StanleyWheeler

  Le Chateau au Chat Gris has passed over the horizon. Not to worry; the cat is fine. This weekend we left Byzantium to visit family and look into a replacement for the 1999 Rattling Battle Wagon. The latter is now up for sale, and I'll be cruising in La Longue Carabine Rouge.  The sunset of the chateau is a sad event. Most of our children grew up there. The youngest may not even remember our other homes - and she just got married. Another daughter and Les Freres Corses lived there with us for a year or two and then for another year after we left for Byzantium. We didn't get to enjoy our last trips to the place because we were busy moving our belongings and hauling off the accumulation of debris--discarding memories. Stuff accumulates in life, and it's a constant struggle to decide which items can still be of service, which are so attached to memory that they can't be discarded, and which ones should've been sent to the trash at least two moves ago. We had a lot of ...

  Let me remind you that you can sign up for my newsletter here: My monthly newsletter Last month I received a number of excellent responses to my thoughts in the newsletter about giving spoilers to readers so that they won't get anxiety about what's going to happen to the characters in the book. There was also one negative response. Maybe I'll elaborate on that in the newsletter I'm doing for this month. I had also promised to address the hollow promises of fortune cookies. You'll have to sign up for the letter to discover what I have to say about those things. In the meantime, I recently had occasion to contemplate the tribute we pay to our dead.  I traveled with my dad to Afton Wyoming for the funeral of his sister. She was the oldest child of his siblings. Three other siblings had preceded her in death. I've observed that the longer I'm around, the more people I know who have crossed the river into eternity.  In fact, today I learned that one of my frien...

I was pole vaulting in the Louvre, or maybe it was Versailles, and using the pole, an ornate blue and gold thing, to balance as I ran upon the walls about a circular room while making important announcements. This was after an earlier bit of slogging through a drying marsh of black mud and tall, desiccated yellow grass; I can't remember if I was chasing or being chased--I remember contemplating that the journey had not been very well planned, and I noticed a lack of insects or other wildlife. I suppose these weird dreams from last night are the product of several days at a professional conference where I logged a steady two to four hours of sleep per night, followed by a return home to a good night's rest on a pungently new pillow whose odor made a merry strange stew of the subconscious sorting system which had been thrust back online after a few days on unpaid leave. (I love those long sentences stitched together by descriptive clauses. I really have to make an effort to break...

I wore a memory today. A pair of them. I hadn't worn them in weeks. I didn't think of the memory when I slipped into them. It was later that I noticed the little yellow flecks against the black leather. There were a lot of flecks...especially in the creases and seams. To what shall I compare them? Stars in the night sky? No; the flecks were too plentiful. Gold dust? Perhaps; flecks of gold glistening in dark rock, more abundant in some spots than others. In a way, that's the best comparison. My shoes were bespeckled, stippled; in point of fact, they were bespattered. I should have cleaned and polished them right away...but I am loathe to do so. Perhaps it is too late. Will memory dim if I scrub away the specks? Will I enjoy the remembrance less if those abundant flakes are replaced with the sheen of well-buffed polish? Will I cease to remember the walk hand-in-hand with my wife in the torrential downpour which splashed the sands of France upon my loafers? While memory m...