Letters to Jenny (20 page)

Now I was going to tell you why I frittered away that hour. It started when I made a serendipitous discovery, and—what? Oh, you don’t know that word? Okay, I’ll tell you about Serendipity. Serendip is the old name for Ceylon, a big island off the south of India. The new name is Sri Lanka. There is a story that there were three princes of Serendip who were always finding good things that they weren’t looking for. So they made it into the word serendipity. Yes, it’s true—there really is such a story, and the word does derive from the name of that island. So when you look for a lost penny and find a dollar instead, that’s serendipitous indeed. It’s pronounced seren-DIP-ity; I know you’ll like that word.

Okay, so this morning I made a serendipitous discovery when Alan finished typing the—what? Look, Jenny, how do you expect me to tell this if you keep interrupting me? Do you want me to touch the THAT’S NOT FAIR square? Oh, all right; what is it this time? Alan? You don’t know Alan? Well, he is my daughter Penny’s boyfriend. She stayed in St. Petersburg this summer, working, so we brought her boyfriend home instead. He is working for me, helping me with research for
Tatham Mound
. I’m a slow reader, and I’d never get this big novel written in the limited time I have otherwise. So when I need to know what was happening in Spain between the years 1500 and 1520, Alan reads the books and makes me a summary. It’s been working very well. This time I found that a computer hard disk crash two years ago had wiped out my copy of the first chapter of the novel I’m doing with Philip Jose Farmer, the one with Tappy, the 13 year old girl who—oh, you remember. Okay. One day I may read that to you. Anyway, Alan nicely typed it back into the computer, and brought up the disk, and I copied it onto my hard disk. But I messed up; when I wanted to go to my directory on the D drive, I typed C: without realizing it, and got the wrong listing. So I typed \MO for the Mound directory, and it put me there, and I was on my way. But Alan, who had been watching, remarked that I had jumped from the C Drive to a directory on the D Drive without specifying the full path name. This was unusual, so we checked it out. Yes, the program really does that, though its manual doesn’t say so; it can find a directory in a different drive, even when you don’t specify the drive. So that was the serendipitous discovery: an easy way to go to other directories. But then in the afternoon I wasted the hour, because the effect was intermittent, and I wanted to know why. I finally ran it down: DirMagic zeros in on the default drive, and can go or copy to anywhere in it, but it can’t do the same with other drives, and you have to use the full path name. Yes, I know this bores you, and you fell asleep three minutes ago, but at least your mother will understand it. In fact she probably figured out the answer long before I did.

By this time you should have your copy of the Xanth PinUp Calendar. I hope you like it. Your mother says she looks like Miss Mayhem the Ogress right now, because of her swollen face. I doubt it’s quite that bad; after all, what about the rest of the Ogress? When you get a chance, you can go through the dates on the Calendar. There’s a typo somewhere, where it says “Nymph’s Mother Frightened by a Pun”—it leaves off the final N. Frightened by a PU? That must be a foul-smelling noise.

And why was I shoveling horse manure for Penny? It seems she’s growing some plants and wants the best. So this is genuine Blue-horse manure, as similar to unicorn manure as Mundania gets. There’s a song, “Sipping Cider,” in which a man meets his wife-to-be when he joins her sipping cider through a straw. As I pitched that manure I thought of that song, but it didn’t quite fit: “So cheek by cheek, and jaw by jaw, we both sipped manure through a straw.” Ah, well.

Every so often I see those two clouds I mentioned way back when, Amorphous and Whathisname. Sometimes they have lovely bright fringes at dawn, when they are sunning themselves. Once they followed me home. They must have, because when I looked east from the house, there they were on the horizon.

I have some other readers—you didn’t know that?— and one of them has named her dog after me, “Piers.” Actually it’s a fake dog, that she puts around her house; when she takes a picture, it looks real. That reminds me of a novelty item called “Dog-Done-It” that looks exactly like dog poop. You put it on someone’s bed, and it’s almost as much fun as a Whoopee Cushion. A variant looks like fresh vomit. Think of all the fun you can have, once you get home!

So have you been keeping up with the news on Neptune? Neptune is about my favorite planet, because back in the 1960’s when I wrote
Macroscope
I had my characters go there and stop at its big moon Triton, and they discovered that Triton had its own little ice-moon which they named Shön. So if Voyager II finds such a moon—well, I was there first. So far they have discovered blue clouds on Neptune, with white cloudlets that cast shadows on the lower clouds (lower clouds don’t like that), and rings and ring fragments (somebody must have blundered through and messed them up), and on Triton are pretty pinks and blues. But no moon-of-moon. Yet. Nevertheless, this all goes to show how much information can come through how small an aperture; the radio that is sending all this has the power of a refrigerator bulb. I bet you think I’m about to make some sort of point here. Well …

Not as many enclosures this time, because last time Cam was taking Cheryl back to college and there was no one to mail the letter until Sunday, so I included the Sunday Curtis. However, today there were pictures of cats, so you can have those, and I cut out Calvin and Peanuts a few days ago for you because I thought they were cute and just in case you didn’t get to see them, here they are. And ditto for a Dear Abby column you should enjoy, especially when you get carsick.

So say hello to Cathy and the Therapists for me, and hang in there for another week. Who knows, something good might happen.

PS—this is my 132th (hundred and thirty-tooth) letter so far this month, on the way to over 160. I have too many readers!

September 1989

Chocolate pudding gets augmented by pureed pizza. A new wheelchair cushion appears. A blowhard passes through. A possibility is mentioned. And the world most likely does not end as predicted
.

SapTimber 1, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Yes, Alan is typing research notes for me on the down-stairs system so I’m up here in color and laser printing. Did I mention that my background is chocolate and my print is vanilla? I’ve gotten to like having a color monitor.

Yesterday we had to take the dogs in to the vet for shots and such. Oh, they were satisfied to go; Lucky is a big dog—he weighed in at 73 pounds this time, and he’s old now; in his prime, who knows what he weighed. It’s just that they get too excited, and it’s hard keeping them under control. I managed to skin a shin—what do you mean, what am I complaining about? You’re thirteen; you’re
supposed
to skin your shins, but I’m too old for that—and today I have a sore back, so I must have pulled a muscle without knowing it. Then today I went on my run, and went full-face through a spider web. I was trying to claw it off without stopping my run when I hit a second one. Fortunately I saw it, and only clipped part of it. Then I encountered a third, and managed to duck most of it. They all had those big orb-weaver spiders. I have nothing against them, but I wouldn’t want one on my face. Then I stopped for the pump and the horse’s pasture water, and the small black biting flies swarmed around me. I swatted a dozen or so—I prefer to live and let live, but those flies don’t share that philosophy—and then pulled off the cap of spiderweb that remained on my hair. I discovered six black flies caught in it. They had buzzed my head and been caught! Served them right. I was sorry I couldn’t take them back to the spider. I don’t like spider web on my face, but I also don’t like ruining all those hours' work by the spider. We have webs around here with lines that extend up ten feet, to the branches of trees; they can go to phenomenal lengths to anchor their webs properly, and I admire the industry and architecture of it. The other day a mosquito came to bite me—there’s another thing I swat—so I swatted it and took it outside, but at the screen door I saw a little running spider—do you remember Jumper in Xanth #3?—so I put the mosquito down next to it, and blew on the mosquito so that it moved a bit, and that little spider pounced on it and took it away. There was my good deed for that day, maybe. So I like spiders, who are sort of the cats of the bug world. Except when they catch dragonflies. Last year I found a dragonfly caught by a bit of web, and I managed to free it. If you are ever down here, I’ll show you how to get a dragonfly to sit on your hand. I finished my run, stopping every so often to comb out the sandspurs clustered in my socks—sandspurs are the mundane version of curse burrs, and I’ve found that a hair-comb works as well as anything to get them out. Anyway, you can see I’ve been busy.

I just checked today’s incoming batch of mail. Now I dictate my answers into the cassette recorder and the secretary types from that. The trouble is, I tend to ramble and lose coherence when I’m speaking, and the secretary doesn’t know what a run-on sentence is, so I have a mess of correcting to do when the letters come back. Sigh. But today the last letter I read was in reaction to the Author’s Notes in the Incarnations series. She lives near the giant redwoods, and says the last of those lovely trees is being cut down for furniture. Ouch! Mankind is such a destructive slob, with so little sense of the art and significance of natural things. She said her world seemed to be coming to an end, because her husband deserted her after 8 years and two children, and then she was riding with a friend, and didn’t know the friend had been drinking, and drove the VW into a pole, and she—the letter-writer—was on the passenger side that hit. Ouch! I know about that sort of thing; ask your mother to tell you about Robert Kornwise, any week now when she recovers so she’s slightly more mobile than you are without your wheelchair. She’s so cheesed off about not getting in to see you that the cats are looking strangely at her, wondering whether she’s a mouse. Anyway, this woman was injured in the heart, and it stopped beating twice while she was on the operating table. She had a vision that she sat up and looked around, realizing that she was leaving her body, and a man said “You can go back, you know.” She thought about it, and didn’t want to leave her children without a mother, and the fact was that there was a new man she thought might be worth marrying, so she decided to go back. Four days later she woke in this world, and a year later she married the man. Now she’s reading my Incarnations books, which relate to things like this, and wanted to let me know. So you see, there’s no telling whom you might have met, back when you were 85% in the next realm.

Which brings me to the next subject: there’s a prediction that the world is coming to an end today: Friday Saptimber Oneth. So if you don’t get this letter, you’ll know why. Maybe if you hold your breath, it will happen sooner. Which reminds me deviously of an old song. I think it was titled “Brighten the Corner,” and its essence was that you should brighten the corner where you are— that is, don’t worry about going far away to have a good time, have it right here. But the version I learned was a parody: “When you gotta go, and the toilet’s too far—right in the corner where you are.” So what has this to do with the end of the world? Well, it was the idea of making things happen sooner, whether meeting God or something a bit lower.

Yesterday I had two letters from your mother. One was postmarked AwGhost 25, so it took only six days to get here, and the other was postmarked the 29th, so it took all of two days. She evidently sneaked a peek at one of my letters to you, and was snapping at “Tooth or Consequences.” She said they gave you some tests, and that you read well (those right-angle lenses must help!) but don’t spell well, and you still don’t like math. You sound just like my dyslexic daughter Penny! I didn’t learn to spell until I became an English teacher, and had to grade spelling tests. There is no relation between spelling ability and intelligence, because spelling in the English language doesn’t make any sense. But when you get set up with your computer, you can have a spelling checker program. They highlight the misspelled word, and offer several suggestions for the word you’re looking for. So it becomes a game of multiple choice, which should be easy enough for you. So make a note: SPELLEN CHEKKER. Anyway, she hopes she has a mouth with teeth in it soon. That was the letter where she announced your Pudding Triumph. What happens if anyone calls you Puddinghead? Right: splat in the face.