Oy, and the traffic!

     Life in a small town has its advantages; store merchants, restaurateurs, the grocery store manager, even the staff at the power company know you by name.  Mountain folks are infectiously nice and everyone knows just about everyone.  In Waynesville, word-of-mouth is the most efficient method of advertising, and a leisurely trip through town is more preferred than using the “four-lane” to get somewhere twice as fast.  You take your time here, there is no such thing as rush hour.

     We do have traffic issues, probably not as bad as some of your Interstates and demolition derby roadways, but I bet you can’t imagine how frustrating it is to get caught behind a tractor doing 8 MPH or having to wait for two or three cars at stop sign!

     People refer to the relaxed pace as “mountain time.”  At first I didn’t understand, then I had a project that required some hired help.  I found out quickly that mountain time is another way of saying, “I’ll get there when I get there.”  Unless of course, it's hunting season, or fishing season, or the hay needs baling, or a neighbor needs a hand, then they might be delayed.  Oh, and don’t jump to the wrong conclusion if someone asks you to meet them at dinner time, around here dinner is that big meal you eat at noon, the lighter fare eaten at sunset is supper.

     Everything moves “a mite slower” here and with far less stress.  That’s one reason why I never go to McDonalds.  The main thoroughfare that connects Waynesville to Maggie Valley and Smoky Mountain Expressway is Russ Avenue.  This is where all of the banks, grocery stores and fast food restaurants have congregated.  A while back, CVS decided that our bustling metropolis was in need of one more pharmacy.  They bought a tract of land next to McDonalds and built a brand new, state-of-the-art, brick-faced architectural abomination with almost no parking for the few people that actually shop there.  The new construction also ruined the access to the iconic greasy-burger-and-fries merchant, so the restaurant rebuilt, expanded and worsened the situation.  I do my best to avoid that area; it seems like every other day someone turning into the tiny entrance at Micky D’s, gets rear ended.  I’ll stick with Wendy’s.

     In addition to the commercialization of Russ Avenue and a similar cancerous growth across town where Walmart built a supercenter and a suburban-esque strip mall, Waynesville still has an active, quaint, Norman Rockwell-type downtown.  Main Street is the social and literal center of our community; it is where everyone meets for whatever reason.  In addition to a variety of restaurants, taverns, boutiques, clothing stores, art galleries, the bakery, and of course, a Mast General Store, it is the location of the monthly First Friday open house, Art After Dark, various festivals, street dances and holiday parades.  Our downtown is within an easy walking distance to the post office, police station, library, the Justice Center and Court House, our community theater and farmer’s market, plus at least a dozen churches.

     If there is any disadvantage to maintaining a traditional downtown, it is parking.  There is a free parking garage at the Justice Center and several strategically placed municipal parking lots, but the most cherished spaces are the spots along both sides of the street.  With the possible exception of leaf season, when all you flat-landers come up to experience our mountain hospitality and incredible autumn views, it is never too difficult to find a convenient place to leave my truck for an evening in town.  But I, like everyone else, must first drive the length of Main Street looking for that illusive, curb-side spot.  Don’t get me wrong, there is always at least one vacant space, but it will be on the other side of the street and taken before I can get turned around.  Geez, I end up having to walk a whole block or more just to get where I’m going.

From the Burr Studio & Gallery 136 North Main Street, Waynesville, NC 28786  

     So next time you're cussing your bumper-to-bumper commute, remember that even up here in God’s country, we’ve got traffic problems, and if it isn’t a McCrash, it’s the long walk for a cold beer.  

The Spring Vernal Equinox

     Today the world hangs in balance. Not from political, fiscal, religious, or cultural ideologies, but in the equality of sunlight and darkness. With each new day in the Northern Hemisphere, the duration of light will lengthen and come to dominate our measures of time; below the equator, darkness will rise in prominence. Day and night, balanced in proportion, the hemispheres now start their slide toward the opposing solstices.
     This is the first day of spring, the symbolic beginning of new life, a time of procreation and resurrection, a celebration of the dawn, Eos, Aurora and Eostre. But in America, we observe this solemn nexus with crass indifference. Beginning today, it will be impossible to avoid the commercialization of gardens, lawns, mulch, barbecues, patio furniture and all things outdoors. But I would suggest that you delay the rush to buy your vegetable seedlings, or the need to change the oil in your lawnmower, and put off tilling that sleepy flower bed. Instead listen to the spring.

     Growing up in a subsistence family of hunters and fishermen, living in the rural farm lands of southern New Jersey, I learned from an early age that Nature plays music, an orchestral opus which evolves as her seasons change. Listen to her. Discover her majestic sounds. Her composition is much more than the trill of her songbirds, the trebled lilt of a mountain stream, the wisp in the leaves of the canopy, or the deep rhythm of a distant thundercloud. It is all of this, plus so much more.
     Most people can't hear Nature; her music is overpowered by the ambient noise of people, traffic, television, radio, iPods, and the mechanical drone of civilization, the chaos of urbanization and suburbanization. But she is still singing, if only you would listen. Take a Thoreau-esque walk in the woods, leave all of that toxic noise behind and you can't miss her symphony of sensual stimuli. She will not only delight your ears, but caress your skin, sweeten the taste of air, manifest in aromatic therapy and produce divinely colored vistas. She sings to all of your senses. It is the lure of her song that brought me to the Smoky Mountains, back to the harmonious peace of country living.
     Her music is modulating with the change of the season. Take some time, find a place and listen.

The Blues in the Blue Ridge Mountains

I wish it were easier to write when I'm in a down mood. I've been battling the blues for about a week. It is not a situational sadness; there has been no tragedy, no catalyst, just a low pervasive depression that occasionally haunts my life. Yes, I know about and partake of the pharmaceutical remedies designed to alleviate most of the profound depths, and I do have a great cognitive behavioral therapist who helps me identify the pathology of my ups and downs. The problem is that the best therapy I have so far discovered is my writing, and as another "somewhat talented" writer once put it, "Therein lies the rub."

I don't write dark stories and I would never want to pen words that might inspire someone's desire to share my maladaptive thought patterns and troublesome moods. The art and craft of my language, fiction or non-fiction, literary, technical, or fun, is meant to stimulate the audience. I want my overt and covert intentions to hesitate in your conscious and subconscious psyches longer than the split millisecond needed for your optic nerve to translate the alphabetic images into a synaptic voltage. When you are finished, I want you to be a little "more" than you were before you read my words; I want to augment your mind, not degrade it. I am not interested in finding company for the misery of my emotional state.

Work is my God-send. The continuous inflow of pages needing edits is routine, automatic and mechanical. The jobs are obligatory and obligations are far more powerful than that inertial tendency to stand still, do nothing and sink deeper. If only I could obligate myself to more of life's activities and duties, I might override the worst of depression's symptomology. But what has this to do with me and you, here and now?

I started this blog because writing the light-hearted letters that accompanied my twice-monthly billing made me feel better. At first, I only wanted to preserve the writing and share it with a wider readership, but as the blog evolved and the site visits grew exponentially, my postings began to be anticipated and expected. The posts became an obligation, and that should be the conclusion: Forget the blues, do it, write! Right?

Unlike storytelling, this blog is a compilation of my observations. I live in an ideal small town environment on the border of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park called Waynesville, North Carolina. (BTW: Don't even think about it. We're getting way too crowded, there's no more room. You can come for a visit but then go home! J) Life is good here and when I see something humorous, ironic or even iconic, I expand that muse, inject a little literary license, limit myself to around 600 words, and hopefully, circulate a smile.

This week the lowlands of my mind have kept me from seeing the majestic terrain of my mountain habitat. Sadly, I could find no rural Appalachian idiosyncratic epitome to infect me with a humorous contagion. But I had to write something, and if you are reading this, then I obviously hit the publish button. I'm not sure I will, but if I did, let me know if it was worthy. Leave a comment below, write back about your own battles, share this confession and my atonement with your friends, please visit one of the advertisers, and check back soon; the sun will surely rise and drive away this darkness. I will find you a smile; I promise.

Take 3

Take Three

    When we moved back out in the country, it was our intention to escape the hubbub of the urban/suburban rat race. It did not take long to realize that Appalachia has a sort of hubbub too, it is just pronounced with a slow rural draw. In our relaxed style of living, I am two days behind in my billing, I don't want to even speculate about the number of pages waiting in my work queue, my truck needs to be inspected and registered, and I haven't been to the gym in so long, that I am afraid they may not recognize my membership number, and that is just the beginning. 
    Yes, it has been another chaotic week. To put it in easy terms, this is my third attempt at getting this written. And this time, hell or high water (translation: snow storms or computer crashes), I am going to finish this.
    The week started with Shirle arriving back home after a two week visit in Florida. She arrived a mere 24 hours ahead of the fore-announced visit of my grandson, Josh, and his beautiful girlfriend, Thao. With guests coming, the house needed a good cleaning (I did mention Shirle was gone for two weeks, right?). The weather forecast was ominous and a trip to town to stock up on provisions was very necessary. The heavy snow was predicted to start about the same time Josh and Thao were scheduled to arrive. They live down in the Sunshine State, and have no experience with driving in winter weather or on mountain roads.
    Now if you think all of that is enough to set the stage for fun, while my wife was off socializing, I made the difficult decision to replace the central hub of my home network because it was less expensive to buy something new than attempt to upgrade the antiquated guts of the old system. I also decided to buy some additional RAM for the old machine with the intention of having backup and a working alternative while I licensed and loaded all of the software I would need for the new server.
    Fortunately, both UPS and Josh beat the onset of winter's (hopefully) last hurrah. The snow settled in overnight and we awoke to the picturesque vista of snow-capped Smoky Mountains and a pure white valley below. Knowing there was no way off the mountain, I secluded myself in the office to begin the necessary work on the computers. I carefully grounded myself, opened the case on the old machine, installed the new memory, closed it up, and booted the system. Everything went as it should right up until Windows began loading the system tray; it shut off (not down, off!). After enough resuscitation attempts that it was obvious that I needed to pronounce it dead, I realized that I had no choice but to begin the arduous task of rebuilding my network on the as yet unopened new CPU.
     Meanwhile, while I'm wearing my "computer nerd" hat, the long, warm rays of sunshine that foretell the onset of spring, melted the snow on the driveway and roads. I was unimpressed because I knew the storm was not over and we were expecting a lot more accumulation; I kept going. I had no idea that down in the kitchen, my thin-blooded relatives were hatching an ill-conceived plan to drive into Asheville for a day of fun and exploration. By the time my workday was over and I discovered them missing, the kids were on their way back, the snow had started falling heavily, and the temperature had dropped so much that my attempt to salt the driveway for their arrival was thwarted by my inability to walk on its icy surface.

Josh and Thao

     Josh made it within about a quarter mile. I could see his car down below but the traction was gone. He parked off to the side and he and Thao set out on foot. Thank goodness for cell phones; I watched and directed him to the easiest path and warned them to walk in the snow and stay clear of the slick pavement. Their short trek encompassed a 150 foot rise in elevation. Out-of-breath and chilled to the bone, they couldn't wait to enter warmth and shelter of my mountainside home.
     The storm is gone and so is all of the snow, the kids are back in Florida, my new server is up and running, the old one slated to be donated to a worthy cause PCs4GED (if you have old equipment consider this: http://www.haywood.edu/pcs4ged), everything is returning to abnormal. Oh yeah, don't forget to set your clocks ahead, we get to lose an hour of sleep tonight; who needs sleep anyway.

They shot the Waynesville town turkey!

     In my post a few days ago I made reference to the shooting of the Waynesville town turkey.  I received enough inquiries to dig out the story from the archives and post it.

     It should be noted that long before I started the blog, these musings of mine were used as a cover letter for the twice monthly invoicing of my regular clients.  It was at their encouragement that I began the blog. 

     This was sent on November 22, 2011, approximately one month after the execution of Tom.

Thanksgiving 2011

     It's time to once again to send out the invoices and I was considering writing a sappy heart-felt letter of gratitude for your business and to remind everyone to count their blessings every day and not just on the third Thursday of November, but instead I decided to tell one of my (hopefully) witty (but true) stories.

     I was lamenting with a friend this morning (you know who you are), about a great tragedy the recently befell my little mountain town.  A year or so ago, a rancorous tom turkey took up residence on the east side of our little burb.  He made the parking lot of the Apple Crate restaurant his headquarters, but was not adverse to wandering the nearby neighborhoods or obstinately standing in the middle of the road to stop traffic and peck at the tires of the (mostly) amused drivers.

     No local ever ventured over to that side of town without keeping a close eye out for Tom Gobbles and watching for his ever escalating antics.  It was refreshing to see an icon of Americana, a true soul of wildlife, decide that we, as a species, were not so bad that he couldn't coexist in the same habitat. 

     And then a couple of months ago, the county animal control officers decided that Old Tom was getting too tame and unafraid of humans.  It was stated in the paper that wildlife in town was dangerous and that the avian mascot of Waynesville was becoming a nuisance.  He had to go.  Our government henchmen tried unsuccessfully for several weeks to trap our beloved bird and relocate him to what they thought would be a better home.  These inane attempts were met with the ridicule and animus of the local populace and the disdain of the elusive bearded one himself. 

     Finally in frustration, our duly appointed officers cornered poor Tom in the yard of his favorite restaurant.  One of the county’s agents, our lone female warden, embarrassed by the numerous ineffective attempts to humanely deal with this overly exaggerated municipal menace, reached into her official county pickup and extracted a shotgun from it security rack.  In front of a restaurant full of patrons and a family with small children exiting their minivan, she aimed carefully and shot Old Tom dead.  (There's more news and accounts on Tom’s FaceBook page -- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Gobbles/201424043209757 )

     Now I blame our country’s famous founding father, Benjamin Franklin for this senseless assassination.  He, of course, wanted the wild turkey to be our national bird and the symbol our great nation.  If he would have spent less time flying kites and more time addressing the Continental Congress, he might have succeeded, and I'm sure our town turkey would have been protected from the aggression of our runaway government in action.

     Now, if the US icon was a turkey instead of the bald eagle, I'm not so sure we'd eat quite so many fowl dinners, and frankly, the idea of roast eagle just doesn’t sound appetizing.  It might also have led to a tradition of feasting on turkey, cornbread stuffing, and mashed potatoes as a Fourth of July celebration.  But then again, the tryptophan and over-stuffed belt-lines may have put a serious damper on the late evening fireworks.

     One last observation:  Maybe, just maybe, good ole Ben has posthumously won out in his attempt to promote a different US symbol.  I don't know about you, but whenever our Washington DC politicians start to talk, all I can think of is a bunch of turkeys.

     Gobble-gobble.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Why a blog?

     I was having an email conversation a while back with someone I consider close regardless of the distance between our homes.  I was lamenting the fact that I was two days behind in my invoicing, somewhat lacking in energetic motivation, and bereft of a writing inspiration for the blog.  Her retort was a simple, “Make it short and sweet.  It’s okay, no one will care.”  I had to explain it is really not okay, and someone will care -- me.

     I would guess that most of you have figured out that I am a writer at heart.  What you may not know is that with VERY few exceptions, it is nearly impossible to make a sustainable living writing.  So instead I ply my talents by helping other writers, researchers, stenographers and the like with editing and proofreading.  But I still desperately seek time to craft my own words on paper (well, computer media), and ease the over-pressure of creative thoughts that haunt my subconscious; hence, I blog.

     Unfortunately when writing fiction, I am one of those craftsmen that must shut down my innate persona in order to animate the characters that inhabit that other world that I write about.  Those characters are both the subject and authors of my stories.  It is their words that end up on my paper, often surprising me by taking the plots onto totally unsuspected paths.  It is a tedious and difficult process of stripping my ego to its bare id; an adventurous sojourn into what I refer to as “the hole.”

     Getting in is a conscious and intentional act; getting out is something completely different.  There is no intentional way to control the length of my stay in the hole.  I have ventured in for as little as a few hours and sometimes for as long as a week.  While there, I am not conversant, generally quiet, keeping to myself; I have been told I am not pleasant to be around, I don’t eat much, drink much, sleep much, do much of anything because I am off living a different life, the life of someone trying to get out and onto the pages of my story.  In case you’re trying to figure out the differences in my personality, I normally eat too much and drink too much; the quiet, introvert that isn’t very pleasant to be around, well, that’s just me.  So by its nature, my writing is not as easy as “stealing an hour or two” to jot down a few pages.

     So back to these posts that you all have to suffer through.  This is therapy for me, a pressure relief valve that vents just enough steam to keep me going.  I get to tell stories about me (no hole needed), and occasionally say something humorous or at least thought provoking.  I can tell when I’ve been successful, or not, by the feedback, or not.  So please indulge my ramblings, and don’t worry that this task was an unnecessary or superfluous addition to my over booked schedule.  Admittedly, sometimes it’s hard to come up with a good topic (they don’t shoot the Waynesville town turkey every week), but I like doing it.  I hope you like reading it; if you do, please share it.

An ass in the mountains

     They say there’s one in every crowd, and yesterday I guess I confirmed it.

     With Shirle down in Florida visiting friends and family, my daily routine has been turned upside down.  Yes, I still get up early and work late, but with the addition of the household chores normally tended to by my loving (well, sometimes!) wife, plus the demands of two very needy dogs who require walks, food and attention, my work schedule is in constant disruption. 

     My property on the side of this mountain is not fenced in or dog friendly.  Our Betsy is well trained and not in need of a lot of attention when it’s time for her potty breaks, but Sebastian is still learning.  I have chased him up and down these steep grades twice, and I am not interested in a third attempt, so Sebastian must go out on a leash.

     Since I have yet to finish installing the garage door opener, my truck sits outside near the tiny level area that the dogs use.  Sebastian, who has recently learned of the canine version of ecstasy, a car ride, now frequently disregards his metabolism’s calling, opting instead to beg at the backdoor of my Explorer.  Partially to satisfy his insatiable desire, and partially because I don’t want the hassle of catching him and forcing him into his kennel, Sebastian and Betsy have been going on my daily trips down the mountain to the mailbox.

     Yesterday as I forged the tiny creek that crosses the entrance to our private road up the mountain, the dogs started going crazy.  I knew it wasn’t the herd of cows in the adjacent pasture, those bovines are old news; and it didn’t appear as though they were answering the Rottweiler who always greets us from his yard high above the mailbox station; the watchdog was uncharacteristically quiet.  It wasn’t until I got out of the truck that I caught sight of the reason for the seemingly vicious attack dog’s stunned silence as well as the chaotic yammering of my own pseudo ferocious companions.

     Yes, even here in the Bible belt, even in the rural backwoods of the Smoky Mountains, even amongst the friendliest people in the world (not counting the ones from Deliverance), you never know when you’re going to run into a big ass (no, not Ned Beatty).  Now, in case you suspect I misidentified this stranger, I have to say I have lived around these animals all my life.  Believe me; I know the difference between most things and a true jackass.  This was, unquestionably, not a horse or a mule, it was a very, very large donkey.

He (my gender assumption) apparently escaped the farm hidden behind the trees from which I enjoy the relaxed sounds of farm life.  From my aerie’s front deck, I often hear the roosters, turkeys, cows, horses, and yes, the occasional bray of this misbehaving Equus asinus. 

     Perplexed with how to handle a six-foot tall donkey, without a bridle to lead him, with two noisy dogs in the back seat, and with no idea where exactly he was supposed to be corralled, the long-eared truant took pity on me and began a slow amble up a rutted trail in the direction of the hillside farm.  Moments later to my relief, I saw the green F-150 that is also garaged somewhere up that lane, approach with the distraught owner searching for his missing Jack.

     I love my rural mountain life, even though I still occasionally run into a true jackass.

Double-duty chores

    It’s been a fun few days here in the Smokies.  I’m acting as sole caregiver and puppy-sitter while Shirle visits with her daughters and grandchildren down in the Sunshine State.

    In the years we’ve been living in the mountains, I’ve grown quite used to these periods of solitude and double-duty chores.  I still wince a little at each hint of a need for her “babies,” but it’s futile to fight the inevitable; I just have to muster the extra time and my seldom used talents to run the household without the all-essential spousal assistance.

Bubba a/k/a Baxter

     Unfortunately, this is my first solo since Baxter, our beloved Cavalier, passed away.  The void he left has been partially filled by a new puppy, Sebastian, and although the little guy is trying real hard, he hasn’t yet replaced my “Bubba.”

Sebastian

    Sebastian is a mixed breed terror (oops, I mean terrier), who was not house-broken when we rescued him.  He did catch on quickly by Shirle and me acting as his biological time clock.  We “broke” him by timed, routine escorts outside and rewarding each success with treats and jubilant atta-boys.  

    These potty excursions are often interrupted with visits from White Dog and Angel, a male shepherd and a female whippet that live in the neighborhood.  Sebastian reacts to these overly friendly dogs with equal parts of excitement, jealous anger and Napoleonic challenges.  Working with gentle leash tugs, verbal commands and the occasional finger spank on the nose, he is learning his social skills and is now anxious (in a good way) for his “friends” to come visit.  (I have to tell you that while I was writing that paragraph, there was a noise at the backdoor; it was Angel wanting to come in and play.)

    Sebastian is experimenting with signals; he's got a bunch of them.  Typical of his breed, he tends to be very vocal and try as we will to understand, he keeps changing which sound means which need.  He has the typical pathetic whine (which originally meant, “I don’t want to get spanked again, so you better take me out”),  but he also uses a whimpering cry, a musical growl, a sassy yap, a snort at the door, and the totally-adorable River Dance, where he kicks his hind feet like an Irish dancer.

    The problem is his needs range from “pee-pee,” to “poo-poo,” to I want to go see if my friends are outside, to I want to sit in the sunshine, to I want to go outside for no apparent reason, to can you play with me daddy, and to “I’m bored watching you work, so I am going to drive you insane.”  He knows how to get our attention, but he has yet to settle on a definitive “this” means “that.”  There’s no way I can risk ignoring him, remember, he is only recently house-broken, so I spend half my day bookmarking my work, putting on a coat, getting him on a leash (I can’t trust him not to run away), and taking him downstairs and outside.  Unfortunately, I never know if it’s for “business” or pleasure. 

    Lately, on his hourly sojourns, he’s been sniffing around the running boards of my truck and standing on his hind feet attempting look inside.  He remembers that his mommy comes and goes in that truck, and he not sure she’s not in there waiting to get out and kiss him.

    To convince him that I really haven’t hidden Mommy’s body under the back seat…                     Sorry, I lost my train of thought. 

    

    Oh yeah, to satisfy his curiosity, I have been taking him on my daily trip down the mountain to the mailbox and bank.  He’s no dummy, I am sure he’s adding, “Can we go for a ride?” to his rotating list of signals.

Betsy

19-year-old Hannah

    But life goes on in the mountains, and Sebastian, and Betsy, and Hannah, and me will survive this mommy-less interlude; I just can’t predict how much work will get done.

Snow + Mountains + Floridians = Panic

   Ah, a winter's day in the Smoky Mountains.  Our daughter and her partner are visiting from the Sunshine State.  They still live down there because they refused to come with us the night we scaled the fence and escaped.  Susan's son and our grandson Noah came along for the visit with the exuberant desire to see real snow for the first time.
   The weather graciously complied with Noah's wishes and snow is in the forecast.  The dilemma is that Susan and Lisa want to spend all day and night Saturday in nearby Asheville, leaving us some valuable time with Noah.  That may not sound like a dilemma unless you remember my mention of our five-story driveway and home perched on the side of a mountain.  These flatlanders panicked the first, second, and third time they negotiated the steep grade up to this house, and although they love the view, they just can't understand our preference for this kind of elevation.  
   This coming "storm" is one of those snow events that just does not allow an accurate prediction.  With the terrain here and to our northwest, the precipitation will break and split and then reform again.  Some places will get significant accumulations, while just miles away it will be dry.  It really will depend on the fortuity of your homestead.  Those of us with a few years experience don't fear the 24/7 weather warnings.  It is only snow!
   Well, these Floridians who abide year-round humidity and dodge the yearly tropical storms, are scared to the point of humor over, "Will we be able to get down?" and "How will we ever get back up?"  We who live here know that snowfall is always a short-term event, and if you can't get down or up a mountain you just wait a few hours and it will clear.

    But with jobs and school and their prospering business, Tide the Knot, they can't fathom the idea of slowing their pace and letting a little time elapse.  Waiting is just not an option they wish to consider.
    This winter we have had visits from three different parties still imprisoned on the great retirement peninsula and a couple from Hawaii; this is the first "inclement" weather that threatened our warm weather friends.  Hey, it's February in the mountains!  We really do have a winter, but it's livable, beautiful, relaxed, and fun.  We chose the Waynesville area because we love it.  If you don't like winter, there are three other seasons you can visit.

Are you ready for a good Valentine's Day whipping?

   Well, this is a bit late (as usual), but this time you can blame my sister.  She is apparently testing me to see how much work she can pile on without it becoming fatal.  Little does she know, when she overloads me with work, I just forego all those other non-essential tasks in my day, like writing posts, doing my invoicing, eating and sleeping.  Ha!  The joke’s on her.

   I’m sure everyone realizes that Thursday is Valentine’s Day (far more important than the birthday of President Lincoln on Tuesday or Washington next Friday).  Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day, time for naked men to run through the streets whipping women with lashes cut from freshly killed goats.  What?  You don’t celebrate it Roman style?  Come on, flogging your sweetheart has got to be better, certainly more satisfying, than buying her chocolates and roses.

   Seriously, that was the way Romans celebrated well into the fifth century.  It was a rite of purification and fertility.  Had something to do with Lupa, the female wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, the orphan brothers who founded Rome.  I’m still a little lost how flagellating young women and boys suckling on a wolf’s teat has anything to fertility; it just doesn’t sound like it could end up with intimate romance.

   But the holiday has evolved into an iconic celebration of love, sex and sappy greeting cards.  You might wonder just who is at fault for those inane poems that cost five bucks and end up in the trash three days later.  Well, there is some uncertainty over just who was Saint Valentine.  The three leading candidates are all holy men named Valentine from the second century and all were beheaded, so don’t lose your head over love.  The most cited “Saint” was a priest who performed secret nuptials for lovers prohibited from marriage.  He was supposedly imprisoned where he fell in love with the warden’s daughter.  On the day of his execution, he wrote her a letter and signed it, “From your Valentine.”

   Most historians, however, credit Bonne d’Armagnac, the would-be founder of Hallmark, with penning the first true Valentine poem.  He was a French nobleman, Duke Charles of Orleans, and was captured by those fun-loving Brits and tossed into the Tower of London where he languished for twenty-five years.  In his isolation and forced celibacy, he wrote his wife a long rambling, (and rhyming) love poem and used that word, it started: "Je suis déjà d'amour tanné. Ma très douce Valentinée." (I am already sick with love, My very gentle Valentine).  By-the-way, that poetry crap must have worked; she waited for him.  Well, she tried to wait for him; she passed away before Bonne was released and made his way back to France, no word on just how chaste she remained in his absence.

   So don’t forget to buy a poetic card (I found out the hard way not to use that email kind), and enjoy the flogging whichever end you’re on.

Super Bowl Monday

   Happy Super Bowl Monday!  

   There’s a movement to make this day a national holiday. I guess too many worker ants are either not showing up at their jobs, or they’re trying to perform their tasks hung over.

   Super Bowl Monday would be an all-American holiday, wouldn’t it?  I mean no other country plays “American” football.  Sure, there’s a Canadian League, but aren’t they actually just Americans who tip poorly?  This time of year about half the population of Florida hails from those unofficial northern states.

   This holiday thing isn't a novel idea.  We've had a national hangover recovery day for years on January 1st.  Think about it, there is no other reason to celebrate New Year’s Day.  If it weren't for the hoards of normally sober, sane, mature, intelligent people acting like, well you've seen them (heck, you're probably one of them).  If it weren't for them, we would all start the business year one day earlier.

   All in all, I’m not sure a new holiday is such a good idea.  Obviously, I have to work today, and I would have to work even if it was a “day off,” but we have plenty of sanctioned lazy days already.  Plus, look how long and hard it was to get Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. his holiday (so what if he wasn't a Hall of Fame running back), if he isn't an MVP, then who is?

   Super Bowl Monday?  We took away Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays and lumped them together with Chester A. Arthur and James K. Polk and call it President's Day.  We crossed out Armistice Day, Armed Forces Day, Patriots Day, Pearl Harbor Day, American Indian Day and even Confederate Memorial Day; and let’s not even discuss The Bill of Rights Day (remember the day we all got to shoot off our mouths AND shoot off our guns).  We used to celebrate Aviation Day, Maritime Day, Pioneer Day, Citizenship Day, and who could forget the original women’s liberation movement on Sadie Hawkin's Day.  There was even a holiday called United Nations Day; okay, so maybe that one deserves to be omitted.  Really we've had a bunch of very prominent American celebrations downsized and outsourced: Flag Day, Arbor Day, Valentine's Day, do we get off?  No! 

   So I say, swallow some aspirin with a glass of tomato juice, bitters and Tobasco Sauce, and get to work America.  Beyonce and the Budweiser ads (and that weird Go Daddy thing) did their thing.  Twenty-two men adorned their faces with war paint and spent a couple of hours trying carry or prevent the carry of a poorly taxidermied pig 300 feet to break an imaginary plane while billions of chicken wings were washed down with gallons of beer.  It's over; somebody won, somebody lost, and it's Monday morning.  Think of it this way, you only have about two-and-a-half months to save up your contribution to our national debt.  

   April 15th, now THAT should be a holiday!

Mountain life has its ups and downs

     Yesterday I was tasked with going out in the front yard and retrieving two door mats, a decorative flag, three landscape lights and some sundry items of unknown but apparent substantial value that had been blown away during a recent Smoky Mountain windstorm.  Now, for those of you that do not live on the side of a mountain or enjoyed a vacation in this part of Eden, my front yard has a slight grade to it.  The best way to give you perspective is that my driveway drops FIVE stories from the garage to the road and the road drops another 500 feet to the street, and from there you just go downhill until you get to town. (UPDATE: I recently downloaded an altimeter app for my Android phone -- the driveway actually drops 110 feet, so that is more like ten stories, and from my gate to my mailbox on the county road it drops another 530 feet.)

    I had been procrastinating the trip into the yard, but the wifey (now ex-wife) said I must, so I sucked it up and jumped off the retaining wall into the virgin forest (Yes, virgin forest, believe me, nobody in their right mind would go F'ing around on that slope) and began to work my way through the overgrown briers, leaves and dead-fall to excavate and gather my belongings.  
     For the most part, the (wife-valued) litter had landed high up the slope and settled on or near the foundation pad.  Unfortunately, two significant and expensive parts of the landscape lights had slid a bit farther down the hill.  After several laughable attempts, I managed to toss the more easily retrieved bounty up onto the lower decking, and reluctantly started the descent further into the "yard."
     I knew that there was no turning back.  No, literally; there's no turning back!  The slope is so steep that once you step away from grading of the house pad, there is no way to climb back up (okay, you Mt. Everest climbers, maybe you might with the expert help of a couple of Tibetan Sherpa).  I carefully sidled my way down through underbrush to the resting places of my wayward lighting and stashed the precious parts under my arm to preserve the use of my hands as essential braking apparatus against the pull of gravity.  With very little steerable variance, my route was straight down as I crept along the uncertain and untrod path through the dense woods in a general tangent towards the intersection of the road and my driveway.
     It was no big deal, I made it just fine.  A few cuts and scraps, a couple of slip-and-falls, and a fully sweat stained dress shirt, and okay, maybe I was wearing the preposterously wrong kind of shoes, but I managed to scale the mountain, ford the roadside ravine, and climb back up to that celebrated iconic symbol of Western civilization: pavement! 
     Did I mention my driveway drops FIVE (TEN) STORIES!  Well, from down there, it rises those same five ten stories.  No elevator, no stairs, no rappelling ropes, just a concrete ramp that was never designed for pedestrians, let alone a middle-aged, out-of-shape writer. 
   Yesterday I joked on social media about never doing that chore ever again and just heading down to the Walmart to buy new stuff to replace anything that happened to fall from the sanctity and protection of my mountain manse.  Yes, that post was funny, and yes, the thorn cuts on my hands, arms, and legs have finally stopped bleeding, and yes, I really have no plans to EVER venture into that front yard again.  But the real laugh is that in all of the diversity of my education, I have never had the opportunity to study the musculature of the human body, and me being an aging, New Jersey, flat-lander whose virile early years are no more than a well-faded memory; the consequences of attempting to scale my mountain, a challenge that even in my youth would have been ill-advised, has had a few consequences.  
     I have aches where I never knew I had muscles; heck, I hurt in places I didn't even know were part of my body!
     Wah, wah, wah!  Big crybaby right?  
     Remember I live on a mountainside.  The main floor of my house is a full 12' story (18 steps) above the ground level where my dogs need to pee several times a day.  My office where I'm writing this is upstairs; another 12' story above the main floor.  Think about it, I do more stair climbing in one day than a chubby soon-to-be-June bride exercising the whole month of May.  And each trip up or down these staircases hurts me in new and ever surprising ways.  
    Oh, in case you wondered, I am skipping the gym this week, instead I'm going to open a bottle of wine and relax in the soothing warmth of my Jacuzzi bathtub.

Not me, I got a flu shot.

   It’s been a fun couple of weeks up here in the mountains.  I took some time last week to run into town for some Marsala wine and went to Ingle’s (our better grocery store).  First off, I did NOT slip and fall and hire a lawyer; I don’t live in Ft. Lauderdale where apparently that is a legally mandated requirement of grocery shopping.  I did; however, notice that every cashier and bagger in the store was coughing, sneezing, blowing their nose or moaning about aches and pains.  Isn’t flu season fun?!?

   I’m no fool; early on I saw the good Doctor Weaver and got my dose of chicken egg and dead influenza virus.  I brazenly stood there in the fog of aerated germs knowing that I had grown the necessary antibodies to fend off even the most aggressive pathogens.  I exchanged courteous greetings with the sickly store personnel and accepted my germ-filled receipt and bagged goods without fear.  Little did I know that while my emboldened immune system was in epic battle with the legions of infectious spores, two or three highly trained “black ops” soldiers would circle around the flanks and attack my unguarded fertile mucus glands.

   Unlike my raven-haired Philly friend (actually, she from South Jersey, but she has a big-girl apartment in the city now), I wasn’t completely incapacitated by the flu.  I did get sick with a fever, aches and pains, and general malaise, but I tried desperately to stay in the running while I summoned some of my frontline forces back to fight the rogue saboteurs.  

   When the viral sorties finally subsided, I found my work queue overly saturated with time sensitive work.  I was confident that with a predicted winter storm heading into the mountains, that my days would be undisturbed by recreative trips to the gym or (God forbid) Walmart, and I would soon deplete my onerous backlog.  But what I had not counted on was the snowstorm causing numerous power fluctuations that were apparently so uncomfortable that my cellular modem/router could not sustain itself and committed equipicide. 

   I have spent the last five days fighting with Verizon (who refuses to believe that any mere mortal non-phone-guy could possible know what the hell he is talking about) and relying on email communications, uploading and downloading, and web searches on my phone.  Oh yeah, yesterday, four days into my worst technological nightmare, Verizon finally told me that my data plan included their “mobile hotspot” service on my phone.  Thanks for the timely news!

   So in case you have wondered why this post and a few other normally timely tasks of mine are just a mite tardy, you can blame that demonic entity that once exorcised from my body, decided to infect and possess my computer equipment.

   Speaking of demons, has anyone noticed that Mercedes Benz is using Sympathy for the Devil as a theme song and incorporating hellish fire in their logo?  What’s up with that?

Whatever happened to Sabrina Aisenberg?

     This is the first of the promised pieces of my fiction.  It is a little longer than a typical blog post, but read on, and please, please, please leave me some feedback.

     In 1997, as many of you know, my ex-wife and I were living in the St. Petersburg area of Florida.  Across the bay in a suburb of Tampa, a four-month-old baby girl disappeared from her crib in the middle of the night.  Based on the anecdotal evidence of a garage door left uncharacteristically open, a family dog that never barked, and the nursery being the only room intruded, the police quickly began to target little Sabrina’s parents, Marlene and Steve Aisenberg as the probable cause of the infant’s disappearance.

     Over the next several years, transcripts of unintelligible wiretaps, police press conferences offering potential scenarios and wild speculative suspicions in the press, were weighed against verifiable facts, unidentified fingerprints, and detectives caught lying on warrant affidavits.  Charges were eventually levied and then thrown out by the courts.  The Aisenbergs have never wavered in their protests of innocence and many in law enforcement believe they got away with an unspeakable crime.

     With no answer to the whereabouts of Sabrina Aisenberg, popular opinion is as divided as the accused and the accusers.  There are as many people convinced of Marlene and Steve’s guilt as there are certain that the botched investigation and “malicious prosecution” is the only reason Sabrina is still missing.

     As a writer, I was intrigued with the juxtaposition of opinion and contradictory evidence.  The following story is my attempt to create an unresolved conflict of truths and beliefs.  Fauna has evolved from a typical third person story, to a monologue, to a one act play, and finally to the interview form as it exists today.  I don’t think any writing is ever finished, but I think this is ready for you to read.   

      Please leave a comment, and share it with friends (there are links for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and email at the end of the post).

Fauna

FOREWORD

     The following is the story of Warren Thomas Smith as it was told to me by the convicted murderer himself just months before his death.  This is essentially the same tale he used as his defense during his trial.  The purpose of recounting this saga is simple:  I promised Mr. Smith that I would.  The promise was in exchange for his granting me the interviews from which this account has been derived.

     I admit that I entered into this agreement suffering the same biases and prejudices that many of my readers are sure to have.  It should also be understood that Warren Smith’s genuine sincerity and indisputable consistency, coupled with events that coincided with his suicide on April 19, 2000, has given me reason to question my initial judgment.  With the exception of this foreword and the attached postscript which details certain news accounts that corresponded with his death, Mr. Smith’s depiction of the events leading up to this tragedy is presented without editorial comment or opinion.

     The interviews represented here were conducted over three consecutive Mondays in November 1999.  I generally write (as I hope many of you already know) stories of life’s anti-heroes, damned by innate evil or uncontrollable circumstances.  I was tediously researching a (still unpublished) plot line in which my protagonist murders his one true love.  In the course of my endeavors to write credible characters, I interviewed and studied eighteen convicted killers.  Each of the fifteen men and three women had killed someone for whom they professed a deep and undying love.  None of the slayings were spontaneous incidences of rage or passion, rather each was apparently carefully planned and executed with total deference to the professed affection between murderer and victim.

     It was with this purpose that I traveled to Raiford, Florida and through the gates of the Union Correctional Facility (formally Florida State Prison).  This was the involuntary home of Warren Thomas Smith, incarcerated and serving a ten to twenty-five year sentence for the abduction and second degree murder of Fauna Adamson.  The State contends that the murder (or disappearance) occurred in precisely the same location in Florida’s Ocala National Forest where Smith had discovered the infant Fauna, abandoned just hours after her birth.  His thirteen year obsession with the flaxen haired nymph and his inexplicable acts, clearly qualified this case for my study.

     Smith had acquiesced to my interview for the reason already stated, and was relaxed and unencumbered by manacles or shackles during each of the sessions.  His stature and demeanor were much the same as we all remember from the televised coverage of his trial.  The nine-and-a-half years of confinement had somewhat grayed his hair and added more than twenty pounds to his stringy physique.  He had just acknowledged his fifty-third birthday (he laughed when I asked if it was a celebration) with an unauthorized tattoo of a broken heart crossed with Fauna’s name.  He was obviously troubled by the juxtaposition of his devotion to the girl and his participation in her tragic fate.

     The following account is edited modestly.  Some omissions are intended to delete repetitions and reiterations that resulted from the various breaks in our conversations.  I employed a minimal amount of editorial correction of syntax and grammar, and only where I was concerned that his poor use of English might detract from the significance of his account.  I was more diligent in omitting profanity as it added little depth of meaning and I desire the widest possible audience for this story.  There are times that Mr. Smith’s chronicle appears to be nothing more than a ludicrous, self-serving, logorrheic fantasy, but it is my considered opinion that Warren Thomas Smith believed every word of his tale.   

Union Correctional Institution 

- Raiford, Florida - 

November 1999

     Okay, if you want to know what [...] happened to Fauna, I’ll try and tell you, then maybe you can tell me why I’m in this [...] jail.

     I found her back in ‘70.  It was kind of fluky that I was where I was.  Right place, right time, I guess.  Maybe it was the wrong [...] place, I don’t know.  But it was all because of my job. 

     I had had a tough week.  Back then I was pounding nails for some […] want-to-be contractor.  He was the kind of […] hole that would stand over you and tell you exactly what to do, and then bust your nuts in front of God and everyone for doing it wrong.  He’d cuss and call me names for doing a job exactly the way he told me to.  He was a good one for screaming in your face.  I didn’t like him much.

     Friday came and I thought about going out and getting wasted.  I drank a lot back then, but instead I just went home.  I was feeling strange.  Kind of antsy, if you know what I mean, like I needed something.  I don’t how to describe it.  This is what those detectives said was supposed to be my pedophilia.  It wasn’t anything like that.  I wasn’t horny or lonely or nothing.  What I think it was, was a prem... What's that word, yeah, premonition, like ESP or something.  I knew something was going to happen, like an itchy palm before you find money.

     Anyway, I cashed my check at the grocery store, bought a can of Dinty Moore, and went home.  I didn’t do much that night.  I ate the stew while watching some movie on TV, and went to bed.  Back then I didn’t go to sleep much without having a couple of drinks.  But that night I fell asleep stone-cold sober.  It was kind of weird, I slept all night, but I remember when I woke up, I was dog-tired.  It felt like I’d been up all night. 

     I know this might sound like a load of bull […], especially after everything that happened, but something was playing on my mind, you know, inside my head, and I think it was Fauna.  I think she was trying to let me know....  Like she was telling me to come get her.  Ever get a feeling like that?

     It was Saturday morning; I was up early, dog-tired, and I had nothing to do. Thought about it and decided to take a drive.  You know, get out and cool down; mellow out and take it easy.  I needed to forget about work for a while.  I thought about calling up some of my friends, but figured I was better off going solo, besides I didn’t know what I was going to do and I didn’t want to be obligated to no one.  

     I stopped at the Circle K down on the corner for one of those big cups of coffee to clear my head and started out east on 40.  I don’t know if you’ve ever driven that road, but its mostly just two lanes that winds its way out through the Ocala National Forest.  Real pretty.  Old Florida, if you know what I mean.  Not much out there; a couple of Podunk little towns and a few biker bars.  It’s a good drive if you ain’t trying to get somewhere fast. 

     There was a lot of traffic that morning; mostly bikes and trucks pulling boats.  That’s why I decided to get off the highway and take the side roads.

     I was pretty near into Lake County when I turned south on 19 and then back west on some little access road.  It wound up towards that campground that’s out there.  I guess it’s still out there.  I crossed the old Railroad Grade Road and turned north on one of those Forest Service roads they keep for the firefighters, and then east again on some county road.  I don’t think it’s got a name.  My coffee was long gone and my bladder was ready to burst.  I needed to find someplace to stop.  

     This part of the woods is really empty; nobody out there.  There’s a few lots cleared like they was going to build something, and every once in a while you’ll see an old trailer or a little cabin, but no people.  I guess there must be some somewhere, but there’s no place to shop; no business to work; not much of nothing except hunting and fishing.

     I seen a short gravel driveway that ended at a gate ‘bout twenty feet off the pavement.  I pulled in it so I wasn’t blocking the road, climbed over the gate, and stood behind a bush to take a pee.  Sounds kind of strange doesn’t it, way out in the middle of nowhere and I had to hide behind a bush to take a piss.  Funny how things stick in your mind.

     You ever been out in that part of the forest?  It’s pretty cool out there.  Nothing around but Nature.  I didn’t know whose property I was on or if I could get in trouble for trespassing or something.  Out there you got to be careful, you know, you could get shot.  But I...  I just...  I don’t know.  I felt right there, you know, inside; I don’t know what, happy maybe?  Not scared.  I don’t know.  It was a weird feeling.

     I decided to walk around a bit.  Just wanted to see more of that place.  I was thinking, it was pretty cold and wet that morning, so I wasn’t too scared that I’d run into a snake or something.  I wasn’t dressed for walking out in the woods; only had on a T-shirt and cutoff jeans. 

     It’s pretty out there.  I mean, real back country Florida.  Huge oak trees with that Spanish moss stuff hanging all down, big pines and cabbage palms, kudzu growing all over everything.  It was pretty in a Florida kind of way; not like the beaches or in the city; old Florida, the way it used to be...  And quiet.  It’s real quiet out there.

     I was trying not to make noise, just listening, in case I could sneak up on a deer or a coon or something, and I was trying to keep a good track, you know, my bearings, so I wouldn’t get lost.  You know how your senses get kind of sharp when you’re out in the woods?  I’ll tell you, I could feel something out there.  I was being drawn by something; something was guiding me, leading me to where she was.  I can’t say what it was, but something was telling me where to go.

     I don’t know.  I was just walking and looking and listening, and then something made me stop.  I stopped right next to a bush.   Don’t know what it was, there wasn’t a noise or a smell or nothing.  I just kind of sensed, or felt, like ESP, you know, that I was supposed to be there.  I could feel it there.  There was something in that bush; something I needed to find.

     It wasn’t really a bush; it was briers.  The thickest […] I ever saw.  Dense, you know, like a solid bunch of thorns.  There was no way through it, no break, no thin spot, no nothing.  The vines were all tangled and man, was it full of thorns.  There was no way in....  I know this don’t make sense, but I wanted...  I knew I had to get in there.  I knew she was in there.  Don’t ask me how.

     Anyway, I picked this spot that looked like it was a little thinner, you know, less thorns, and I plowed right in.  Jees, even now, thinking back, that was so weird...  And stupid.  How my life would have been different if I hadn’t have gone in there.

     The cops were wrong.  She was in there.  I’m not making any of this up.  Right in the mess of that.  Right in the middle of all those briers.

     I swore before, and I’m swearing now.  You make sure that whoever reads that […] knows, I ain’t lying.  This is the whole [...] truth and nothing but the [...] truth.

     She was in there; that’s where I found her.  Inside those briers and you get this right.  Inside there, there was a hole in the ground.  Not deep, sort of like a bowl or something, I don’t know, maybe like a bed or some animal’s nest; right in the middle of those thorns.  And right there, in that hole was that little baby.  She was naked, just lying there in a pile of green leaves, not crying or nothing.   What?  Huh?  Yeah, they were green, like someone has just picked them off a tree.  Made a little bed for her.

     Anyway, I was really freaked by it.  I thought about trying to forget the whole thing and book it out of there.  I was thinking I didn’t need no trouble; I didn’t need to deal with someone’s lost baby, but then she looked up at me and smiled.  Man, I can’t tell you what that did to me.  And not the way those […] holes tried to make it seem, I ain’t no pervert.

     Yeah, right, I got a record: sex offender.  I got three years for humping a girl who was only fifteen.  I did my time for screwing that little slut.  It don’t have nothing to do with this.  Besides, a nineteen year old boy doing his underage girlfriend ain’t the same as molesting a little baby or doing something to his daughter.  I ain’t a pervert, and them […] holes knew that.

     Yeah, that’s part of the story too; getting her out of there.  I’ll tell you, it wasn’t easy, but I got her out of there without her even getting a scratch.  I got pretty tore up though; I was a bloody mess; cuts all over my chest and arms.  I had took my T-shirt off and wrapped it around her.  Folded it up like a diaper you know, then I wrapped my arms around her as tight as I could and pushed my way back through the way I come.  It didn’t matter that I was getting cut up; I knew I had to protect that little baby.

     Once we were out of there, I ran like hell all the way back to my truck.

     It took me about twenty minutes to find a damn 7-Eleven and call the law.

     Man...  That’s when all [...] broke loose.

     Some State people came and took little Fauna and the cops put me in cuffs.  There was all kinds of cops there; local Sheriff's deputies, game wardens, even some Feds, ‘cause it was in the National Forest.  

     I took all of them back to where I found her.  I showed them the briers and that hole with the leaves.  I showed them everything, told them how I got there, everything...  But they said I was lying.  They were saying she was in too good a shape, that she wasn’t cold enough, that no one could have put her into those briers or got her out without her being scratched up.  They said that there was no shit or piss or anything in them leaves that showed she had been in there.  They said there was no evidence at all except for what I was saying, and that didn’t make no sense to them.  I thought I was screwed.

     Yeah, well that’s the way it happened.  Think about it, why would I lie?  I was the one who called the cops.  Why would I finger myself?  I could of just left that baby in the woods and nobody would’ve known.  No, they got it wrong; I wasn’t lying.  They still got it wrong.  Besides, why would I be lying now?  After all that’s happened, I got nothing to gain.  It ain’t like they’re going to change their minds.  No, I ain’t lying.  I swear to you, this is the [...] truth!  But they won’t believe me. 

     They finally let me go around midnight, pending the outcome of their [...] investigation.  I’m sorry, I’ll watch my language.  I guess you can’t print that, huh? 

     See, they didn’t have no evidence to say I was lying or that I was telling the truth, so they had to let me go.  Our legal system at work, ha!  They still ain’t got no evidence, but here I sit.

     Anyway, I asked if I could see the kid.  They said she wasn’t none of my business, that the State of Florida was taking care of her.  I know it sounds strange, but when they said she wasn’t my business, I got really pissed.  I...  She...  She belonged to me!  I found her!  She ain’t belonging to no one else!  She was my baby!

     I was stewed about that all weekend.  All I could think about was my baby.  I don't know how, but I knew she was supposed to be with me.  Monday came, man; I didn’t even call in to work.  Screw it!  My new baby was more important than work.   I just started calling every damn state phone number I could find.  I had to figure out where she was, so, you know...   Listen, I wanted to see her, nothing more.  I still don’t know why everyone still tries to make more out of this.  In my head, she was my kid, you know.  What would you do?

     I don’t remember who it was that slipped up and told me, but I found out that Fauna was being kept by Mrs. Mary Adamson.  I didn’t know Mrs. A back then, but it didn’t take me long to figure out who she was and where she lived.  It wasn’t but about thirty miles away.  I went straight out there.

     Mrs. A was calling her Baby Jane Doe when I got there.  What a [...] name.  Sounded like something they’d put on a dead body in a morgue, not on a live baby.

     Mrs. Adamson was all right.  She’s a nice lady.  Widowed.  I never told her how sorry I was for what happened.  She loved Fauna too.  If you see her, would you tell her I’m sorry?  And tell her I’d like to see her; tell her to come visit if she can.  I really liked her.

      Anyway, I told her who I was, that I was the one that found the baby and all, and she let me right in.  I got to see little Fauna right away.  Mrs. A could tell I didn’t like it when she called her Baby Jane.  I told her right out why.  I told her that I found her out in them woods and until they could find her real momma or whatever, I thought she should be called Fauna.  I told her, you know, like in school, you know, Flora and Fauna.  I always liked Earth Science.

Mrs. Adamson liked that name too.  Said it fit her.  That’s how she got to be Fauna.

     Anyway there was a lot [...] going down over the next couple of weeks.  Half the time the cops acted like they believed me and were looking for whoever left her in the woods, and half the time they where trying to figure out whose kid I had taken and if I had did anything to her.  Funny, at the time, I thought my [...] nightmare couldn’t get any worse.  Look at me now.  At least they ain’t going to kill me.

     Mrs. A said that even the doctors from DCF were acting suspicious.  They kept checking Fauna to see why was she so healthy and if she had been violated, and how if she had really been out in them woods, why she didn’t even have a rash?

     It is pretty weird you know, you claim she was out there naked as a jay-bird without even a diaper, yet there were no signs of hypo...,  whatever that word is where you get really cold on the inside.   Besides, how was someone going to get her out there without leaving some kind of trail or footprints or a cigarette butt or something?  Hell, I still can’t figure it out, if it were people or something, how’d they get her into those briers without cutting her up real bad?  Not to mention, why.  Why leave her out there?  I guess that’s why they never really believed me. 

     Mrs. Adamson let me see Fauna almost every day I could.

     I had to get a new job; I kind of never made it back to the other one.  He was an […] hole anyway.  I started driving a truck for a laundry company.  You know, like for nursing homes and restaurants.  It paid pretty good and I had plenty time at night and on weekends to go over to Mrs. A’s and play with Fauna.  After a while, the law started to leave me alone some, stopped asking me questions and hassling me.  Everything was going pretty good.  I thought all that [...] was finally passed me.

     Fauna was doing great too.  She got big, real fast, like I mean one day she’s pissing in a diaper and the next she’s walking around and talking and […].  You know I never had a kid of my own, except Fauna.  You got any kids?  Kids grow up fast.  It’s like those first ten years are a blur.  Man...!  You know, learning her to ride a bike...  Learning her to talk...  Birthday parties...  Damn, it all happened so fast.  She just got big, I mean, I guess I was getting old too, but man...  She just got big so fast.  I wish I remembered more.

     I had found her in February, so me and Mrs. Adamson decided to make her birthday February 2^nd.  You know, Groundhog’s Day?  Came out of a hole...?  I don’t know, maybe it’s only funny to me and Mrs. A.  Anyway when she was...  I don’t know, she was pretty young, Mrs. A said we had to have her christened.  We just told them her birthday was February 2^nd and that’s what they wrote down.  She got christened and that’s when she legally became Fauna Adamson.  They had to use Adamson, not Smith, I guess because I wasn’t her real daddy.  Not that Mrs. A...  It don’t matter.

     You know what?  That was when I learned how to spell Fauna.  I thought it was like the deer, you know F - A - W - N - A, but it was really F - A - U - N - A.  I laughed about it that night, you know, I named her and the whole time I didn’t even know how to spell her [...] name.  I guess I remember some stuff from school pretty good, but I wasn’t no good at spelling.  Since I quit school, I don’t do much reading and I never did write much, you know you don’t need to do much reading and writing when you’re a delivery man; bed sheets, tablecloths, towels; invoices are already made out.  I just count [...] and get them to sign for it.  Anyway, that don’t matter, she was legally Fauna Adamson.

     Things were going along pretty good up until about the time she turned ten.  I don’t remember the day exactly, but it was sometime in February, not long after her birthday.  Mrs. A said that DCF had found some people who wanted to adopt her.  It didn’t sink in too good right away.  Mrs. A said she couldn’t keep her anymore; they wouldn’t let her.  She said Fauna was going to have to move up in the panhandle with some Christian minister’s family.  She said she wasn’t legally mine or hers, and this new family had rights.  Right, they got rights?  What about me?  What about Mrs. A?  She said that some state psychiatrist said I should stop coming by to visit.  He said we needed to get Fauna used to me not being around so that she wouldn’t get upset when she moved.  Some […], huh?  We’d been together for ten years, and some shrink, never been around her and me at all, thinks it would be better if we just stopped seeing each other, like that wouldn’t screw both of us up.  Mrs. A said we didn’t have no choice; we didn’t have no rights.

     Man, I hadn’t had a drink since...  Well, since before I found Fauna.  […], I made up for it that night though.  I got really messed up.  I must have been drunk out of my mind when I decided to take her.  It was pretty stupid I guess, but I’m still sure it was the right thing to do.  They didn’t have no right to take away my little girl.  I did have rights and so did Fauna.

     I took her right out her bedroom window.  It was on the second floor, so we had to use a ladder.  I’d seen a show on TV about, what was his name, Limburger?  Anyway, that give me the idea how to do it.  

     All I had was $482.00 and an old Ford pickup that was running pretty good.  Fauna said she didn’t care; she wanted to be with me.  She said I was her daddy.  We took off and made it all the way to the northwest corner of Texas before that old truck broke down.  That’s where we stayed; we never even tried to hide.  I got a job on a ranch, under my own name, and we just kind of settled in. 

     No, why would they ask?  She was my daughter.  Nobody ever asked.  No, I didn’t say nothing about Adamson.  We just used Smith.  I had ID and they took my word about Fauna.

     The Johnsons, the people that owned the ranch, liked us.  They helped out a lot with Fauna.  She got to live with them in their big house, she had her own room, and she went to school and everything.  Nobody really said nothing about her, even at the school.  I told them her records was lost.

     I stayed out in the bunk house with the other hands, but we were still just like a family.

     You should have seen her back then, she was really happy.  She loved all them animals on the ranch.  It was like she had some kind of power with them.  The horses, the cows, all them animals, even the chickens, they’d just come up to her, you know.  They were never scared of her, like they knew she wouldn’t never hurt them, like she understood them.  It was pretty cool.

     You know, one time I remember, we were out walking around in the pasture and she went right up to a jackrabbit.  She just bent over and petted it.  That damn jackrabbit, you won’t believe this, he went down in his hole and brought out a whole bunch of baby rabbits.  I ain’t […] you, it brought out its own babies for Fauna to pet.  She just set down on the ground and they all come right up to her.  She did [...] like that all the time.

     We should have stayed there forever, you know, in Texas.  It was a good life for both of us.  Man, it sure would have been better...  Better than this.  I guess anything would have been better than this.

    Homesick for Florida?  [...] no!  It was Fauna’s idea.  We had been in Texas for about three years.  Fauna had grown up.  She was a teenager.  She said she wanted to go back to Florida.  I wasn’t going to argue with her.  Well, I did for a while, but she usually got her way, you know, she kind of had me wrapped around her little finger.  Besides it wasn’t no big deal.  I didn’t think the law was going to give us any crap.  I figured they’d stopped looking for us seeing as how they never found us.

     Fauna had grown into a real lady, you know, developed and all.  She had this great, long, straight, blond hair, and a perfect face, I mean perfect, like really perfect features and she had a perfect figure too.  She looked better than any of them women on TV or in the movies.  I know that some people are going to think that I mean this in some bad way, but man, she was hot.  I mean, I know what hot means, but she was like my daughter.  She was pretty and all, but I never thought of her as anything but my daughter, I swear.

     We came back because she wanted us to.  I wanted to stay there, but she kept talking about coming back.  She said that she wanted to see where I had found her; where she came from.  She wanted to see what her woods looked like.  Let’s face it; there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for Fauna.  So we come back to Florida.

     No, I wasn’t too worried; I figured nobody was looking for us very hard after all that time. 

     So, I bought us a truck, we packed up everything we had, said good-bye and left.  We came across I-10 to 75, turned south to Lake City.  There’s an old efficiency motel there, you know the kind with a kitchen in each room.  I paid three weeks in advance.  It was pretty cheap you know, about a hundred and a half per week for a room with a kitchen and maid service and everything.  They even give you dishes and pots and silverware.  Paid for three weeks, I guess I lost money on that, huh?

     Anyway, we got in pretty late in the day. We didn’t do anything except buy some groceries and eat.  We watched some show on TV and went to sleep.

     The next day, I guess that had to be Thursday, April 12^th; we got up early.  We took turns getting showered and dressed.  I always gave her privacy.  I decided that we could eat breakfast on the road even though we didn’t have much money left.  I figured McDonald’s wouldn’t be too expensive.

     We ate and got out on the highway.  Not far, you know, just a few miles.  I drove down to the 40 turn off and turned east.  It was like I had just driven it yesterday, I knew exactly where I was going without thinking about it.  I don’t think that I hesitated even once.  I drove right out there to that spot; that same driveway; that same gate.  We hopped the fence and walked into the woods.  It was exactly the same as it was back in ’70.  Nothing had changed except it was foggy that morning.  The fog didn’t matter ‘cause I knew where we were and exactly where we were going.

     It didn’t take too long to get there, I told her, “It was here, honey.  Somewhere right around here.”

     I knew what to look for, but she seemed to know too.  I was looking one way and she walked off in the other.

     I know this sounds strange, and I’m going to swear to you again that this is the truth, but there wasn’t a sound or a smell or anything.  I just suddenly knew.  I knew Fauna had found it; the brier patch.  It was still there.  Looking exactly as it had all those years ago.  How she found it, I don’t know.  It was like she had some instinct, you know, or ESP.  She knew what to look for and right where to go.  I felt it too.  I know you won’t believe this, but I felt her feel it.

     I turned around and Fauna was about thirty yards from me.  She had taken off all of her clothes.  She was naked.  She was... beautiful.  I’m not saying she was sexy or I was turned on or anything, you know, she was really, really beautiful, but she was my daughter and all grown up.  It was like I was seeing her for the first time.  I never saw her bare-ass naked before, not since she was a little baby.  Now she was all grown up and developed like a woman.  She was... beautiful!  Like no woman I’d ever seen before.
     I swear, it might have been the sun coming through the fog, but she seemed to glow, like there was a spotlight on her or something.  I’ll never forget how she looked.  She was so beautiful.  That was the last time I ever seen her.

     She was standing right where I had been back in 1970.  She looked up at me and waved and then she walked right into those [...] briers. 

   I thought, “Christ, she got no clothes on and them thorns..., them [...] thorns!”

     I ran as hard as I could.  It couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds to get there.  The briers ripped my shirt right off my back.  I ran right through them.  I was back in that hole, that dip, or nest, or whatever [...] it is, and she wasn’t there...  She wasn’t anywhere.  She was gone...

     I screamed.  I ran back through the thorns.  I kept screaming and yelling.  She didn’t answer.  I ran and I looked and I called and I ran.  I couldn’t find her nowhere.  I swear, she was there and then she wasn’t.  I swear.  She walked in them briers and just disappeared.

     I didn’t do anything to her, I swear.  I ain’t lying.  Nothing happened to her except she was gone.  The blood on her clothes was mine from the thorns, I don't give a [...] what the cops say.  I picked them up, you know, her clothes, and got my blood all over them; my blood!  That’s why they were bloody.  I didn’t hurt her.  She didn’t scratch me like they said.   Nobody will believe me ‘cause it’s too...  I don’t know...  I don’t know what to say anymore.  She’s out there, somewhere in them woods, I know she’s out there, she’s got to be out there and she’s got to be alive ‘cause I didn’t kill her.  I swear I never hurt her.  I couldn’t have hurt her...  I couldn’t have...

     Someday...  Someday I’ll prove it.  The truth will come out.  It has to.  You’ll see.  They’re going to let me out of here one day and as soon as they do, I’ll prove it to you.  To you and all of your [...] readers.  I’ll prove it to that [...] sheriff and that [...] Judge; to everyone.  I didn’t murder no one.  Fauna’s out there.  She’s still alive, she has to be, and I’ll find her again.

POSTSCRIPT

     The following two news clips came to my attention while I was still compiling my notes and editing this interview.  I make no assertion that, with the exception of the embedded references, these items have any relevance to the veracity of Warren Thomas Smith’s account. 

GAINESVILLE, FL:  Authorities continue their investigation into the human remains unearthed by hunters last weekend in the Ocala National Forest.  The Alachua County Medical examiner, Dr. Everet Deiter has determined that they are the bones of a human female in her early teens.  He says that preliminary test show that they were probably deposited in the woods between ten and sixteen years ago.  There has been no confirmation from anyone connected to this case that these are the bones of Fauna Adamson who disappeared in that area in 1983.

In a related story, Warren Thomas Smith, the man convicted in the disappearance and murder of Fauna Adamson, was found dead in his cell at the State Prison in Raiford today.  Officials say that he apparently hung himself shortly after learning that the Parole Board had denied his request for early release.  His remains will be interned at the prisoner’s cemetery on the penitentiary grounds tomorrow morning.  He has no known relatives.

SEATTLE: Washington State authorities have widened their search for the parents of a female child found abandoned in the Olympic National Forest near Seattle.  The baby, found in remarkably good condition, was discovered in a thorn covered ravine in a remote area of the forest accessible only by foot. When discovered, the baby was naked without a diaper or blanket.  “It was as if she had been left to die,” said one health official.

The heroic rescue is being credited to a troop of Boy Scouts on a weekend wilderness hike.  Park Rangers have been unable to determine the trail used by whoever left the baby in the woods.  There are no suspects or persons of interest.  US Forest Department officials are requesting information on any suspicious activity in or near the Olympic National Forest last weekend.

The child was taken to Children’s Hospital for a medical evaluation. When she is released, she will be placed in the care of the Department of Social and Health Services.