I was working as night aide for Mr. Kenneth Riley when I heard the Big Store’s membership had opened up; night aides don’t hear as much as the day help but Mr. Riley’s Depends ran out early one week and his great niece, Helen, brought out a case complaining about the trip she’d made to get them. “Can you get me a glass of tea, Viola?” she huffed. “I’m about to perish from this heat” “I’ll bring it to you as soon as I get your Uncle Kenneth changed” I said. “He’s been going through those diapers fast and I don’t want him to get sores waiting for a fresh one.” “Never mind, I’ll get it myself then” she said and made a face. When I came back from her uncle’s bedroom, Helen was sitting with her heels up on a kitchen chair, swilling iced tea like she was the Queen of Sheba. “When did the Big Store start keeping late hours?” I asked her. “Last year, I think,” she said. “Probably, when the credit-union people started going.” I didn’t understand that. “The credit union?” I asked. “No credit union around here hires enough folks to make The Big Store…
Not all trash is trash: that’s the first thing you’ve got to know. I’ve picked over, cleaned up and used other people’s trash all my life but I know the difference between a bargain and cheap. It’s all about quality and no Big Store can sell that off its underground shelves, no matter what you hear. You need to know how to shop. My name’s Viola; never mind how old I am, it’s probably older than you. I’m a widow woman and I’ve spent most of my life working for somebody else. I was serving on the breakfast line at the Piggly Wiggly when I met Ponder, the man I married. used to say he walked in for a sausage biscuit and walked out with me. Ponder picked trash for a living, buying a car or cabinet someone didn’t want, then mending and selling it to someone else for a little higher price. That kind of a job doesn’t bring in wages, not the kind you can show the government, so I stayed at the Pig, serving breakfast until the store shut down. After that I cleaned houses and sat with sick and…
My sis and I fought over everything when we were kids. Books, records, pizza, you name it, both of us wanted the better, bigger share. We thought we’d grown out of most of that habit until we started discussing books to talk about on this blog. Barb insisted she wanted to write on Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I wasn’t willing to give that one to her. Mom & Dad, wherever you are, this is our attempt to share… BG: First, I think you have to discuss how this is related to The Jungle Book. How this says maybe the dead are nothing to fear. LG: Well, it is an homage to the Kipling classic. In Kipling’s book, Mowgli is raised by wild beasts of the Jungle, which was surely a strange, fearful place for Victorian Europeans. In The Graveyard Book, Nobody (Bod) Owens is protected and nurtured by the ghosts in an English Cemetery and death is a fearful unknown state for us. In both books, the child learns valuable information from beings he would normally be taught to fear. It could be both authors are trying to say the “unknown” doesn’t always mean “bad.” BG: It’s more than…
My mother tried to raise kids who didn’t know fear. I think she must have experienced some very bad moments in her own childhood because she understood the nature of childhood terrors and did her best to keep me and my sister from everything scary. Our TV shows were monitored, our movie choices screened and Mom made sure that the books we read could never frighten or intimidate us. All of this careful planning had a funny result: we grew up scared of a lot of things and although my sis recovered fairly quickly, (she’s far braver than I am) it takes me some extra work to get past the terror on the screen and in fiction. I work at this because I don’t want to miss something good, just because it is disturbing but sometimes I have to ask (as my Mom must have before every Halloween and roller-coaster), “Why do we like to be scared?” The wish to be frightened is part of Halloween tradition but this goes back a lot further than a “Haunted-House-for-Charity” (think about this: these days, we get startled out of our wits in order to give money to a worthy cause. Must we…
It’s Halloween Season again and TV channels, movies, radio and much of the internet are paying tribute to this time by retelling the stories that entertain and scare us. The traditional cast of characters are all on display: witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies and other deadundead players that make things go bump in the night. I like most of these but they don’t terrify me. Haunted homes come closer to the mark since the atavistic part of my brain gives credence to these tales. It’s easy to believe homes absorb the emotions of the residents they protect and impressions of the events they witnessed. Still, because this type of haunting make sense, in the end they really don’t really frighten me either. These are traumatized buildings with PTSD and it’s obvious they need therapy. However, there is a sub-group of the haunted house that doesn’t follow this pattern. These are the houses that go bad without reason or rhyme. These sentient, “born bad” buildings prey on inhabitants for their own malevolent reasons. There aren’t many novels that fit in this category but one of the greatest is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It can make you distrust your…