the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Many bloggers have said, “The best thing about that TToT bloghop is the variety of viewpoints and the succinct and engaging writing.” Some have said, “There is such an accessible vibe among the writers, especially with the theme being ‘gratitude’, which in lesser hands can be somewhat… distancing.” It is even rumored, some have wondered, aloud… “That being said, there’s that Doctrine blog that throws photos and music around like a piñata at Tasmanian birthday party. How ever does that nice host manage such of chaos?”

Speaking of ‘that nice host’, Kristi is there, backstage/behind the scenes keeping the show going every week so the rest of us can come and relate the people, places and things that have made us feel grateful. Thanks, Kristi!

On with the grats!

1) Phyllis

‘Her master’s image’ redux
Gotta look close. Phyllis reflected in the TV*
*if they still call ’em that

2) Una  discovered a frog in the grass one night this week. (She did that ‘dog hop’ thing, springing straight up in the air, never taking their eyes off whatever it was that startled them). The next day I found another one on the side lawn, (not eating the lettuce, of course). Took me a picture:

Eastern Spadefoot Toad (Scaphiopus holbrookii)

Went online with the photo to get the species. (Read all about the frog: here) I trust you caught the line about ‘smelling like peanut butter?’ lol serially!

Ain’t this internet somethin? Totally got to assign it a Grat (Number 5)

3) work (thousand words, coming at ‘cha)

4) The weather (or climate (or whatever the necessary hybrid term. Weathmate, maybe?))

5) Internet and the humongous virtual used bookstore that it manifests as for clarks everywhere

6) Getting very close to having Almira in a state I am willing to send out to those who would be beta readers** (hey! that’s a total standalone Grat Item… I’ll take it!)

7) (Where was I? oh yeah, the Almira excerpt. Well this weekend I thought, let’s try something a little different. How about an excerpt that isn’t in the book? You remember when we wrote a story about how Hunk Dietrich was caught, as a boy, in the Great Tri-State Tornado? Ever wonder what the real story of Dorothy and Toto and Mrs. Gulch was?

“I’m ever so worried, I don’t know where Toto has run off to. His bowl in the yard hasn’t been touched.”

Dorothy spoke to the five adults sitting in the dining room. In perhaps unconscious mimicry of her missing terrier, she found and held eye contact with each person, just to be certain her lament was appreciated.

Hunk was frowning, as if trying to remember something, but failed with a shy smile. Hickory, the farm hand with the most potential to feel her angst, simply looked sad. Next to last was Zeke, except he avoided Dorothy’s stare by glancing at her mother. With a few more years of life experience, the teenage girl might have recognized the spoiled-food look of guilt, in the overweight man’s eyes. She finished her appeal with Uncle Henry, who had his list on the table next to his half-eaten breakfast and might have well been in Paraguay. Her adoptive mother pressed thin lips into a thinner smile, for a brief second, Dorothy witnessed a look of assessment of threat too far away to pose a threat. Or so she hoped.

Emily Gale got up from the table, which signaled the end of breakfast and the start of the workday.

“If…” the older woman’s face briefly twisted, like a bittersweet tendril finding flesh, “your dog doesn’t show up by lunch, we’ll take the truck and go looking for it.  Now go help Margherita in the kitchen.”

***

“What the….?!!”

Emily Gale managed to load more surprise, disdain, hate and fear into two words and a starving ellipsis than seemed possible. She sat with her elbow resting on the sill of the open passenger-side window as the farm truck drove slowly along County Rd #2.

The afternoon was overcast with clouds that, like aggressive high school boys at the start of a cafeteria lunch lime, elbowed and pushed each other to dominate that near limitless Kansas sky. Fields, baked by the relentless late-summer sun, held dust close, a prairie fog that distracted from the clouds overhead.

The cause of Emily’s consternation was a bicycle traveling towards the truck. In fairness to Emily and Dorothy and Henry Gale, crowed into the front of the truck, it wasn’t simply a bicycle moving at an impressive speed back towards the Gale farm, it was the woman pedaling it.

Wearing a coat that was long enough to be at risk of being caught the bike’s chain, the speed she was traveling left the coattails to flap behind her. There was a subtle dilemma confronting any observer, compounded by the movement along the road, and that was: was this a very short woman on a normal sized bicycle or a normal woman on and gargantuan vehicle? Or both.

What was not a mystery, at least to a local resident, was the identity of the woman.

The face of the woman on the bike was either frightening or startling. Like the prow of an ancient Viking longship, the woman’s nose took the lead, carving the air and, in a sense, determining her path. It was large, sharp, hooked downwards and… mostly it was large. If that were the only remarkable quality to the woman’s face, then the first characterization, no matter how un-Christian, would have been sufficient.

Life, despite the best efforts of some people, is not always that simple. While the nose of the woman on the bicycle passing in the opposite direction was hard to ignore, the eyes that formed the true center of her face were impossible to miss.

While the Bard is famous for noting eyes being the window to the soul, one immediately regrets such a limiting metaphor. The eyes of the woman on the bicycle were beautiful the way that nature’s most dynamic creatures are beautiful, the eyes of the tiger, the gaze of the soaring eagle, the depths of love as a mother watches her child sleep in her arms.

Except there is a darkness within them that, given the speed of the bicycle passing in the opposite direction, our observer is fortunate to be spared from experiencing.

“Turn back! Turn back, In the basket on the back! It was Toto!”

Henry Gale slowed enough to leave the asphalt road and cut a dusty arc in the newly mown alfalfa field and drove in the opposite direction.

Dorothy, wedged between her adoptive parents could barely contain her excitement. One hand rested lightly on the steering wheel as they approached the woman and the bicycle, now stationary to the side of the road. Thinking her aunt was trying to help steer, having the advantage of being on the passenger side, she felt the wheel being pulled hard to the right. Without thought, Dorothy countered the unexpected rotation, and the truck came to a stop. The right side rearview mirror three inches from the small woman standing next to the large bike.

No one spoke.

“Miss Gulch.” Emily Gale’s words defied the climate, an ice-brittle greeting stuck in the dusty gravel between the truck and the woman at the side of the road.

“Emily. Henry. Zeke” The woman’s accent was odd enough to notice but, to a sixteen-year-old girl, not distinctive enough to wonder about.

“Dorothy.” There was a pause, like a composers trick, inserting a rest at the beginning of a melody.

No one moved.

The wicker basket, attached to the back of the seat, made a sound.

Looking only at Emily Gale, the woman turned, un-latched the top and after accepting a pink-tongue lick as greeting, lifted the small dog up and towards the cab of the truck.

“Toto!” Dorothy tried to pull herself over her aunt and through the window.

Emily Gale raised her left hand from where it still rested on the steering wheel and said,

“That will be enough, Dorothy. Zeke! Take the dog from Miss Gulch so she can be on her way.”

The farm hand, a shadow of guilt veiling his eyes, jumped from the truck, accepted the small black dog and turned away. Holding the dog’s leg he waved it past his boss and Dorothy smiled from her place in the cab, between the two Gales. A smile of relief flared and then suspicion began to kindle as she looked past her aunt at the woman outside.

“Alright Henry, get this truck back to the farm. This ain’t no summer holiday.”

Zeke sat in the open truck bed, the dog cradled in his hands, watching as the short woman remained standing, alone at the edge of the limitless prairie.

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE To any Reader or ‘almost-participant’. If you’re feeling the butterflies and would really rather have a gradual transition on stage, then this is what you’ve been waiting/hoping for/dreading/wondering why none of the other bloggers gather the villagers and hand out torches… just send your Grat Item in with attributions and before you can say ‘Wait! I wasn’t serious…” your words will circle the globe.

9) Sunday Supplement

10) Secret Rule 1.3  […because life always seems to be ready (pretty much at times we are not) to spring a new set of rules on us; why shouldn’t we get our hands on that bad boy and make sure that all of the rules are not for them, that some of the rules can be written for us? huh? why the heck not?!]    … uh, ibid   op. cit. Lorem ipsum y’all

* and, of course, any other Friend of the Doctrine. Not so clear (or comfortable) with this whole beta read thing. I get the idea: an objective, critical read of the story with the goal of identifying (any) weaknesses or strengths that might be further developed. Seems like a lot of work. If you’ve found the excerpts from the book intriguing but are not comfortable with the critical thing, do not despair. I’ll, like, totally send you a copy to read…just because.

Lyric Advisory: This week’s music vid is the Foo Fighters cover of Prince’s ‘Little Nikki’  For some reason it lodged itself in my consciousness this morning. Excellent version, perhaps a bit on the racy side, if you’ve waited for Sunday morning to listen.

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Ola
Sitting in the single most potent everyday example of magic, the space between dark shade and illuminating sunlight, Ola looks at the man behind the camera. A black and sable German Shepherd, the classic ears triangulated and focused on her surroundings are absent, being that she is lying in the grass of the backyard, the deck a brown-cropping of the mostly green field of view. Her light brown haunches are in the lower-right of the photo. Head is to the left and turned in our direction.
Even those people who have not had the fortune to be a dog’s alpha, the expression on her face will nevertheless provide a glimpse into our relationship.
Ola is smiling and her ears are relaxed to the sides. This simple, not-really-a-posture-but-very-much-a-physical-communication, conveys the un-qualified trust she possessed.
It is not a trust meant to allay fears or concerns, it’s far simpler than that. It is the knowledge that I would protect her in whatever she might need protecting from, both large and small.
The part of me that wants to say, ‘Yet she died. I did not protect her well enough,’ is the reason for the ‘smile’ in her expression. It says, ‘I know you better than you know yourself. We have each other’s back here in this moment and thats all that matters.’

Welcome to the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop. Hosted by Kristi, each week people from most ever where write, submit, link, read and share the experience of gratitude in such a variety of contexts and expressions that you will surely sit back and say, “Whoa! I never realized that the people in the blogosphere were so eloquent, loquacious, organized in thought and… err  eccentrically creative. Where do I sign up?”

Good news, you are a couple of clicks away from joining in.

1)  Una

Una sitting before the springtime battlefield.
Quiet on the front, ravening moss wounded and slowed for the moment. She has confidence we can deal with the new challenge.
In the center foreground of the photo, Una has turned her head to the left and is facing the camera. This posture affords us a plentitude of visual cues. (Had she not turned, we would have observed an upright, rounded off wedge with a shiny black coat, topped by twin triangles of ears.)
Facing us we see the light brown marks above her eyes and a dusting of silver along the bottom of her jaw.
In contrast to Ola, Una is pretty much black-on-black…’Has-anyone-seen-my-eyebrow-pencil?” Interesting to note that, in the family tree, Una is closer to the ground than Ola… despite her amiable personality and relatively diminutive, she shows less of the modifications (of breeding for purpose and appearance) that her larger sister demonstrates.

2) Phyllis

On their way out for a walk

3) the Wakefield Doctrine

4) work (It puts me out there, in my car, with lots of interesting things to look at and such)

Hopkinton Meeting House (c 1790)

5) Six Sentence Story. bloghop… fun with words, go there, read words, write words, it’ll all work out

6) Almira excerpt: (Backstory/context. Sterling Gulch enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force to go and fight in Europe towards the end of World War I. He was wounded the first time he saw action.)

1918 Arras, France

The dream is the same I’ve had since landing at Saint Nazaire. The part that makes it ‘that dream again’ is how it begins. I hear Almira calling me from across a field. I don’t see her because I’m not in that field, I’m working on something. In a blacksmith shop, complete with an anvil and bellows and a forge. From where I stand, I feel the heat from the forge but at unpredictable intervals a blast of frigid air stabs my face. There are shoes hanging from the ceiling, all sorts of shoes.

Hearing Almira’s voice change from greeting to alarm, I put down the hammer and walk outside. The blacksmith shop is clearly in a small town. There’s a sense of vehicles and people passing in the street outside the windows, but when I step outside, I’m standing in a meadow. Almira’s voice again, coming from a wooded hill in the middle of a wide-open prairie. She is backing away from something in the woods and trying to warn me of danger. The dream usually ends with a single clap of thunder, but of late, the sound is stretched becoming a howling, like hungry wolves in a winter’s forest.

On those nights I have the dream, a nurse always comes to stand next to my bed, touching my forehead with a cool, white cloth. There is no rise of daylight and there’s no sense of the approaching of night. I lie in a single bed with an army green blanket and stare at the lights hanging from the ceiling.

I assume I’m on some drug, because I always remember that I forgot to ask her name and where we are, content to stare into her face, framed in a blonde halo.

“Lieutenant Gulch, can you hear me?”

I hear my name, but the person speaking is short, balding, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and is not a beautiful woman. I supposed the drugs don’t always work as well as they’re supposed to, so I tried to close my eyes.

“Lt. Gulch, wake up! We need to move you. And your cooperation is really gonna make this go smoother.”

I decided that if I don’t open my eyes, things will go back to the way they’ve been since…. well, since I started having the same dream over and over and sometimes waking up to a beautiful nurse.

“Nope. Can’t do this to me, I need to get this ward transported outta here.  As the cops in my neighborhood used to tell us, ‘You’re coming along, whether you want to or not’.”

Maybe it was the tone of his voice, which had none of the poetic cadence of dreams, so I opened my eyes again and stared at Captain Tribianni. At least that’s what the name tag on his shirt pocket maintained.

“Better! Let’s start with the stupid questions and then I’ll tell you the plan and I can get on to the next soon-to-be-discharged patient.”

He pulled a metal chair from somewhere to his right, sat down, crossed his legs and stared at me,

“Come on! Gave you a clue there… say something and I won’t have to put a notation on your chart that will require less from you now but will cost you too much when you get home.”

His raised eyebrows looked sincere, so I said, “OK, doc. Let’s do the easy parts first. I’m leaving this place. That’s neither good nor bad until you tell me where I’m leaving to…”

“Fair enough. You’re leaving and heading home. The U. S. of A. Long boat ride, but from what I see on the chart here, you’ll survive the trip. You’ll have company, the War is over. You slept right through Armistice Day! Now that you’ve passed the first test by not asking me any disturbing questions like, How soon can I re-join my outfit, lets deal with the really tough subject…”

“How bad am I hurt?”

“Give the man a kewpie doll! I’ll give it to you straight. You have all the parts you came over here with, it’s just that some don’t work so well. You get to walk out of here and you can sign for your stuff, provided you’re left-handed. Your right hand is going to take time to get back to being as useful as it was when you got off the boat. So, wait, don’t ask! I’ve given this talk 13 times today already.

You’ve been down here in the Caverns in Arras for a month and a half. Mostly because of the damage the mustard gas did to your lungs; although the shattered right arm was also part of the reason. What makes you a lucky man is that down here we’re able to prevent influenza from completing the job the Germans started on you. You missed the worst of it. So, we’ll get you thinking about moving around a little. Then, we’ll tell you to start moving around more. You’ll start to hate the head nurse, but he’s used to that, it tells him you’re getting better. Then, in about 3 weeks, we put you on a truck that’ll take you to a boat that will return you home. Then the real hard part begins.”

“No, that won’t be a problem for me. I have a wife who’s waiting for me.”

The doctor got up and, after tapping me lightly on the knee with the chart, walked to the end of the bed and hung it on a hook at the foot of the bed.

“One thing, doc. The blonde nurse, when does she come on duty? I want to say thanks for her help.”

“Don’t make me put a note in your chart, son. All the female nurses shipped out 2 months ago, their skills were more needed in the front-line hospitals, frankly this place is a storage facility. Haven’t seen a woman in 6 weeks.”

He watched my face more carefully than he should have, given I asked such a simple question.

“Oh. never mind. Must be mistaken.”

He nodded, more to himself, and walked away.

7) Sunday Supplement

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE  If anyone is out there with what they believe is a sincere desire to get into the bloghop game but feel what they have written is not what they think it is, send it in as a comment. I’ll post it right here at #8. With full attribution and ever thang.

9) Non-winter weather today. It was not, as Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, at all ‘frightful’.

10) Secret Rule 1.3 (“… the completion of a list of Ten Items is, even in its anticipation, something to be grateful for; so, op.cit. that bad boy and enter it right down there at Number 10!” [“…. ibid, y’all”]

music vid