The Times of Your Life Read online

The Times of Your Life

  Random Writings, Chosen at Random, that can be Read Randomly

  Copyright 2011 by

  Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

  Copyright 2011 by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

  All characters in these short stories are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The authors’ website.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Last Train from Mendrisio

  Red Willow Brew

  Marathon, My Marathon

  Postage Due

  The Test of Time

  The Landscape of Time

  The Portrait of Time

  The Architecture of Time

  Time is Our Friend

  (Most of the Time)

  Time presents us with a universe of thought. Peering back into what some call the infinity of time, we have the opportunity to empathize with those who have lived before us, not only our own ancestors but those many and diverse lives that sculpted world history—not just the stories of kings and queens, generals with their wars and politicians with their cleverness, but the uphill climb of those real persons who, working against the formidable social and business constraints of their times, created new concepts in science, society, medicine, the arts and transportation.

  Reading primary sources such as their personal journals, their memoirs, and their exchanges of letters with others allows us glimpses into the machinations of their minds, impressionist pictures of their spiritual and behavioral beliefs. Such sources describe their hopes and allow us to fear their failures and share their successes. Extrapolating their personal stories into the present time and even out into the future gives us a thrill of times that may come and that we may experience. Empathy with them living in their time allows us to develop a feel for our own time and the limits imposed upon us by society’s many institutions and accompanying restrictions, and by those we impose on our own selves, limiting our vision, or hopefully freeing it.

  That “time is money” is a slogan of commerce and industry and old-fashioned factory assembly lines as money rules our lives rendering us its obedient servant.

  This same commerce has wished upon us the rule of retirement, so that we do not hinder emerging ideas for commerce and throw up roadblocks to the volcano-like momentum introduced by the bubbling energy of each new generation. Yet to acquiesce to this time called “retirement” dulls the excitement of time, and then time ceases to be our friend.

  However if we view retirement not as our pesonal withdrawal from challenges but rather as the sight of enticing new horizons, then once again time becomes our friend.

  The House of Blue Lights

  Outside of town, down a remote road that led to no known place, there hid, so the legend goes, an old house whose eves were strung with strings of blue light bulbs, each one of which cast—so the legend warned—a weird and ghostly spell upon those who dared to approach close enough in the hours long after dark had tinted in ice-cold colors this House of Blue Lights’ rural Indiana situs.

  The place was not so far away by car as to require a long journey, rather a more driving resolve of achieving this destination, plus for safety the accompaniment of supportive friends as one, in daring do, undertook this frightening mission of creeping up upon this bluish and so-it-was-said the floating and almost ghost-like amorphous haze that engulfed The House of Blue Lights.

  Who, assuming they were a living person or persons, lived or moved ghost-like inside this house? And if we went there and summoned enough courage to move through the haze and knock on the door, who was to open the door and, hopefully and fearfully, respond to the questions to which we all needed answers?

  The person or thing that might open the door in response to our hesitant knock could be possessed with either great wisdom or great terror for us standing, hopeful but helpless, before it, waiting…. Perhaps these two traits of good and evil might display themselves together in one really innovative person.

  At that time in our developing and generationally obedient teenage minds, the good of wisdom was reserved for teachers, preachers, a governor, a mayor, the banker and others of comparable merit who were in charge of the society we knew. That left evil, the terror of the unknown.

  Unless our ranks were joined by several of us out for an evening of adventure, we were singularly afraid to venture out there to visit the dreaded House of Blue Lights. This night was to be our communal awakening or a lark lost to “score one for let’s see what happens.”

  In our limited growing-up life experiences of the 1940s, most of us mainstream teenagers had not yet discovered that those people in charge of society each pursued their own selfish agendas, whether they be the party line of an organized national church—oh yes, the minister might have opinions but they were allowed to reach only so far. Like a billiard ball hitting the bumper, his personal and possibly divergent opinions would bounce back to conform to the thrust of the official church doctrine. The same with the politician and his party’s line, the businessman with making his profits, the teacher’s duty to echo his school’s authorized curriculum, the patriot to wave the flag of country in order to deflect all criticism.

  Yet, secretly we longed for someone—perhaps it was the person living behind the entry door of The House of Blue Lights—to open doors to as-yet-unseen rooms of life where guidance about behavior, about our lives to come, about our own directions in the darkness of a Mid-West evening, might be found—a light illuminating for us the answers that surely must exist out there in the real world.

  For the person turning on those blue lights must be too wise for the comfort of normal city society and therefore confined either by authoritarian decree or by self decision to retire behind the façade of blue weirdness and remain inside behind those blue lights, waiting to be asked, waiting to be allowed to pontificate about life, waiting as did the Oracle at Delphi, to give answers, no mater how vague—but at least to give answers for us in our own minds’ ways to interpret and to therefore act upon.

  Now, some sixty years later and remembering The House of Blue Lights, I fantasize about gong back there to the middle of that state of Indiana to try to find once again this ghostly house. Yet while buoyed by fantasy, I realize that its lights, its wisdom, its threats have long ago disappeared, victim to a bulldozers blade, to fire set by dissident teenagers of a later day, to violent storm, to the decay of time, and I wonder what became of that person who waited there safely behind those blue lights? And what of his—or maybe the person was a “she”—wisdom, advice and future-looking thoughts. Was that wisdom hiding there in The House of Blue Lights never to be accessed? Is there wisdom hiding somewhere today, waiting to be read, waiting to be heard, waiting to be acted upon, wisdom accessible nowhere else, a secret wisdom, a treasured wisdom? Where is The House of Blue Lights and the person sponsoring the glow of wisdom (or terror?) in today’s world? And if found, would we dare go inside, venturing beyond its ominous façade?

  A Perplexing Question of Timing

  Amongst the many perplexing questions for mankind to ponder, which include: How and why was the Universe Created; What is the True Purpose of Our Lives; Where does God Live, or does He or She even exist; Do Animals really think; How Long will it be before Our Sun Burns Out; and did the Neanderthals interbreed with the new species on the block, Home Sapiens; one must add: why were individual people born at the time when they were born and not sooner or later in time, or yet to be conceived?

  When one reads the story of history, the question cannot help but be contemplated: what if some or all of these folks were born
earlier or later, or perhaps their souls or their characters or their personalities are still patiently packaged in the queue of future-to-be-people, waiting for that moment of conception and their dutiful arrival on earth? Is there a never-ending inventory of such souls on which the world has drawn in the past and will so do in the future, till the end of time?

  How did it happen that the people who founded this country all arrived on Earth at more or less the same time, well virtually the same time, on the shores and in the colonies of the New World? Some even coming from the Old World. Did their timing of their appearances on the New World’s stage conform to a script written by a Higher Power? Some might argue so. Ultra patriots and politicians and some historians might put forth this patriotic or nationalistic argument. Others might cite Jesus’ career as having been pre-determined by this same Ultimate Power. Yet to what power would these same folks turn to justify the rise and the terrible lives of Adolph Hitler and his cabal of cronies? What if Hitler had been born thirty years earlier? To the Nazis can be added a long list of butcher-like dictators and self-serving leaders who along the timeline of history committed unspeakable human crimes. What if they had been born later, or not yet at all, still waiting off stage?

  In the 1930s a comic strip portrayed characters who, in commenting on an event in which she or he found themselves embroiled, philosophized that they were “born thirty years too soon,” or on some occasions, “thirty years too late.” Perhaps trying to adapt to rapid changes in technology and unsettling changes in societal behavior can lead one to conclude in the same way as this comic strip person did three quarters of a century ago.

  Yet try to change your personal script. Yeah! You can’t can you? Such a fruitless attempt and the obvious void of any result leads a person invariably to experience another of life’s helpless feelings, as one seeks answers to perplexing questions surrounding one’s own existence.

  The Gatekeeper

  The Director of the Foundation gave me my job because, so she told me, she needed someone with my literary qualifications to sort through the hordes of today’s writers and their plethora of material, be it poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. After all, she explained, today there is little good writing. She let me read the learned article she wrote thirty years ago about the great authors of the West, which she published under her by-line in the Foundation’s slick magazine. “Nothing written since,” she said to me with that deep all-wise female laugh of hers, “can come close to the literary accomplishments of those now-deceased men and women of letters.”

  “Back then,” she had said in her article, “writers had dedicated editors at the New York publishing houses, editors who really edited. Moreover, literary agents, as well, labored with their writers to produce well-polished pieces.” Knowing I had read her article, she now looked at me and opined, “Today there is only an explosion of quantity—not quality. Why everyone with a word processor thinks he or she is a budding Pulitzer Prize winner, a Steinbeck, a Paul Horgan, a Willa Cather, a D. H. Lawrence…” She rattled off name after name of the well-known writers who wrote about the West at some point in their body of literary work and whom she had so eloquently ennobled in her long-ago article.

  So I was installed in my position as the magazine’s literary critic with instructions to really criticize, and to do so regularly and often. Because the Foundation was so prestigious and so influential, book editors at local newspapers, bookstore owners, as well as the women at the city, county, and college libraries, whose job it was to select the books to buy, would follow my lead. My criticism was to become the word, at least in these parts.

  Because of the Director’s power, she told me she would assure my coronation and my reign as the region’s literary gatekeeper. And she did. I joined the list of local celebrities. And her celebrated article remained the definitive authority on writers of the West. No new ideas for society penned by local authors were to be allowed to pass through my gate. No new writing styles were to be praised. Streams of consciousness, minimalist, revisionist—they had all been developed years ago. Like the legendary man at the U.S. Patent Office who resigned his position in the 19th century because he was certain no new inventions could possibly be created, the Director assured me there would be no new thoughts expressed by today’s writers. “Don’t forget,” she reminded me, “there are only a few story plots, and in their plays the Greeks presented them all.”

  The Director’s argument made sense to me, because she was, after all, the boss, my boss, the Foundation’s boss, the region’s intellectual literary authority. Yet I couldn’t help ask myself, “Would that status quo remain, installed, indeed nailed to the crosses high up there in our literary pantheon?”

  Local writers besieged me with their hopes, their articles, their stories, their books, asking me to review them, pleading with me to praise their words, begging me to support their careers. Few had been published by the “major” New York publishers. If they were published at all, it was by little-known small presses of dubious distinction, which made my rejection job easier. After all, the Director explained to me with impatience and intolerance in her voice, only publishers in New York are trained to detect an effort that could qualify as today’s “really good” writing. “The rest is…well, just the literary rabble running amuck.” Those big conglomerate New York publishers, of course, chose to focus on established Eastern authors writing the tried and true books about coming of age, child abuse, historical novels, the romance genre, and in non-fiction all the how-to books about subjects ranging from computers to cookbooks to child psychology and child rearing.

  Given her overview of writing and publishing, I speculated that the big publishers provided a perk or two to my Director, perhaps permitting her a praising quote on the dust cover of some history book about the West, perhaps providing her and her counterparts around the country invitations to speak at book festivals, writers’ conferences and other events.

  Ego enhancing can be as valuable a currency as hundred dollar bills bulging from a surreptitiously-delivered envelope. I pictured a booking agent in the Manhattan office of the Publisher’s Association, whose job it was to match a list of prominent people with dignitaries for the upcoming calendar of conferences. In return for their continued endorsement of the publishers’ writers they would receive occasional gifts, ranging from Cartier pens to Armani tuxedos or designer gowns. The Director hinted she might even enter my name in their coveted list.

  But then at times, I worried the Director might eliminate my job altogether. That is, until I realized that her keeping me on was essential to her making sure that no new writers emerged in the region, for if they did, her thirty-year-old article could not be reprinted every year in the Foundation’s colorful magazine, and her position as the region’s literary authority would be compromised and she would be out of favor with the New York publishing establishment. In that event she could no longer chair the Foundation’s annual Book Festival, in which academics praised the writers of the distant past, and where she would receive the accolades of the wealthy people who supported the Foundation with their tax-deductible gifts. For her own ego needs, I began to understand that I was employed to keep the regional literary gate closed, while suggesting an illusion of swinging it open with invitations to new writers proffered by every issue of the magazine. Both for her own vested reputation and to respect what everyone perceived to be the literary status-quo, she and I worked together so that no new writer from this part of the country would be allowed passage through my gate into the land of literary acceptance.

  Then one day a local writer brought me the following short story, unpublished even by a local small press or magazine, unendorsed even by the local high school or community college English teachers. The Director was out of town delivering the keynote speech at the National Convention for Foundations. I had finished composing my trashing criticism for the next issue of the magazine, so instead of simply smiling politely and discarding the story, I took the pages home with
me that evening, expecting to quickly dismiss this story during the first commercial break on the nightly network news. You see, I have learned to be a fast reader.

  The story was entitled “The Gatekeeper.” I read it in its entirety that evening, soon switching off the television. I concluded that from here on out in my life I could no longer allow anyone else to think for me, to direct my mind, to rule my values. No taste of being a local celebrity, no matter how seemingly secure I felt in my job, no matter how much ego building I benefited from, no bribe in any form could substitute for my personal intellectual integrity. Late that night I wrote my resignation letter. The next morning I taped it to The Director’s door of her suite of offices as her return greeting.

  Here is “The Gatekeeper:”

  When the GI Joes came home from fighting and winning World War II, they wanted to marry, buy new homes, and begin to parent the generation that soon became known as the Baby Boomers. A total of fifteen years of the economic deprivation of the Great Depression followed by the hell of war nurtured their pent-up demands for materialism, for maternity, for male macho madness. Most women had waited for them, most factories tooled up for the manufacture of their post-war motorcars.

  Yet the proposed new suburbs of houses needed wood for floors, walls, and roofs. Where was there to be found enough wood, cheap wood, pliable wood, wood that easily accepted the waiting-to-be-hammer-driven nails of the muscular and eager house framers?

  Fir trees, Douglas Fir trees—they were they best of all the wood species for framing these houses that would hopefully line all these new streets in all these new metropolitan suburbs. Someone in New York said these unique Douglas Fir trees grew “Out West.” Someone in the Empire State Building read one of the novels of Zane Grey, wherein he told of vast stands of these magnificent trees growing “Out West.” These wonderful trees were described as 180 feet tall, three and a half to six feet in diameter.

  One enterprising analyst on Wall Street, researching trees in the New York Public Library, learned that Zane Grey and his Indian guide often fished for trout in a place called Diamond Lake. He found a map and spied a Diamond Lake, shaped like a cut diamond that lay deep in the heart of a county in the far-off state of Oregon in a county named Douglas. From his map, he saw this Douglas County was as large geographically as the entire state of Connecticut. The county surely must be, he reasoned with his analytical logic, named for the Douglas Fir tree. The county seat showed up on the map as being a place with the nice name of Roseburg.