SIX WEEKS ago, when we had fly hatches swarming, I wondered whether autumn might ease right into spring. But we did get winter yesterday, maybe two feet of it.
Hard to say, it was so windy. In some places the snow’s waist deep, in others a few inches.
Five deer walking by our back fence this morning.
It would be nice if it were to stay cold. Last week I saw water ponding in the wetlands east of the house, where the Pocasset River meets the Pawtuxet. With the rivers already high, a fast thaw would likely mean flooding.
I took the radiator fan off the ’49 truck last week. No sense pushing cold air around when the motor will run at 190 degrees without it. One less belt to drive.
Pam’s car won’t take much digging out but the spare beater car behind it is buried.
We enjoy having the little girl here two days a week. She mostly wants time with her Mimi, I’ve been more or less discarded. They play puzzles and sing songs while I scribble away in the basement. She will, on occasion, still cop to being “a smooth jazz baby,” but when I ask whether she still digs Doc Powell she gives me the Doc who? look. I gather my influence has waned from last winter when I was her daycare provider five days a week.
Saw another climbing movie I can recommend, 14 peaks. It’s not great filmmaking but a great story, quite an astonishing achievement by a team of Nepalese climbers. It’s good to see them get their due. Western climbers are nothing without the sherpas who make it all possible, mountaineers who have lived their entire lives at high altitude and are simply built for that environment in a way that western climbers aren’t.
I came away thinking the filmmakers aren’t clear on the line between drama and melodrama, haven’t yet learned the concept of less is more. They’re young, likely raised on reality TV. If you can overlook that, 14 peaks is 101 minutes well spent.
When the filmmakers start asking my advice, I’ll let you know.
I’ve read all the Ian McEwan I had piling up on my desk. Lately I’ve been reading Dawn Powell (no relation to Doc), one of the overlooked novelists of the post-war era. I’ve got four of her novels here. Right now I’m into The Locusts Have No King, which feels like living inside the pages of the 1940s New Yorker, a kind of understated, comic tale of bar cruising and social climbing.
Powell was a talented and prolific writer but never made a living at it. I read somewhere she’s buried in a mass grave on Hart Island, the potter’s field off New York City.
A few days ago I saw a red-tailed hawk that had been belled. It belongs to someone, or used to. According to the state there are only seven licensed falconers in Rhode Island. I don’t happen to know any of them so who do you ring up to say Hey, was that your hawk hunting in Cranston the other day?
On the home front, I still have lots of plaster work to do around the new windows. This coming week I’ll paint the ceilings throughout the first floor, then start on walls. As always, Pam’s been patient with my slow progress, hasn’t had the locks changed yet. If you haven’t seen this bit of history from ten years ago there might be a chuckle in it for you. Sometimes our life together seems like one long home-improvement challenge.
The fire in the basement two evenings ago. Winter nights are cozy here in my lair. I get some reading done, a little writing, Pam often comes down to read by the fire as well.
I like to run the stove with the door open when I’m burning black oak, it gives off the best-smelling wood smoke of all time. It perfumes the whole house wonderfully.
With black locust I keep the door closed, especially if the wood has bark on it. The smoke given off by locust bark is wretched. I reserve those sticks for overnight burning when the neighborhood’s asleep.
I’ve got plenty of de-barked locust on hand, all of it well seasoned. When you split dry locust with an ax the bark almost always flies off. Locust peels as easily dry as cedar does green.
As for splitting wood with an ax, one of my all-time favorite things to do, here’s a little trip down Amnesia Lane. This isn’t the smooth jazz baby who alleges she never dug Doc Powell; it’s her future mom at that age, 2-1/2, in the winter of 1984. This was in Maine where we were living at the time.
I snapped this pic in a tall tamarack grove on one of the woodlots the bride’s family owned, a pretty 28-acre parcel right in town. We used to harvest our firewood there, mostly maple, yellow birch, poplar. Little D1 would sit up on the woodpile for hours and talk to me as I split the rounds with an ax.
I have nice memories of working there in shirtsleeves on sunny, windless days, temps in the 20s, working warm in that warming kind of work, happy chatter from the little talking machine, lovely days.
Now, all of a sudden, my little girl’s about to turn 40. Here she is last Sunday at the bowling alley with her smooth jazz baby.
I need to get outside and start shoveling! Will close here with what’s going on in the Himalayas.
In yesterday’s strip, the Phantom’s son, Kit Walker, pops into a tea house to find seated there, of all people, Savarna Devi. This isn’t happening in real time in the strip, it’s a look into the future as discerned by the seer Old Man Mozz.
Mozz foretells disaster for both the Phantom and his son if the Phantom follows through on his plan to free Savarna from Gravelines Prison. And follow through he will, of course. The 21st Phantom’s that kind of guy.
He gets shot up rather seriously while breaking Savarna out of prison. Out of his head with fever, he says something to her, what, we don’t know exactly, but it sends her off to the Himalayan city where the Phantom’s son is studying.
One thing you have to understand about Savarna, a character I created some years ago: she had an idyllic childhood in a prosperous maritime family sailing out of India. Then cutthroats commandeered the freighter one night, slaughtered her father and brother and enslaved her at age 12, with all the attendant horrors you might imagine that involves. So that’s her backstory.
Nowadays, anybody who wrongs Savarna is being awfully cavalier about their continued existence. She takes no prisoners, which is why she’s awaiting execution in a Rhodian penitentiary.
And one thing about Mozz: the Phantom never knows if the old man’s answering the question he just asked or the one it’ll take him five more questions to get to. Mozz is quite at home in the fourth dimension where time is all of a piece. Indeed, he calls his prophecy of the 21st Phantom’s death the record of his death.
Here’s Kit flirting with the counter girl at the local tea house. I love that the artist, Mike Manley, has the old lady behind the counter giving Kit the stink eye. That wasn’t in my script. I laughed out loud when the proofs came over. Wonderful stuff!
And here’s where we left it yesterday: Kit making a poor choice about where to sit.
Will let you know how things work out.
Tony DePaul, January 30, 2022, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
I enjoyed the artwork in the 12 days of dialog-free Phantom. Please tell Mike that some of us really liked it.
Will do, Ed. Thanks for following the strip. I should probably check Mike’s FB page this morning, see whether he’s getting any constructive feedback there, pro or con. I’m not on FB but Pam is, I’ll ask her to sign in for me.
On the phone the other day, Mike did mention that we’re getting savaged on our employer’s site, but that’s standard on everything we do.
I don’t know why Mike feels compelled to check in on Comics Kingdom. The late Paul Ryan did, too, and really took it all to heart, the snark, the gratuitous cruelty. I used to quote Groucho at him: Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Don’t do that.
But it was like a car crash, he just had to look.
I love that little touch by Mike Manley. And old man Mozz does remind me of some old folks I’ve had the privilege of interacting with here in East Africa. Never giving you the direct line, thriving in the eliptical, working with hyperbole, regaling you with deep truths veiled in mystery…
Ha! It makes my morning, Vincent, to think that somehow I accidentally stumbled onto a true-to-life connection to East Africa with this character.
I’ve heard that some readers prefer the early Mozz, the teller of tall tales on Lee Falk’s watch. I’ve evolved him into an ascetic who has mystic insights even he can’t account for. That was part of the trend toward a greater narrative realism overall, I think, insofar as we can talk about realism in a story about a guy running around the jungle in purple tights. 🙂 Will just have to keep aiming for the delightfully preposterous as opposed to the merely preposterous.
The Phantom universe may be as fanciful as any other construct in the history of the art form, but introducing real-life stakes into the narrative does seem to up the game a bit (I hope). Mozz is a big part of that.
The former Mozz would be useless to me nowadays, utterly nonfunctional. In Falk’s day he was a source of unreliable information, a cranky old fart, a misogynist. If I’d been stuck with that version of Mozz I’m sure he would have disappeared from the strip in 1999 when our founder did.
I’ll call Mike’s attention to your comment! Thanks so much for reading, Vincent.
So here in Kansas it was 68º today. I rode my bicycle in my shirt sleeves. By Wednesday evening we’re supposed to have 6″ of snow in Wichita with single digit lows. The 20+ mph wind will ensure that it will be much deeper in my driveway. I dug out the snow blower I bought in a moment of weakness some years ago. I’m not a big fan of snow, or winter for that matter, but it has been so dry I’m actually looking forward to the moisture. Nothing like a good fire on a snowy evening.
A 60-degree difference over two days, yow… we haven’t seen anything like that here yet, Jim.
Gonna get soggy, though. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday looks like rain and 45-ish.
What kind of snowblower did you go with? D1’s hubby and I are thinking of pooling our resources on a Toro Power Max 826 OHAE. Runs about $1,500 and comes with five consecutive snowless winters 🙂
Sounds like the kind of intervals we have for snow blowers. I think it was about 2013 when we had our big snow (20″) that resulted in my snow blower. May have used it the next year. I don’t remember. Anyhow, it has been dormant for a while. Used it this afternoon. Sure was easier than shoveling.
Ours is a small Toro gas powered model. I’ll email you a picture of the label. It’s fine for Kansas snows, but I’m not sure it would handle a Rhode Island snow.
Every year I hope time will skip over Winter and maybe just stop in the Fall. Or cut to Spring…
Beautifully written column, Tony. And thanks for the book recommendations and the literary history. I’d like to raise my reading a level, and your current reading sounds interesting.
I also liked the link to your past life—what a story about you and Pam in Philadelphia!
The section on the Phantom—I saw the sour look on the “old lady behind the counter” and I get a real kick out of knowing what Mike Manley, an accomplished artist as well, brings to the Phantom. Wish he had more time for painting
Your blog brings life into these winter days. Thanks!
Thanks for reading, Robert. Mike really is a terrific artist. A fine artist first, which is what makes his comics art so good. Today or tomorrow he’ll be filing material I’m eager to see. We’re doing a 10-day stretch of pure sequential art in February. I’ve seen the first two. Mike’s working as we speak on four to six more.
The photo of Emily on the woodpile is how I remember her. In fact, the last time Kirsti and I saw her was a year before that photo was taken. Crazy weather everywhere: snow in New York, bare ground in Norway. (Well, at least in the southern half.) Just finished a good read: Autumn by Ali Smith. Now enjoying The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by D. Graeber & D. Wengrow. The New Yorker and Atlantic wrote compelling reviews, and rightfully so. Best to Pam.
Thanks for the heads-up, Bill. The Humanity book is tempting, but since Autumn is fiction I’ll go for that one first. Our friend Larry’s after me to stay on the long-form fiction spree, maybe learn something that will help make my second attempt at writing a novel only half as big a trainwreck as the first.
Fun to look back at your lives….I just watched a video recently describing “dead as a doornail”, so I appreciated your reference and know how it was done. You’re right…it’ll last.
We bought our first house and then had no money to “fix it up”. It did get a new roof. Six months (to the day) of the husband being tied off to a tree and climbing and pounding the nails in every weekend. There were snow flurries in the air as he pounded in the last nail on the garage roof. I wouldn’t change those early memories. You do what you can to stay afloat. Dinner and a movie before children became “movie and a babysitter” after children. All good.
Hi, Cynthia! A story about your late uncle Richard: He was running the gas station in Orono while building the house on the Gardner Road after hours. He didn’t own a car, so at the end of the work day he’d walk 2 miles to the house site, work late into the night, then walk back to town where he, Margene and Pam had the apartment next door to the gas station. One winter night he was up on the roof pounding nails and Bob Voelker from across the street got out of bed, grabbed a hammer and told Richard if you’re not going to let me get any sleep tonight I might as well help you put this roof on. And up the ladder Bob went.
They were good friends for the rest of their lives.
If I’ve gotten any of these details wrong Pam will say so.
Bob Voelker wasn’t living there when the house was being built. It was Al Chaloux. Tony knows I always have to set the record straight so here I go again. I know you didn’t know Bob or Al so this is me being me!
Also Gary was already born when Dad was building the house and he did live with mom, dad and me! 😂
Cynthia, this is yet another funny example of math brain v. word brain. I should know by now that Pam hears everything literally. That is to say everything–literally everything–literally. While writing the comment above I said to Pam: was Gary born when you were living in the apartment in Orono? She said no.
After I push the send button she says: you forgot Gary.
Wait a minute… you said Gary hadn’t been born when you were living in the apartment in Orono.
She says, no, he had been born before that, when we were living in the apartment in Bangor.
🙂
You two could go on the road as a comedy team. I appreciate the literal reference…we have some in our family and it’s interesting…or eye-rolling, depending on the day.
Oh, I love that story of Uncle Richard. I’ve probably told you before, I was five when I met my new aunt and was smitten. I stayed with them overnight and don’t remember Pam or Gary, just that I was spending the night with my aunt and uncle without my parents! That made me feel very special. Did they live in a trailer at one time? Love you two.
They did, I think. I seem to recall someone saying they lived in a trailer in Alabama after Richard got out of the Army, and after Pam was born they moved to Maine, hauling the trailer behind them on their way north.
Thanks for the update on the Phantom, Tony, this is a really excellent story, with this intriguing structure of Mozz’s prophecies and the anticipation of how the Phantom will actually deal with the situation… plus Manley’s drawings of course.
Guess you’ll have to wait for the snow to melt before any more biking…
Best wishes Bill
Thanks for reading, Bill. I almost took the bike out for a blast last evening. Decided against it because I wasn’t sure I could get back home before the snow started.
Thanks for the good word on the daily strip. This narrative’s going to run for quite a while yet. It’ll likely end up being the longest story in the 85-year history of the strip.
If you got snow like what we had in Maine last night, you’re still out shoveling! Take care, and keep on writing.
David
Thanks for reading, Dave. I got a halfway decent job done in two hours, just enough to get the cars out of the driveway. I’ll hit it again this evening. Starting a fire now to thaw out a bit.
I’ve just spent the most enjoyable, best half hour of my day, looking at your “bit of history” beautiful family photo album. Thanks for posting, it just made my day.
The old post, Ellie? That was the 36-year mark, hard to believe it’s 46 now.
Thanks for reading!
Tony, love the little D1 shot and commentary. That is really touching. I must be nostalgic today.
Brad
Thanks, Brad. She really was a sweet little girl. Now she’s raising two just like her.
Great update, Tony. Alway enjoy reading your scribbles. Glad y’all are well.
Thanks, Eric. You must be counting the days to Tybee by now.
Nice shots
Just walked in the door. I got us shoveled out in 2 hours. It’s waist high out by the road. But it’s dry, shovels fairly easy.
So I was reading a Swedish Kurt Wallander mystery, by Henning Mankell, as I am sure you know. At one point a character mentions that their daughter is named Diana , after Diana Palmer. They love their Ghost Who Walks over there…
D1’s middle name is Diana. But just because we like the sound of it 🙂
Glad you mentioned Wallander, you reminded me I still have the very last one, “The Troubled Man”, to read. I discovered the books after visiting Ysted in Sweden where the books are set. You can do a tourist trail round some of the places that appear in the stories, and I had a coffee in Wallander’s favorite cafe…The late Mankell was a great writer.
The Phantom makes another appearance in a Kurt Wallander mystery, “Sidetracked”. Wallander finds a Phantom comic and realizes the goal of his search is of a certain age.
I’ll say no more.
The Wallander books are so good, I circle back to them occasionally to re-read them. They never fail to move me.
I’ve never read any. Will have to put Wallander on my list…
They’re very good police procedural mysteries, there’s a sub text of being about the state Sweden was in at the time Mankell wrote them.
Got to dig out “Sidetracked” now and look for the Phantom reference!
Just bought “Locusts have no king” by Dawn Powell, hadn’t heard of her before so thanks for reference.
Bill
I’m enjoying Locusts. It’s fun, and unlike anything I ever thought I’d enjoy reading. She needed better everything and never got it: better editor, better agent, better publisher. She had such a star-crossed life it’s a wonder she got any real writing done at all.