Letters to Jenny

  I understand that they are making you exercise to try to build up your middle muscles, so you can sit up better. That’s probably a pain, but still worthwhile, because you need to be able to put it all together if you want to get walking sooner rather than later. I also understand that they want to change your red racer wheelchair to one with a seat/shoulder harness. That’s probably so that you won’t go flying out if you put on the brakes too quickly.

  Stray thought, speaking of speed: did you notice how you moved to Warp 7, and then you heard from WaRP, the Elfquest folk? Cause and effect; what else? I’m going to ask them if they would like to do the cover for the novel, if the publisher agrees. I feel they could do Jenny Elf best. The picture probably wouldn’t look too much like you, but that might be best, because you wouldn’t want to pass people on the street and have them keep stopping and staring and saying “Hey! Aren’t you that elf who helped the centaur foal?”

  Meanwhile, having completed the Xanth novel, I’m into my next, Tatham Mound. This chapter is a tale adapted from the Popol Vuh, the sacred text of the Quiche Maya. My Indians are here in Florida, but there’s a girl whose mother was a fugitive from the civilized Maya region (they wanted her to marry an Aztec chief, and the Aztecs were really into ritual human sacrifices), and so she brought her heritage with her. You say that’s too farfetched; you can’t imagine anyone’s mother doing that? You can’t fool me; I know you know of a case yourself. So we learn the tale, and it’s a phenomenal one. There’s this girl, Xquic, which I think is pronounced Shkeek, who goes to a tree where there is skull-like fruit and one real skull, and she talks with the skull, and it drips a drool of saliva into her hand, and she becomes pregnant with twins, who will go to avenge their father’s death. No, that’s not the way it’s normally done, but the Mayas didn’t use storks. It’s a fascinating tale. When her father sees her pregnant he gets upset; in fact he orders her heart to be cut out and burned. Discipline was firmer in those days, you see. But she talks the men who are to sacrifice her into taking the blood-red sap of a tree and forming a heart-shape out of that, and they take that back and it fools the others. But her problems aren’t over. So you can see that this is no dry treatise on Indian lore; I mean to do right by those Indians.

  Tell your mother I took the brain-sides test she sent, and my score was Left = 76, R = 129 and I = 95, which makes me a right-brained person. The description fits—but so do the descriptions for left-brains and mixed-brains and integrated-brains, so it means nothing much. It reminds me of the Kuder Preference Test I took in college, that concluded I should be a writer of math textbooks. I could hardly think of anything I less wanted to do! I mean, would you like to write math textbooks? The problem with these tests is that they force unrealistic, nitpicking choices. You want to know what it’s like? Okay, try this: Question One: would you like to eat a bug, or a worm, or either? If you try to say “Yuck! I wouldn’t do any of those!” you are an uncooperative client, and maybe you should be put in reform school. If you say you would rather eat the bug, then the analysis will show that you have a morbid attraction for hairy-legged things. If the worm, then you like squiggling cold things. So you could wind up being a taster for a roach motel. This is one reason I don’t do well on standardized tests; I always have too many objections that the test makers don’t appreciate.

  But some readers are pretty perceptive. Today I received a fat envelope from the National Institute of Dyslexia. The woman writing works there, and says she’s noticed dyslexic aspects of my writing, and inquires whether I or any member of my family is dyslexic. Now that’s interesting, because she doesn’t mention my Incarnations Notes or Bio of an Ogre; apparently she picked it up from my Adept series and my would-be horror novel Shade of the Tree, wherein I have a hyperkinetic dyslexic boy. I don’t think I’m dyslexic, but I did take three years to get out of first grade. Certainly my mind is different—oh, you had noticed?—but it’s my wife who says “Go left!” while pointing right. A friend came to a screeching stop midway between the forks of a super-highway split once, when she did that. Still, we do have a dyslexic daughter. No I can’t just dismiss the letter; she wants to nominate me for a dyslexic achievement award. I’ll try to discourage her, because I think I’m ornery but not dyslexic.

  We had a lot of rain this past week. We have a pool, and the water was up to 82°F, and I figured one more scorching hot day would bring it up to swimmable temperature—I freeze below bathwater level—and then the rains and clouds came and cooled it four degrees. Sigh. Those storms always sneak up on us, when my wife has laundry out drying. You hear plink, plink, and you think it’s the eaves dripping. Then WHOOSH!! and it’s a drenchpour. We dashed out anyway and scrambled in the laundry from the line. I’m sure your mother knows exactly how that’s done. It reminds me of an old alarm clock I had when your age. It would go dink, dinkdink, dink, dink-dink gently for thirty seconds. If by that time you hadn’t gotten up and turned it off, it would abruptly go BBBBRRRRIIINGGGG!! and send you up to clutch at the ceiling.

  Are you asleep yet? I figure your folks use these letters to lull you to sleep. No? Oh. Well, it’s Enclosure time. One I won’t enclose: a solicitation from the National Gardening Association for money, saying “Kids like Jenny are counting on you!” I didn’t know you were working for them, but it does seem to make sense. They also say: “And from her wheelchair, young Jenny makes one of the most joyful discoveries of all: that gardening is really a nine-letter word for ‘freedom.’ “ Well, I don’t know; if four-letter words are bad, what about nine-letter words? I am enclosing a clipping telling of a man who is marrying a woman, and his son is dating her mother. You see what goes on in the outside world while you’re in the hospital? And a picture and article about a miniature deer, and Curtis, and a couple I thought you might relate to: man unable to move well, and woman pushing a boulder up a hill. This business of getting your body back, bit by bit—I figure at times it feels like that.”

  Jejune 10—Now for my morning-after paragraph. I had done this letter, then last night your mother called me, telling me that it was Jenny Gildwarg rather than Jenny G. As long as I’m here again, let me fill in what I forgot yesterday. Despite the jokes and things, I don’t take your situation lightly. When I walk in the forest—it’s really more like a jungle—you are in my mind, and when I see interesting things I think “Jenny would like that,” and I picture you trying to bump along across the forest floor in your wheelchair and I realize it’s a foolish thought; you’d have to stick to the road, which fortunately goes by most of the magnolias and up Ogre Drive and past the bunny section and the heron section and the lines of pines. I think of you a lot, Jenny, and it lends meaning to what I see, whether it’s a squirrel or a pretty flower others might call a weed. I understand how your mother feels, with the flowers, thinking of you. The truth is, it may seem dull and lonely in that hospital, but the thoughts of many of us are with you, if only this were the Elfquest world and you could receive those thoughts directly. When I mention you to correspondents, without details, they express concern and sympathy. Jenny, if you went to a fantasy convention with a name-tag saying Jenny Elf, you would discover how many friends you have, and how they care for you. I think one day that will happen.

  Jejune 16, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  I hope your day is good because mine is. What, because it’s Jenny-letter day? Well, that too. But mainly it means that things have been falling into place for me, intellectually and physically. For example, this morning I was reading in a dull book about Florida history, because I need information on the Calusa Indians who lived in South Florida, and I wasn’t finding much, but I plowed on—and then suddenly I encountered phenomenal stuff about their marriage and death customs. No, don’t start scowling; this is neither dirty nor grim.

  But first an interruption, because at this point my wife came home from a shopping spree with two recliner chairs, so naturally I had to dash out to unload and carry them into the house, and that was a job beca
use I no longer have the muscle I used to before the tenonitis wiped out my arm exercises, but we struggled and heaved and shoved and managed to get them in before the storm that was trying to catch us in the act broke. They’re nice chairs; they’re soft and comfortable, and they swivel and rock, and they lean back to two levels, so you can relax for watching TV or go all the way back and snooze. If you think we’re crazy to huff and puff to haul these into our family room, just wait till you see what your mother’s hauling into your house: an elevator. Can you imagine your mother carrying an elevator? No wonder she gets tired!

  I was about to tell you about the Calusa Indians. No, don’t look like that; your mother gets all up in a heavel when you make that face, and she’s already dis-heaveled from carrying that elevator. The Indians are interesting. You challenge me to prove it? All right, I will, but you have to listen. Nuh-uh—you have to keep your tongue in your mouth, too. (You thought I wouldn’t see? Ha!)

  First, it turns out that the Chief likes to keep things in the family, so he might marry his sister. When he got tired of her, he’d kick her out and take a younger, prettier wife. In one case he had his son marry her, after he was tired of her. Right; that was a mother and son marriage, and they had several children. I mean, just how close can a family get? But now the death customs: they believed that each person had three souls, one in the pupil of the eye, one in the shadow, and one in the reflection. When the person got sick, it was because he’d lost a soul, and they had to herd it back in the way you’d herd a wild animal, cornering it and forcing it back, until it reluctantly returned to the person, and he got well. When the person died, he lost two of his souls. But the one in the eye remained. That meant that if a living person went to the place of burial, he could talk with that third soul. The Spaniards who conquered Florida in the 16th century remarked that there must be something to it, because an Indian who had gone to talk with a dead relative came to know things he could not otherwise have known. Right—because the dead can see more than we can. I think this makes a lot of sense, and it explains some things that have perplexed me before. But it relates beautifully to my story in Tatham Mound, because there my protagonist (main character) has a bad experience, and spends a night by a burial mound, and communes with the chief spirit of that mound, Dead Eagle, who tells him that he must find the Ulunsuti, which is the terrible colorless diamond crystal, the most powerful talisman known; one look at it even in a person’s sleep can bring death not to him but to his family. Think about that for a moment: that’s one deadly stone! If he doesn’t find it, his whole tribe will be wiped out. So he sets out to find it, and on the way he meets the nine year old girl whose mother was a Maya, and she tells him the story of “Little Blood” I told you about last week. But mainly he’s checking in with all the burial mounds, to inquire of their spirits where to find the Ulunsuti, and of course some of those spirits refuse to tell him. Now he’s passing through Calusa territory. So now I know how it is that he can speak with those spirits: because one of their three souls remains. Now admit it: wasn’t that interesting? Oh—you already knew? Sigh.

  So that was my morning research; soon I’ll be writing that chapter, and it should be a good one. This isn’t Xanth, but by the time it is written and published you’ll be older, and you may even enjoy reading it. Who knows, you might get interested in the American Indians and become a world famous scholar.

  But I was telling you about my day. It’s a running day, and I needed a haircut, so my wife cut my hair just before I ran, and naturally in the middle of that a man came delivering 110 reams of computer paper. His little girl was with him, maybe five years old; we showed her the wren nest, and I told her how we once had little girls, but then they grew up and went to college. That’s what they do, you know; you’ll be doing it too, in due course. Don’t shake your head at me; I tell you I know, because I’ve seen it before. You’ll grow up and get educated and get married and move to Hawaii or somewhere and send your mother a postcard each Christmas, for which she will be duly grateful. Anyway, we got the paper in, then finished the haircut, and I trimmed my beard. Then I ran—and sure enough, with all the weight off my head, it was my fastest run of the year and the second fastest ever, on this track. (I used to run much faster, but I was younger then, still in my 40’s). When I run I time it, and I sort of run a race with myself, against all my other runs. At the first quarter I was tied for fastest, but at the half I had dropped back to sixth place. But then I began overhauling those other selves, and by the three quarter mark I had passed three of them and was third. By the time I finished, I passed another, and so was second overall. But the thing is, those other fast runs were made in winter, when the temperature was about 70°F; today it was 90°. So I’m very pleased with this run.

  The other nice thing that happened a few days ago was word from a man who had happened to be in a book store, waiting for his wife, and he saw people buying my novel But What of Earth?. That’s a novel I wrote about fourteen years ago, but the copy-editors rewrote it and in my judgment destroyed it. So now I have had it republished, by a different publisher, with every word restored to the original version—plus 25,000 words of comment about what I thought of the editing. Your mother will have fiendish delight reading that one; it’s a case where the worm turned and just about destroyed the wrongdoer. So I hope that that store was typical, and that all over the country people are buying it, and that they enjoy it when they read it.

  Meanwhile, what else is new here? Well, our horses are doing fine; some day I’ll tell you all about them, because they can be very nice when you get to know them. Last week I mowed the lawn, which was nervous business, because before I hadn’t seen one of my wife’s sets of plants in time and mowed it flat. Ouch! But several were day-lily bulbs and they put out new leaves without trouble, and the last one was the kind of plant you can grow from a single leaf, and now it has put out half a dozen new leaves from its decapitated stem, so it survived too. Phew! When I mowed, I encountered a big box turtle in the front, and another in back; I think they come to eat our grass, which is fine. There isn’t much grass in the forest; in fact, we have about all of it. I also saw a toad, and mowed carefully to avoid it. Later I saw another turtle, just two inches long.

  And a new color of dragonfly: deep black-blue, verging on purple, handsome creatures. I do like those dragonflies, because they’re so pretty, being all shades of green, blue, brown and yellow, and because they eat the flies that would otherwise be chomping us and our horses. On my last run, not today’s, I stopped at the magnolia tree—never mind why—and a deerfly sat on my leg to bite me, and a green dragonfly swooped in and grabbed it. You can’t ask for better service than that! Then one evening we were watching TV, a James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, which it turned out we hadn’t seen before—I thought we had seen them all—and my wife went out to check something near the pool, and there was a four foot long rat snake. It had come in because the screen door hadn’t quite closed. We know that rat snake; it circles the house in its quest for rats or whatever. But we were afraid it would fall in the pool and drown, so we had to get it out. Probably I just should have picked it up, as it’s harmless. But four feet long? I was wary. So we just sort of herded it around and toward the open screen door, and finally it went out. Next morning there was an item in the newspaper about a harmless four foot snake loose on a jetliner. So that’s where that snake went! You doubt? Okay, I’m enclosing the clipping. So you see, it’s been an interesting week.

  As usual, I have an envelope full of clippings for you. Is it true that you make your mother make copies of all of them? They really aren’t that important, just things I think you’ll like in passing. The Marmaduke comic on back of the Curtis is funny too. There’s a Ziggy cartoon you may appreciate. There’s a girl and horse picture that’s so pretty I just had to share it with you. There’s a Doonesbury comic, splatted with ink; all week long they had trouble with the careless cartoonist, and got pretty fed up about it. And there’s a picture of a
house in pine trees: I can take or leave the house, but oh, those pines! You’ll have to let me know if you don’t like getting deluged with these things; when I see something interesting, I say “Jenny would like that,” and I save it for you. I’m also enclosing a more recent printout of the Author’s Note in Isle of View for your mother. Once I knew how you wanted your name given, I went over it and naturally made four times as many changes as I expected—your mother’s friend Andrea Alton can tell you how that is—and printed it out and shipped the novel off to my agent. I think it’s a good novel, and not just because of Jenny Elf. I’m showing it also to Richard and Wendy Pini, so they can correct any errors I may have made in describing an Elfquest elf.

  So let me know how you’re doing. I write about myself mostly because there’s not a lot to write about you. I mean, what’s the point in inquiring about all the things you did, when I guess it’s pretty routine therapy? But it’s important even if it’s dull. I hope you are still making progress out of that pit, inch by inch, and please do let me know when you break through to something new.

  Know something? It’s now 5:30 P.M., time to feed the horses, and it’s raining. Hard. How do I get out to feed them? Pretty soon Blue will neigh to remind me, and I hate to get neighed at, because it makes me feel guilty. Those horses expect to be fed on time. Sigh.

  Jejune 23, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Growr! Remember when I told you that the computer is out to get you? Well, it still is. Let me go back to a lot of dull relevant detail to clarify this. No, don’t tune out. This is my letter and you have to listen to it, or you get magic itch-dust down your back. And on your tongue, if you stick it out. Ha, I thought that would make you behave! The secret in getting along with folk is knowing the right threat to make them do what you want.