. My special education administrator, Alecia Mobley, black woman. My assistant superintendent, Theresa Battle, a black woman. It might seem all my friction came from black folks, but any scan of my 300+ image gallery on this topic would show that most interested parties were white folks.

It was no fun having my boss’s boss’s boss clack down the hall to my room, point her finger at me, and pull me from my job.

Suspended but allowed to substitute teach for the remainder of the year, St. Paul put me through Beyond Diversity™ training developed by San Francisco’s Glenn Singleton, for the second time. Having been told by school to speak to no one or face firing, and by my union attorney, Meg Luger, that my writing was racist, I said nothing. I tried to believe that it was immediate, local, and personal, and I would eventually get over it. No idea it was never personal, local or immediate. Fox called. CBSLocal TV and radio called, NBC and ABC affiliates, and reporters out east.

Anyway, I had my walk of shame and infamy. License suspended by the state, then reinstated. Career ended. Couldn’t sue because my attorney got me to sign a paper, under extreme duress in July 2016. Now, if a smarter attorney were able to vacate that decision, given by weak counsel, if any attorney had filed an harassment restraining order against my stalkers, it might have ended my siege mentality sooner. If talking to 25 attorneys, to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or the ACLU had yielded just one ambitious lawyer up to the task of vacating that pressurized decision, I might’ve recovered a bit, been made whole, as they say. If I’d taken the interviews offered, if national Fox’s or the NYTimes’ own interviews of me had turned into stories, if my own written piece had been published by Quillette or by Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which stated interested for weeks, I might have gotten word out to more potential readers of my then-blog or this Substack.

You don’t want to be choked by some injustice forever, you just want one editor’s bites to land a story; maybe a footnote of recognition; that you were there before the panic; George Floyd was the last big boom; you were there in 2015 when Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, at Yale were screamed at and she was forced to resign over Halloween costumes; when this tidal wave of race hoaxes swept over America because of fake victims, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, and no one cared about Tony Timpa; you were there when St. Paul violated children’s right to disability services; you were there half a year before Bill C-16 on compelled speech in Toronto that introduced us to Jordan Peterson; you were there a year before Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were driven out of Evergreen; that was a hell of a long time ago.

And you got out. That will have to do. Pictures like the liar Chauntyll Allen getting arrested for invading a church service will have to do.

The tale cannot be told by just anyone; the firstborn cannot be truth executor despite his seniority and wealth of witness; it can’t be the sculptor, despite his antennuation and elegant reach; it can’t be the nun, despite her being God’s liaison; certainly not the jinglesmith, despite spinning three minute candy floss for folks, sending vibrations flowing to every TV viewer; nor the doctor, despite diagnosing constellations of mystifying, interlocking symptoms, and curing her patients.

No, he must have plenty of words, but be expert at nothing, clever even if slow, naive and weary of world travel, inept, easily entertained and hurt, quick to laugh or punch back in tears.

He must be removed to a window seat, barred from full membership; even at this wide aperture, he is unequal to the task to tell all; but a right enough reporter to nail the outline, draw gasps, laughs, and disgust. This is one family’s tale of pounding on the ceiling of prestige, sniping about which virtue is cardinal, and why is it prudence, tools to walk around and discern classic beauty, while shy of his family’s pretties — just worried for slightly deficient, innate, almost pinnacle beauty, asymmetrical physicality, fine enough clothes, tasty food, and adequate manners around a table of cloth napkins and multiple forks.

Each Lafferty holds a facet of the light passing through him, but only Tadhg has a mouth big enough to shout, yet little prestige to lose, such that the tale issuing forth can be disassembled from one place, and glued back truly as a tongue-in-groove floor, so authentic despite its inaccuracy and pomposity, that only he, still, can be trusted to tell it with the fuel to light a thousand hearths, with gas that smells like roses.

Why did you do it? (This is torquing my nuts, and I went to bed last night all calm and happy till I saw your post. I know, I should never look at my phone at night.)

I can hardly find words for the betrayal, in a friendship so sanctified that despite months or a year apart here and there, you and I always got through it, picked up where we left off due to our intuitive alchemy, decades of vibes, we’re really good together, and despite drifting tectonic plates, culture, different families and root systems, our own comedowns and humiliations, eclectic palates, heroes, blah blah, we could always join back up and be laughing in a minute.

Do I give it 24 hours? What do I do with you?

You’re my longest term friend in adulthood, counting since my dad’s death in 1991, 35 years ago. You’ve come out recently defending a corrosive, disgusting public figure who worked tooth and nail to destroy me personally 10 years ago. She was mischaracterized by the U.S. president’s stupid Ai photo, but a dumb stunt inflicted on a longtime perpetrator by our idiot-in-chief doesn’t soften my derision for her.

I rally back to my conversationalists, of whom there are too few, I talk to the ghosts of my elders, my mentors, and I ask them, Should I do anything about this? Should I let it go, since it’s culture and politics, and unworthy of dedicating attention to such a 90 IQ criminal? Elders knew my predilections and propensity to snap; to make bad things even worse.

“Toe the line, Teddy, m‘boy, toe it. Eat this humiliation, too. It doesn’t matter. It won’t matter in 24 or 48 hours.”

I should be writing this letter instead to myself in the persona of a beloved deceased elder bestowing loving assurance, telling me, laying her gentle hand on mine, It’s okay, Teddy, there-there, she would say, she who took pity on my bad temper. She lived as a spinster of three spinsters among a family of six sisters and one deceased brother, collapsed back into their father’s home at the sunset of their lives. Almost all remaining five girls died in the 1970s. A boy died in the thirties.

Dear Teddy,

I hope all your dreams come true. .. [Let’s see, what else would she say? I might project onto her some favorable wits, poor unmarried, sacrificial lamb to her siblings’ needs that she was, had she seen me grow up past ten years old.] You’ve been wronged, betrayed, lacerated. You know, every word you say to address that offense may leave a mark on yourself. But I understand how deplorable staying silent to an offense can be. Look at me. I was never tall or beautiful like my sisters, I was never courted, I served dinner my whole life in the diningroom but ate in the kitchen alone by the sink. I have my vague reasons for modesty and its human vice, pride, but never spoke of it, certainly not to you grand-nephews and -nieces. Understand, I know the burden of silence, and if I had it do over again, I would talk to your other aunties and think of a response. If it were they who were responsible, I wouldn’t say a word, as God would have us suffer little issues with forbearance and humility. But this great pain is not your sibling doing it. This is someone with whom you might have some words, because you do not owe him such humility. You’ve lost some dignity and sleep on it, so be careful and say something that does your integrity good.

Sincerely,

God loves you, and I love you,

Auntie V

I could stop right there because I’ve talked myself off the ledge successfully by visualizing my Aunt V. Poorly, but I caught some of her. What remains, though, in this disputation with others and self? What remains? What is left, worthy to jaw over? In this life, you will find yourself in the wreckage of humiliations. Comedowns. I picture them, like a tornado’s path through a neighborhood. We all have to suffer humiliation. If we are not ashamed or beat up by someone, we’re not normal people. The desired goal is to remain open, and not armor up. Armored up people are ready for offense and fight, but they cannot experience any good blessings.

I says to myself I says, [that’s the tone of Aunt V: “so she says, she says to me, she says”], Teddy, m’boy stay open to all that can wring you to rags and anoint you with love.”

That’s about all I got for this on a Friday afternoon when I’m supposed to be writing fiction. Accidentally wrote “wringing” fiction, ha!

Sincerely,

Teddy

Each sprig that pushes off a trunk is dubbed center of the universe; first, the oldest, yes you, captain, long awaited and loved, our number one son, carry the crown; then number two, join the crew, oh, so big, don’t cry, do cry, express it all, be all your brother cannot; comes along three, our bouncy darling girl with temple dimples, life is complete, then not; here is four, a wild card, guileless and funny, forever slipping from sight; and then, god damned, another with such a huge head, mother has lost count, and he’s lost oxygen and needs help; she’ll be split by C section; never doing this again, if she survives; (but no, what the hell is a mother? a tousled giver who refracts again into voluminous skirts), if not bearing more, bearing all; here she comes, the sixth and last baby, stella maximum, the cherry atop the float atop the parade slowly passing; and she has Nefertiti eyes, so broad, her lashes so serene, few can hold her gaze without averting their own. It’s only a tree in a forest, but one worth talking about, whose underground parents, four grandparents, 16, 32, 64 greats, asleep in the earth for this rustling green progeny, who stretch here for a minute, soon to shoot seeds across the velvet heaven and not on the sidewalk, senseless to oblivion or fruiting. Oh, is the tree still standing? If babies come, then babies come?

Is that it?