In 2007, not only did Manny find a job he kept for the past four years--onto greener pastures after his "garden leave"--but his parents took us and our two grown children to Rome for Christmas. Someday I'd love to return.
We had lots of fun. Manny's sister came, too.
June, 2010
Above is a photograph Manny took and I “enhanced,” a practice to which he objects but really isn’t that different from many time honored processing techniques. This is Ucluelet on Vancouver Island where we spent a week after my cousin Coquille Talbot’s wedding to Severin Knudsen in Port Townsend, Washington--a great place, btw.
Ucluelet is supposed to be great for surfing, providing you wear a wet-suit. We didn’t do either, although I’m fairly certain surfing is beyond me. Even when I was young, I preferred to attempt my few death-defying stunts (and I had a few) on land. Otherwise, it’s a tiny town on the very western edge of the island. The area had various half-built housing developments, I assume arrested by the poor economy.
As happens on many vacations, I suffered a monster, multi-day-and-night migraine. That’s not untypical of migraine sufferers but it’s no fun and means that you’re no fun. Of course, we had our moments. The landscape in Ucluelet at the right time is wild, powerful, and haunting.
Since we never watch TV at home, whenever we go on vacation (it’s one activity I can manage with a migraine), I watch TV like an addict: we saw Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Philadelphia Story” and 'round-the-clock forgettable shows on Canada’s Comedy Channel. One comedian, however, mentioned Uclulet as the place old people go when they’re waiting to die. Funny at the time, although bear in mind, I was in terrible pain and had been for a few days and sleepless nights.
[Note: Tip and Ozma is a repeat of one of the first posts on Diary of a Heretic and has always brought in a lot of hits, even when nothing else seemed to. Manny and I read his father's copy of "The Marvelous Land of Oz" when we were very little and hiding in the attic of his family weekend "farm" in Wisconsin. Manny found the idea of a boy turning into a girl--or a girl being enchanted into a boy--startling and frightening.]
The pictures come from L. Frank Baum’s second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Written in 1902, the sequel follows the fabulous adventures of an orphan boy, Tip, who was raised by a sorceress. Tip makes friends with the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Glinda the Good Witch, and new characters like Pumpkinhead and the Saw Horse.
When he approaches the gates of Oz, Glinda and his friends realize the sorceress has cast a spell preventing him from entering. Glinda summons the sorceress, who explains she enchanted Tip as a baby. He cannot enter Oz without breaking the spell. The Tin Man is elected to break the news to Tip that he is not really a boy, but a girl--and not just any girl, but the Princess Ozma. The illustrator here is John R. Neill. Copyright did not exist in 1902, but Mr. Neill illustrated all 14 of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. In this illustration, the Tin Man has just given Tip the perplexing news.
Glinda threatens to strip the soceress of her powers if she does not restore Tip to his (her) rightful self. The Princess Ozma will rule Oz once the boy-to-girl transformation takes place. The sorceress gives Tip a potion to drink and sends him into a dreamless sleep.
And soon:
“Tip’s old comrades stared in wonder…and then every head bent in honest admiration of the lovely Princess Ozma.
The girl turned to her old friends. Speaking the words with a sweet diffidence, she said, ‘I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before. I’m just the same Tip, you know, but only—only—’
‘Only you’re different,’ said the Pumpkinhead.”
Four years ago my husband Manny (real name Philip but people call him ‘Phil’) was laid off for three months. (A phase the grasshopper in me recalls as free-wheeling and fun—he was home!) But after a season of unemployment, he landed a position with a big company in an imposing building on 56th Street. For four years, he worked twelve hours a day, Monday through Friday and often on Saturday on Saturday. Some of his weekend dedication may have related to me spending every minute fussing over some negligible fiction post, which while I’m writing it feels absurdly urgent. Several weeks ago, he got a new job, which appears more secure. He will work just as hard and just as many hours, but we’re both hoping he enjoys it more.
When he let his employer know he had been hired elsewhere, the HR department found a contract he had signed agreeing to sixty days “garden leave.” When he learned two weeks notice wasn’t enough, he could hardly believe it. “Garden leave?” News to both of us.
Ordinarily, garden leave applies to big wigs. When rich and powerful people move from one corner office to another, their previous employer pays them to stay home for sixty days—and supposedly garden. The idea is to prevent the power-broker from taking clients and company knowledge to his or her next fabulously lucrative employment.
For Manny, of course, “garden leave” meant his previous employer intended to keep him working double-time because of deadlines and short staff due to rampant lay offs. He bargained hard to cut the sixty days to thirty: thirty long days into nights when he would not be clipping the topiary hedges but rather writing untold reports, attending meetings, writing reports about them and rewriting white papers and black books to lawyerly and marketers’ demands.
Today was his last day! Hurray!
He’s free until October 24th, when he starts his new long, hard slog. Between now and then, we’re going to St. John’s, an island in the Caribbean where we went four years ago before he started the job he just left. St. John’s is mostly a Nature Preserve, which means only one hotel sells tourist stuff or caters to toffs.
We’ll stay in ecologically efficient huts. See the roofs in the photo? We can eat communally with the camp or cook stuff on a hot plate. Manny loves to snorkel. St. John’s has great snorkeling (including sharks.) Once I’m in the water I always like snorkeling, sharks or not, much more than I imagined. We might even laze around! We might dance outside to a roadside band.
The camp maintains its own glassworks, using recycled beer bottles. Last time Manny made a great paper weight, while I sweated through a migraine, which I would have endured wherever I was.
During my absense, Diary of a Heretic is schedule to put up a few new photos, new in that I haven’t used them before, and run a few perennial favorites—not my favorites—these are my accidental hits. “Guaranteed Happiness,” the only story, is flash fiction. The other two are pictures of Tip and Ozma from “The Land of Oz” and a picture of a woman’s feet I posted with “Time Will Tell” from my story about Trevor, which is begging to be rewritten.
On October 24th when Manny leaves here at six a.m. for his new job, I’ll most likely resume my struggle to write well enough to tell a make-believe story that intermittently catches someone’s interest for thirty seconds.
Welcome to my online fiction. You've arrived as I'm rewriting a serialized work-in-progress, James Bond and the Girls of Woodstock. Links to those posts
start in the sidebar on the right; just scroll down a bit. Be prepared for more conflict; more epiphanies—and moral intrigue like never before. Look halfway down the sidebar for links to occasional Flash Fictions (stories in fewer than 500 words). Thanks and leave a comment, relevant or not! Click here for my feed.
We're going to Idaho tomorrow for a week-long celebration of my father's birthday—a big family reunion. The Sawtooth Mountains still have lots of snow so Manny and I hope to cross-country ski, which is often just as fun as downhill, (but much less expensive.)
I've put up six more early posts from "James Bond and the Girls of Woodstock" to appear automatically. Past that, I will post another four, letting it go when the story develops its first real complications. What happens from there remains unknown.
Next on my schedule is another crack at a story that has hung around here for years, doing nothing but beg for attention.
