Jeffrey Allen Davis's Blog, page 6

Interview by Peter Younghusband

Peter Younghusband has posted an interview of yours truly over at his Christian Fiction Review blog.  Check it out here.

Be sue to read his other interviews and reviews.  He’s a faithful brother in Christ who loves good books!

Legacy Blog #15: The Library and Spider-man

My Beloved Daughter,

On to my next “fandom.”

While I met friends in Campbell, I didn’t visit them outside of school much at first.  On the weekends, after Saturday morning cartoons.  Grandma Pat took me to the library in town, which was slightly larger than the one in Van Buren.  Pouring over the books there, I came across four books about Marvel super heroes.  There was one about the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-man.

Each of the books contained biographies of the heroes, along with reprints of two comics, including the comic where the hero was introduced and another random comic.  I read all of them, but Spidey really resonated with me.  A geeky science whiz who couldn’t get the girl who was suddenly given great powers and had to decide what to do with them.  The reprint of Amazing Fantasy 15, his origin story, was pretty cool.  The book also contained diagrams of his equipment, like his belt—where he carried his web fluid and he had a nifty light with his mask on it—and his web shooters.  I practically memorized that book.

The first Spider-man comic that I bought was an issue of Marvel Team-up where he worked with the Black Widow.  It was the comic where he got sucked into the ship that took him to the Beyonder’s world where the original Secret Wars took place.  This is where a god-like being forced some of the biggest heroes of the Marvel Universe, led by Captain America, to fight an army of some of the biggest villains, led by Doctor Doom.  The series was twelve issues and two of the highlights (for me) was seeing Spider-man trounce all of the Avengers in issue three and get his black suit (which would turn out to be an alien being that went on to be part of the villain, Venom) in issue eight.

More than comics, I’d watch his cartoons and get shirts with him on them.  Action figures (which I never kept in good shape) also filled my toy box.  I had posters and trading cards.  I was a huge fan.

Over the years, Spider-man broke up with his girlfriend, the Black Cat, and married Mary Jane Watson.  This showed me that he a geeky person can overcome his geekiness and marry a super model.

By the time I was in high school, I’d started visiting the Fantasy Shop, in St. Charles, every time I would go there.  I started putting my Spider-man comics in bags with boards to keep them in good shape.  I had several hundred comics at one points and, like an idiot, sold the collection for a pittance.

When you collect things tied to your fandoms, be sure to keep them in pristine condition.  You can give them to your kids as a legacy.

My Thoughts on the 2016 Election

It’s over.

As the election loomed, my wife simply said she looked forward to the campaign ads ending.  Admittedly, the negativity of those ads became irritating.  I, on the other hand, prepared for the worse.  I prepared for the election of Hillary Clinton, resolved to the belief that she would nominate an abortion-supporting, legislating from the bench Supreme Court justice and fundamentally change our country into something that it was never meant to be, at least as far as our founding fathers were concerned.  I would have gotten up this morning, forgiven those who voted for her and moved on with my life, doing the best I could do with what God has given me.

That’s not what happened.  Donald Trump has won.  We will, if he keeps his word, get a Supreme Court justice who adheres to the Constitution.

But the angry hatred hasn’t ended.  The Clinton-loving media would have us think that Trump’s supporters were violent, bigoted and hateful people.  That’s not what I saw.  I saw a group of hard-working men and women who simply wanted a chance to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and not have to worry about their jobs being taken by people coming here illegally and being physically attacked by those same people.  While I did see some people on Trump’s side say hateful things about Hillary’s supporters, I challenged my friends and readers to call me out if I attacked her supporters.  I said things about Hillary, but not those who would vote for her.  I know some very intelligent people who voted for her and won’t challenge them on that.

On the other hand, I have been attacked by those same liberal friends.  A dear friend that I’ve known for twenty years, who is suffering from cancer and fearing that Trump will remove the pre-existing condition clause from Obamacare, told me that she would tell her grandchildren that I supported the candidate who wanted to kill her.  Another man that I’ve known since I worked at Chase—a refined, polite man whose father was an ambassador from an African country to Great Britain—basically told me that he hoped that my daughter gets sexually assaulted.  My family is pretty evenly split along party lines and a younger cousin, who is really more of a little sister, said that she wanted to unfriend all people who voted for Trump, not just on Facebook but in life.  She bit my head off when I reached out to her to tell her that I loved her.

The violence from those who supported Hillary, I fear, will continue.  Lord, I pray that I’m wrong.  I pray that, after Trump’s winning speech, which was very kind, we can come together as a country and move on, truly making America “Great Again.”

Legacy Blog #14: Job Change and the Move to Campbell, MO

My Beloved Daughter,

The job at the sawmill didn’t last long for your Grandpa Chuck.  The mill kept opening and shutting down, which wasn’t good for a man who was supporting a wife and three children.  So, after talking with his brothers—who worked for a company that pushed ammonia barges along the Mississippi River—he took a job with them.  I was five when he went on his first trip.  I remember us taking him to drop him off.  Grandma Pat was crying and I didn’t really understand why.  But he was gone for a month.  Then he was home for a month.  Then he was gone for a month.  And so on . . ..

I remember that we had to take him, usually, to catch the boat in Memphis, Tennessee.  It was a four-hour drive from Van Buren, so we’d usually drive to Kennett, which was about half way, and stay the night with your GG there.  Then we’d go on down to Memphis and drop him off.  Then we’d go back to Kennett and stay another night with GG.  Then, we’d head home.  This resulted in a lot of missed school for me, as we’d repeat the process every month to either drop him off or pick him up.

So, in January of 1984, we found a house in Campbell, MO, and moved there.  It was about a half an hour drive from Kennett.  I didn’t have to miss three days of school every month and we lived closer to GG.  Grandpa Chuck had relatives in Kennett, too.  Your Aunt Ruth and her husband moved to Campbell after us and your Grandpa Chuck’s brother, Jerry, did, too.  Finally, your Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Ronald moved there with Leon and Leah.

It didn’t take long for the town of Campbell, MO, to become home.

It was a bit larger than Van Buren.  When I was in elementary school, Van Buren had about 800 people.  Campbell had 2000.  It was still a small town, though.  We had, when I moved there, two grocery stores, two restaurants and one video store that was inside of a gas station.  Not that the latter mattered, since we didn’t really get our first VCR until I was in the sixth grade.  By then, we had another, newer grocery store that rented movies.

On the other hand, we lived inside of the city limits, so we were able to get cable television.  I would come home from school and watch cartoons for a couple of hours.  I didn’t play outside much anymore.  And I gained a lot of weight.

I don’t really blame all of me not playing outside on the cartoons.  My first teacher in Campbell, Mrs. H, really liked to pile on the homework.  After the cartoons ended, at 5 PM, I began working on it.  I took a break for supper and usually finished it just in time for bed.  This was a daily occurrence, making each evening a chore.  I hated it and grew to hate going to school.  Recently, sociologists have said that more than an hour of homework per night is counter-productive.  I wish they’d have learned that in 1983.

To top it off, if you didn’t get your homework done, you got a mark.  Three marks and you got a paddling.  I can still remember her taking the offending student into the hall and jumping in my seat every time we heard the WHACK!!!  They made sure that we all heard it, so that we were deterred from making the same errors.

When I finished the third grade, I was thrilled to be out of her class.  Then she moved up and I got her again for the fourth grade.  The next year was better, although she still had some questionable practices.  One child, Scotty, acted up in class one day.  Now, we would say that he had ADHD.  Then, Mrs. H decided to punish him by telling us to pretend that he didn’t exist.  We jumped into this with gusto.  By the end of the day, he had been reduced to a blubbering mess by the lack of interaction.

To this day, I feel guilty about my part in it.  And I am glad that Mrs. H has long since retired and can’t do this to children anymore.

Legacy Blog #13: My Early “Fandoms”

My Beloved Daughter,

I sometimes tease you about your fandom of Five Nights at Freddy’s.  Truth is, I had a number of fandoms, too.  Of course, when I was your age (and younger), they didn’t call it a “fandom.”  Over the course of these blog entries, I’ll discuss some of my fandoms.  I’ll get to them as I go through that phase of my life.

I got an early start on being a Star Wars fan.  We watched Episode Four (“A New Hope) when I was in the first grade.  Mrs. Nicholson recorded it off of T.V. at home and brought it in for us to watch on the VCR.  Our school had one television and VCR that would be checked out by a teacher and rolled on its stand to the room.  We’d bring a dime and buy popcorn to eat while watching it.  I know we watched a number of movies while I was in elementary school there, but Star Wars was the only one that I remember.

From that point on, I wanted to BE Luke Skywalker.  I imagined myself being a Jedi Knight.  For Halloween, in the third grade, my Aunt Debbey made me a Luke Skywalker costume . . . just like the one in Return of the Jedi.  I had the cape and it even buttoned in the front, across the top and down the side.  I remember when we got it in the mail from Kennett.  I was so excited.  Normally, at that time, store-bought Halloween costumes were made out of cheap plastic with these cheap masks that had a rubber band in the back to put them on the front of your face.  But I had an awesome costume that year.  Grandma Pat bought me a laser sword that was green when it lit up, like Luke’s lightsaber.

When I look back on it, The Adventure Chronicles eventually evolved out of the “fan fiction” that I wrote at that time.  I use the term loosely, as I was simply creating my own versions of the Star Wars characters, not using the existing ones.

My cousin, Dan, was even more of a Star Wars fan than I was.  He had TONS of the toys, including the original Millennium Falcon.  If we’d have known then what these toys would be worth now, we’d have taken better care of them and Dan would be set.  Heh.

My next fandom was Pac-man.  When compared to the Halos and Street Fighters of today, a yellow head that moves around a maze, eating dots and avoiding ghosts might seem pedestrian.  When I was a child, it was THE game to play.  They had the coin-op machine at the grocery store in town.  I’d play it when Grandma Pat was getting groceries.

For Christmas one year, I got a table-top video game of Pac-man.  It looked like a miniature version of the arcade game . . . well, at least on the outside.  The game’s graphics were really cheesy but I loved it.  Grandma Pat was better at it than me, though.  You liking My Little Pony and me liking it with you reminds me of Grandma Pat liking Pac-man because of me.

When I was in the third grade, I got an Atari 2600.  With it, I got Pac-man.  The graphics were even worse than on that tabletop game.  But that Atari was my home video game system until I was in the fifth grade, when it finally gave out on me.

These are just two of the fandoms in which I was interested as a kid.  As we continue with these legacy blogs, I’ll touch on more of them.

Legacy Blog #12: The Party Line (Phone)

My Beloved Daughter,

Party lines mean something much different today than they did when I was a child.  It’s a political term today, referring to beliefs in voting that generally fall into accepted norms within a specific party, like Republicans being, generally, pro-life.  When I was a child in rural Van Buren, MO, it was a term for a specific type of phone line.

Our first phone when I was a kid had a party line that was linked to my paternal grandparents’ phone.  Since we lived so far outside of the city limits of that small town, it was the only type of line that we had available.  Our first number had the last digits of 8535.  Your great-grandparents number ended in 4690.  To call each other, we would simply dial a seven before those last few digits.  To call anyone else in the town, we only had to dial the last four digits of their number at that time, as Van Buren’s prefix was the same for the entire town.  It wasn’t until we had moved to Campbell that we had to start dialing the prefix and it was pretty much made a requirement in all cases sometimes in the mid-eighties.

If we needed to call someone, we couldn’t do so if they were already on the phone.  If we picked up the phone, we could join in to their conversation, as they shared the line with us.  It didn’t work out too badly, as they didn’t like to talk on the phone too much, as I recall.

During the summer, my cousin, Dan, would come and stay with us for a couple of weeks at a time and wanted to keep in touch with his parents—since he was half your age at the time.  We’d often pick up the only phone in the house—which was on the wall in the kitchen and had a chord and a rotary dial—only to hear Grandma Davis talking on the line.  We’d eavesdrop; listening to the conversation for several minutes, until one of us would inevitably giggle, alerting her to our presence.

“You kids get off the line!”

Yep, good times.

Legacy Blog #11: The Switch

My Beloved Daughter,

You came by your love of animals honestly.  And, the fact that you really don’t cause trouble is something that you came by honestly, too.  Your old dad liked animals as much as any child.  And, usually, I only had to be told to do something by my parents once.

In the times when I did get in trouble, it was usually for doing something that I didn’t know was wrong.  Like the one time that I let your great-grandpa’s hounds loose.

I was about five at the time.  Grandpa had paid a significant sum for those hounds, all of which he was going to use for hunting.  I don’t even remember how many of them were in the pen.  I just remember that I—like any child that age—wanted to play with the doggies.

I walked out to the pen, probably talking to them all the time.  My intention was to get in it with all of them.  The moment I opened the door, they toppled me and ran off into the woods.

Grandma Davis was livid.  My dad and two of his brothers went out into the woods with Grandpa, looking for them.  They searched for hours.

They never found them.

Grandma told me to go home and wait for my dad.  She told him that he needed to make sure that I learned from my mistake.

I remember watching him walk into the yard.  He approached Grandma Pat’s rosebush with purpose, pulling his knife out of his pocket.  He cut a switch off of it and walked calmly toward the house, whittling the thorns off as he came.  Then he came inside and calmly told me to bend over the coffee table.  I did so, terror-stricken.

Each strike of that switch felt like liquid flame on my rear and legs.  I tried to hold in the tears but, when he hit me the last time, I remember screaming in agony.

He stopped with that strike.  I like to think that he realized that he’d crossed the line when he heard me scream.  As I lay on my stomach on the couch (I couldn’t sit on my bottom for three days), your Grandma Pat called him in the kitchen and yelled at him over the severity of my punishment.  Grandma Pat had spanked me before, only with the open palm of her hand.  A switch was something that she never felt should be used . . . especially leaving the whelps that it did.

Later, after I’d stopped crying, he hugged me and told me that he was sorry . . . not that he punished me, but that he had crossed the line in the punishment.  He told me that he loved me and would never use a switch on me again.

I don’t want you to think that your Grandpa Chuck was abusive.  He wasn’t.  In fact, he went beyond his promise to never use a switch on me again by simply never spanking me again.  Not that he really needed to.

One takeaway from that switch was that I had a healthy respect for my father.  When he told me to do something, I didn’t argue or talk back to him.  So maybe I just never gave him a reason to spank me again.

An Award for BUSTER’S LEGACY

The Christian Fiction Review blog has posted an awesome review of Book Four of the ADVENTURE CHRONICLES.  Also, I’ve been awarded the The Reality Calling Spirit-Filled Speculative Fiction Award!

Check out the review here.

Special thanks to Peter Younghusband for his review!

Legacy Blog #10: Grandpa’s Farm

My Beloved Daughter,

Your Great-Grandpa Wes was a farmer.  The man was very mechanically inclined, but he WAS a farmer.  Pure and simple.  During the years when my dad was growing up, farming wasn’t the industrial thing that we have now.  There was a reason that your paternal great-grandparents had such a large family.  The extra hands were necessary.

By the time I came along, farming was already leaving the family farm for the farming corporation.  So, I’m thankful that I spent my early childhood right up the road from your great-grandparents’ farm.

I saw things that even most other children of my own generation didn’t get to see.  I had fresh chicken.  Of course, I also was among the cousins who watched Grandpa Wes kill said chicken with his bare hands, not realizing that he nearly made all of us never want to eat poultry again.

I got to see Grandpa’s smokehouse, where he cured the meat from the pig into sausage and bacon.  You haven’t truly tasted bacon until you’ve had it that fresh.

You might have seen a garden before.  Grandpa’s filled a few acres.  Vegetables were grown with real fertilizer (i.e. poop).  Just so you know, when you see “organic” fruits and vegetables sold in a store, that’s what this is.  No chemical fertilizers.  They used manure.  Yes, the food tasted good.  But I sure HATED it when the wind blew just right during planting season in the outskirts of Van Buren, MO.

Then, there were the farmer’s auctions.  Grandpa Chuck called them—simply—The Sale.  “We’re going to ride with your Grandpa to The Sale,” he’d say.

Grandpa raised chickens (as noted before), but his big thing was pig farming.  He bid on them at The Sale.  I’ll admit, I was usually bored to tears when we were at the auction.  I didn’t understand what was going on at the time.  I knew better than to squirm, as it was expressly forbidden by Grandpa Chuck.

I remember a particular situation where your Great-Grandpa Wes noticed that I was bored and his playfulness came through.  I remember looking up at him and he was staring at the rafters in the ceiling.  I looked up and didn’t see anything.  Grandpa Chuck looked up and, I’m sure, didn’t see anything.

Around us, people started looking up to figure out what was so interesting in the rafters.  In the entire arena, a large crowd was staring upward.

Then, Grandpa Wes stopped looking upward and stared back at the stage with a grin.  I remember asking him what he was looking at.  He leaned over and said, “Nothing.  I just wanted to see how many people I could get to look up there.”

Ah, those were the days.

Legacy Blog #9: Grandpa’s Farm

My Beloved Daughter,

Your Great-Grandpa Wes was a farmer.  The man was very mechanically inclined, but he WAS a farmer.  Pure and simple.  During the years when my dad was growing up, farming wasn’t the industrial thing that we have now.  There was a reason that your paternal great-grandparents had such a large family.  The extra hands were necessary.

By the time I came along, farming was already leaving the family farm for the farming corporation.  So, I’m thankful that I spent my early childhood right up the road from your great-grandparents’ farm.

I saw things that even most other children of my own generation didn’t get to see.  I had fresh chicken.  Of course, I also was among the cousins who watched Grandpa Wes kill said chicken with his bare hands, not realizing that he nearly made all of us never want to eat poultry again.

I got to see Grandpa’s smokehouse, where he cured the meat from the pig into sausage and bacon.  You haven’t truly tasted bacon until you’ve had it that fresh.

You might have seen a garden before.  Grandpa’s filled a few acres.  Vegetables were grown with real fertilizer (i.e. poop).  Just so you know, when you see “organic” fruits and vegetables sold in a store, that’s what this is.  No chemical fertilizers.  They used manure.  Yes, the food tasted good.  But I sure HATED it when the wind blew just right during planting season in the outskirts of Van Buren, MO.

Then, there were the farmer’s auctions.  Grandpa Chuck called them—simply—The Sale.  “We’re going to ride with your Grandpa to The Sale,” he’d say.

Grandpa raised chickens (as noted before), but his big thing was pig farming.  He bid on them at The Sale.  I’ll admit, I was usually bored to tears when we were at the auction.  I didn’t understand what was going on at the time.  I knew better than to squirm, as it was expressly forbidden by Grandpa Chuck.

I remember a particular situation where your Great-Grandpa Wes noticed that I was bored and his playfulness came through.  I remember looking up at him and he was staring at the rafters in the ceiling.  I looked up and didn’t see anything.  Grandpa Chuck looked up and, I’m sure, didn’t see anything.

Around us, people started looking up to figure out what was so interesting in the rafters.  In the entire arena, a large crowd was staring upward.

Then, Grandpa Wes stopped looking upward and stared back at the stage with a grin.  I remember asking him what he was looking at.  He leaned over and said, “Nothing.  I just wanted to see how many people I could get to look up there.”

Ah, those were the days.