Four Shorts, All Good

We can legitimately lament, and perhaps mourn, the transition of the bookstore and the rise of the electronic book. But one of the benefits of e-books, and there is more than one benefit, is the accessibility of short works – short stories, novellas, short novels – that would never have seen the light of day except packaged with similar-length works. I’ve been working now and then on my own novella, which will most likely emerge one day in pixilated form.

Before us are four such short works – two children’s stories, two suspense stories.

Peter Pollock’s A Very Different School is the first of his Professor Alexander stories. The town of Rosefields has constructed a new school. Even if only a small number of students will be attending. The teacher is Professor Alexander, and he has a unique way of teaching – by time machine. In this first story, he takes his students to the very first Easter week, to see Jesus enter Jerusalem on a donkey, the last supper, the betrayal by Judas, the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane and the arrest of Jesus, Peter’s denial, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Three of the children in the story just happened to share the same names of Pollock’s own children – and that’s how the story came to be written.

Pat Hatt’s Tune at High Noon is a very different kind of story – a rhyming story about the town of Rumbling Tumblewood and a host of animals who are the townspeople. It’s a sleepy, happy kind of town, until a band of outlaws (played by cats; Hatt has a cat or two that he often writes poems about) arrives and takes over. Things go from bad to worse, until Goosey Air (who runs the saloon) figures out a way to corral the cat gang and their cohorts. It’s great fun, and it’s mean to be read aloud.

I can see myself reading both of these works to my grandchildren, an engaging way to learn about Easter and a fun way to learn about standing up to bullies.

 

And now two for adults.

Rearview by Mike Dellosso was originally part of a collection of seven stories by various mystery and suspense writers, and then broken out as a separate novella (or long short story). Dan Blakely is a college professor who arrives at school one morning to find himself accused of assaulting one of his female students. He’s told to clear out his office and leave. As he experiences his life turning upside down, he decides to kill himself, but survives a car crash to find his been given a reprieve of seven hours. So what would you do with your last seven hours? We find out what Blakely does, and Dellosso weaves a story that is reminiscent of the old Twilight Zone television programs.

Mirror Image, a short story by Dellosso and Aaron Reed, begins in a library. A man finds a book, and the picture of the author is the man’s doppelganger. He finds himself tracking the author down, learning what his life is like, and then determining to take the author’s life as his own, even if murder is required. This is another story with twists and turns, as we come to occupy the mind of a man determined on a fateful course of action.

Four short works, two for children and two for adults. And all thoroughly enjoyable.

Related – author’s blogs:

Mike Dellosso

Pat Hatt 

Peter Pollock

Peter Pollock’s “Web Hosting for Dummies”

My day-to-day job involves just about everything online – social media, web sites, blogs, online news sites, news portals, discussion boards, and basecamps of one sort or another. Outside of work, I’m involved in two online sites and this blog.

That said, I’m not a geek. My understanding and knowledge do not extend to all the terms, phrases, systems, and processes associated with the online world. Ask me how Twitter or Facebook work as relationship and communication channels, and I’m all over it. Ask me about the databases that sit behind Twitter or even my own blog, and I will likely give you a blank look.

I don’t program TV remotes, either.

And then I discovered that Peter Pollock had written a book for me, Web Hosting for Dummies.

No, I’m not looking to host my own blog site. But I deal with people who do host blogs, and web sites, and news portals, and I deal with them every day. Now I know what questions to ask to make sure I’m getting what I pay for.

What Pollock has done here is to take all of the technical underpinnings for web hosting and provided a comprehensive summary of everything you might want to know and everything you need to know.

And it’s written in plain English.

If I had read this a month ago, I would have understood a conversation two tech people were having about SQL inquiries, and why it was important.

Web Hosting for Dummies provides all the essentials – what it is and how it works; what’s essential to make it work (like databases, logs, and possibly scripts) (and what all those are); how to manage security (absolutely critical in this age of hackers and online thieves); troubleshooting; and what kind of server you should choose. And then the book gives a list of free apps, what your host won’t do for the money you pay, and some really good resources.

Pollock, who lives in California, is a blogger, web host, speaker, and all-around subject matter resource. I know enough to know he knows what he’s talking about.

Did reading the book make me an expert in all these technical things? No. But it did provide an base of understanding for the next conversation with the IT guy about issues with my blog site. So the next time I hear something about UNIX, I’ll know why it’s an option.

Peter Pollock, you have done the communications community – the non-technical side of the communications community – a real service. PR people, marketers, advertisers, authors, and writers owe you a debt.

(And for the record, the SQL noted above, short for Structured Query Language, is “a way of storing large amounts of data abd quickly retrieving, searching and storing that data.” It’s in the book’s glossary, not to mention a hefty explanation in the text itself.)

At three in the morning

It awakens him at three in the morning,

first with the flash of anxiety edged

with panic, then the dark, rainy gray

of resignation. He moves his hand,

touching the cold sheets next to him,

cold when he wants the warmth

of what he knew. The laughter

that was has fled, leaving a dismal

silence to create its own vacuum,

its own void of memory. He considers

the possibility that it is he who lies

buried in the white coffin.

This poem is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, and the word today is grief.

It is also submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Arsenal

I construct my fortress carefully,

with words and verses, catch

phrases and platitudes, theologies

of my imagination, to articulate

or simply utter, in growling tones,

to fend off the evils outside,

discovering too late that I’ve

imprisoned the evil within.

This poem is submitted for the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. To see more submissions, please visit Peter’s site.

This poem is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Illustration: The St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, constructed in 1869 at the St. Louis County Insane Asylum, is located on Arsenal Street in St. Louis and for years was known as the “Arsenal Street Asylum” or simply “the Arsenal.” Today, it seeks to help people return to society, as opposed to keeping them away from society.

One more circle

They grow like a fungus attaching

themselves with hooked tentacles

into work, productivity, creation,

innovation, value; toxins pouring

into the lifeblood. Dante created

nine circles of hell and perdition:

limbo lust gluttony greed anger

heresy violence fraud treachery

but he forgot one more circle,

the tenth circle, the lowest pit

of all: for those who call

meetings.

This poem is submitted for the One-Word-At-A-Time blog carnival (the word is “more”) hosted by Peter Pollock, and for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets (where the links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today).

Illustration: Dante’s Inferno by Gustave Dore.

A Kind of Madness: "The Heart Aroused," Part 1

I first read David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America when it was first published in 1994. I was occupying one of those “high watermarks” in my career, having helped create an environmental revolution in the chemical industry; writing speeches for a CEO whose words were recognized, admired, quoted and reprinted; successfully undertaken the transition of employee communications to new electronic technology; and preparing to create the company’s first web site – one of the first corporate web sites in the manufacturing industry.

I read The Heart Aroused, and I remember the shock of recognition, and even a sudden chill. With my team, I had gone through an incredible burst of creativity, and it had helped to unleash profound change within the company and within our industry. But alongside that creativity was a growing feelings that people, processes and the status quo were being threatened.

We launched the corporate web site. One of its most popular features was a weekly cartoon (which back then took forever to load on the computer). It humanized the company in a way nothing else quite could. Employees loved it. Human Resources didn’t.

The CEO retired about the time we launched the site, and it was sooner than expected. His successor, like new CEOS like to do, started making changes. The changes to the business weren’t that unusual, but within five years they led to the company being split, merged and acquired. But the changes to internal management and the management of people became an all-out assault on the company culture.

What came was a kind of madness.

Staff functions were reorganized into the latest business fad – shared services. Staff functions were expected to be profit centers, selling their services to the business units. To my knowledge, only one team managed to succeed – mine. We hired a PR firm to teach us how to be a PR firm. I had to go out and sell, which I did. I will not forget the expression on my boss’s face when I told him I had sold enough business to cover the cost of my team and to hire five additional people.

We were successful; most teams weren’t. The reorganization created significant chaos, and a lot of work simply stopped. The concept was finally abandoned when the CEO decided to spin off a significant portion of the company. As that was planned, some of the most bizarre corporate behavior I had ever experienced was occurring.

Imagine 300 senior executives at a retreat, directed by a consultant to sit on the floor to play a game with Legos.

Imagine spirit teams wandering the corridors, looking for people to celebrate and sing to.

Imagine a room set aside in the executive office building for meditation, opening to any and all employees but you needed to bring your own meditation pillow.

Imagine people being paid as full-time employees to lead a one-hour discussion a week on novels.

Imagine people being told to work on whatever they found interesting – even if it was someone else’s job and responsibility.

Imagine a decision to eliminate the corporate archives, because someone wanted the physical space the archives occupied.

Imagine a corporate speechwriter telling a secretary to get the vice chairman out of a meeting so the archives could be saved. Imagine that speechwriter – in his business suit – climbing into a large dumpster to rescue archived photo files that had already been trashed.

Whyte’s book helped me make sense of what was happening. The changes did unleash a lot of creativity, but they also unleashed something Whyte talks about in his book – the darkness where creativity lives. Because with creativity come our fears and phobias.

The company eventually split, merged and was acquired. The madness (and those singing spirit teams) came to an end. There had been a lot of creative destruction, accompanied by a lot of destruction of creativity.

I found myself washed up on the shore of the spun-off company, and two years later washed up on the shore of a downsizing. Like a lot of other people, I learned that cultural change can also be matched by utterly ruthless people grabbing what they want and prevailing, even if for a short time.

Many of the really good, creative things my team had done were destroyed. A few things (like the archives) were saved. Other things did outlast our version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Surrounded by chaos, fear, ruthlessness, meanness, and a few examples of heroism, I was forced to confront and define what was important to me. I would turn away from corporate life for almost five years. In the middle of that period, I started envisioning a story – a story that became a manuscript and finally a published novel.

But the creativity that could have been utilized in a corporate context was channeled in another direction.

On Wednesday at TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist will begin a weekly discussion of David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. You can read the prompt here. Because of the importance the book has played in my own career and development, I will have three posts this week: this introduction today, a post on Beowulf on Tuesday; and a meditation on the heart on Thursday.

This post is also being submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The word for this carnival is madness, and the links will be live on Tuesday.

Life, Daily

Sunrise, curtained

date, disappears

hero, clay feet

promise, broken

hope, unrealized

honor, denigrated

hard work, disregarded

championship team, loses

expectation, flattened

commitment, unmet

restaurant, closed

addiction, unresisted

trust, violated

feelings, hurt

summit, unreached

savior, ignored

This poem is submitted for the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, and the word is “disappoint.” To see more posts, please visit Peter's site.

It’s also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visit the site. The links will live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph: Lonely man by Anna Cervova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I hear the sounds of marching

The sounds of boot steps, marching,

pounding in my ears, hundreds,

perhaps thousands, locked

in unison, thudding on stones,

staining in the blood on streets,

life force pouring down lit avenues

and darkened alleyways, marching

to a song of violence, a drumbeat,

the tattoo of the mind, un-thinking

in unison, the lords and hordes

of violence rush forward, feeding

upon themselves, drinking themselves

intoxicated, consuming impieties

and impulses, boot-steps formless

and deep, the wave crashing

upon the golden shore, the wave

edged in silver needles.

So I heard a sermon Sunday on Proverbs 1:8-18, and my notes included words like violence, siren song, marching. Coincidentally, the One Word Blog Carnival today has a prompt of “marching,” Peter Pollock is hosting the carnival, and you can read more posts at his site.

This poem is also submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph: Marching by Sharon Apted via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Belonging to an age

It comes from a Latin word that means “of a generation” or “belonging to an age.” And if there ever were a word that belonged to our age, it is the word “secular.”

It is a word about which we could fill volumes; one blog post will be insufficient to do much beyond raising a few questions.

For more than two centuries, secularism – however it’s defined, and it’s defined in numerous ways – has been in the ascendant, at least in the Western cultures of Europe and its descendants -- North America and Australia, for example. Some define it as a belief that government decisions should not be made on the basis of religious considerations; some as a theory of modernization; some as the rationale for no state church; some as a reasoning for the so-called separation of church and state; and others some combination of the above.

Despite all of our concerns about “secular humanism” being as much a religion as anything that comes out of a church, synagogue or mosque,” the fact is that it is not a religion, and trying to argue with “secular humanists” that it is indeed a religion is a lost cause. But secularism is most certainly a worldview, a particular way of looking at the world, an insistence that religion be confined to its proper sphere, which does not include government in all its forms.

The twentieth century, fertilized by its predecessors, gave birth to two of the most extreme, vicious and murderous forms of secularism ever experienced: Nazism and communism. (One could argue, I suppose, that both were actually religions in that the leaders were treated – almost worshipped – as gods, but Hitler, Lenin and Stalin never claimed to be gods.) The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t hold a candle to the sheer scale of barbarity dreamed up by those three figures. And before we start pointing out the obvious about the Crusades, let us also point out that before the Crusades there were the jihads that conquered the Christian Roman Empire in Africa, the East and Spain. The Crusades were about “winning back” what had been lost.

Europe by far is the most secular of societies and regions, but Europe and its ruling elites are encountering something that no amount of understanding and accommodation seems able to calm, and that is the growing presence of Islam, and specifically radical Islam. Others more knowledgeable than I am, including many secular thinkers like Bruce Bawer, see secularism, and secular governments, as ultimately incapable of dealing with radical Islam.

Secularism is a product of modernism, and modernism loves to specialize and compartmentalize. Modernism has had an enormous influence on the church, which for a very long time abandoned the work place and the public square of ideas as “secular” things that weren’t as important as “church” things. We bought that argument, and forgot that our faith applies to all things. This doesn’t mean that we have to run “Christian” candidates for public office or evangelize with tracts among the cubicles, but it does mean that we are called to live out our faith seven days a week.

I am a Christian living in the United States, ostensibly a secular nation shot through with Christian history and sensibilities, even if it tries to deny it. I practice my faith in perfect freedom. No one tells me to go to church on Sunday; no one prevents me from going to church on Sunday.

I had both of my children educated in Catholic and Christian schools, not because I was concerned about “godless secular humanism” in public schools but because three years of public schools for my oldest – grades four through six – proved that our local district schools were about things other than education – self-esteem being the leading goal at the time. Having a great sense of self-esteem wasn’t going to be worth much if my children couldn’t spell or write a simple declarative sentence.

And it is there, I think, that I’ve had my closest brush with secularism. I saw it, I saw its effects, and I realized that as a worldview it is ultimately both destructive and self-destructive.

It’s a One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, and the word is “secular.” To see more posts, please visit Peter at Rediscovering the Church.

Strategy Comes Second

Many years ago, I was part of a team of people who worked very closely on a series of projects, mostly of the “crisis” kind. The team leader was generally well liked, and prided himself on having a strategy for every project and every crisis.

As can happen with a team like this, we tended to lurch from crisis to crisis, and we often seemed to be doing ongoing crisis management. This kind of work is hard, harder than most. You’re usually dealing with negative news. The news is always highly visible inside and outside the organization. And your personal “exposure” can often be high, especially if what you say is likely to be repeated in places like newspapers, TV reports and blog posts.

One day, after yet another meeting on yet another crisis, a team member and I were walking back to our offices when, almost out of the blue, he offered this characterization of our team leader: “He has a strategy for everything and a vision for nothing. And it’s killing us.”

It was one of those startling moments, when something is said and you immediately grasp the truth of it. In this case, my co-worker had nailed it.

Unless a vision comes first, strategy will become generally useless – and counterproductive.

The fact is, vision has to come first. Then strategy. Then tactics.

Take, for example, the Great Commission in Matthew 28. Jesus tells the disciples “to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching to obey everything I have commanded you.” There it is – the vision. Christianity was for all nations, and the disciples would be the ones to make that happen.

The strategy was to send disciples out, like Barnabas (and later Paul) to Antioch. Paul perfected the strategy. The tactics were generally straightforward and simple – show up at the local synagogue and preach the gospel; if thrown out take the few who believed and meet in house churches. In some cases (like Athens), preach to the local leaders; if ridiculed or stoned, take the few who believed and meet in small groups.

The strategy and tactics surely don’t look like “making disciples of all nations.” In fact, one might argue that, at least in the short term, the strategy and tactics looked more like failures than successes.

But the vision was long term, and that’s what the disciples grasped. No matter what happened in the short term – persecution, stoning, imprisonment, harassment, even death – the vision of Jesus in Matthew 28 was eternal. Jesus even implied that in the Great Commission: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Strategies and tactics can change. Visions tend to be for the long haul.

This post is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The one word prompt is “strategy.” To see more posts, please Peter’s site.

Photograph: Street Chess by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Resolutions can be good things

In 7^th grade, my English teacher assigned our class to participate in a debate, “Resolved, that foreign aid is good.” Yes, I know, pretty basic for a debate topic, but we were 12-year-olds. The entire class was required to do research, and then the teacher selected none of us to participate in the debate – four to argue for the resolution, four to argue against, and one moderator. The judges would be the teachers, but the students would also be able to vote by applause.

I was selected for the affirmative side. Also assigned to our team was the guy known as the class smart-aleck, the one the teachers had the most disciplinary problems with. A lot of the kids believed we were doomed to lose because we had somehow gotten stuck with “Roy.” Not to mention the fact that the best-looking guy in the7th grade was assigned to the negative team, and he could make a lot of the teachers blush.

I did my individual research in the New Orleans city library and the Tulane University library. My father dropped me off at the university one Saturday, and somehow I found my way to the building and a helpful librarian. She pointed out that technically the library was supposed to be for only students and faculty but that she would make an exception for me. She smiled when she said that.

We practiced. We rehearsed. We held mock debates within the affirmative team, and threw all the arguments we could find against our position. And we began to see something in Roy that no one else had ever noticed. He was a smart-aleck, yes, but he was also smart. He was articulate

The debate was a big deal. We would be speaking in front of the entire 7^th grade – some 200 kids, 10 teachers and a bunch of people from the administrative office. What really convinced us it was a big deal was that we had to wear coats and ties.

We had a strategy. I was captain of the affirmative side, and I was positioned as first affirmative – to lay out our major arguments in favor of the resolution. We assigned Roy as second affirmative rebuttal – the last one to speak in the debate. The class smart-aleck would have the last word. Now everyone knew we were doomed, because the teachers hated Roy.

We did well. We held our own. The negative side was no set of slouches, however, and they had prepared as well. But you could say the affirmative side had a slight lead going into the home stretch.

Roy stood up. With the booming voice that drove his teachers to threaten violence, he swooped in on the negative arguments like a giant hawk. And destroyed them. When he finished, the entire audience was on its feet, cheering. It was just like one of those movies except it really happened.

The affirmative side won. For the first time in his life, Roy was a hero. And it completely changed his life.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but some kinds of resolutions are good things.

It’s the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, and the word for this carnival is “resolution.” To see more posts submitted, please visit Peter's site, Rediscovering the Church.

Season

Autumn: not winter, not yet,

the rains of spring, the fires of summer

behind, the snows of winter ahead;

autumn: the clock slowing,

the quiet growing in the cool light

of October, the wisest month when

color is seen most clearly, the color

always there hidden in a shroud of green

what mattered doesn’t

what matters is

oak and maple shed their possessions,

giving what they have to serve

what comes after, a compost

to molder and simmer and bake,

decaying and dissolving, waiting

the order of heaven: a time

for every purpose.

This poem is submitted for the One World Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The prompt word is “season.” To see more submitted posts, please visit Peter's site. The links will be live at 10 p.m. Central time tonight.

Painting: Autumn Trees by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.


My recording of "Season:"

Season by Glynn2

Disparate patches

Disparate patches, forgotten fragments.

discarded and left over, folded

in a blue box at the back of the closet:

Eliza’s dress, Franklin’s shirt (ruined

by the bullet hole at Shiloh), gingham

from curtains and tablecloths, red

velvet from a stole, all fashioned

into a covering for decoration, then

warmth, then utility; lining the bottom

of the wagon headed west, protection

against mosquitoes and later Rockies

cold and ice; a corner singed that night

in the desert, the fabric absorbing

the smell of the fire the taste of the flame

the light of the stars and almost a shroud

when the fever came. A mottled collection

of scraps and repaired and ill-repaired and

not repaired pieces but it reads biography,

it reads history, it reads family.

This poem is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, using “quilts” as the prompt. To see more posts, please visit Peter's site. The links will be live at 10 p.m. Central time tonight.

Photograph: Antique Quilt, via FlosieFloo.com

Innocence

Only once was it presented

only once was it glimpsed

dragged beaten and scourged

to be ridiculed and abased

destroyed.

The bearer stood silent waiting

without expectation but

in full knowledge of what was

and what was to be

destroyed.

To placate and play to

for the sake of the nation

for the good of the people

he said here is the man to be

destroyed.

This poem is submitted for the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. To see other posts submitted for the prompt of “innocence,” please visit Peter's site.

Illustration: Ecce Homo by Antoni Ciseri (1871)

What we see in childhood

Little black notebook is waiting her prayer,

murmured and spoken her Saviour to hear;

words penned to page with the ladies to share,

the gospels, the psalms that she held so dear.

Her mother took boarders, two bits a night.

Young man saw motion with such airy grace,

her voice full of song and laughter and light.

He met with her mother, argued his case.

She bore him five children, including a son;

He sheltered and loved her his whole life long.

Puzzled  that he thought of her as the one,

She nonetheless loved him; he was her song.

       Now in her winter, I sit by her feet,

       watching her write in her notebook so neat.

This poem (a sonnet!) is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival on “childhood,” hosted by Peter Pollock. To see other poems, please visit Peter’s site. The links will be live at 10 p.m. Central time.

This poem is also submitted to TweetSpeak Poetry’s prompt to write a sonnet based on personal history. My poem is about my paternal grandparents. If you’re on Facebook, you can see the prompt at the T.S. Press page. If you want to get really involved, you can check the photo play prompt from a recent High Calling post, which includes photography and a sonnet (I’m photography-impaired, so I just did a poem).

The Fence

We’ve lived in our house in suburban St. Louis for 25 years this month. It occupies a corner lot. For various and sundry zoning reasons and setback requirements, the house isn’t centered on the lot, so a big chunk of the yard is front yard and side yard.

It wasn’t an ideal lot, but it was close to ideal for a fence. But not just any kind of fence. It had to be a “pretty fence.” And it became a story in two parts.

The Fence, Part 1: My wife worked with a garden designer who specialized in historic gardens, and a landscape expert so we’d know what to plant and where. The fence would be constructed of redwood. And it would have a main arched gate and posts that looked like something out a Victorian magazine.

This was an “event” in the neighborhood. Most people were curious. An adjoining neighbor was moving to another city, and they were nervous. Their house was for sale, and somehow they got it into their heads that our fence would keep them from selling their house.

Everyone, including the nervous neighbor, knew that construction would start at the end of May. The day came. The construction crew arrived with the pieces of fence. Holes were dug for the posts. Concrete readied. Posts were placed.

The nervous neighbor freaked. The wife nearly became hysterical and made a scene. More than once, too. She went door-to-door in the neighborhood, ranting. No one understood what the problem actually was, but whatever it was, it was huge.

The only clue we had was when our neighbors suddenly started tearing down the stockade fence they had for their backyard. Apparently, the pretty fence was going to make the stockade fence look shabby. However, the stockade fence didn’t need the pretty fence to make it look shabby. It looked shabby enough all on its own. 

The fence went in. A few weeks later, the neighbors sold their house and moved out of state.

We learned that Robert Frost was wrong: fences do not necessarily make good neighbors.

The Fence, Part 2: The fence was gorgeous, literally a traffic stopper. It became something of a landmark in our area, perfect for giving directions (“It’s just two streets past the big white fence”).

It wasn’t long after it was installed, however, that we noticed the white stain was flaking in places. We didn’t think stain was supposed to flake. Lots of phone calls and several visits later, we discovered what the problem was.

To give it a finished look, the carpenter had planed the redwood. It did give the wood a finished look. It also sealed the wood. The wood wouldn’t hold a stain, or paint, or anything. It was like Teflon. Thus began a saga lasting years. I scraped, sandpapered and stained. And painted. Countless others did as well. The pretty fence needed constant attention and upkeep.

Finally, after more than a decade, we discovered some posts were rotting. They would need to be replaced or torn down. We did both. The famous fence was torn down, and replaced with one that looked very similar, except the main gate wasn’t arched. The posts, though, looked almost identical to the original.

The difference was – the new fence was plastic.

I love that plastic fence. And it’s still a landmark.


This post is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The prompt is "fences," and to see more posts based on the prompt, please visit Peter's site. The links will be live at 10 p.m. Central time tonight.