Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 3

 

Two

I’d never heard of Wisbech, Ohio.[i] So when Father told me that we would be moving there, I just looked at him blankly and waited for more information.

Father looked back, then said, “It’s a small town—just a little east of Cleveland. Not far from the Lake Erie shore.”

He had found a house there—an old, old place, he told me, a place that was in some ways very similar, I admit, to where we were currently living. Father loved old houses. I did, too—though I’d never lived in a newer one.

“I think you’ll feel at home there,” he said. “I think it will seem … familiar.” He looked at me. “And different, too … different enough to … to …”

I offered a weak smile in return. I didn’t want Father to feel bad. I felt bad enough for the both of us.

Father went on. “It will take us awhile to pack up and leave,” he said. “The good news is that you’ll probably miss some weeks of school.”

That was good news. As I’ve said, I couldn’t imagine having to go back to school in Franconia, having to deal with all the drama about the death of Gil—especially from kids who’d never said a kind word to or about him the whole time he was … alive.

But “Okay” was all I could manage.

***

And it did take us a long time to pack up that old house—especially all the scientific equipment I’d assembled in my basement laboratory.[ii] It was fortunate it had been—and would be—a mild fall, lasting clear into early November, a period we had learned to call “Indian Summer.”[iii]

Anyway, Father had assured me there was an even better space for all of it in the new place he’d found.

We also had to sell our old house, of course. And that happened very quickly. In fact, the first day we put the For Sale sign out in the yard.

The buyer was Mr. Leon, the Franconia school custodian. As I mentioned in an earlier collection of these papers, he had lived in that house before, as a boy. So it made a kind of sense, I guess—getting back the old family home. Living there again.

As I said, it took some weeks to pack it all up. I didn’t go to school most of those days. But when I did, I was a ghost. No one seemed to see me—or speak to me. And I certainly didn’t speak to them. I felt like a prisoner, putting in time before release.

Then Father rented a truck, and off we drove in early October, leaving Franconia, heading north. We drove right by the middle school (where I should have been sitting in class), out past the Franconia Settlers Cemetery (where the original founders of the town had long lain), a spot which, of course, reminded me of Gil—in more ways than one. And, finally, past the Franconia town limits, where I thought I saw, in a stand of trees, a ghostly image of Gil, staring at us as we drove by.

I took a quick glance at Father—had he seen it, too?

But his eyes were fixed on the road ahead. Just like Father—hard to distract …

***

Father was right: In some ways Wisbech did resemble Franconia. A small town—lots of old houses. A little local library. (I knew I would be in there a lot.) An old brick schoolhouse with a sign out front: Marguerite Middle School.[iv] It looked like an old factory from the nineteenth century. I would learn there was a new high school, on the other side of town. The middle school got the old building. Figures. Kids are crazy at that age, so why give them a decent place to spend their days? They don’t really, you know, deserve it. So went the “thinking” of the school board, I would guess.

The house, as Father had told me, really was a bit like our old one—as if home-builders in the nineteenth century had one pretty basic idea—then reproduced it all over the place. Brick. Big front porch that swooped around two sides (added later, I learned). Two stories. So many rooms we didn’t know what to do with them all. Wet basement. (My lab would not be there, I knew.) Hot, dry attic—and that would become my lab. It was accessible only via a pull-down set of stairs. I kind of liked that. And father helped me install a window air-conditioner up there, so it was tolerable, even comfortable, in the heat that remained in the Ohio air those late summer weeks.

We took a few days to move in, then Father said it was time.

“Time?” I asked.

“To start back to school.”

I sighed—maybe groaned a little.

“I guess,” I confessed.

Father tried a joke. “It is illegal, you know, to stay home from school … we don’t want the local constabulary rolling up here and taking us away in handcuffs, do we?”

“No.” I smiled—but was thinking that actually might be fun—and a jail was probably preferable to the middle school. A classroom, to me, had become just another version of a cell.

***

Monday, October 7, 1996, was my first day at the new school. Over the years I had learned to become invisible at school. Oh, not actually invisible, of course. But I had a couple of things going for me, and most important, probably, was this: I still looked like an elementary school girl—not a young woman. So … the boys ignored me, and none of the girls felt … threatened … by me. I would not be taking anyone’s boyfriend away! And that meant there was no point sending any jealous energy my way.

 I’d also learned how to spend my days so that kids—even adults—would never really notice me. Not after a while. And once that brief “while” had passed, I could move through the halls, sit in classes, eat lunch—and no one was really paying attention to me. I never raised my hand, never asked another student a question, never sat with anyone else in the library—or at lunch. And pretty soon, as I said, everyone pretty much left me alone.

Except Mr. W.[v]

***

Mr. W. was the eighth grade English teacher—one of the few in this small school. He was an older man, nearing retirement (as I soon learned), and he was doing something that I thought only younger teachers did: teaching us about something he didn’t really know all that much about. In this case, it was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Of course, the other kids couldn’t tell that he was improvising most of the time—“winging it.” But I could.[vi] I kind of liked Mr. W. (he was one of the few people at the school who actually seemed to notice me), so I started leaving him little notes—trying to be kind—about the things he had gotten wrong in class. He started looking at me with increased curiosity, and I knew I’d better be careful. I did not want to become a “presence” at this school.

***

I remained in touch—a little bit, anyway—with my best friend from Franconia, Harriet Eastbrook. Both her mom and my dad had installed America On-Line on their home computers, so Harriet and I would exchange email now and then. They usually didn’t say much.

Vickie,

Miss you! Are you okay? I’m going to try for cheerleader again. Should make it. What are you doing?

Harriet

***

Harriet,

I’m glad to hear you’re okay. I’m okay, too, I guess, though you know how much I miss you—how much I grieve about Gil. I’m pretty sure I loved him, Harriet. And now I’ll never see him again.

Good luck with your tryout.

Vickie

And that was about the extent of it. Oh—and I should tell you. I’ve sort of “corrected” Harriet’s writing. I mean, she was really careless about it. Didn’t capitalize things. Used abbreviations that it took me awhile to figure out. It wasn’t until later that I learned that what she was doing was common on email. Vickie was not being weird; I was.

***

Father and Mrs. Eastbrook remained close, I guess. Once, both Harriet and I had thought that they would move in with each other. And we both thought that was a great idea—for them, for us.

True, she was still officially married to Dr. Eastbrook, but he was no longer in their family picture—not at all. After all, he’d tried to kill Harriet and me back on that Lake Erie island, and I had seen him at Niagara Falls when Gil …

No, I can’t write about that— can’t think about that. If I let Gil linger in my head—in my memory, in my imagination—the rest of the world goes away. Shuts down. And I mourn until something in my life shocks me awake—like Father coming into my room. Like having to get up in the morning and return to Marguerite Middle School.

***

Father’s new “job” as a freelance online journalist was going well—practically from the very start of our arrival in Wisbech. He could write well—could write quickly—and soon he was selling his pieces all over the World Wide Web.

He wrote mostly about personal, about human, things—not about politics or religion or all of those other things that divide people. So Father would write stories about a small local library, struggling to survive—about a woman who worked at a local restaurant and gave all of her tip money to help local kids buy school lunches—about a man who set aside part of his farm to restore pets that had been abandoned or abused by their owners—about why certain streets had the names they did—about … you get the idea? He was loving his new life—doing what he wanted, writing about what he wanted, spending time with me … I was lucky.

***

And then something changed at school. Something that … complicated … my life.

---

[i] There is no Wisbech, Ohio. But there is a town by that name in England; it was the birthplace of William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, in 1756. It’s about 100 miles north of London; the population today is a little over 31,000.

[ii] Vickie discusses this space quite a bit in the previous two volumes of her Papers.

[iii] I checked this: It’s true.

[iv] Marguerite is the name of the beloved wife in St Leon, a 1799 novel by Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin. Marguerite dies in the novel, breaking the heart of St Leon. Needless to say, because there is no town named Wisbech in Ohio, there also is no Marguerite Middle School.

[v] Vickie, of course, is referring to me here, Mr. Walton. I’m not sure why she didn’t use my full name, but I’m leaving this exactly as she wrote it.

[vi] The earlier collections of Vickie’s Papers explain her obsessions with Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein.

My Father Fought the Nazis

Dad 1941? 42? He's in the center.

My father (1913-1999) was a life-long Republican. He was especially fond of President Eisenhower, who, of course, had led American forces in Europe, forces who helped our allies defeat the Third Reich. Dad had a story he loved to tell about Gen. Eisenhower. It was a cold morning in France; Dad, who was serving in the Army, was in the mess tent having coffee when the General's Jeep pulled up, and into the tent he came.

"Any coffee?" he asked. They found some. And Dad exchanged salutes with him as he got in his Jeep and headed off somewhere more important. Dad never forgot that salute.

These days, men and women of my generation are thinking about WW II, the war that cost millions of lives, that destroyed cities in Japan and Germany and elsewhere, the war that showed the darkest sides of our species. A war that in many cases involved our parents. (I've seen some recent posts on Facebook about it.)

Dad joined the Army right after Pearl Harbor and trained to be a chaplain (he was an ordained minister--Disciples of Christ). He served in both theaters (South Pacific, Europe), and although he was a chaplain, he saw lots of combat, was fired upon, fired back. He earned a Bronze Star for courage under fire. He never talked about it.

I remember when I found out about that medal (I was an Oklahoma boy fascinated with firearms), I went to him, all excited:

Danny: Did you ever shoot your gun?

Dad: Yes.

Danny: Did you ever kill anyone?

Dad: I hope not.

That stunned me so much I didn't even think to ask, "Why?"

But I know this: I wouldn't want Dad shooting at me. He was a crack shot, grew up on an Oregon farm, where he hunted regularly. I went hunting with him years later a few times, and I never saw him miss.

Anyway, Dad was involved in some major battles (from D-Day through the end); his unit was among those that liberated Dachau--and he would never talk about that. Many years later, the mid-90s, I went to visit the site, and it remained horrifying to look at--to contemplate.

I also visited Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died in 1945. I was born in 1944. So while my mom had me in a stroller, pushing me around our Oklahoma neighborhood, Anne Frank was dying in Bergen-Belsen, probably of typhus.

Dad rarely talked about the war--hardly at all. I think he was profoundly changed by what he'd seen. I think he was trying to forget.

But he remained in the Air Force (to which he'd shifted), in the Reserves, got called back to active duty during the Korean War. Fortunately, he did not go overseas but to Amarillo AFB in Texas, where we lived from 1952-53. He stayed in the AF until he retired as a Lt. Col. He insisted his military information be on his gravestone. It is.

Anyway, Dad had seen firsthand what the Nazis were capable of.

And so I imagine him seeing our recent news: the invasion of our Capitol. And I absolutely know what he would think, the horror that he would feel, the disbelief that all of this could come here.

Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 2

One

And then everything changed.

It was 1996, the summer after my seventh grade, and our spring trip to Niagara Falls, which I wrote about in the previous packet of these papers, had been a disaster.

My friend Gil Bysshe—my dear, dear friend Gil—had committed suicide at the Falls. Suffering from a terminal illness, he had decided—without telling anyone—that he would die there during the trip that he and I (and others) had won for our high ratings at the school science fair only weeks earlier. Gil had long loved the Falls, he’d told me. And I guess he thought that dying in a spot he loved would be much better than suffering in some hospital. Much better than gradually diminishing to nothing.

I’d just met Gil that year, and we hadn’t exactly hit it off immediately. In fact, there was at first quite a bit of tension between us, especially when I accidentally discovered that for a local history project he was doing research on my house!

He swore he hadn’t known the house was ours. I wasn’t so sure.

But—gradually, gradually—we began to discover that we had a lot in common. We were both, well, loners. We liked to read. We each had an odd sense of humor.

I was not quite the loner that Gil was, of course. I had a best friend—a double, almost (though we were very different in some basic ways). Harriet Eastbrook, who had moved next door to us. We were great friends, though as middle school went along, we drifted a little bit apart—at least on the outside. She became a school cheerleader—and loved that public life.

Harriet also had … developed … quite a bit in middle school. More … “womanly,” I guess would be the word. She attracted older boys (even creepy men—as we saw). And she liked it.

These attractions got us into big trouble earlier when we were up on Put-in-Bay, a Lake Erie island (as I’ve written).

***

Anyway, that summer after Gil’s death, everything changed.

I just could not accept his loss. Could not stand it that he would no longer phone me. Or be waiting for me after class. Or walk me home. Or to the library (our home away from home). Just the fact that he was no longer here was a reality I just could not handle. He haunted my nights. My daydreams. And whenever I kthought of him, tears. I just couldn’t help it. Gil was gone. Forever. How is that even possible? In what universe is that even right?

My father had tried all kinds of things to try to help. From being home more. To taking me on little trips. Buying me books he knew I’d love. Trying to talk with me about it.

But I couldn’t talk about it. Whenever I began to do so, my voice would just fall apart. And so would I.

Occasionally that summer, here and there, I would run into kids from school. If they could, they’d pretend they hadn’t seen me. Or they would say something rushed and insincere. But I have to be fair to them—people don’t really know what to say to other people who are really suffering. And so they say dumb things—like “In time you’ll feel better” or “He’s in a better place now” or “We can’t know when our time will come” or … you know?

At first, I was annoyed when people said things like this to me.

But then I realized that just saying something was a hint that the speaker actually had a heart.

***

I suppose it was all of this that convinced Father that we ought to leave Franconia, the southern Ohio town where we’d been living, where I’d been going to school, where he had been working for the local newspaper.[i]

“Vickie,” he said to me one night at supper. “I think my career is about to change.”

I looked up in surprise. I’d always imagined he’d be writing for newspapers forever. “Why? What’s happened?”

“Well, it’s not so much something that has happened but something that’s going to happen.”

I just looked at him.

“Computers are changing everything,” he said. “And I think it won’t be too much longer before they pretty much completely take over the journalism profession.”

During the silence that followed I thought about what he’d said. It made sense. Sad, sad sense.

“So what are you going to do?”

He looked at me a bit before he spoke. “I think,” he said, “there will always be news—but for most people it’s going to arrive on screens instead of on the front porch.”

“So you’re going to start doing computer journalism?”

“That’s the idea,” he said.

And then I realized what he was saying. And I was shocked. “But you’re not going to do it here,” I said. “Not in Franconia.”

“It’s not going to happen here—not until it’s too late.” He sighed. “If I want to make a new career,” he said, “I’m going to have to do it near a major city.”

“Like?”

“Like Cleveland.”

“Cleveland? But that’s way north of here …”

He just looked at me. Then said, “I don’t think I really have a choice, Not if I want to make enough money to support us.”

I knew there was no arguing with him—and I didn’t really want to argue with Father. And though I really didn’t want to leave Franconia and Harriet, I knew that everything in town—every single thing—would forever remind me of Gil. And I wasn’t sure I could survive that. Just the thought of walking through the school hallways, the thought of not finding Gil there … it was just all too much for me.

And so began the process of leaving. It was surprisingly quick. And painful.

---

[i] As I mentioned in the first volume of Vickie’s papers, there is no town named Franconia in all of Ohio.

Corona Daze

 

I've not done much since the commencement of Corona Daze.

In part--it's due to my increasing inability to do much, but in the greater part, it's because of a fell mixture of fear and circumspection.

I don't go out much at all; the last six months or so I've had two destinations: the barbershop, a doctor's office. Early in Corona Daze I would ride along with Joyce (I no longer drive) to the grocery store, sit in the car, and wait for someone to wheel our order outside and put it in the trunk.

But soon even that was getting beyond me, and when we got home, I was too dizzy to help Joyce unload, so I figured I would be more useful if I lay down until she arrived with our goodies and then help her. So that's what I've been doing.

Other than that, I'm enmired in routine. And here it is, Monday-Friday:

• Up at little before 7--then downstairs to unload the dishwasher
• Back upstairs to shower and dress--Joyce supervises my dressing because by the time I'm ready for that, I am very dizzy and need some help.
• Down to my study to begin the day--fussing with Quicken, etc
• Into the kitchen, where I make some Keurig coffee and microwave a scone we've baked.
• I say "we" because I need Joyce's help now with setting things up, with cleaning up. I just can no longer do it by myself.
• When all is done--out to the family room (which I've begun to call "Venue One"), where I read the Times on my iPad, send our family a little bit of doggerel based on the word-of-the-day on the little calendars I gave them for Christmas, a doggerel I wrote earlier when I was in my study. I read fifty pages of the book I'm working on and fuss with Facebook, email, etc.
• About 9:30, I'm done, and I head into my study to fuss some more, and it's only lately that I've begun to include doing a blog post with that "fussing."
• Then upstairs to talk some with Joyce before diving into bed for a nap.
• Up a little before lunchtime. Downstairs I begin to do a little prep for that--and rest on the couch.
• After lunch with Joyce--out I go to Venue Two, our living room, where I read (online) the Beacon and the Plain Dealer, I read 50 more pages of "my" book, work on a sestina to send to Joyce, and, in recent weeks, I completed my 3rd volume of The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, which I've begun serializing on this site.
• Most days I then head out to the pantry, where our Airdyne stationary bike lives. I ride a furious 10 minutes (about all I can do), burning about 110 calories. (I used to ride it for forty minutes--or an hour out at the health club before heading off to do more exercising on their equipment.)
• Then upstairs for Nap #2.
• Down to fuss a little with my computer, then shut it down for the night.
• Into family room couch to rest some more before helping Joyce prepare supper.
• Head upstairs a little after 5:30--change into pj's, read a bit from each of the seven books I currently having going up there.
• Joyce joins me--and for about an hour we stream  bits of "our" shows.
• Lights out about 8.

That's pretty much my week--except for scone-baking once/week, feeding sourdough starter on Saturday, mixing and baking bread on Sunday.

Sound excitin'?

In ways it is.

In other ways, of course, it's depressing ...

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Vol. 3--Installment 1

Well, here we go ... This has taken me a long time to do--all sorts of inhibitors (health, of course, primary among them--but also weakening eyesight).  The previous two volumes I published on Kindle Direct some years ago, and this one, to be frank, I didn't think I'd be able to finish.

I’m not sure I have, actually, but serializing will help me catch problems of all sorts before I truly release it to the world.

 

 The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein

Edited by Her 8^th Grade English Teacher,

Mr. Bob Walton

Packet III: The Monster Among Us

(1996–1997) 

a novel by

Daniel Dyer

 

Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Dyer

 

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

 

Dedicated to my immediate family: 

Wife (Joyce), Son (Stephen),

Daughter-in-law (Melissa), 

Grandsons (Logan and Carson).

 

I love them all profoundly.

 

Foreword

By Mr. Bob Walton 

If you’ve read the earlier two collections of The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein—and you really should if you want to make much sense out of this volume—you know that I was, for a time, Vickie Stone’s eighth grade English teacher.

I say “Vickie Stone,” but, as you learn in that first volume, her actual name was Victoria Frankenstein, and, yes, if you believe what she has written, it was that Frankenstein to whom she was related—Victor Frankenstein, the young man who created perhaps the most famous monster in the world.

The problems of such a claim arise immediately, don’t they? I mean, weren’t Victor Frankenstein and his creature just fictional creations? Weren’t they born in the mind of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who, in the summer 1816, dreamed it all up for a ghost-story competition among friends in Geneva, Switzerland? Then expanded that story into a novel published in January 1818?

So we’re supposed to believe that Victor was real? That his creature actually existed? That’s quite a stretch, isn’t it?

***

In the first volume, I told you how I met Vickie back in the fall of 1996 when she appeared one day in my class in early October. As I wrote then, Vickie was a very quiet, studious girl—and the other kids in the class barely noticed her. If at all. She didn’t contribute during class discussions; I didn’t call on her. I mean, I wanted to, but whenever I made the move to do so, something Happened, and changed my mind.

***

That fall—the final year of my long teaching career—my department chair had urged me to teach more “classics” to my students. She actually recommended Frankenstein, which I’d not read at the time, and I thought that was a great idea.

And then I read it—and realized that very few, if any, of my eighth graders could handle the reading. It was long; it was complicated; the sentences were thick, the vocabulary very advanced. So … I found a comic-book version of the story, and we read it (much to the dismay of my department chair!). And I showed my classes parts of Frankenstein movies. The kids wrote stories—that kind of thing.

I was astonished when Vickie Stone began leaving notes for me, notes that corrected things I’d said in class about the book—about Mary Shelley. How could she know so much?

Eventually, as I’ve told you, she left me many pages of her life story—pages she urged me to read but not to share with anyone else. She also told me not to copy those pages.

But I couldn’t help it. I did copy them (which, later, I learned that Vickie somehow knew), and, as you know, I published them—in the two volumes previous to this one.

And this is the third—and, I fear, final—installment. I’ve not heard a thing from or about Vickie Stone since this latest package of her Papers arrived one day in the mail.

***

A warning.

As I said with the earlier volumes, I am very suspicious—more than suspicious—about the truth of what she’s written. I mean, I’ve tried to check much of her detail—and so much just doesn’t appear to be true. Everything from the names of people—to the names of many of the places, like Franconia, the southern Ohio town where she and her father were living during the events she relates in the two earlier volumes.

And she has clearly made up the name of the town where I met her in northeastern Ohio. Here, she calls it “Wisbech”; I’m not going to tell you its actual name. I guess I’m a little embarrassed? I guess I want to protect, as much as I can, the reputation of the place—and the school—where I lived and taught for many years.

As I did in the previous volumes, I have occasionally used endnotes here to comment on the things she says. But I have not changed a word she wrote. Not a single word.

As I’ve said, so much of what she said in her earlier volumes is just so hard to believe! Her astonishing knowledge of and skill in science, her weird and gigantic classmate (Blue Boyle), that strange experience on that Ohio River island, the even stranger one on Put-in-Bay, a catastrophic tornado, all topped off by that horrible incident at Niagara Falls near the end of her second volume.

Are we really supposed to accept all of that as fact? When I’ve been unable to find virtually any proof for any of it?

***

And speaking of Blue Boyle. As I was preparing and taking notes on Vickie’s latest installment of her papers, I one day received the oddest package in the mail. It was rumpled and crumpled, and I could barely make out the handwriting, could barely make out that the handwriting spelled my name. (How the folks at the Post Office ever read it, ever got the package to me, is a mystery—no, a miracle.) I could not read the postmark.

Inside that package were some of the messiest handwritten pages I think I’ve ever seen—and I saw a lot in my middle-school teaching days. (Oh, you would not believe!)

But I quickly figured out who they were from.

From Blue Boyle.

It seems he had been keeping a rough diary/journal of his own—and I do mean rough. It took every atom of my skill in reading poor student penmanship to make out what he’d said—and I didn’t always succeed. (Fortunately, his few diary entries were all very brief.)

The pages deal, roughly (there’s that word again!), with some of the events that Vickie narrates in her own papers. So … I thought I would include Blue Boyle’s observations here.

Needless to say, the differences between his penmanship and sentence structure are, well, astonishing—not unlike the differences between a torn paper kite and a jet airplane. So I fixed it so that you could read it, too—though I wasn’t at all sure about some of the words he used. All I can say is that I made my best guesses.

Except for the last entry, which was surprisingly easy to understand.

***

So welcome to another journey through the life of Victoria Frankenstein (a.k.a. Vickie Stone)—or maybe it’s just a journey through her imagination? You decide. I honestly can’t.

Back in the Saddle Again?*

 

The last time I posted here was August 15, 2020. At that point I was feeling pretty lousy--side effects of a new cancer med I'd begun and some deepening depression about what lies ahead of me.

Since then, I've grown a little more ... resilient? Though no more "well." I am very unstable on my feet right now (various doctors are trying to figure out why); I've taken some bad falls--as the bruises on my body confirm.

Still, I want to write about a few things--so here I am, back in the saddle, but it's more like a child's rocking horse, and as I think about it, about my balance issues, it seems that I have become the rocking horse.

In subsequent days, I hope, I'll be catching you up on all that's gone on with us during Covid Daze, but the main thing is this: Slowly, slowly, slowly I have been working on the 3rd volume of The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, a YA trilogy I've been writing for quite a few years.

I published (via Kindle Direct) the first two volumes; then my body said, "That's enough!"

And, for a while, it was.

Then I told myself that I can do this, and now I'm nearing the publication stage once again. But first--as I did with the previous two volumes--I am going to serialize the book first on Blogspot--on this site. That will give me a chance for one last look before I launch it onto the Web. A chance to catch the problems (and I hope they're small ones).

So ... here's hoping I can continue this.

*And here is Gene Autry, one of my cowboy heroes in my boyhood, singing the "Back in the Saddle" song.

Link to song.

Hiatus

 On hiatus for a while.