Letters to Jenny (8 page)

So our life goes on from day to day in its petty pace, and I guess yours does too. But keep working at things, Jenny; even inchworm steps are better than none. And tell your mother I meant to write her a letter too, this time, because I have a whole lot to say, but I ran out of time. So in a few days I’ll write her. You say all I have to do is tell you what I want to say to her, and you’ll tell her? Well, thanks, but do you really want to tell her two pages? I thought not.

PS—Since I changed from the manual typewriter to the computer, my I’s don’t capitalize; I think I take my finger off the capital key too fast. So I made a macro to capitalize them for me. It just capitalized 27 in this letter! And four more in this paragraph. Don’t you try to miss I’s like that—you’ll get cross-eyed.

Oh, one more thing: your mother told me of a story you wrote once, about flowers and a blind princess. Is it all right if I put that in the novel? I think it’s a lovely story, and it does explain why flowers have pretty smells. You have such a nice way of seeing things, sometimes, Jenny.

Ouch—and the printer messed up your letter; I’m printing it over. As I said before, the computer will get you if you don’t watch out.

*AUTHOR’S NOTE:

T
HE COMIC STRIP
I
MENTION SHOWED
C
URTIS HAVING LUNCH WITH HIS WHITE FRIEND
G
UNK, A VEGETARIAN, WHOSE SANDWICH HAD A WHOLE CARROT IN IT.
G
UNK IS A FRIEND TO ALL LIVING THINGS, AND HIS HOMELAND OF
F
LYSPECK
ISLAND IS A MAGICAL REALM
. J
ENNY AND I JUST HAD TO LIKE GUNK.

T
HE WHISTLE STORY IS BASED UPON A DEVELOPMENT IN
J
ENNY’S THERAPY PROGRAM
. J
ENNY HAD GOTTEN A WHISTLE, AND WAS ABLE TO BLOW IT.
T
HIS WAS A SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT, CONSIDERING THE GENERAL PARALYSIS OF HER FACE
. S
O I MADE A STORY ABOUT IT, POKING FUN AT HOSPITALS IN GENERAL.
B
UT I HAVE TO SAY THAT CUMBERLAND HOSPITAL IS A MUCH NICER PLACE THAN THE ORDINARY HOSPITAL, BEING RATHER LIKE A RESORT IN APPEARANCE AND ATTITUDE, AND THIS STORY HAS NO RELATION TO REALITY THERE
.

T
HESE LETTERS CONTAIN SEVERAL MENTIONS OF COMPUTERS IN CONJUNCTION WITH
J
ENNY’S MOTHER.
S
HE EARNS HER LIVING BY PROGRAMMING COMPUTERS, THUS IS RIPE FOR TEASING
. T
HERE WILL BE MORE OF IT
. I
T SEEMS THAT JENNY LAUGHS WHEN HER MOTHER GETS TEASED, AND HER MOTHER LOVES TO HAVE JENNY LAUGH, SO SHE ENJOYS GETTING TEASED.
T
HIS IS A POSITIVE ATTITUDE
.

May 1989

A right big toe uses a right useful computer to right difficult communications. 24-X = 12+X. One person gives a story to another, who may or may not have missed something. A realization of hair loss incurs a moment of sadness. And a happy reunion takes place.

Mayhem 5, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

I figured out what happened to the last letter: this word processor puts a “ruler” at the top of the file, setting the margins and things. When I set up a new file, for the Jenny letter, it put on its default ruler (yes, your mother will explain that in more detail than you care to hear; just ask her. She’s eager to start in, if you just give her the teensiest bit of encouragement) at the top. Then I used my “letter” macro to put my letter format on, forgetting the default format, which was now off the screen. So when I printed, it took the first ruler, which was the wrong one, and ignored the second. Then when I reset the paper, I put it in wrong. Growl!

I have things to tell you from the fun to the awful, and not enough time to tell it all, because I’m in a Jenny chapter of
Isle of View
now, with Jenny Elf and Che Centaur and Sammy Cat captives in the bottommost bowels of Goblin Mountain, and I want to get back and find out how they fare. Jenny is about to meet Gwendolyn Goblin—Um, I’d better check with you on this. She’s lame; I always knew that. That’s why the goblins wanted a horselike steed for her, so she could ride around instead of walking, and be princessly, or more properly chieftainessly because goblins have chiefs not kings, despite her handicap. But why foalnap a centaur foal, instead of a mere regular horse or something? Because, I now realize, there is more than lameness wrong with Gwenny. She doesn’t see well. If she rode a centaur, the centaur could see things and tell her, so that she would always know with whom she was dealing and what was going on, and never make embarrassing mistakes. But you see, this notion stems from your story about the blind princess, so it’s not wholly mine. Your mother told me she would ask you if it’s okay to tell that story here, and if you agree, Jenny Elf will tell it. But to have Gwenny Goblin with poor sight too—well, that fits so well that I think I’ll do it, unless you scream blankety murder or blow the whistle on me. No, no, don’t blow that whistle! The last time you did that—well, never mind.

Back to business: suppose I cut out the nice parts and cover the nasty parts instead, and—what? The other way around? Brother, you’re fussy today! No, leave that whistle alone; I’ll start with the nice.

Remember last time when I told you about the wrens in the bicycle bag? How they didn’t come back? That was Thursday I found the nest being started. Well, Sunday morning when I returned with the bike, using a new bike bag, a wren flew out of the other one. So I went inside and opened the bathroom window right next to it, quietly, and watched. Sure enough, Carroll and Lina Wren (down here we have Carolina wrens, with reddish undersides) flew in immediately, perched on the bike and looked all around to make sure I was gone. They had returned to the nest! My daughter Penny happened to drive up from St. Pete that day—the nice thing about daughters is that they visit even after they grow up and move away—and I told her about it, and she said I hadn’t looked closely enough. Her beady daughter eyes had spied an egg in that nest! A couple of days later there were two eggs there, and now there are three. So we have a family started here, and how glad I am that I took the trouble to set up that bike bag, though I thought they weren’t using it. I’ll report on developments as they occur. As I have said, wrens are good to have around the house; they are bold little birds who clean out the bugs that are trying to sneak into the house.

Now an ugly item. Ask your mother whether she should read it, as I happen to know she’s already sneaked a peek at it. She’ll skip it if you ask her to. This is from the news, and you may have picked it up already. A group of teenage boys in New York City went “wilding”—that’s a new term—and ran through Central Park at night beating up anyone they could find. They found nine or ten people. One of them was a lady jogger. They hit her in the face with a brick and raped her and hurt her so badly that they left her for dead. Several hours later when help came she had lost three quarters of her blood. They put her right into Cute Care and managed to save her life. That was last month. Now she has come out of her coma and is able to squeeze someone’s hand on command and move her eyes, and she evidently understands what is said to her, but they don’t know yet whether she will ever recover completely. Her life will never be the same, regardless, I thought of you when I read about this, because though the circumstances of your injury were different, your situation is similar. I think you can understand how that woman is feeling. She is recovering faster than you, because (I think) she was hurt more in the body than the head, while you got bashed worse in the head. But none of it is any fun. I don’t expect you to feel any better because someone else got hurt, but if you are the kind who prays, you might pray for her. You know what she needs.

Back to a nice item. Your mother sent me two of your pictures—no, don’t glare at her, she means well, honest she does, you just have to make allowance for mothers—of princesses—no, not the originals, she made copies, you don’t think she’d risk the originals, do you? So stifle that glare—uh, where were we? Somewhere in that sentence I got lost! Also your story about the blind princess. So now you get my critique. Stop that! Come back from under that sheet! You’re disturbing the Bed Monster! I told you this was a nice item, I think. Your spelling is like mine, which means you are a creative person. The only one in my family who could match my bad spelling was my dyslexic daughter Penny. Oh, I can spell now, of course; I learned it when I was an English teacher, and had to abandon my creativity. Sigh. I don’t know whether I’ll ever recover. But your pictures—what do you mean, what makes me think I’m an art critic? I took art classes for six years and once thought to be an artist, so there! Why didn’t I become an artist? Let’s change the subject. What? Look, we really don’t need to go into that. Oh, all
right
: I realized that I was not good enough to make it as a commercial artist. Now are you satisfied? I feel your pictures are marvelously mature, considering your age, and expressive. Maybe you’ll be able to do what I could not, and be an artist. But it’s something else that brought me to this paragraph. One of your pictures is of a woman with her baby, and she is crying. I’m not sure what the story is there, but I don’t think that’s the blind princess, unless maybe there’s a chapter I missed. But what I notice is her hair. It flows out and forms a kind of cape behind her, framing her upper body, I love that. I remember when—but no need to go into that.

Oops, you say you want to go into that? Sigh. All right. When I was eleven years old, I knew a girl who was twelve. No, I’m not making this up. She was everything desirable in a woman, as I saw her, I loved her. No, no one took it seriously, and certainly she didn’t; what would this fine young woman want with a boy of eleven? But my mental picture of her remains to this day, and I think I still love her, over forty years later, in my way. I know it by the hair. Her hair was the length of that of the woman in your picture, and though it did not flare out like that—she wore it in two long braids, mostly—I like to think that maybe it could have, had she wanted it to. To this day the first thing I notice about a woman is her hair. Have you seen pictures of the singer Crystal Gayle? Right—she’s my favorite singer. Because of that hair. Oh, she sings well, very well, but I really didn’t notice her singing until I saw her hair. So when I see your picture, and that hair, oh Jenny, it touches me. Perhaps by no special coincidence, I have a lady goblin in
Isle
of View named Godiva, who has hair like that. And of course in a prior Xanth novel I had Rapunzel. Nada Naga, in
Heaven Cent
, has hair like that too, and younger Prince Dolph loves her. Now you know why.

And an in-between item. I understand they have to give you nerve blocks, because you get pain, I have half a notion how that is. Some years back, when I was doing more strenuous exercises than I do now, my right arm started hurting, especially when I moved it, and it got to the point where it was getting hard for me even to type on the computer keyboard. So I saw the doctor, and it turned out to be tenonitis, or inflammation of the nerve. Not a life—threatening ailment, and it doesn’t sound like much, but if I moved my arm suddenly I could just about faint from the surge of pain. It was a job sleeping at night, because when I rolled over, the pain jerked me awake. Medicine didn’t help. Finally the doctor gave me a shot of Novocain in the nerve. That wasn’t a nerve block, and it didn’t make the pain go away, but it did reverse its course, so that in the following months I was able, slowly, to reach farther before the pain started. About the time my right arm got better, it started in the left arm. This time medicine helped, but it still reversed grudgingly. All told, it was about two and a half years from start to finish, and it wiped out all my arm exercises. I had done as many as fifty chins on my study beam, and a lot of Japanese pushups, and I had muscles on my arms. All gone now. Running is the only exercise I maintained. But in the course of this, I learned that pain was not necessarily bad. I found that when I knew exactly what caused it, and how to avoid it, and could control it by reaching only as far as I cared to tolerate the level of pain, I could get along with it. I get the feeling that you suffer pain, and you don’t want to make a scene about it and get everyone all up in a heaval, so you just tolerate it. Sometimes the pain is better than the shot in the nerve. Okay.