Long Ago and Far Away, or Right Now and Up Close

In a time when I had more hair, my husband and I visited the fairyland castle of Neuschwanstein. It was the one that inspired Walt Disney to build a castle in the middle on Disneyland--a magical place, and did feature swans, such as a gold swan faucet in a bathroom. On site I heard that they had running water fed from a water source at a higher elevation from the castle. And later on, I read that the castle had flushing toilets too. (King Ludwig died in 1816, before the final completion of the castle.) Magnificent paintings featuring scenes from Richard Wagner’s operas adorned many walls, and in the kitchen, there was a Leonardo di Vince device to warm the dinner plates. It consisted of a chain that could be pulled up the wall behind the stove. The chain had spaces for plates, and in using that device, the guests received their food warm.

From the beauty of that castle and how much King Ludwig loved Wagner and swans and was determined to have it beautiful and perfect, I never bought the story that he was crazy. There is a mysterious story about him drowning in a lake while on a boat ride with his psychiatrist. Hum—sounds suspicious to me, especially since he had privately funded the construction, and a great amount of money was released upon his death.

I developed an infection while in Germany, and there at a hospital an English speaking young man checked me in. He told us he was doing community service in place of military service, for he was a pacifist. After hearing that we were from Southern California, he told this story: Once while surfing at La Jolla, California, he was hit in the face with a surfboard. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors treated him with such kindness that he vowed to treat others the same.

A doctor gave me some medicine and said, “This is Wednesday. We’ll bill you.”

Imagine.

We were in Germany because my husband's company sent him to an Optics Trade Show in Stuttgart, Germany, and I was invited to go along. His job was to collect data on new instruments. My job was to eat, play and make merry. Oh, and to catalog what we spent on meals and lodging.

We made several other stops in other countries, but Germany was the most impactful. For, throughout my life, I thought I was German from my mother’s side of the family. She grew up in a German community, although she knew no German. However, my Great Grandmother was the first child of their family to be born in America and spoke broken English. The family immigrated before the war and I believe her mother endured that ocean voyage while pregnant—maybe she passed on my tendency to get sea-sick. It was, therefore, somewhat troublesome for me to visit a land that was the primary cause for the Second World War. I was expecting to see war-torn buildings.

 I saw nary a one. I remember taking a walk one morning and stumbling upon a cemetery awash in flowers (It was May). Individual graves were fenced in with rot iron fencing, and there were so many flowers it was as though I was in a greenhouse. I watched an old man walk shakily to a faucet, fill a sprinkling can, and carry it back to a grave where he tenderly watered the flowers.

We rented a car and drove around the gorgeous countryside where cows stood on green hillsides, and yellow flowers dotted the green. Many immaculately manicured farms had their morning feather comforters airing out the windows. This was before down comforters were commonplace in the U.S., but most hotels on our European trip used them, and I became a fan. I have slept under down ever since.

The day following our castle visit,  I said, “Let’s drive into Switzerland. I want to see a land where blood never touched their shores.” And so, we drove until the Alps stopped us, and the picture of the little boy bringing home the cows in the misty evening is emblazoned on my brain, especially one cow. She was laboriously walking along behind the others and obviously pregnant. Finally, she stopped, gave a deep sigh, then carried on.

In Lucerne, Switzerland, I saw a sign printed boldly on a pharmacy. It was my Family name—the family that had migrated from Germany. The name was Hertenstein.

“See," I said, "My people lived in Germany for a while, but got out.” Not realizing that I had it backwards.

 A couple of years ago, as a Christmas present, my daughter chased down our ancestry on my mother’s side. And to my utter surprise, I’m not German, but Swiss.

 

And Right Now and Up Close:

This morning, in preparation for the paperback edition of The Incredible Yellow School Bus, I wrote a dedication to my daughter Nina:

 For my beautiful daughter Nina.

 I wrote this story when my daughter was in the first grade and read it to her class. (It kept their attention.) Ever since, Nina has often admonished me by saying, “Mom, publish the school bus story.”

 But I didn’t, until now.

 It was my first fiction story of any length, and I thought I needed to learn more before anyone read it. Often, I would dink with it and make it worse.

 Now, these many years later, Nina says to me, “Mom, sometimes a person’s first work is the best. And then we think we ought to make it a certain way and lose the purity of it.” See, she grew into a wise adult.

And then I wrote Incredible's sequel, A Journey Into Inner Earth, and that was a fun write and read. 

 Thanks Nina. This is for you.

Mom

It tickled my fancy.

 Thanks Nina. This is for you.

Mom

  

And from Amazon:

While Amazon’s algorithms are somewhat of a mystery, it’s a known truth that when your book accrues a certain number of reviews, or a lot of reviews in a short amount of (unspecified) time, Amazon kicks into gear multiple promotions for your book. Free promotion that would probably cost a fortune if you had to foot the bill.

 Every time your book is reviewed, the algorithms are updated, and your book’s internal ranking increases.

 They say the magic number is 50 reviews. Wow.

 

A special Thanks.

  So, my dear ones, if anyone wishes to add a review to my Amazon page, I will thank you profoundly.  The first FIVE people--kids or adults--to write a review for either or both books, will get a tee-shirt as a special THANK YOU.

 (I will need your NAME, ADDRESS and size. Adult or child, S, M, L, XL, 2XL.)

 

Want a different color than black? Tell me.

 

I’m providing links to review the books, for it took me a while to learn how to do it, and that will, hopefully save you time.*

To write a review for The Incredible Yellow School Bus, please click on the below picture: This will take you to the Amazon review page. 

For A Journey Into Inner Earth, click below:

 

 

*To go Amazon's route, go to the item you want, SCROLL WAY DOWN on the left side of the page, past other books until you come to this:

 

Thanks for reading. You know I love you,

Jo

Panic Pushing the Publish Button--plus

My intended blog post, #Will Evil Ever be Eradicated from the Earth? is below, but first this:

When I was a kid, I rode a school bus—as many of you have. We lived near the top of a long sweeping hill, and I was the first kid on the bus each school day. The driver lived further up the hill, and each night he parked the bus at his house. In the mornings, it was easy, he just picked up the kids on the hill and drove us into town, to school.

 My kids say I have no inkling of time, and I guess I didn’t in those days as well, for often, I was running down our steps as the bus was coming to a screeching halt outside our gate. The driver took to honking for me. The trouble was he laid on the horn for about a block before arriving at our house, and he honked whether I was running or waiting. (We did have an elderly couple living across the street, who were former owners of our property. They were hard of hearing, and never complained.)

 After six kids were onboard the bus, the driver pulled into a neighbor’s drive, parked on his steep driveway, set the emergency brake, and with an “I’ll only be a minute,” jumped out of the bus.

 A moment later, I felt a slight shutter as the bus gave a groan. I knew the brakes were about to fail.

 Well, the driver heard it too. He flew into the bus, and caught the controls before the bus, with six kids on board, began to roll.

 My story set the stage for this children’s book: The Incredible Yellow School Bus. It became a fantasy, of course.

 

 

I wrote the story when my second daughter was in the first grade. The protagonist/narrator was 11 years old. 

The story sat in an old file. Although my daughter kept telling me to publish it. I didn’t think I could.

 Fast-forward 20 years, I wrote the sequel, A Journey Into Inner Earth, set four years later. The protagonist was then 15-years-old.

  

You know the old movie where a fellow waves his hand over the signature line of a check? He just couldn’t get himself to sign it. That was me in pushing the publish button on these books.

And then, miracle of miracles, on my birthday a week ago my internal voice, you know the one who likes to whisper? This time it screamed at me: “PUBLISH THOSE BOOKS, STUPID!”

 My ears are still ringing.

  I’M DOING IT. (But don’t call yourself stupid—yourself is listening.)

Note, I am jewell d

Both books available within a couple of days on Amazon.com

Now for the blog post I intended to use before getting carried away.

Have you heard about #The Paper Clip Project?

I had forgotten about it until a night ago when I heard Dr. Harley Rotbart, a pediatrician, being asked this question:

 

 “Will evil ever be eradicated from the earth?”

He thought for a moment, started to say no, then stopped himself. “It will come from the young people,” he said. Then he proceeded to tell the story of the paper clips.

It happened in 1998 in a little town of 2,000 in Whitewell, Tennessee. The town was very homogeneous, all white. Most were protestants, not even a minority or Catholic. The first class consisted of 16 students and was taught by Sandra Roberts, a language arts teacher. When she informed the students that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews. The students were quiet and then began to ask questions about how many is six million. Finally, one of the students suggested that maybe they should collect six million of “something.” The doctor said that the paper clip idea came from a man who wore one in his lapel to commemorate a Holocaust victim. Therefore, they chose paper clips.

Family and friends contributed. Even with a lot of help, they only had 160,000 paper clips by the end of the year, and the students were discouraged. Unknown to everyone at Whitwell, help was on the way.

Two German White House newspaper correspondents, the Schroeders, learned about the Whitwell student project from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. The couple wrote letters and printed them in German newspapers, asking for paper clips and for letters explaining why people wanted to support the project. Within three weeks, the Whitwell students had received 2,000 letters and 46,000 paper clips.

The students wrote celebrities, and soon their 6 million goal seemed within reach. They asked the Schroeders what they should do if people kept sending paper clips to the school after they reached the 6 million. The Schroeders reminded them that historians believed at least eleven 11 million Jewish and non-Jewish victims were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. So, the new goal for the Whitwell, Tennessee students became 11 million paper clips.

Thinking they needed a home for all those paper clips, the Schroeders figured they would find an old rail car such as was used in WWII—the sort that had transported the Holocaust victims. They contacted many people in Germany, but no one knew of a World War II vintage railcar that was available.

A few months later, the Schroeders flew to Germany and drove over 2000 miles through the countryside, looking in old rail yards. Finally, a friend told them to talk to the Director of the Railroad Museum in Ganzlin, Germany. So they did.

The museum had one rail car, built in 1917, Number 011-993, just like hundreds of railroad car pictures from the Nazi Era. The museum director, reluctant to part with the car, finally agreed to sell it to the American school children. 

The German Ministry of Defense shipped the authentic rare railroad car to Tennessee, and the railroad absorbed the expense.

The railroad car houses 11 million paper clips.

 

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the science of reading, was worried—as perhaps you have worried—that she might be losing the knack for sustained, deep reading. 

 

She still buys books. "But more and more I read "in them rather than being whisked away by them," she wrote.

 

Wolf told herself that it wasn't the style of her reading that had changed, only the amount of time she could set aside for it. 

 

So, she decided to set up an experiment on herself.

 

She decided to set a time every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman. It was Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi. (Hesse received a Nobel Price in Literature in 1945.) It was precisely the sort of demanding text she once loved.

 

The experiment went yuck!

 

She hated the book. She hated the whole so-called experiment. She had to force herself to wrangle the novel's "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me." 

 

The book's narrative was intolerably slow. She said she had "changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration." 

 

She had lost the "cognitive patience" that once sustained her in reading such books as Magister Ludi. 

 

She blamed the internet. 

 

Remember how English teachers admonished us to "develop our paragraphs?" Now, most all paragraphs need to be about two sentences long. In fact, large blocks of text soon lose their reader.

 

And now I read that the GPT-3 equipment they are installing in cell phone prompts will give our phones the quality everyone pretends to but does not actually want in a lover — the ability to finish your thoughts.

 Have you ever written a message where the damn messenger writer decides what your next word ought to be? For crying out loud, now it wants to write for us. 

 

The GPT-3, instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, as our messaging appts do, would produce several paragraphs in whatever style it intuited from your prompt. 

 

If you prompted it Once upon a time, it would produce a fairy tale. If you typed two lines in iambic pentameter, it would write a sonnet. If you wrote something vaguely literary like We gathered to see the ship and all its splendor, like pilgrims at an altar, it would continue in this vein: 

 

If you wrote a news headline, it would write an article on that topic, complete with fake facts, fake statistics, and fake quotes by fake sources, good enough that human readers could rarely guess that it was authored by a machine.

 

OMG, is this true?

 

But then I come upon this quote by Geralyn Broder Murray. He greatly anticipated the arrival of a new bookstore in her neighborhood: Good News!

 

 "And, for all the traumas bookstores have faced, they don't appear to be going anywhere, which to me means there is hope for everything and everyone."

 

Remember when bookstores started having coffee shops in their facility? 

 

I was in heaven.

 

I miss bookstores. Oh, we still have Barnes and Noble in town, for which I am grateful. However, when I read Geralyn Murray's thrill at having an independent bookstore move into her neighborhood, I was taken back to how I felt walking into a bookstore—all that adventure, all that knowledge, all ability to spin yarns. We used to have a wonderful Metaphysical bookstore in town that had a sign, "You want a book about what?"

 

"So, writes Murry, "the next time I feel the world crashing down around me," I know exactly where to seek refuge: through the doors of my very own neighborhood bookstore, where the beauty and promise we all have within us is waiting to be picked up, purchased, and brought home in the form of a book — reminding me that all is not lost. Far from it."--Geralyn Broder Murray Sep 22, 2021. 

 

We used to frequent Libraries when we were kids. (And remember Ray Bradbury said he educated himself by reading from one side of the library to the other. And then, look what a writer he became. And he reveled in it. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ― Ray Bradbury)

 

But think of a bookstore and how thrilled you were with your new purchase. You couldn't wait to get into it. You would carry your book home, and it would be yours. And you wouldn't have to pay any Library late fees.

 

And then when the coffee shops arrived, well imagine, you could choose a book from the shelf, sit at a table and gently peruse the book—careful to keep it pristine, no coffee drips or anything.

 

In the days of bookstores, I would plunk down twenty-five bucks on a book and think nothing of it. Now I'm used to the $2.99 prices of Kindle, and even with my own book, The Frog's Song, I feel it's overpriced, but it is what the publisher demands. (Hey, they have to make money; otherwise, they will not stay in business. Which was the reason bookstores closed.)

 

I read on my Kindle. I order books online, but there is nothing like the thrill of walking into a bookstore where the air zings with the excitement. It's a feeling not present in a library.

 

Oh, I take that back—some libraries. I went into the Oregon State Library in Corvallis, Oregon, once to research the horse's brain and was overcome with their beautiful building--windows along one side, floor to ceiling, lots of light, a small food court, and a restroom. I could live there.

 

After reading Ms. Murray, I thought of the first book read to me by my mother, Anne of Green Gables. And in the second grade, there was a special reading time where we put our heads on our desks, and the Sister-nun read Heidi. That was the best time of being in the second grade. In the middle of the year, I had entered a Catholic School, a new kid, and was thrust into academia--I was embarrassed when asked to read aloud and stammered over my words. And you had to stand beside your desk. Horrors.

 

Before that, what I remember from the first grade and half of the second was that we played, and I was a darling because I could draw. In Catholic School, I made a special friend, a non-Catholic who was there because her mother, a doctor, thought it was the best school. 

 

The point I'm getting to is this, those first books we read as children are etched into our soul. Perhaps they help form who we are. How I loved The Black Stallion series. I have read many books since, but none are as special as those first reads. 

 

See ya. I'm going to have a glass of wine and pick up my current novel. (I just completed: Where the Forest Meets the Stars, by Glendy Vanderah Loved it.)

 

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." --Ray Bradbury

 

Do you have any comments, feedback, gripes, or suggestions on improving my service? (Yeah, Joyce, open a Bookstore—in my dreams.)