I hope you enjoyed my verses last week. I’ve been thinking of writing enough of them to make a children’s book of poetry. How many would make for a modern day “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” I wonder. That book saw it’s 140th birthday last year. That’s quite a publishing run!
Many of my verses make use of idioms and wordplay. In fact, I was originally thinking that I should call it “Verses for the Complete Idiom,” playing off of the “Complete Idiot” how-to series, but I doubted children would get the connection. Also, the number of idioms in the English language is legion! When would such a project even end?
In my days working at Crown Books I was delighted to discover children’s books by Shel Silverstein. His skewed view of the world was nothing short of genius, and his illustrations were of minimalist perfection. Oh, how I wish I could draw! If you don’t recognize the name, seek out “Where The Sidewalk Ends” or “Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book” to get started.
I’m no Silverstein, but his work has inspired me and I thought I might use my poem “Verses Versus Curses” as the title of my book. I think it sets the mood, gives a nod to Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” and could be the first poem in the book.
Speaking of idioms, here’s another poem I wrote recently based on the weather “raining cats and dogs.”
Cats and Dogs
It never did rain cats and dogs
When I played in a puddle.
It may have showered toads and frogs,
But not one you could cuddle.
A street could flood with pigs and hogs,
Creating quite a mud-dle.
And clouds that hail down sticks and logs
Will make the children huddle.
But “sticks and stones may break my bones”
Is not a sound rebuttal.
I’m aware that “rebuttal” is not on a child’s standard vocabulary list, but there’s nothing more motivating for learning a word than hearing it used in an interesting way. I was three the first time our family took a sabbatical in Germany and I returned at age four with many new words in my own vocabulary, both German and English.
TTFN
P.S. This is not a New Year’s resolution, just an ambition.
Ed Asner stood at the end of my gurney and put his hand on my ankle by way of encouragement as he was talking to someone else. He moved on before I could thank him but I sure appreciated the warm assurance.
You may remember Ed Asner from his portrayal of Santa Claus on the movie Elf. Like my daughter says, the holiday season hasn’t really started until we sit down to watch Elf. It’s a Christmas favorite in the Margerum household and I love to pull my “World’s Best Cup of Coffee” mug off the shelf to salute the holidays.
Maybe you remember Asner as the voice of the curmudgeonly Carl Fredricksen in the animated movie Up. He flew his house to South America by equipping it with balloons.
My memories of him date back much further to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” in which he played Mary’s boss in the newsroom of WJM-TV.
In the very first episode when she interviewed for her job, he asked inappropriate questions about her personal life and she stood up and reprimanded him for it. In response, he walked around his big desk with a half grin on his face and told her, “You know what? You got spunk.”
She modestly tried to thank him for the compliment but he interrupted her.
“I hate spunk.”
That got a huge laugh from the live audience and the relationship was established. The series ran for nine years.
His character, Lou Grant, was one of the few—maybe the only—to get a spin-off from a sitcom to create a drama. He was given the job of City Editor at a Los Angeles newspaper in a series that began immediately and “Lou Grant” would run for five years. Ed Asner won Emmy Awards for the same character in each series.
This was the Ed Asner I knew and loved even though, like Mary, I was a little intimidated by him.
I was on a gurney donating blood along with many more actors in the Screen Actors Guild and Asner was there because he was the SAG President. Maybe he could sense my fear, actors are practiced at sensing the emotions in other people. I hate needles, and his hand on my ankle was just the reassurance I needed. I breathed a little easier after that.
The only words he could’ve said to improve on the moment would’ve been:
“You know what? You got spunk.”
TTFN
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Screenshot
Last week, a few hours after my newsletter went out, I saw a social media post from Judy Norton that an autographed CD version of her Christmas music is available through her website: judynorton.com.
I had only mentioned where I saw it downloadable.
Downloads are handy but so difficult to wrap, don’t you think?
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Well these weren’t here when I walked down this path on the way to the park. I wonder if someone dropped them or just abandoned them…
I wonder.
That’s what I do. I wonder. And ideas begin to take shape.
I showed this photo to my wife—the photographer—and she complimented me on the composition after I described a different version that didn’t include the path in the distance. Isn’t it exciting to realize what you’ve learned from your partner just by sharing interests?
“Now there’s a writing prompt!” she said, reflecting my thoughts back at me. “It makes me think of someone who was so scared he jumped out of his shoes and ran. Or maybe a huge eagle grabbed him and flew away leaving just his shoes.”
“Right?” I asked, feeling the juices of more stories start to bubble up in my imagination.
In my newsletter from two weeks ago I wrote about a 12-year-old girl who came to my book signing at Main Street Books. She wants to be a writer and her mother encouraged her to ask me questions. As did I.
Of course, the most commonly asked question of any writer is “Where do you get your ideas?” Especially when the writer has written a fantastical adventure tale!
Just as the girl asked me that question, a customer walked past, saw my flyer about the kittens, and exclaimed “Awww, they’re so cute!” as she passed by.
“There’s a story right there,” I told her. Maybe she always wanted to adopt a kitten but lives in an apartment that doesn’t allow pets. Or maybe she had a cat who passed away but looked just like one of these kittens. Everyone has a story to tell, right?” The girl nodded. “If you pay attention to other people and listen to their stories, that’s a great way to begin. And then you can start playing around with those ideas by using your imagination.”
I didn’t tell her that I was a notorious daydreamer in school. My mom told me I was an easy child because she could set me in the middle of the room with a handful of toys and I would entertain myself for hours. She was right! I remember doing that.
My attraction to theatre was a natural extension of that kind of thinking. Hey, Eric, do you want to join a group of students who all use their imaginations to tell stories and then add sets, costumes, props, lights and more? Hey, sign me up! What a perfect activity for a devoted daydreamer!
Taking my own advice, I made a point of asking the girl what she had written and then listened to her story. I could tell we were kindred spirits, dabbling in fantastical worlds and characters. I could also tell that she appreciated having an adult listen to her like an equal while encouraging her aspirations.
So what flight of fancy did my imagination run to when I saw these shoes?
Maybe they’re lying in wait for you to come along and try them on, because they’ll take you into a world where trees talk, birds read your thoughts, and dreams come true.
TTFN
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Sinking Feeling
Having failed to lure Tabitha into our humane trap, Debbie and I pivoted to catching her kittens instead. Maternal instincts are a pretty major influence so this could be the needed work-around. We only managed to catch four of the five before the early snowfall, but we still hope the last one will give the cage a try.
They’re isolated in our small downstairs bathroom and when I went to visit them, these two were cuddled up together in the sink. That’s like a greeting card photo, right?
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Three torties (tortoise shell markings), one tabby (already looking like her mother), and one black cat (a Halloween kitty).
If you’re thinking you only see four in the photo, zoom in on the black kitten in the middle of the kittenkaboodle*. Its head is down but if you can find the eyes, you’ll suddenly see the fifth kitten. It’s like one of those Magic Eye pictures.
While you’re looking closely, check out the paw of the tortie to the far right. There’s a bright white patch on the toe, like a mani-pedi gone awry. But totally adorable. I’ve already started calling her Toe White.
We’re thinking we can drop one in the first five Trick-or-Treat bags that open up when we answer the doorbell. A trick that grows into a treat! Probably throw in a can of cat food for good measure.
So all that time we spent worrying about getting Tabitha back to her unseen kittens when we took her to the vet was absolutely accurate! And she’s now bringing them around for us to take over the feeding of the brood. We’re pretty sure they’re nesting under the deck by way of a small opening at the steps.
In my updates from the last few months I’ve mentioned how streetwise Tabitha is—dare I say cagey—and that she won’t walk into the humane trap we used before.
I’ve imagined the old fashioned upside-down cardboard box held up by a stick, but you have to be there to pull the string, AND be ready to hold down the box during the thrashing of a frightened feral cat, AND have a way to transfer the cat from the box to a cat carrier. Not very practical.
I’ve also thought about childhood TV cartoons of a dog catcher carrying a big net on a stick. They don’t do that anymore.
Tabitha still needs to get those non-dissolving stitches removed, so stay tuned for more updates and more precious kitten pictures.
TTFN
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I thoroughly enjoyed my Saturday at Main Street Books in Lafayette, made several new friends and got to encourage a 12-year-old girl who already knew she wanted to be a writer. I could see her mother’s gratitude and approval for what I was saying. Their mutual thanks were really special to me.
I also got to reunite with some of the high school students I had directed in plays over the last few years. They were at the Farmer’s Market outside and were so enthusiastic about coming in to see me. They have a play coming up this weekend and I’m excited to see what they’ve accomplished under their new director.
After the book signing, Debbie and I visited one other former high school student working up the street. They are already out of college, also a writer of plays, and we got to talk shop between customers. They work at Scones & Doilies and let me tell you, walking into that bakery, the aroma alone will register an additional five pounds on your bathroom scale. And you won’t object because it’s heavenly! We bought a few treats, including gluten free options that Debbie could enjoy.
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*kittenkaboodle—get out your scorecard, Eric has added one more word to the English language!
It was my first semester at the University of Southern California where I was working on my Master’s Degree, and one of the great icons of science fiction was coming to campus to speak!
The man who wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and countless short stories. THAT Ray Bradbury.
And because I was born in October, he clearly wrote The October Country just for me. I had to meet him!
What made me think of him for this newsletter? I’ve been listening to his novel Death Is A Lonely Business, another Bradbury masterpiece that he wrote in 1985. It features a young aspiring writer in 1949 living alone in Venice, California, who gets caught up in a murder mystery that’s rife with haunting metaphors of fog and mist, and a pay phone that rings in the middle of the night only to deliver the sound of a distant person breathing.
Bradbury doesn’t write horror, he writes the stuff that makes you pull your covers over your head to protect yourself from the monsters under the bed. The psychological terror of childhood fears. He’s a poet of anxiety, a purveyor of winds off the graveyard.
In this novel, his protagonist is writing some of the same stories that Bradbury himself wrote in his younger years. An informed reader will hear the echoes of stories like “The Fog Horn,” “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” and many more. I was transported to when I had first read these stories and felt like Bradbury was telling me the origin of each story.
In his talk at USC, he pointed through the dark auditorium, his finger penetrating the walls and across the quad. “The library,” he told us, “that’s your most important education of all right behind you.” The university had a huge library. “Go read,” he told us, “anything you can get your hands on. That’s where you’ll learn the most. One book will lead you to the next and the next… Never stop.”
I never have.
While I sat listening to him speak I thought about the many stories he had adapted into short plays, and I wrote him an invitation to see me in my first play at USC, Eugene O’Neil’s “Ah, Wilderness!” I promised to reserve two tickets for him if he could make it.
The other advice he gave about writing was entirely practical: begin by writing short stories. You can spend a year writing a terrible novel and it’ll waste a year of your time, or you can write fifty-two short stories, one a week, and sell at least one. He defied anyone to write fifty-two terrible stories in a row, one of them was going to be good!
A few years later I wrote one story and sent it in to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I sent it on paper, through the mail, with an SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) so they could send me their reply. I still have that story in my files, and my rejection slip. I was too embarrassed to send it out to another magazine, or to write fifty-one more. My bad.
I was also embarrassed when I handed Mr. Bradbury my hand-written invitation to see my play. Others were waiting in line for autographs but I had to run to class so I just handed him the folded paper.
“Does it have your return address?” he asked, stopping to take me in, probably seeing a reflection of himself in my eyes.
“No,” I answered, “you don’t have to answer it.”
I still picture him opening up my note and reading it long after the play was done, thinking to himself “I’d like to have seen that.”
TTFN
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Tabitha is still coming to eat her medicated food, but we’re going to run out. We need to capture her soon. Her son, GG, looks in the window to see if I’ll come out to pet him while he eats. He also lies on top of the picnic table outside to watch TV with us every night.
He’s so ready to be domesticated.
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For anyone who lives around Lafayette, Indiana, I’ll be signing copies of The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles at Main Street Books on Saturday, October 25th from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.
The books make a good holiday gift for children ages 8 to 12. I’ve heard from parents and grandparents who have read the book aloud—the original audiobook—saying they created special memories with the young folk.
I can sell you a MAMLA coffee mug for your hot apple cider, and I’ll be giving away bookmarks and mazes if you just want to come by and say hi.
October 25th is the last day of the Farmer’s Market for the 2025 season. Always a fun time and just a block away from Main Street Books.
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The saga of Tabitha has reached a stalemate for the time being. She will not re-enter the cage to eat food and spring the trap, but after several days of not eating she showed up at our back door looking thin and forlorn. So we fed her…with medication. She ate more than one-and-a-half cans.
She still needs to have her sutures removed, but her rear end didn’t look swollen last time we could see it. Maybe she bit through them while cleaning herself?
Hopefully she’ll trust us once more to provide food and care and have her stitches out at the vet, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Meanwhile, I have an excellent book to recommend:
The Maid, by Nita Prose
Like me, you’ve probably seen this book cover several times over the last few years. It was selected for the GMA Book Club, among other things. I saw the audiobook on sale and decided to give it a spin.
I like whodunnits and, having worked retail, served coffee and bartending, I figured I could relate to the service aspect of a hotel maid.
But Molly is a maid with a difference.
Molly is the first person narrator, so her perspective isn’t entirely explained. She seems to be on the autism spectrum, as she admits to having difficulty discerning other people’s emotions. She is also obsessive about cleaning rooms, her clothing, and her apartment.
Molly is also very observant, like her TV hero Columbo. She and her Gran used to watch that show together all the time, making her a perceptive detective.
When Molly enters to clean a room in The Grand Hotel she discovers the dead body of a very rich man. She becomes a prime witness, and later the prime suspect.
Molly’s point of view is delivered with perfection by Lauren Ambrose in the audiobook, conveying her confusion, frustration, and emotions. I suspect that if you read the book yourself, you’ll also hear Molly’s voice in your mind. The narrative is written that well.
No spoilers here, but I will say that I was surprised by a few twists and turns near the end of the novel and even got a bit choked up by the sentiment in that part of the story.
Speaking of the end, do not skip the epilogue. Writers these days are discouraged from presenting a prologue or an epilogue because, they say, it should just be part of the book. I don’t have an opinion on that, but if you skip the epilogue of The Maid you’ll miss the most interesting twist of all.
I see that Nita Prose has written additional books for this character, but this first book is completely self-contained, no cliff-hanger or unanswered questions. You could start and stop with this first book and feel very satisfied.
Thanks, Nita, I appreciate that. I don’t like those stray hairs any more than Molly does.
When I left off last week, Tabitha had stepped on the metal plate to trigger the door spring and we whisked her off to Purdue Veterinary Clinic. Then we made the decision to bring her back and release her so she could go nurse her kittens somewhere out there in the woods.
We had decided to trust her to trust us.
Now you’re caught up.
After feeding her the canned food with the stool softener, we lifted the cage door and she pulled back like the photo above from when she was captured.
“C’mon, Tabby, we brought you back to feed your little ones. Go.”
I pressed my finger against her backside through the bars of the cage and she dashed out, crossed the deck, and disappeared into the brush.
“Just please come back, so we can give you more medicine.”
A moment after she left I realized that I had touched her for the first time since she was born over two years ago. In the past she had been willing to touch her nose to my finger, and I’d settled for “butterfly kisses” from her whiskers but I always wanted to pet her. She was soft and furry, of course, and a little bit scrawny, but mostly I felt her warmth and the moment of connection that came with it. Interesting what your finger can tell you in a brief touch.
It was a bucket list moment. Brief but meaningful.
God bless that cat, she’s returned to eat every morning since. And I know the medicine is working because I saw her in the neighbor’s yard a few days later when she lifted her tail to spew brown liquid generously across the grass. Sorry, Cindy.
The current conundrum (or cat-nundrum) is our need to catch her again to have the sutures removed. On Monday morning she sat by the cage staring at the food for twenty minutes hoping to get her daily bowlful, then gave up and left.
No food. No medication. Did we make a mistake by letting her loose? Or did we save her kittens?
The vet checked her for lactation and was uncertain whether she was actively nursing because of the low amount of milk they could express. We chose to let her feed them if at all possible—these kittens we’ve never seen.
I started writing about this series of events two weeks ago with “Fear of the Unknown,” and we’re still fearing the unknown. A reflection of our times, isn’t it?
Meanwhile I finished writing the adventure of the two girls in The Most Amazing Museum of Chicago and got them safely away from The Great Chicago Fire. More unknowns ahead for me and my characters!
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I was honored to receive an email recently telling me that my book would be featured in a display at The Caretaker’s Cottage curated by the West Lafayette Public Library. My wife and I went over to see it and she took this photo of me. You can see MAMLA on the top shelf of the display case farthest to the right.
It’s quite the incentive to put my nose to the grindstone and finish my sequel, The Most Amazing Museum of Chicago. I have 10,335 words written on my first draft, so that’s not nothing!
The Caretaker’s Cottage was remodeled into a beautiful little museum that the public library set up and it sits on the edge of Grandview Cemetery, where my parents and grandmother are buried. The cottage was built around the turn of the twentieth century and housed the cemetery caretaker and his family.
The grand view, now hidden by majestic maples and towering oak trees, looked down the hillside and across the Wabash River, providing a spectacular vista of Lafayette.
I used to walk or ride my bike past that cemetery on my way to junior high school and always found it calming, not frightening like cemeteries in the movies.
The rotating displays of the museum honors West Lafayette residents from soldiers to sports figures to writers, telling the story of our city. There used to be a display of my mother’s campaign memorabilia and some highlights of her twenty-four years as mayor. That exhibit and more are now housed on the top floor of the public library.
A less comfortable story, but vital to tell, is that West Lafayette was once a sun-down town. That means that everyone who was not white had to leave the town by the time the sun went down. Non-whites were allowed to clean houses and do manual labor, but they could not live here.
This practice ended before I was born, but it sends a cold spike into my guts when I think about it. The docent admitted that she benefitted from generational wealth, living in the house that her grandparents built about a century ago. She even showed us a copy of the deed they signed with large letters excluding non-whites. It was poignant.
What is it they say in Alcoholics Anonymous? Before you can begin mending, you have to admit you have a problem? I’m glad to see the racial mix across the city and when I work part time at the Junior/Senior High School. I hope we, as a nation, can continue to mend and learn from our history how ever uncomfortable it may be.
We are, after all, the human race. We are one people.
I was preparing to direct a stage version of Dead Man Walking in Wichita when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
The Death Penalty Discourse Center operated out of that area. Had they even received the check for the performance rights? I had no way of knowing, and they were unreachable. Louisiana was hit hard.
There was nowhere to go but forward.
Sister Helen Prejean’s bestselling memoir had been adapted into an Academy Award winning movie and, as a theatre professor working in a university founded by nuns, I knew this would be a significant opportunity. The hurricane turned many lives upside down and this play did the same.
I gathered a cast of very talented and dedicated actors who understood the gravity of this story and the questions of life and death. Even my eight-year-old daughter played an important role as the surviving sister of the murder victim. She delivered a haunting performance as the forgotten child, emotionally abandoned by her parents who were drowning in their own grief.
A local sister who ministered to prisoners on death row came to speak to the cast about “her men.” She told us moving stories of the men who lived daily with the regret of their deeds and their desire to make things right with the survivors, their consciences, and God. Her words transformed them from monsters into flawed human beings.
For the execution scene, the university choir recorded a moving rendition of “Amazing Grace” that played through the prisoner’s death and the removal of his body on the gurney. The audience didn’t know that the sweet tenor solo in the recording was sung by the actor playing the prisoner.
I have personal notes from several actors thanking me for the opportunity to live and feel the reality of their characters. One even described how she and the actors playing the parents of the murdered girl broke down in a group hug backstage, holding one another and weeping. She was thanking me for that experience.
My wife and I watched TV for weeks during Katrina recovery efforts, saddened by the mounting death toll.
Eventually the check did clear. Sister Helen and the members of The Death Penalty Discourse Center were among the survivors. I’m sure they were changed by the experience. I know we were.
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“You don’t get down off an ostrich. You get down off a duck.”
My latest entry for the New Yorker’s weekly caption contest.
I admit, I borrowed the punchline from one of the many elephant jokes that were popular when I was a kid. I’ll also admit that I didn’t know what duck down was when I was that age. I thought the entire joke was based on the size of an elephant compared to the size of a duck. Obviously it’d be far easier to dismount a duck because you could just stand up. LOL.
Years later, when I actually understood the joke, I got to laugh about it all over again.
I consider this caption my homage to the well-known elephant joke. That’s not stealing, it’s a salute to the original. It also makes the reader imagine what the guy on the ground asked to get that response.
In improv this type of laugh line—a reminder about something said previously—is known as a call-back. Audiences adore a good call-back. It’s equivalent to an elbow in the ribs, including them in the joke while saying “See what I did there?”
I performed with an improv group in Los Angeles that was called Synthaxis. (Shout out to Margo and Phil who recently reminded me of that name!) If improv wasn’t difficult enough, we had the added challenge of being a children’s improv group. That meant we were playing in a world without guns, drugs, bad words, or naughty bits. Go ahead! Feel free to make stuff up, just dance around those land mines!
One of those land mines was getting a “grab,” a suggestion from the audience.
I’ll never forget one time when me and another guy were asking the audience to name an activity and the only response was a wise guy who said “making love.” There are often several suggestions to choose from but when everyone heard that, the suggestions dried up.
My scene partner and I looked at each other, didn’t say a word, and started to mime hauling large objects around like a couple of furniture movers. We stacked one large object on top of the other for a couple of minutes until we were satisfied and stepped back to look at what we had made.
“L – O – V – E,” one of us said.
“LOVE,” said the other.
And then we shook hands and congratulated one another.
It brought the house down! Second only to a good call-back is taking an impossible grab and figuring out a way to play it anyway.
Those moments are the “war stories” that actors share for years, the way athletes relive an amazing play that wins the game.
I hope you have some amazing “war stories” to share with friends and family. It can make for delightful nostalgia. Most story telling does.
TTFN
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By the way, do you know how to make an elephant float?
Root beer, two scoops of ice cream, and some elephant!
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If you received this email because it was forwarded to you by a subscriber, welcome. You can subscribe as well by following the link on my website: ericmargerum.com. A free story awaits you there.
Eric Margerum 