Letters to Jenny Read online

  Remember when I told you about our rows of pine trees, and the blueberries that were getting mowed down? Well, a lot of blueberry bushes did get flattened, but a number survived because they were between the trees where the mower couldn’t reach. Now they have berries, and we’ll be able to pick them before long. Spring comes early to Florida, you see. You know, as I look at those pine trees, and see all the rows, it’s as though each row is a life, going straight through to the other side, with the trees alongside marking off the years. Some go a long way, and some only a short way. Each seems unique, yet if you step into the next row, there it is with its own life, just as nice. I think that if we could step from one person’s life to another, as we can between the rows, we would see how similar they are, even though each is the only one that seems real to it, and each probably believes that if it closed its eyes, all the others would have no existence. It’s sort of funny and sort of sad and sort of awesome too.

  We had a little bat visit. We found it on our garage door a few evenings ago, hanging from the top of the screen. It must have been too tired to make it home, so it stopped at our house. It turned its head and looked at us, but didn’t fly away. We left the garage open, but it stayed where it was all night, and the next day. I’m afraid it’s dead now. We would have helped it if we could, but we don’t know much about bats except that they are good to have around. They’re like flying mice, really. So I guess we’ll have to bury it. Some don’t make it out of the hospital, unfortunately. I considered calling it Brick Bat, after the one in Heaven Cent, but that might be unkind.

  Remember all those fireflies that turned up in our forest? They’re still here; every night they flash all around our house. I woke up one night and there was one flashing in our bedroom. I thought about catching it in a glass and taking it out, but I was afraid that in the dark I’d hurt it, so I waited till morning—and then couldn’t find it. I hope it found its own way out, because houses really aren’t the place for fireflies. We have fireflies by night and dragonflies by day. I was talking with some folk outside, and a dragonfly came and perched on my shoulder. They’re so pretty, with their four wings and their different colors! I saw six blue ones at once, one day. When we go out, they are always curious just what we’re doing, and sometimes they will sit on our hands if we hold them up.

  I’m enclosing a cartoon about the awful oil spill this past week in Alaska. Do you watch the news on TV? Maybe you should. Two recent headlines have been about the oil spill and nuclear fusion. Do you want a lecture on how they’re connected? No? Too bad, because I’m going to give it anyway, and maybe you’ll be interested when you see how it relates to you.

  You see, our world needs a whole lot of energy, for everything from jet planes to hospitals. They get most of it from fossil fuels like oil, and when they ship that oil, accidents happen. You know how bad drunken drivers are? You would not be in that hospital now, if the driver who hit you hadn’t been drinking. It’s a mean, bad business, drinking and driving, and there’s a group trying to stop it, called MADD. That stands for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Well, the captain of that oil tanker was drunk, and his ship cracked up and leaked oil into the sea, and now thousands of innocent birds and seals and fish are dying because they got soaked in oil. So we need to stop the drunk drivers—but also to stop the shipment of oil, so it can’t foul the ocean.

  The trouble is, we need that oil, for a squintillion things. So what do we do? Well, another source of power is nuclear energy. But that can foul things up awfully too, when some drunk driver pulls the wrong switch, and radiation gets all over the place. But there is one kind of nuclear power, nuclear fusion—that’s pronounced New-Clear Few-Shun—that hardly makes radiation at all, and could make enough energy to take care of all our needs for just about forever. It’s what makes the sun shine, after all. The trouble is, it is very hard to make fusion work on Earth; it takes about a billion dollars worth of equipment, and they still don’t have it working. Except that now these scientists have found a way to do it simply and cheaply at room temperature. Maybe. They have set up something a bit like a car battery, that makes so much heat it melts the equipment, and they think that only fusion could account for that. We can’t be sure until other scientists duplicate the effect, to be sure it really works. But if it does work, it may mean that we won’t need oil any more, and no more poor ducks will die in the spills. That’s why, in the cartoon, the animals are hoping that fusion will work.

  So there was the lecture. Now you know why you should be interested in nuclear fusion. Because you care about animals. Maybe you’ll grow up to be a cartoonist like that, who helps folk understand what’s at stake.

  I understand you may have a roommate now. I hope you get along okay. My daughters have roommates at college. Anyway, keep getting better, Jenny!

  Apull 14, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Ha: I finally got my new ribbon, so the letter will print out dark instead of light. See, look at it—isn’t that nice? No, don’t squinch your eyes shut! I’ll hold my breath until you look. One, two, threemph, fourmth, gasp—ha, you looked! Now let me catch my breath.

  I have several things, this time. First, I’m typing this letter Friday instead of Sunday, so that I can mail it Saturday, and it will arrive Monday or Tuesday so your mother can have it in time to read to you on Wednesday. Last time it came too late for her, and she was miffed, and you know how bad that is.

  She told me that you had decided on Sammy to be the cat that makes it into Xanth with Jenny Elf, and she sent three pictures of him in his speed-bump mode on the stairs. Okay, I am replacing [cat] with Sammy in the text; I haven’t changed them all yet, but I will when I edit the novel. I did go over Jenny Elf’s introduction in the novel, and I printed out those three pages for you. So you can make someone read that to you any time—no, don’t throw away this letter yet! You can wait till the end of this paragraph, can’t you? Because I need to tell you the background. Chex Centaur is searching for her foal Che, and has been checking with all the search parties, but no one has seen anything yet. Finally she comes back to her cottage in a clearing, with Grundy Golem, who is helping her search. That’s when this text starts. Remember, I’ll probably make small changes later, as my daughter Cheryl catches me on more errors. If you spy any, let me know; I may have forgotten more than I ever knew about Elfquest. Okay, now you can throw away this letter.

  Now let me tell you about the way I feel about cats. I don’t like them. No, wait, don’t throw the bedpan at me yet. You see, cats do like me. And there was one I did like, and she’s the one I want to tell you about. But it’s a sad story, so don’t listen too carefully.

  It all started with Pandora. Pandora was the girl who opened a box she shouldn’t have, because she was curious (girls are like that), and all the ills of the world flew out and we’ve been in trouble ever since. Well, this cat had kittens in our car, and we discovered this when we were about to drive somewhere. So we called her Pandora, because of all the mischief. The daddy-cat had skipped out—this has been known to happen with people, too—so we had to take care of her and them. She was a stray cat, you see. There were three kittens: two tiger-striped like their mother, and one black with a white face. All three were males. You know, I just discovered that the females of most species have different names, except for cats. A female goat is a doe, a female sheep is a ewe, a female horse is a mare, and so on. But a female cat is a what? Apparently there it is the other way around, and it’s the male cat who has to take the other name: Tom. Anyway, when they were old enough we gave away the two tigers, but we kept the black and white one, whom we named Panda, because he was the son of Pandora, and his coloration fitted. Pandora we didn’t keep, because she had bad manners. If you walked along a path, she would rush past you, get just ahead of you, then hiss and scratch you if you continued walking on her path, even if you had never seen her come. So we had her spayed and gave her to a cat shelter.

  Well, Panda grew up with our dog Canute,
who was a beautiful Dalmatian, also black and white. Canute’s story is a sad one, so I’ll skip that. Then, months later, a small midnight black cat appeared, evidently dumped by some tourist going north—they do that, and if I say any more about the practice of dumping, I will become uncharitable, which is a polite way of saying #$%&*f⊘!!, so I won’t. We didn’t want another cat, so we ignored her. But she seemed to want to take up residence in our garage. So we shut her out. Then, when we went to open it, she appeared from nowhere and dashed in. Now this was really pushing it, so I went in with the dog to rout her out. She stood guard before a box, so I kicked over the box, trying to make the point that we didn’t want her in there, where she was apt to get shut in by accident and starve. And a kitten fell out.

  Oops. I investigated. There were five newborn kittens, which explained why she had been so desperate to get back in; we had shut her out from them, not knowing. One looked just like her, and one looked just like Panda, and the others were all shades in between. This was a perfect genetic pattern, solidly incriminating Panda as the father. So we were responsible. We brought her into the house and named her Pandora II. Panda didn’t like that; he was jealous of his turf. Too bad; he should have thought of that before he—well, never mind, the Adult Conspiracy just invoked itself. She turned out to be a perfectly house-trained cat. We had a different dog then—no, don’t ask about Canute, this history is sad enough without that. Let me just say that once we adopt an animal, that animal is ours for life; kittens are the only ones who have left. I usually think of dogs as honest and cats as dishonest—stop glaring at me, will you, just let me tell my story!—but the dog would sneak anything she could, including the cat’s food, while the cat sneaked nothing. I mean she would not jump up on the table to go after food. That’s a rigorous moral code, for a cat. When we went for a walk around the block, Pandora II would come with us. She liked people. She did not go out at night to prowl; she preferred to sleep on my daughter Penny’s bed. Penny was then five. The only problem was that Penny was hyperactive—if you don’t know about that or dyslexia, you’re lucky—and when she wiggled her toes under the covers, Pandora would pounce on them, thinking they were edible. You see, Pandora had survived alone for a while; she was a huntress. She would never claw a person knowingly. In fact she had a thing about that: no person could do any wrong. If anything happened, such as someone stepping on her tail—I know it’s mean to mention such a thing, but accidents do happen—it was the dog’s fault. She would go and hiss at the dog, who like as not was sound asleep and was quite confused by it.

  Well, we gave away the kittens again, and kept Pandora II. She was a wonder. One day an obnoxious neighbor’s dachshund came charging in to chase Pandora. She fled; I saw them disappear around the house. Then the dog reappeared, yipping, with the cat hot in pursuit. My daughter had seen it happen: Pandora had retreated to the base of a big punk tree—no, you don’t have that kind where you live—whirled, hissed, and given the dog a good swipe on the nose. He was far larger than she; I think she weighed only about three pounds. But she just didn’t take any guff from dogs. So, in the course of such episodes, I came to like her; she had a lot of mettle. She was our cat.

  Then one evening she did not come in. We were perplexed, because she had not done this before. But if she wanted to be outside, we wouldn’t stop her. It would be no good hunting for a midnight black cat at night! But in the morning, as I went out to pick up the newspaper, I saw her lying there at the edge of the street. “Oh, no!” I said, dreading it. She was dead; she had evidently been hit by a car. I buried her behind the house. Telling Penny about it was almost as bad as finding Pandora dead; it tore us both up. That was sixteen years ago, and it still hurts. So that is the story of the only cat I ever really liked, and I just can’t see my way clear to liking another. I guess I’m a one-cat man, and Pandora was that cat. Oh, Panda was all right— but several months later, he too was hit by a car. You might get the notion that I don’t like what careless cars do to folk. Right.

  You know, years later I was on a panel at a science fiction convention with Andre Norton. I don’t know whether you read her books; she has had over a hundred published, and many are juveniles. She loves cats. So it was quite a panel when I said I didn’t like them. But then I told of Pandora II, and Andre Norton and I are friends.

  Now on to better things. Yesterday we had our first magnolia flower of the season. You see, when we built our house here on the tree farm last year, we had to make a half mile long drive to the house, which is hidden in the deepest jungle. We wouldn’t let them doze out any magnolia trees, which were growing wild throughout the forest. So now they are tame trees along our drive, and one of them is flowering. Magnolias are big, lovely flowers. We have a dogwood, too. Actually, I’ve never seen an ugly flower; even so-called weeds can have wonderful little flowers, if you just look carefully at them. But you can see a magnolia flower for a hundred feet. We can’t count the magnolia trees we have on the property, but there are at least thirteen along the drive—those I did count—and some in the forest are huge.

  Look, I am running on too long—who else do you know who does that?—and must stop. Beware; some letter I may tell you about the beauty of math. No, don’t turn your nose away in disgust; I can tell you something about math that will fascinate you. You see, when I was your age, math was my worst subject. Then I discovered how it can relate to art. I may also get on the subject of the creative mind in the prison of circumstance. But not this letter, so relax.

  Let me just pass along to you a riddle that annoys me. It is this: take a cup of coffee—what? Well, I know you don’t drink coffee, and neither do I, and I’ll bet your mother doesn’t either, but that isn’t relevant. Pretend it’s mudwater, okay? Take one teaspoonful of that coffee and stir it into a cup of tea—you don’t drink that either? Neither do I. But your mother does? Pretend it’s something awful, like tannic acid from boiled leaves. Okay; now take a spoonful of that mix from the tea cup and put it back into the coffee cup. Now the riddle: is there more coffee in the tea cup, or more tea in the coffee cup? No, I won’t tease you about the answer. As I figure it, they are the same: just as much coffee in the tea as there is tea in the coffee. Having figured it out, I looked up the answer in the back of the magazine where I saw this problem. It said that some problems were almost too easy, and that there was more coffee in the tea cup. What? Either I missed something, or that’s a wrong answer. Which is the problem I often have with tests of any kind: their answers don’t match mine. When that happens, their answers are wrong, of course. But I remain annoyed.

  Remind me next time to tell you about the Llano; that should interest you too. Now I really must go, because I have to write a letter to your mother, and she’s jogging my elbow.

  Oh, what’s Jenny Elf doing right now? Well, I’m in Chapter 6, and she and Che Centaur are the captives of goblins who have a grotesque fate in mind for them. But Jenny’s magic talent is about to be discovered. Yes, she has one, because she’s from a magic land. You see, she—oops, I’m at the end of the letter. Meanwhile, don’t let things like this frustrate you; just keep getting better.

  Apull 21, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Guess what: I had a letter from Sue Benes, your Occupational Therapist! Aren’t you jealous? No? You say you got one from Elfquest? Well, try this one: I also have one from Jenny. Oops—that’s you! In your Elven Armor. Well, now; I wouldn’t have thought of that. Thank you. Just don’t get into any fights with the human folk. And one from your mother. You remember how many pages she wrote me when you smiled (4), laughed (6), and moved to Warp 7 (7, of course—oops, that was that phone call)? This time you Spoke—right, eight (8) pages. You know, I was going to call the hospital today to find out how you’re doing, but there was so much information in those eight (8) pages that I can’t think of anything about you I don’t already know. Besides, I’m afraid to try I don’t know the Warp folk as well as I knew the ones in Cute Care. But about your letter: your
mother said you still have a bit of trouble signing things, but that she could make out the J and Y. Well, I can also make out an N in the middle. But you have a way to go yet before your signature gets as indecipherable as mine. The more I sign it—and I have had to sign thousands of times—the worse it gets, until now all you can read is the P, but you know there’s an I there somewhere because the dot is in the middle of the P. I read a book about grapho-analysis once, telling how to judge folks' character through their handwriting, and I resolved that no one was going to get at my inner secrets of character that way, so I set it up so that the I-dot was always inside the P. Let them try to analyze that! They’ll think that I’m impossibly introspective, and, um, ouch, they might be right. Sigh.

  I’m enclosing a couple of comic clippings from today’s newspaper: one Family Circus about a vegetarian, and a Curtis, because it seems your local paper doesn’t carry it. It’s really just an ordinary comic, though today’s strip is a bit painful in an unintended way: I’d hate to have that happen to a parakeet. We used to have parakeets, starting with Cinnamon, whom we inherited from my wife’s sister when she got married and moved away. Naturally we named the next one Nutmeg, and went on through the spices from there. But all that was before we were adopted by a cat. I wrote a story about parakeets; it’s in my volume Anthonology, which volume is unsuitable for the mothers of teenagers to read. Anyway, I hope your music playing doesn’t sound like that of the comic.