Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 8

A May Memorial

In the Sun's Last Glow

On her terrace where she once had viewed a crimson field,

she stands recalling heroes who were battling their foe.

She still can feel the terror! How her poor heart reeled

thinking of her lover fighting on the field below,

with others on that plain bathed red as the sun dipped low.

The brave men lie in caskets which now are concealed

beneath a plain that ran with blood, where bright irises now grow.

She thinks of her own strong brave man, draped in white and sealed

forever in a casket too. He was her Romeo.

The sorrow flooding her she had never thought to know.

She looks down from her terrace with a heart that won’t be healed.

The mighty dead now lie in grassy fields. . . and lo!

Around the graves are swords, which are green blades revealed

with *purple flags that softly wave as a May wind starts to blow

and she is bathed in red again, there in the sun’s last glow.

* Purple flags refer to the name of the purple iris that resembles a flag

Copyright © Andrea Dietrich

Tags: Poetry

Thunder in the Night

A delivery truck on a cross street. A plane climbing to cruising altitude. The rumble tumbles through my bedroom windows, comforting enough to lull me to sleep.

Then light flickers through a slit in the closed blinds, and one of Thor’s bowling balls knocks a #10 pin into the dark with a growl, and I know I am in for another midnight thunderstorm.

Last week there were three of them in a row. The rumbles would give way to flickers and growls and then to flashing strikes and booming claps that seem to shake the house.

One of the things I missed most in Seattle was Midwestern thunderstorms. We did have occasional thunder, and sometimes a startling clap or three, but they were as rare as snowfalls.

Now, I get both of them.

Lulled by the rumbles, shaken awake by the crack and boom, I am always sung back to sleep by the steady rainfall, that arrives like a blessing.

There are times when missing my Seattle home and friends strikes like a knife to the heart. But sleeping after thunder in the night and waking to a red bird in a redbud tree make the pain at least bearable. Sometimes almost worth it.

Mete

If there’s one thing I wish I had more of, it is memories of Mete Sozen.

Mete Sozen, my sister’s husband, died in his sleep on Wednesday night last, at his daughter’s home near London. My sister, Joan, gave chest compressions while his daughter, Ayshe, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but even after that, after the ambulance and the doctors had a go at it, he slipped away from them all.

He was 87 years old, 15 years older than my sister, and had been getting weaker, but his doctor saw nothing worrying on the near horizon, so they flew to England. Which is a nice thing, in the end, because he was with his daughter and wife until the end.

His son by his first marriage and her daughter by her first have had a hole blown into their lives, as has his family by marriage. It doesn’t matter that he had a full, happy, successful life, and that he was 87. Or, it matters, but not to us. What matters is that he is gone.

Mete Sozen was born in Turkey in 1930 to a somewhat well-to-do family. He was educated at Robert College, an independent private high school in Istanbul. He pursued his academic career at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he met my sister, and left there as Professor Emeritus to become Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, United States, a position from which he never retired.

I used to describe him as someone who went around the world following earthquakes to determine why the buildings fell down. “Well, for one thing, they had an earthquake,” I would say, thinking I was funny. He would smile in a manner that said, “Very funny,” meaning not at all. What he actually did was concrete stress testing and figure out ways in which local construction companies could build to withstand earthquakes, writing instructions that could be easily followed using easily obtainable materials. Or so I understood it to be. There’s much more, but you’ll have to Google him for that. The important stuff is what follows.

He was much loved by his students and fellow professors, many of whom gathered at his home in Lafayette to sit in his study among his books and working materials to remember him and mourn his loss.

My sister and the children loved him with all their heart. To my brothers, he was a good companion when the family gathered and he could join them. To me, he was a man with humorous twinkling eyes and a kind heart, someone I would have liked knowing better, but living too far away to see him often.

The last time I saw him was when he and my sister and my brother Randy and sister-in-law Vicky came to see me in Madison last November. My daughter-in-law, Betsy, who joined us, is a little unsteady on her feet after a bad bout with chemo. As they were leaving, Mete walked ahead of her and stood below her on the steps to ensure that she didn’t fall. I remember his eyes, full of kind concern, and his arms held out to steady her. Betsy didn’t often even trust that my son, relatively young and strong, would be able to catch her, but she trusted Mete implicitly. If she falls, I thought, they’re both going down. But she didn’t. She went down the steps, the warmth of his eyes giving her the confidence she needed.

It’s the last memory I have of him. I didn’t know him well, but I miss him already.

Bad Dreams

I have bad dreams. Just last night I had one that didn’t make any sense. I dreamt that my favorite ex-boyfriend had found a new girlfriend, and that their families were getting together and everyone was very happy, and when I realized this, I was inconsolable. Sobbing my heart out. Then trying to drive as far away from them and all their (our) friends as possible, thinking of things to do to forget about happiness. It wasn’t surprising to find myself on a bus instead of driving a car, this being a dream, and that the bus was going in the wrong direction, but happily I can’t remember what happened after that.

Here’s the thing. He might be my favorite ex-boyfriend, but I broke up with him and when he found the love of his life, I was very happy for them. Still am. They’re both good friends. When I woke up, it was a relief to find that I wasn’t in the least little bit sad anymore. So what the hell?

All twenty toes and fingers would very likely suffice to count my good dreams over the years, and right now I can’t remember a single one.

My last novel was inspired by house dreams, dreams that were for the most part neither good nor bad. Instead, they tended toward the frustrating. “I know this house, I’ve been here before, I’m so happy to be back, but why isn’t it the same? Why is it so disappointing? Why are the good times all gone?”

Most of the bad dreams, though, are dreams in which I fuck up, a fear that carries over into real life – or is it that the real life fear carries over into the dreams. It’s more than finding yourself naked in a public place (although that happens). It’s more likely that I can’t find something I promised to find, or can’t get somewhere I promised to be, or something that I thought was secure is out of order, out of line, out of bounds. Something for which I am responsible turns out utterly and completely FUBAR.

It’s not quite that bad in real life, although I sometimes have to explain to folks that a modus operandus of mine is Always Go The Wrong Way First, because then I know it’s the wrong way. Same thing with putting things together, taking things apart, which way is righty tighty anyway? Stuff like that. Start off on the wrong foot, but the very next step has to be the right one.

Oddly, I never dream about my two ex-husbands. I do have a lot of dreams about several ex-boyfriends. About missed opportunities. About messing up something good, or something I thought was good not being so good after all.

And yet, I swear I have no regrets. Looking back on my real life, I honestly can’t see it working out any other way. I wrote an entire novel, A Dream of Houses, visiting the possibility of another path, and I think the only lesson I learned from the enterprise was to have a little more respect for the paths I've rejected.

So how should I think about the bad dreams? Are they signposts? Are they telling me that the road ahead is still pretty much same-o, same-o? It’s okay, if it is. I’ve got the Wrong Way syndrome fairly well covered. Is that’s what it’s all about? I’m an old lady. Are the bad dreams a warning that now is not the time to let my guard down? Are bad dreams our friends?

If we’re not paying attention, the Wrong Way could always become the long walk off the short pier. Maybe bad dreams remind us to keep on our toes. To stay alert. We’ll live longer that way. With any luck, we'll stay sharper longer too. More chances to make our other dreams come true.

Close Call

I came thaat close to being the victim of a con job.

Funny story.

I’m trying to rent out my spare bedroom, so I took a nice picture and placed an ad, “Pleasant Room in a Pleasant House with a Pleasant Woman,” on Craigslist, Madison. I hoped it would attract a graduate student. My neighborhood isn’t exactly happening enough for an undergrad.

I got three replies, all purporting to be women from further away than I had intended to reach. Two said they were Chinese and one said she had grown up in Venice, Italy, but was now living in Alaska. I was drawn to the Venetian, of course, but she had also claimed to be a “nice Christian woman,” which I am not, so she was out. Of the other two, one included a picture. I answered that the room was hers if she wanted it.

Her written English was a bit broken – as time went on the syntax put me in mind of a Nigerian Prince – but for all I knew, it might be common among many furriners to always wish a correspondent a “great day” and be “happy to read from them.”

She said her name was Dalona Hylton, from Independence, MO, but raised in China. She also claimed to be a nurse for UNICEF, but was coming back to the States with a nursing job in Madison. Actually, she didn’t volunteer that last – I had to ask twice what she planned to do in Madison. When she asked if she could count on “15 minutes of my time” to receive her “car and artworks,” which were being shipped to me (I had since given her my address), I said sure, but was thinking, “Hmmm. Artworks? Is she smuggling Ming vases?”

So I googled Dalona Hylton, and found her. She had joined an online pen pal site, hoping for a “man of her own.” The picture depicted the same woman in the picture that “Dalona Hylton” had sent me. The discovery both reassured me (that she was real) and troubled me (no mention of her being a nurse).

Then came a text from the delivery people. Was I going to be home to receive her things? I responded that I would be home all weekend. The next kicker was that the cashier for the delivery people would have to be paid before they could deliver anything. I responded that it would be Dalona’s responsibility. They responded that she had told them she was sending me a check. I asked how much the delivery would be. They said $922. I said don’t be silly, and I don’t have a check yet.

You’d think I’d be completely certain by now that I was going to be victimized, but since the response was that they were quite willing to wait, I was again put a little off my guard. My only excuse is that there was always the possibility of this being on the up and up, somehow, and how handy a nurse would be to have around the house. Also, if I refused to pay for anything, what were they going to get out of it and how?

There was another little wrinkle I would have caught earlier had I thought to double-check. I asked her where she would be flying from, and she said she was working in Beijing and would be flying from Beijing International Airport. If I had gone back to Dalona Hylton’s pen pal page, I would have noticed that it was posted in December, 2017, from Independence. I found that one later.

In the meantime, you see, she said her father was sending a check, and she gave me a tracking number. That tracking number finally said it had been delivered to some place in California (another patsy?). When I told Dalona this, she said she had made a mistake in one number (I didn’t compare them) and gave me a new one. This one said it had left somewhere in Queens and gone to the International Distribution Center in Jamaica, NY, and that it was, from there, in transit to the destination. That check never arrived. A week and a half later, I was told another check was on the way, and this time when I tracked it, it said it would be delivered by 8:00 on Wednesday (Jan. 24), and it was. A check for over $1,800 dollars. Which was more than I had required – we had settled on $700 for first month’s rent, plus holding the room for most of January + $922 for delivery charges. This tracking originated in Tallahassee, FL (she had told me before she thought the check was coming from Tennessee - easily confused with Tallahassee, I supposed), but the check I received was from a Chicago firm.

I emailed her right back and said that as soon as the check cleared, I would get in touch with the delivery people (who, by the way, also sounded sketchy, but sometimes my curiosity and optimism know few bounds) and things could get rolling.

Now here I want to emphasize that I was more than 75% certain that this was a shakedown, but I couldn’t quite figure out how they thought they would get my money from me. My plan was to deposit the check and wait until it cleared – something my credit union makes very easy to check on – before I used any of it, and to tell her that the overage would be applied to March rent.

This is where I nearly made a huge mistake. You see, I wanted to wait until the bank notified me that the check was bad, at which point I would email something snarky to her and get back to advertising for a roombuddy, this time specifying a personal interview. My assumption was that the bank would not give me money based on that check, that even if I deposited it, they would hold it until it went through. Given that assumption, I had not planned on telling the bank I thought it might be a bad check. They would notify me if it was. I still couldn’t figure out how she was going to make money from me, if I wasn’t going to use any of my own money on her behalf. I still held open the (very small) possibility that this was legit, even though I was no longer certain I even wanted this woman in my house. She wasn’t presenting with much personality. But I was mostly curious, and curiosity could have killed this cat.

The teller at the bank took one look and asked if I needed to access the funds right away. I told her a little bit of the story, and that I would need to use it to pay delivery people, but that I was not going to use it unless it cleared. She suggested that I not deposit it, and said it was very likely a fraud. It wasn’t until I read a little more about these scams when I got home that I found out that it is not uncommon for banks to go ahead and deposit the money, making it available for immediate use, *before* ascertaining that the check is a bad one, and then holding you liable. See below.

I could have felt assured that the check was good, and paid the $922 out of it, only to be told a story about held-up visas or some such thing and asked for the money back. By that time, the bank would have ascertained that the check was fraudulent and I would have been out the money. Seems a long way to go for $922, but there is likely another avenue they can follow to winkle the money out of you. But my bank – excuse me, credit union – was on the ball, and believe me it was a relief to find that I didn’t have to play games with Dalona Hylton anymore and that I would not be out any money.

I do hope there’s an end to it.

One problem is that, wherever I looked online, I could find no other examples of scams analogous to mine (would-be renters preying on landlords). And yet, after I reposted the ad on February 1st, I received three others, much more obvious than Dalona’s first enquiries, which were shorter and more modest. Here’s an example:

Thanks for the cordial response, My name is Shanina Jones I'm 25yrs old.(female) I was born in China Beijing i speak both language, my Dad is from US while my Mum is from CHINA… I went to Beijing University Of Technology china and i graduate last year in Beijing University Of Technology.

I’m fun loving, personal, friendly, clean, caring and respectful of others. a non-smoker, don’t do drugs but i drink occasionally, am single and have no children. I go to church every Sunday. am presently on research work at Guam, but will be coming to the state for my master degree… I'll loved to call you but here is a remote area calls are very hard to go through, and i don’t want to waste much time.

I’m really interested in renting from you, please send me some picture of the room if you can because i will not be able to come over and check on it before renting.

I really want you to tell me more about yourself and if you have garage or parking space cos ill have my own car coming over. I will sign all necessary papers/Lease at the point of my arrival because there is no printer and scanner close to me. Please let me know the total payment of the place and the payment will be done via Certified Check. So i want you to feed me back with the following details so that i can ensure you are ready to accept the payment.

Below is the information needed to facilitate the mailing of the check.

* Full Name:

* Address, City, State, Zip Code:

* Cell and Home Phone Number:

* Month Rent:

Note: My Dad will issue out the payment for the deposit as soon as possible, with that you can hold on the place prior my arrival and payment will be shipped to your address. I’ll be waiting to read back from you with the information requested today.

Thanks for your Cooperation.

Shanina Jones

This warning on the Craigslist notes for avoiding fraud and scams comes closest to this one:

. Distant person offers a genuine-looking (but fake) cashier's check:

• You receive an email or text (examples below) offering to buy your item, pay for your services in advance, or rent your apartment, sight unseen and without meeting you in person.

• A cashier's check is offered for your sale item as a deposit for an apartment or for your services.

• Value of cashier's check often far exceeds your item—scammer offers to "trust" you, and asks you to wire the balance via money transfer service.

• Banks will cash fake checks AND THEN HOLD YOU RESPONSIBLE WHEN THE CHECK FAILS TO CLEAR, sometimes including criminal prosecution.

• Scams often pretend to involve a 3rd party (shipping agent, business associate, etc.).

My lesson learned here is not so much one of recognizing when I am likely being had, but one of thinking I could be smarter than the con artists. If my credit union had not been vigilant, had not refused to deposit the check where I might have thought it had gone through, I would be out almost one thousand dollars.

A just punishment for thinking I’m too damn smart.

This is the email I just sent to “Dalona.”

Good try, Dalona. Of course the check was bad, as I suspected it would be. Now, is the real Dalona Hylton from Independence part of your little scam – she seems to be the same woman in the picture you sent me. I googled the name, and found her. The resemblance is what made me think you might be for real for a while. But then the car delivery, the English syntax of a Nigerian prince – it all added up.

Hope you find some way to do good in the world. Maybe helping UNICEF kids?

I Believe in Christmas

Believe what? asked Shadow. What should I believe?
Everything, roared the buffalo man.

—American Gods

All the fairy tales are real and all the myths are true. Didn’t you know? The Year of the Crow (rephrased by author).

We are story tellers, we humans. Since the days when our only comforts were a blazing fire and each other, we told stories. We gossiped. “Did you know? Have you heard? Here’s what I think happened.” We told hunting stories. “The men spread out among the trees. I could hear the auroch bellowing. It was fearful, let me tell you. I had hidden behind a fallen log, getting my spear ready, when suddenly …” We related tales of our journeys. “You ask where I’ve been. Well, you know the place where the sky touches the earth on top of the Dark Hills. I wanted to touch the sky, so I walked and walked as far as far can be until I reached the Dark Hills, and then I began to climb …”

And when the world grew dark and the days grew short and the cold winds blew, when berries dried on the vine and dropped tasteless to the ground, and animals were rarely found, when snow transformed the world into a place filled with a terrible wonder, children grew frightened, convinced that the earth and all in it would soon die. That was when the grown men and women, who had seen it all before, remembered the terror they too had felt as children, remembered the stories their parents told them. Stories of where the sun went, of why the cold winds came, of how life itself was sleeping under the snow waiting to be released in the spring.

Those were the first Christmases. Winter claimed the land, the people told their stories, and soon the sun returned, bringing life and hope. The children will remember.

As the children grew and journeyed beyond the Dark Hills and peopled the earth, the stories grew, changing with new tellers in new places under new circumstances. The long, cold, dark night became Yalda Night . Yule. Dongzhi. Shalako. And yes, Christmas.

They are all ancient, and I think they all have their roots in something real. The real experience of the longest and darkest night. Stories told of real people and the seemingly magical events surrounding them. Stories of how a candle was placed here, a gift given there, a shaman’s dance followed by a piece of good luck, fires kept alight to ward off evil, food made from available materials keeping life and hope, body and soul, together. A child is born, and a story is told of prophecy.

I was born into the story that a child was born, and even though I have given up believing in that particular child in the way I was raised, I haven’t given up on the story. It’s all there. The candles, the gifts, firelight and food, and even a shaman or three. And every year, just as prophesied, the sun is reborn and light returns to the world.

Joy to the world and goodwill toward all peoples, love conquers all and peace will prevail may not be the visible realities of our world, anymore than the stories we tell to explain the long dark nights, the short dreary days may not be annotated histories.

But still. I am the atheist who sticks a five-dollar bill into a Salvation Army kettle. I decorate a tree, I buy and wrap gifts, I bake and cook enough that the leftovers will take me and mine into the New Year. I love the long dark, because without it, why would we celebrate the light? Where would we be without our stories?

I believe it’s time for pie for breakfast.

I believe in Christmas.

Sorry, Charlie

I’ve been a Charlie Rose fan since the old Night Watch days, well, nights. I was dating a bartender, and we’d come rolling home about 2 or 3 in the morning, and there was dear Charlie talking to some comedian or actor or somebody like that. A veritable life preserver as we were coming down in the wee hours.

I remember a comedian calling into the show during that time, thanking Charlie for the same thing. Comedians and musicians get off work in the wee hours and usually have to roll back to some anonymous motel, still amped from the evening. Charlie was their life preserver too. An entertaining yet safe and stable place, an anchor in a turbulent world.

Nightwatch ended, and I lost track of Charlie for a while. I also broke up with the bartender, and couldn’t afford a TV of my own. By the time I could, Charlie Rose was on PBS, airing at 11pm in Seattle, with another station carrying it at midnight. I wasn’t out carousing so much anymore, but Charlie Rose was still a good way to wind down on my way to sleep.

Charlie didn’t “interview” his guests at the famous round table (whatever will become of it now, I wonder?) . They had conversations. He wasn’t Mike Wallace. He wasn’t even Dan Rather. He was just Charlie, sitting down for a chat with a friend or two or three. And everybody came to Charlie’s table. Presidents, prime ministers, actors, directors, people who wrote books, sports figures. Even the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Sometimes he put me to sleep, sometimes he didn’t. But ever since I got DVR abilities, I always copied Charlie, so he’d be there when I needed him.

Not any more.

Not too long ago, I wrote on social media that somewhere in America tonight a man is losing sleep over whether he should get ahead of the story and confess or wait until he’s outed. A few days later, I posted that the winner was: Charlie Rose.

I should have been more surprised than I was. He is, after all, a man of a certain age in an industry that has long fostered a penchant for that sort of thing. Not that that’s any excuse. His excuse, apparently, was that he always thought his advances were welcome, that the encounters were consensual. Really, Charlie? Where was your vaunted insight?

It was hard to read the story in the New York Times. Hard to hear one woman talk about him leading her into the bedroom and asking, “Baby, baby, why are you crying?” Hard to hear his long-time producer and friend, Yvette Vega, confess to not listening to these women when they came to her. “That’s just Charlie being Charlie,” she would say. I can almost imagine myself as a young woman feeling mortified, at Charlie’s treatment of me and at my inability to handle it. To just go along with the gag of “Charlie being Charlie.” I could almost hear myself wondering, is this what it takes to get ahead in this business? Does every successful woman in New York have this memory from the first days of their careers?

The response to these allegations was abrupt. Charlie Rose was simultaneously fired from CBS and Bloomberg, and dismissed from the PBS lineup. And I was shocked at the immediacy of these actions. Surely, I thought, he has a few shows in the can. Are they really going to waste all of that material? I knew he couldn’t go on, but I was reluctant to let go. I tuned in that very night, at midnight here in Madison, and sure enough – Antique Roadshow. Just like that, Charlie Rose was gone.

On reflection, I realized that I would never be able to see him in the same way again. A Bill Cosby moment. That friendly, intelligent, interesting face now hides a leer. A leer never looks good on a 70-something face. I did have a couple of older shows in the can, two conversations with Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes. I didn’t actually watch – I turned on my pillow and closed my eyes, ready for sleep, and listened. I guess if there was a perfect moment for Charlie to go out on, it was this conversation. Charlie had been a 60 Minutes contributor for the last few years, and the two men talked about their professions, as if they were things that mattered. They did. Unfortunately, some things matter more.

Charlie didn’t know he was saying goodbye, but I did. As I listened, I had to wonder at the hubris that allowed him to accept Fager’s appreciation of his work. I was wondering, was he waiting for the other shoe to drop? Or did he already know that it would?

I’ll never know. I deleted the last of Charlie Rose from my TV queue and said good bye.

Sorry, Charlie.

I Remember November

Two poems today, celebrating my first November in Wisconsin after 32 years.

"Dull November brings the blast,

Then the leaves are whirling fast."

- Sara Coleridge

"How silently they tumble down

And come to rest upon the ground

To lay a carpet, rich and rare,

Beneath the trees without a care,

Content to sleep, their work well done,

Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly

Until they nearly reach the sky.

Twisting, turning through the air

Till all the trees stand stark and bare.

Exhausted, drop to earth below

To wait, like children, for the snow."

- Elsie N. Brady, Leaves

Tags: Poetry

House Hunting

I once read that dreaming of houses means that you are searching for the right one, for your proper place in the world, for, like Goldilocks, the place that's "just right."

I've always dreamed of houses, from big houses where I get lost to small ones that turn into nightmares. Some houses recur, like the big clean, white dormitory where I once was happy that I revisit hoping to have that happy time again, but it's never the same. Then there's a nightmarish version of the house my ex-husband and I actually bought, with the too-small rooms. Sometimes I dream that it sits near a huge forest, the paths of which I seem to remember. Sometimes it's on a hill near the town where my grandparents lived. Always the landscape is familiar. Never have I been to anyplace like it. Speaking of my grandparents, there are dreams where I am taking people to their marvelous, magical cottage near the river but, although I can see the house as clear as anything, we never get there. One of my favorites is the church - or maybe it's a theatre - where the upstairs rooms are huge bedrooms filled with heavy dark furniture, deep red brocade hangings, and views of a winter night under moonlight from the windows.

So now comes my third novel, A Dream of Houses.

It's the story of a woman who has changed houses from time to time, but nothing seems to have changed for her. Maybe she isn't in the right place. Maybe she should have taken another path.

So, she does.

It's harder than you might think, imagining other futures for yourself. There's a kind of false vibe that has nothing to do with its being fiction. When I think of some of the other paths I might have followed, I always find myself saying, "I can't imagine it."

But I've tried. Because I think it's a path we all should go down once in a while, if for no other reason than to get right back where we belong. Which may or may not be the place from which we started.

I hope you enjoy A Dream of Houses.

It's a story of ordinary people with extraordinary dreams.

Tags: Prose

Settling In

It’s four months since I rode into Madison with my son in a Rav 4 full of belongings. Almost four months since the Pod arrived in my new driveway with the rest of ‘em. I think I'm beginning to settle in.

Things I Like

My House:.

There’s a fireplace in the living room, and all my favorite LR furniture and artwork are right at home there.

The kitchen has white cabinets and appliances, including a side-by-side fridge/freezer. Spacious and homey, it is.

My office accommodates my big oak desk for work, a table for jigsaw puzzles, and a table for other projects, whenever I get around to them, with my captain’s chair swiveling between them all.. My third novel, A Dream of Houses, has gone up on Kindle from here, and has just today been sent to my paperback publisher, 3rd Place Press. I could wish the window had a view of the back yard instead of my neighbor’s back door, but quibble, quibble.

My bedroom is just the right size for everything from the bed to small bookshelves to the TV, and has a ceiling fan.

I hope somebody will feel the same way about the back bedroom when I get the bed frame put together and advertise for a house buddy.

The bathroom is two steps from both bedrooms and the office.

There’s a washer and dryer in the basement. The steps down are carpeted, with a railing. It’s cool enough in summer to iron down there, the only time I iron anything anyway.

There’s a garage with an automatic door. My car comes in at night with me.

Thunderstorms
Musing Monsters – My new writing group.
Woodman’s Grocery, where a full bag costs me $35, not $75.
University of Wisconsin Medical Center, where they took me in like a long-lost child.

Things I Don't Like

Madison Streets: Even in town, it’s hard to make out a grid. Mostly that’s because Madison grew up around small lakes and even the arterials bend around them. I’m in a semi-suburb, where the streets are laid out, on purpose, like wet spaghetti thrown against a wall. Four months in, my Garmin is still my best friend. Sorry, Alexa.

Summer Heat: Granted, it’s not Phoenix, but all the same …

The Horizon: No mountains.