Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 2
July 23, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 22
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 22Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. A miracle? Why not?
Jeremy generally dreaded airline flights when he had to travel on business. But when it came time to pay another visit to Willoway Manor, he actually looked forward to the trip. Even though there might be nothing he could do to improve his father’s prognosis, he would be doing a son’s duty. He would be checking on the treatment plan and the list of medications — including any reported side effects. He would cross-examine and harangue the attending physicians and caregivers — not to alienate them, but at least enough to command their due diligence. And he would be paying the bills.
He was in charge of the finances now, and he flew First Class. He rationalized the option because he needed a wheelchair with an attendant on the jetway. The attendant would lift him from the chair and carry him through the hatch and into his seat. Booking a seat close to the front of the plane avoided the inconveniences of being carried down the aisle like a big, floppy piece of luggage.
Far from being embarrassed by this procedure, Jeremy regarded it as royal treatment. He’d grown used to the typical reactions of the other passengers. Most would look, then glance away, then stare back to study him when they thought he might not be looking at them.
Jeremy figured their behavior would be no different if he were George Clooney or Elon Musk (ignoring the fact that neither of those celebrities probably flew commercial anymore).
Ever since he’d first required such assistance, he preferred the attendants to be women. But as he grew older and bulkier, the job required a larger and more muscular person. And perhaps because their work was more strenuous, the bigger folks didn’t smell as nice. When he was lifted by a strapping guy — Jeremy imagined them to be dedicated weightlifters — the fellow’s touch and stance were surer. Jeremy was not as afraid he could get dropped.
Life was so much easier when you trusted your caregivers. This aspect of Jeremy’s logistical challenges made him appreciate how much Clifford’s day-to-day comfort and wellbeing depended on the dedication of a small army of professionals.
Another thing delighted him about flying First. They took your coat and hung it up. Jeremy always traveled in a sport coat. He liked having concealed pockets for his pens and his glasses so he didn’t advertise his geekdom. And whenever he went Back East, he insisted on carrying an overcoat, or at least a convertible raincoat. To his mind, Southern Californians who didn’t sufficiently fear the rigors of cold weather (rainy, snowy, or goddamn slushy) were just plain foolish.
This time, besides graciously accepting his navy blazer and gray Harris-tweed overcoat, the flight attendant efficiently found a way to store what Jeremy had come to call his sticks.
* * *
July 20, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 21
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 21Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Why not confer with your fellow wizards?
On Clifford’s television, Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the size of the universe. The accompanying animated illustration started with a micro view at the atomic level, then spiraled out — there was the spiral again! — expanding the view over and over until the entire known universe, a network of filaments containing more than two trillion galaxies, fit on the small screen.
Appalling to Clifford, the immensity of the universe was beyond words. Not just for him, for any breathing human. Certain mathematical notations can express its unimaginable size, but it’s a useless abstraction unless all you want to do is more math. He remembered some of his science lessons from the 1950s. At the time, students learned about the solar system. And lots of people understood that most of the stars in the sky were other suns. But no one had the data to calculate — much less imagine — the size of the universe as it has become known based on deep-space observations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. And now that new telescopes and sensing arrays were being stationed a million miles from Earth — how much bigger, in our calculations if not in our minds, could it all get?
July 16, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 20
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 20Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Can Jeremy prove it actually happened?
Data drilling was Jeremy’s favorite thing. Within his own lifetime, it had become possible to query the collected wisdom of the human race in seconds — on any subject. What was Sandy Koufax’s batting average in 1952? What is the average annual rainfall in South Sudan? How do you add metal links to an expansion watchband? What makes the holes in Swiss cheese? Why did the ancient Mayan civilization disappear so suddenly?
During his day job, Jeremy developed and then fine-tuned algorithms for conducting searches of online databases. He’d built on a scheme known as binary trees. When a search engine finds a new piece of information, it stores the path to it as a sequence of directions through the networked information maze of cyberspace. Choice of direction at each junction, or node, is binary — left or right, one or zero. The path to the South Sudan rainfall result might involve a billion such choices: left-right-right-left-right-left-left-left, and so on. Before anyone ever searched for the information, finding the path to it took a while. But once the path was stored (as when a Web crawler hunted down a new keyword), traversing it again to receive the result typically took less than a billionth of a second. But in Jeremy’s world, even those billionths can add up and snarl the works. His persistent goal was to make searches shorter and therefore more efficient. Doing so would make it feasible to search ever-larger and more complex databases — and collections of databases.
Jeremy’s specialty as a programmer was the balanced binary tree. With all those left-right branchings, search trees tended over time to become lopsided, having many more nodes on one side than the other. But in a network of branches that is roughly symmetrical — having as many choices on one side as on the other — the time required to traverse any branch is a short as it can be. The tree at that point is said to be balanced, or tuned. Jeremy had found ingenious ways to rebalance binary trees in the background — performing his balancing act between searches, invisibly. His job was like a mechanic’s on an old Jaguar sports car — the kind with manual rather than hydraulic valve lifters. The newer hydraulic lifters were forgiving, but sloppy. The mechanical type were precise, but fussy. Due to wear, weather, and changing oil viscosity, the valve timings kept going out of adjustment, requiring an expensive visit to the shop every few weeks. And in the days before electronic diagnostic equipment, the veteran mechanic had to develop an ear — like a piano tuner’s — for the sweet spot when the engine was humming at its peak performance.
Jeremy thought of his job as a quest for the sweet spot. His goal was an elusive thing of beauty, all the rarer and more wonderful because few people — not even his colleagues, and certainly not their system users — would ever notice his invisible magic.
July 13, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 19
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 19Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. He never meant to go there.
Clifford’s plans for his life did a turnabout when he fell in love with Tessa, or what he thought at the time to be love. Her soft, reflective side touched him, and he began to want what she wanted more than he wanted whatever it was he’d thought he wanted for himself. Fundamentally, he wanted to see her happy. He wanted the black cloud that followed her around to be swept away. He wanted her to laugh without caution or shame.
So he paid for a private investigator to find the children, then he hired a family-practice law firm to handle the paperwork. He went through the savings he’d accrued in his years of bachelorhood in a month. The court had no trouble ruling against Dunham in the fellow’s absence. Once Tessa had custody officially, she and Clifford were married in a small ceremony in the dining room of a hotel in Midtown. Tim was ring bearer and Sarah was flower girl. His parents flew in to attend, still bewildered by his life choices, but his mother said confidentially she thought he was brave and doing a fine thing to take responsibility for those children. Tessa’s widower father Hank was there, arriving from points unknown, having sobered up for the occasion. Their two best friends, a young couple who lived in their apartment building, were best man and maid of honor. The officiant was the pastor from a church that operated a soup kitchen in the Village, a congregation where Clifford had told himself he meant to join.
Ten years later, after the family had moved to Cleveland and then to Los Angeles, teenage Tim died in a freak sports accident. Tessa suffered an emotional breakdown that lasted two years, then she ran away with the maître d’ of their favorite restaurant, leaving Clifford to care for fourteen-year-old Sarah. He was struggling financially at the time, as they pretty much always had since their marriage, and he would become all the more stressed when soon afterward he began his career transition from marketing to academia.
July 9, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 18
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 18Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Difficult to believe, but so real.
If I was some stuffy British guy in a former life, what the hell did he do that carried over into mine? And, no matter what it was, what difference would knowing the story make to me now?
The following version of events may have been embedded somewhere in Clifford’s subconscious. Or it may have been the plot line of some book or movie. Or it may exist in some etheric record in a library that can only be read by spiritual beings. Significant portions of it — that is, significant to Clifford — never showed up in any history book.
* * *
July 6, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 17
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 17Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Hints of a past life?
The year was either 1990 or 1991. Clifford couldn’t quite remember. He stood in the gift shop of the RMS Queen Mary fingering trinkets aimlessly as Eleanor shopped. They didn’t have any grandchildren, but the progeny of their nieces and nephews was numerous. Eleanor kept meticulous track of their birthdays, impending graduations, and even sporting achievements. Although in Clifford’s opinion any kid would prefer a check or a gift certificate, Eleanor insisted that the obligatory monetary gift be accompanied by a suitable greeting card along with something, however small, “to remember us by.”
The bins on the table in front of Clifford held keychains and fobs, pencil sharpeners, paperweights, drink coasters, and miniature replicas of the gray-lady steamship. The souvenirs were festooned with images of the ship, some with its royal insignia, along with the Union Jack. Some items also bore the Stars and Stripes with the label Long Beach, California in recognition of the decommissioned vessel’s current mooring place.
July 2, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 16
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 16Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Has he any right to think this way?
Clifford’s lust for Myra was not diminished because he had zero chance with her. Oh, he was handsome enough for a man of his age. Dress him up in a gray-flannel suit with a crisp, white shirt and yellow tie — and he could pass for some charismatic CEO. Just don’t ask him to give a speech at someone’s retirement dinner. The communication challenge was at the heart of the matter. Despite what makers of cologne and romance novelists who write about animal magnetism might want you to believe, seduction — and even basic attraction — can be all about language. A homely man who can make a woman laugh will almost always have an edge on a lame-speaking hunk, at least after initial impressions have faded into the background.
So, the fact that Clifford couldn’t or wouldn’t speak was indeed a barrier to his success in gratifying his desire. True, he and Myra shared a bond of secrecy. Alone of all the staff, she suspected that he had lucid thoughts — and probably rich, interior monologues — going on inside his damaged brain.
June 29, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 15
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 15Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. He resolved to do better, but could he manage at all?
It was time he had it out with Eleanor. He’d hoped she’d visit him, as Jeremy had. Jeremy’s side of the conversation had seemed very real. But Jesus, when he was posing as Christiansen, had been telepathic, possibly but not necessarily imaginary. The historical personages who had visited Clifford were surely projections from his own mind. But when Eleanor suddenly appeared in his room, he could not be sure whether her presence was physical. He didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, here or there (wherever there might be). In any case, the conversation might have been the same.
“I never imagined you’d go and have a stroke,” she complained.
“It’s not like I planned it,” he said.
“Do you even know where I am now?” she asked.
“No fucking clue,” he said.
“I’m working with orphans in Africa,” she said. He noted a tone of self-righteousness in her voice. But he judged it was forgivable. She had a right to be proud of what she was doing, and she didn’t need to be defensive about it, especially around him.
“Are you spending my money?”
“Our money?”
“Who is underwriting your mission is all I’m asking,” he said.
“You. And the Pan African Beneficent Alliance,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “David Rockefeller or David Koch?”
“Don’t be snarky,” she said. “Who cares where the funding comes from if it’s doing good?”
“Point taken,” he said. “How are you personally? Are you getting three squares a day?”
“I get by,” she said. “Seems like you’re managing, as well.”
“I do all right,” he replied. “I have the hots for the day-duty nurse.”
“It’s good to have a goal,” she said, and her presence either evaporated or he fell off to sleep.
* * *
June 25, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 14
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 14Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Should he even bother trying to work it all out?
The human being is a marvelous, a wondrous, creation. Alone among species, except perhaps for the cockroach, people are endlessly adaptable. If we survive long enough to launch settlers to Mars or some good-sized asteroid, some of them will no doubt survive, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges. Cockroaches can eat the wiring in old TV sets, and we will eat shit or each other if it becomes necessary. The Donner Party discovered this, as did Napoleon’s army, the Germans at Stalingrad, and Rwandans who thought their life mission was to hack their neighbors to pieces with machetes.
June 22, 2025
Clifford's Spiral: Chapter 13
In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:
Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?
Chapter 13Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. What can there be to learn from Reverend Thurston?
It was another bright, clear morning. Just enough wispy clouds in the robin’s-egg blue sky for decoration. Someone had wheeled Clifford out onto the edge of the patio. He’d been too drowsy to know who it was. It couldn’t have been Myra. Her intoxicating scent would have startled him awake.
He’d lost track of time. He was pretty sure it was still spring because the ground looked squishy and smelt funky. From his vantage point, he looked out over a duck pond, and beyond a grove of trees he could glimpse the verge of a golf course. High-priced real-estate here, no doubt.
He was not only confused as to time but also as to location. He could remember seeing snow on the ground here, so Jeremy hadn’t shipped him off to Florida. There would be seasons. Jeremy must have been the one to make the decision. His son might be making all the decisions these days. Eleanor was a distant memory. He was sure she hadn’t visited him. Had she died? Run away with the gardener? Been confined to some rival institution that would challenge his to a bridge tournament?
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