Letters to Jenny (18 page)

Stop it, or I’ll stick my tongue out at you. I’m not bluffing. See? OPEN YOUR EYES! You think I can’t make you do that? Just watch:

My first enclosure is a photograph of a painting of a cute little cat. I CAUGHT THAT! YOU PEEKED! On the back it says “This I did for one of Jenny’s friends …” No, that’s coincidence; this woman paints, and her daughter is named Jenny, but I’m showing you this—I can’t give it to you, because it’s a gift to me, and, well, you probably understand the ethics of that. But I thought you’d like seeing it. And your eyes are wide open now, aren’t they! You keep trying to get the better of me, and you should know better.

Okay, I’m back from horsefeeding. I have to move this letter right along, because my daughters and wife mean to drag me off to eat out, because they won’t all be here for my birthday, so I’ll lose the last part of the day. So—what? What do you mean, what do the horses eat? Grain and hay, that’s what. Oh, you mean what are
we
going to eat? Well, when I do go out, I take a little bit of everything edible (non-meat) from the salad bar. So let’s get back to this letter—what? Oh, all right, I’ll make a report when we get back. I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning, because it’ll be too late tonight.

Now to business: my daughter Cheryl found a baby turtle along the drive a couple of days ago. It was a water turtle, and it was far from water, so she brought it to the house—she was driving, and so it got a car ride—and I took it down to the lake. Then we went out and looked for more, in case they had hatched and were similarly lost, but didn’t find any. Well, we saved one, anyway. This morning, or maybe yesterday morning, I saw another turtle, right by the barn door; I had to open the door over her shell. She was laying eggs there. That was a land turtle. Well, if some predator doesn’t dig them out, we’ll have more turtles in due course. Turtles are fun, and we encourage them.

Actually, my contacts with wildlife are fairly frequent.

Sometimes a bunny doesn’t know which way to go to get off our drive when I’m pedaling my bicycle out to get the newspapers, and a couple days ago, during my run, I went full-face into a spider web. Remember that clipping I sent you? No, I got all of it except the spider, though I suspect the spider wasn’t exactly pleased with the loss of her web. Stop smiling; it’s not that funny. Meanwhile we have one magnolia tree that had a bloom on the first day of AwGhost last year. Guess what: not this year. But we have two azaleas, which normally bloom only in early spring, with flowers now. Maybe plants take turns.

Did you know that Neptune has three more moons? That makes six, now, though the new ones are all baby moons. In my novel
Macroscope
, which you don’t have to read, I have Neptune’s big moon Triton having a little moon of its own; I’m waiting to see if they spot that moon, in which maybe I’ll be famous for having described it first. Maybe in a few million years those little moons’ll grow up to be big moons. Which reminds me: there was an item about a couple who had a dwarf child. Something in the genetics. So they adopted a Korean child with similar dwarfism. I don’t know those folk, but suspect I’d like to.

I had a call from your mother, right after they took her face apart. She informed me that my address of Twenty-Tooth Extraction Drive was wrong; they took out twenty-three teeth. Sigh. But it was the tooth of the month, just as I predicted. No, a drunk driver did
not
run his trailer-tractor rig over her face, it only looks that way. She’ll be better any month now, and she means to come in and make you look at her face before it becomes uninteresting again. That way you’ll know what kind of a glare to expect if you misbehave. She also warned me not to be too affrighted by the letter she had just mailed; it was written when she was mostly out of her mind. Today that letter arrived—and it was perfectly sensible and interesting. Maybe that’s what she meant.

Next enclosure is for your roommate, Cathy: it’s a Cathy comic I thought she’d like, about how people train dogs and how dogs train people. You’re a cat fan, so Cathy must be a dog fan.

Oops—I must have forgotten to clip out the Alligator Children’s page last Sunday. Will you ever forgive me? Here’s Curtis, anyway.

Today I received ten letters, a number of which were also birthday cards. I don’t know how so many folk found out about my birthday. Are you sure you haven’t squealed? Some even send gifts, which I’d prefer they didn’t, because I’m not sending them gifts. One woman says she’s madly in love with me, and no, she’s not my wife, she’s someone else’s wife, but she keeps sending letters of adoration. Humorous ones, fortunately. I guess it’s easier to love me from afar. STIFLE THAT SNIGGER! Once she wrote “I just turned forty, and I’m still mad about it!” Her last card showed a purple dragon, and said “I know how you like to fantasize. On your birthday, may all your dreams come true!” And a sign to hang on the doorknob: “DO NOT DISTURB—unless you’re part of my fantasy!” This time she sent me a device you’d like: it’s the Traffic Buster, which is a little box with an ON/OFF switch that turns on madly blinking lights, and four buttons marked Auto Machine Gun, Grenade Launcher, Death Ray, and Rifle Gun. The idea is to scare impolite drivers out of their wits, and of course that means just about every other car on the road. You want to listen to one? Okay here’s the Grenade Launcher:—— = = POW! Did you hear it? Tell your daddy to put the device on your Christmas list. Then you can visit the hospital and scare all the nurses with it.

I understand you’re learning sign language now. Would you believe: there is sign language in Xanth #12,
Man From Mundania
. Because Ivy can’t understand Mundane speech, but signs work okay. I also have sign language in my Indian novel,
Tatham Mound
. That’s not quite the same, but similar. It’s a universal language, really; with it you can talk to anyone who knows signs. My daughter Penny has done some work in signs. So I wish you well. All the same, if you can connect up one more nerve in your head so you can talk directly, that’s okay too.

Which I guess brings me to a more serious item. Two days ago I had a good day’s writing going, but in the afternoon it washed out because of phone calls and the mail. A letter asked me to send one of my dreams—the night kind—as they are collecting dreams of famous folk. Who, me? WATCH THAT SNIGGER!! Trouble is, the only really dramatic dream I can remember I already described, in
Bio of an Ogre
, and I don’t like to repeat myself. Then the first call: from the guy who is working on the Xanth video movie. He said a studio is interested, and might send down a jet plane to bring me there and show off the first sample. I won’t sign a contract, see, until I actually see a bit of it, to be sure it’s of the quality I want. But they must be pretty sure it’s good. So it’s an exciting prospect; maybe Xanth really will be animated. Then, later, your mother’s call, sounding as if they hadn’t gotten quite all her teeth out, because she could still talk, and that reminded me that you still can’t walk or talk or eat. It didn’t seem fair that good things should be happening to me, when I really don’t need them, while you are the one who really needs something good, like a burst of healing in the nerves. I mean, you have the brain and you have the body, you just don’t quite have enough of a connection between them. That night I dreamed a sort of mixed-up melange that faded as soon as I woke and tried to remember it—you know how dreams are—but it was as if I took a jet plane and visited you and you couldn’t talk to me. That didn’t cheer me much either. So I described that dream, and its background, and maybe the dream-book folk will be satisfied. I penciled it out for my secretary, which means it’ll be about ten days from now before it’s actually typed up and ready to go, so if you or your mother object I can intercept it then.

8:30:40
P.M.
—Well, I’m back tonight, to my surprise, so I’ll tell you about it. We headed off at 7:00 to RAX, and I loaded up on a bit of everything. When I came to the broccoli soup I had a problem: they had forgotten to cut up the broccoli, and it was all in huge branches. I had stems sticking out over the edge of the bowl and dripping cream soup on the floor, and when I tried to tilt the bowl the other way the soup crept up to burn my fingers. (Was that a titter?) To eat it I had to pick it up by a soupy stem and chew off the ends, which tried to dangle like clam stomachs—I don’t know how meat-eaters can stand to eat clams!—and though the ends I held were ice cold, the ends I was trying to eat remained ouch hot. (That sure sounded like a titter.) But the soup was good and so was the mixture of everything else I had on my plate. Do you like onions and hot pepper? No? Well I do, in moderation, so I had them, and of course finished with three flavors of pudding with peach and pear slices and apple sauce on top. We were a party of six—Wife and I, and our daughters Penny and Cheryl, and their two boyfriends—and naturally I was the last to finish. I always am. Everybody else in the world eats at hectic speed. I tried to hurry, but that just gives me gas—well, never mind. Just be glad you weren’t there. We got to talking about how it was in school. In my day, when they served that kind of large-curd tapioca we called fish-eyes, folk would put a fish-eye in a spoon and use it as— you know what a mortar is? It shoots a shell up, so it loops down and hits someone else on the head? That’s the idea. These big sticky fish-eyes, those innocent teachers … (now that sounded like a laugh!) More insidious was the butter. I had a pat of it once that was so cold it clinked as it hit my plate. But when it starts to soften, well, if you use a spoon to flip it up so it sticks to the ceiling, over someone else’s head, and slowly melts—oh, that’s old stuff to you? Ah, well. Maybe you should tell the nurse that you and Cathy want to practice eating, starting with butter and spoons. Maybe the nurse will be dull enough to fall for that.

Harpy therapy! Be a good girl, if you can’t get any butter. (Hey—I think that’s a pun! It was accidental.)

AwGhost 11, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Well, my days have been hectic again. Yesterday the phone started ringing, and I was calling New York and California and points between, and—but I guess you’re not interested in that. So—what’s that? You say yes, you’re
not
? Oh. Well. Um. If you feel that way …

But one thing yesterday will interest you: we found a skink in the living room. A skink is a sleek local lizard. Nothing wrong with it, except that it won’t find many bugs to eat in the living room. So we shooed it out, but it hid in a closet, and it was a job to shoo it out from there. We finally got it out the door, and closed the door—and later in the day there it was in the living room again. We pondered and concluded that either there had been two skinks, which seemed doubtful, or it had a secret entrance and had come in again. In which case it wasn’t trapped and could find its own way out again. So we left it alone, and it disappeared. Okay. We don’t mind it inside, we just didn’t want it starving there.

Yes, I finally had my birthday, and no the world did not come to an end. My wife gave me a compact disk player, and my daughters and their friends gave me assorted disks to go with it. So I’ve been listening to Pete Seeger songs and Simon & Garfunkel and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture—hey, on my stereo system, the cannon sound from different directions!—and his “Marche slave” whose marching beat I like. Funny thing, it seems that “slave” is not capitalized though it derives from “Slav”; he wrote it to help raise funds when the Russians were aiding the Slavs fighting the Turks. Anyway, having learned about compact disks, I find I like them. So we saw this ad to buy about 60 disks with most of the light classics cheap, and— ah, well, it’s hard to resist a sale. Meanwhile I have also been listening to cassette tapes of Jim Reeves, about my favorite male popular singer, and Crystal Gayle, well, you know, that hair.

We were getting bit something awful by the chiggers. Those are a Florida phenomenon: tiny mites, so small you can’t even see them. They are on the foliage outside, and when you walk by they brush off on your socks, and climb down into them and then burrow into your skin, and you get an itchy welt that can take a couple of weeks to clear, and some get infected. I got blisters from them on my ankles, which I had to puncture so I could run without a problem. My wife gets bitten more than I do, though she spends less time outside. Well, it’s a fact that women taste better than men. So the past few days I’m been dousing my socks with bug spray or repellent, and that seems to be stopping it. So if you ever visit Florida, watch out for chiggers.

You know, I have some trouble with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. No, that’s not when you carp at tunnels. It’s a problem with the hands. The nerves leading to them go through the Carpal Tunnel in the wrist, and if it’s tight, your hands and fingers start getting numb. I wear my watch on my right wrist, though I’m right handed (well, what I was taught, I do right handed; what I learned myself I do left handed. Folk with ambiguous handedness are said to be confused mentally too. Now you know) because the slight pressure of the band on my wrist turns my hand numb. As it is, my left hand only tingles a little and perhaps is a bit weak, but I normally have no problem. Sometimes my right hand has trouble too, but not too much. Anyway, what I was thinking is that it is as if you have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, only your whole body is affected. Now if only you could take off your watch and have everything better— well, it was only a notion. Stick with the dull therapy. I keep hoping that you are about this far // from making a key nerve connection, and suddenly all circuits will light up and you’ll be able to do everything. Well, it’s a nice hope, isn’t it?

While we’re on the subject of you (how did that happen?): the Xanth Pinup Calendar is now getting published, and I’ll send you a copy, maybe next week when I get my copies. Maybe I’ll send one for your daddy too, so he doesn’t get jealous. Men have a better notion what pinups are, for some reason. You will see that we have gotten a bunch of good artists together, and there are some nice pictures. But I’m only leading up to my subject. The artist who handled the project for me—you see, I did this calendar myself, paying for all the art, and then found a publisher for it, but I needed someone to actually do the job, who knew the artists and all—his name is Ron Lindahn, and he and his wife will be at a convention near you this NoRemember. I told him about you, and he said he and his wife Val might visit you and show you some more art. He knows you’ll probably be in your wheelchair and not able to jump up and down and scream in typical teengirl fashion. In short, these are nice folk, and you will know them through their art in the Calendar, and if you would like to meet them, they will come to your house or the hospital or wherever you happen to be at the time. Now don’t get the galloping shyness! I just thought that here’s a chance for you to meet some artists—Xanth artists, really, and since you may some day be an artist yourself—well, think about it, and if you say you’re not interested, I’ll write you another paragraph about it.