Category Archives: folklore and ethnography

“Fill this bottle, Sir”

Posted on by
3

Having been raised as a true Scots Presbyterian, I am of the generation that doesn’t go to the doctor unless you’re really, phlegm-producingly sick. This has resulted in a couple of serious incidents over the years, but the habits of a lifetime are deeply ingrained.

So it came to pass in my 71st year that Wendy finally persuaded me to have a health check. (Read: she made the appointment and threatened me.) Last Monday I duly presented myself at Doctor Ashley’s office and had my first proper check-up in ten years.

I’d taken along the medical history brought with me when I moved to the US from Scotland, and the academic paper on Nail Patella Syndrome that features a photograph of my toe-nails. (It’s a hereditary condition). To my great relief I received a clean bill of health – a surprise to Wendy, and I suspect even to the doctor!

But this wasn’t the end of it – oh no, not by a long way! This Monday I was scheduled for lab work. Admonished to fast beforehand and come early to deal with paperwork, when presenting myself at the counter, I admitted I’d had a breakfast bar at 7a.m.

The secretary said “whaaa?”

I repeated my crime, fearful now that I’d be turned away. She called in a senior member of staff, who asked me to “repeat that, please.”

“I had a breakfast bar at 7 a.m.”

“What’d you have?”

“A baaaaaarrrrrrr.” Experience has taught me that, when accents collide, strengthening the vowels can help SW VA ears.

“Yes,” said the woman, in the patient voice of one dealing with an imbecile. “But what was on it? Eggs? Bacon? Oatmeal? How much did you eat?”

Realization dawned at last, as my father-in-law is fond of breakfast bars—the Shoney’s kind, not the six-per-pack granola kind. I laughed and explained, she laughed and took me to the back—

–and poked me repeatedly, trying to get a vein. I told her a funny (now) story about a nurse years ago in Scotland with the same trouble. She bit her tongue and tried again. This became very unpleasant until she got what she wanted. I regretted telling her the funny story.

Several unspeakable samples and a couple of preventive shots later, I was wending my way home, a bandage the size of Russia around the drill site that had been my arm.

Satisfied, my darling Wendy?

The Jabberwock vs. the Narrative Arc

Posted on by
4

So the last time I finagled a weekend away from the bookshop and holed up to write, the Jabberwock roared and a lot of work got done. But I also discovered something. Three days isn’t as good as two days.

If you have three days, well, it stretches out, luxurious, like a snake in the sun, SO much time to get things done. If you have two days, you arrive the night before and haul your writing utensils onto the desk and slam some food in the fridge and start making notes to yourself so you can get up in the morning and hit it hard.

I come from a long line of procrastinators – which is in itself an oxymoron; think about it–so it doesn’t surprise me that time is the first thing I squander when there’s “plenty” of it. And this past weekend, with just two days to write, I got double the word count of my three-days wonder in late January.

It was less listening for the roar of the Jabberwock (if you’re going “huh” just now check out the blog postings from a few weeks ago) and feeling his claws pull me in, than constructing a framework on which to build: “this goes here, write a section that bridges that,” managing word flow and putting things where they make a cohesive narrative arc.

Oh, that sodding term again. For those unfamiliar with it, the narrative arc is what distinguishes a series of fun, comedic episodes forming individual chapters from a story with a beginning, middle, end, and series of events and consequences that spark other events and merge into a whole. A whole, not a hole. Narrative arcs are what make stories compelling because you want to find out what happens next, as opposed to just a pleasant read one can dip into and come out of at will.

Narrative arcs are flippin’ hard work. But once you get the frame up, they really help move the story along.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, sorry we forgot to put a blog up yesterday and we’re back on schedule now: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, with Jack guesting once a week.