most of the songs I know. If we ever meet, and no one else is around, I’ll sing some for you, but you’ll have to promise no one else can overhear; you know how it is. One of the funny ones goes like this: “My sweetheart’s the mule in the mine; I drive her without any lime; on the bumper I sit, and I chew and I spit, all over my sweetheart’s behind.” One of the serious ones is “The Ohio,” pronounced O-hi-O, about a man who drowns his girlfriend because she refuses to be his bride. A song can be ugly but beautiful, as I guess you know. Then lunch and here to this letter. After this I’ll have to proofread 27 fan letter answers the secretary typed and pack them off. Then, tomorrow, I can return to work on the story I have to do for someone else’s anthology, and finally get to work on my real project,
Tatham Mound
, about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto. No it’s not fantasy, it’s historical and archaeological. If you promise not to tell, I’ll tell you a secret about that. Do you promise? No, I won’t accept a stuck-out tongue as an answer; I demand a firm blink. Okay, the secret is this: I got interested in archaeology because my daughter Cheryl was getting into it, and the local folk discovered an untouched Indian burial mound right here in Citrus County, Florida. That’s a rare thing; there are few if any left, and the culture of these Indians is unknown, because they all disappeared. What happened to them? Maybe this mound had the answer. What was needed was to excavate that mound scientifically, studying the placement of every bone and arrowhead and piece of crockery. But that would cost money, and there wasn’t money. So I gave the University of Florida the money to do it, and my daughter Cheryl worked on it, and now we know much more about those Indians than before, and I will write a novel to bring them to life and show how they perished. It’s a tragedy, all right; they were wiped out by plagues brought by the Spaniards. The evidence was in that mound. I expect this to be the most significant novel of my career, and tomorrow I get to work on it. But I don’t want folk knowing about the money yet, because then everybody would be asking me for money, and I just wanted that mound to get done. Uh, no, it couldn’t be left untouched, once discovered, because poachers would come and destroy it, as has been the case with most of the other mounds of Florida; that’s why so little is known about the local Indians. So it was excavated with respect, and my novel will really make the case for those Indians. I know what their land was like, because I live in it, and I know how the white man treated them. Forget about cowboys and Indians; this is a serious novel.
Sigh; I have rambled on for three pages. Well, you’re a good listener. Let me check your mother’s last letter, which just arrived today. She says you haven’t had a chance to answer about how you want your name in the Author’s Note. Well, let me know, so I can do it right and ship the novel off to New York. There is one more thing you maybe should know: I’ll be dedicating the novel to you, just to “Jenny,” however it is in the Author’s Note. Then folk can wonder who you are, until they find out at the end.
Your mother says they are setting up to rework your house, so that you can buzz around it in your blazing red wheelchair. She says she’s trying to figure out how to fit twice as much computer into half the space, and asks “ten pounds of dung in a five pound bag?” Another term for that description is—oops, there’s the Adult Conspiracy again. Well, I’ll sneak it in in brackets, so no one knows about my violation of the Conspiracy. The term is [blivet]. Don’t throw it around carelessly. Speaking of dirty things: she says that Ray’s car is now called the “Nitrogen Pot.” That must be some car! She also says she doesn’t drive much now. But after your accident—well, I had a car accident,
Tatham Mound
, about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto. No it’s not fantasy, it’s historical and archaeological. If you promise not to tell, I’ll tell you a secret about that. Do you promise? No, I won’t accept a stuck-out tongue as an answer; I demand a firm blink. Okay, the secret is this: I got interested in archaeology because my daughter Cheryl was getting into it, and the local folk discovered an untouched Indian burial mound right here in Citrus County, Florida. That’s a rare thing; there are few if any left, and the culture of these Indians is unknown, because they all disappeared. What happened to them? Maybe this mound had the answer. What was needed was to excavate that mound scientifically, studying the placement of every bone and arrowhead and piece of crockery. But that would cost money, and there wasn’t money. So I gave the University of Florida the money to do it, and my daughter Cheryl worked on it, and now we know much more about those Indians than before, and I will write a novel to bring them to life and show how they perished. It’s a tragedy, all right; they were wiped out by plagues brought by the Spaniards. The evidence was in that mound. I expect this to be the most significant novel of my career, and tomorrow I get to work on it. But I don’t want folk knowing about the money yet, because then everybody would be asking me for money, and I just wanted that mound to get done. Uh, no, it couldn’t be left untouched, once discovered, because poachers would come and destroy it, as has been the case with most of the other mounds of Florida; that’s why so little is known about the local Indians. So it was excavated with respect, and my novel will really make the case for those Indians. I know what their land was like, because I live in it, and I know how the white man treated them. Forget about cowboys and Indians; this is a serious novel.
Sigh; I have rambled on for three pages. Well, you’re a good listener. Let me check your mother’s last letter, which just arrived today. She says you haven’t had a chance to answer about how you want your name in the Author’s Note. Well, let me know, so I can do it right and ship the novel off to New York. There is one more thing you maybe should know: I’ll be dedicating the novel to you, just to “Jenny,” however it is in the Author’s Note. Then folk can wonder who you are, until they find out at the end.
Your mother says they are setting up to rework your house, so that you can buzz around it in your blazing red wheelchair. She says she’s trying to figure out how to fit twice as much computer into half the space, and asks “ten pounds of dung in a five pound bag?” Another term for that description is—oops, there’s the Adult Conspiracy again. Well, I’ll sneak it in in brackets, so no one knows about my violation of the Conspiracy. The term is [blivet]. Don’t throw it around carelessly. Speaking of dirty things: she says that Ray’s car is now called the “Nitrogen Pot.” That must be some car! She also says she doesn’t drive much now. But after your accident—well, I had a car accident,
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