A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. — Ring Lardner

Mount Shasta, March 25, 2004: This morning Adrienne told me she learned, in journalism classes, not to send a stamped, self-addressed envelope. She went on to say that beginners think their work is so precious that someone might steal it, but, she says, any thief could just make a xerox copy.

I had to argue, of course.

Thinking back to when I was writing stories, I reminded her that xerox copies didn’t even exist. The first I remember them was when Dave Harp taught Blues Harmonica for Musical Idiots in San Francisco, using a xeroxed lesson. (It was his technical innovation, and due to the high cost of fifteen cents a page, he wrote the lesson parts in little boxes, some sideways, so that an entire lesson would fit on one legal-sized sheet.)

Adrienne countered that you could just use carbon paper.

I argued that you couldn’t send the carbon copy, so if your story didn’t come back, you’d have to type it all out again. She said that didn’t matter, these days, with computers.

You see. Round and round. There is no purpose in arguing with a woman. And since you cannot win such a contest, why place a conflict between yourself and her majesty your darling? It won’t get you anything soft and wonderful.

But the point is … I remember carbon paper.

Anybody else here remember carbon paper?

If you can remember carbon paper, please raise your hand.

Oh, no wait. I can’t see your hand anyway, and later you could say you raised your hand and how would I know?

I’m just trying to be logical here.

Mount Shasta: Adrienne is puttering around the house, singing her new song “Lizzie, Come Home.” Adrienne is a prodigous song-writer, though usually writing only one or two lines of each song. It’s interesting to hear her sing those lines over and over. Tickles me.

But this time, she’s got a whole verse and chorus, and a sweet melody. It’s about our new bowser named Lizzie. Lizzie’s an Aussie (Australian Shepherd), normally long of hair but we’ve shorn her and she looks like a hound on the front half, and a rotweiler on the back half.

Sweet disposition, and loud voice, she’s devoted to Adrienne, and follows her like a little shadow. Sleeps on her bed at night. Guards her diligently against the cat, and sometimes me.

It wasn’t always this way for Lizzie. She’s had a hard life, poor little rich girl.

Lizzie is pure-blooded, with papers somewhere, originally bought from the breeder by a very wealthy man as a gift to his wife. When I say wealthy, I really and truly mean wealthy. For example, Marin county is the most expensive county in northern California, andthis guy lives in one of the most expensive homes in Marin. It’s up for sale, just now, for ten million. So, you know, wealthy. Let’s just call him “Richie Rich”.

Lizzie was a sweet gift, I suppose, but unfortunately, neither the man nor the wife know bupkis about dogs. Dogs aren’t trinkets for setting on the shelf. A dog needs to be a member of a pack. And Lizzie was largely abandoned, spending the nights locked in the laundry room, left alone for weeks at a time as Richie and Mrs. Rich journeyed to their home in New York, their home in London, their home in Malibu, or their home in Tokyo.

Other than being imprisoned and having to wait 12 hours to pee, Lizzie had some care, from the housekeeper. And that’s where Adrienne, formerly of Adrienne’s All-Weather Dog-Walking business, came in. Adrienne dog-walked Lizzie daily, and did pet-sitting for weeks at a time. Adrienne is Lizzie’s best pal.

When Adrienne announced our departure to move to Mount Shasta, all her clients said, “Oh, no!” except for Richie Rich. He said, “Can you adopt Lizzie? I’ll pay you.”

And when we moved, Mrs. Rich asked Adrienne to come and pet-sit, though it was a five-hour drive. Skipping over a lot of hassle and driving, Lizzie came to pet-sit with us, pending an adoption agreement. At the last minute, on Adrienne’s voicemail, Mrs. Rich left the message, “Oh, and can you take Kittie too?”

As it happened, on that day, Adrienne had driven to Marin with a raging flu. She was weak and hallucinating, and overlooked the wise response which would have been to turn down the Kittie deal, since we had no place to stash Kittie. Alas, she had no energy for debate, and hallucinating with fever, brought Kittie to Mount Shasta.

Thus it was that we stored Kittie and catbox underfoot in my tiny office. It was less than a joy forever, though Kittie was a sweet cat. Big guy. They’d pretty much abandoned him as well, sometimes left for weeks without food, so Kittie had learned to stalk and kill moles in the woods behind the mansion. A rugged individual.

And thus it was that Kittie, confused after escaping the office one night, bit rescuing Adrienne’s hand and put Adrienne into the hospital for six days over Christmas, gave her an infection which brought her close to death, and required her to take medicines which made her sick as hell for weeks. Come to find out, Richie and the Mrs. had never bothered to get Kittie his shots.

In the meantime, during these three months, Richie and Mrs. Rich were “too busy” to talk with us regarding the adoption. Lizzie had come into our home, and for the first time in her life, found herself a member of a proper pack. She slept in the same den, she had her sister Tulip (our border collie) to help guard the house and sniff out the yard, and she had company round the clock. Alone no more, it was heaven for Lizzie.

During this time, Adrienne didn’t know whether the adoption was on or off. Richie Rich had claimed he’d pay her, but how much were we talking about? We couldn’t reach him to discuss it.

Should we just take on her expense? Was I a cheapskate to request our expected cash out of pocket like food, clipping, and vet costs?

Hard to say. On a spreadsheet, for Lizzie’s expected lifespan, these costs total a surprising $25,000, but this shouldn’t be difficult for a guy that spent $170,000 on a fence, and contributed a cool million to a recent political campaign.

We sent this off to the Riches. But heard nothing. I guess they were “too busy“, and they were away to London.

When Adrienne last saw her, Mrs. Rich had deferred discussion to Mr. Rich, and Adrienne now deferred to me, and so, man to man, or rather, voicemail to fax-machine, me and Richie went over the figures. At the end of this baloney, Mr. Rich claimed that “they just missed Lizzie too much”. By this time, Adrienne is in love with Lizzie, and Lizzie is a member of our household. Send her back? Unthinkable.

Adrienne asks, angrily, “What kind of people would consider giving up their family dog?”

I have to agree. What kind of people are these? And I didn’t believe they wanted her back. I suspected the guy loved his money more than the dog, and was just looking for a cheaper way to get rid of it. And while we have no mansion in Ross, we can afford to feed the dog.

After more delays, I trapped Richie on the phone. It soon became clear that it was all about the money, and nothing to do with love. I asked what he’d meant when offering to pay for Lizzie’s adoption. He paused.

“That’s a fair question,” he said. “I guess I thought I’d just send her off with a small check, perhaps $3000.”

“Done,” I said.

Lizzie is now ours. The guy’s a lawyer, did I mention that? He faxed a document, call it a bill of sale, or a release of liability. We signed it. He sent a check.

I’m happy for Lizzie, I like her. I’m happy for Adrienne. Lizzie is a great addition to our pack. It’s a good deal.

But you know, dealing with these people left me less than impressed. It would appear that, just because you sit near the front of the airplane, it really can’t make you a first class person.

Henrietta, Texas, 1971: After Dr. Strickland had died, but before we moved to the farm, I’d finally completed my Bachelor’s Degree at Midwestern University, so I lived in our home on the west side of town. (Just across from where Eddy Frank lives now.)

There, in a back room, while waiting to see if I’d be accepted into the University of Iowa or some other school with a Creative Writing department, I wrote stories every morning.

Everybody was warned not to bother me. I was an artiste!

I had to yell at a younger brother or two, to get my point across, but, big self-important bully, I did.

After my writing session, I’d sit at table, drinking coffee and visiting with my mom. There I worked out the Jumble, which is a newspaper puzzle with scrambled words. My younger brother George could just look at them and tell me the words, but I had no such skill.

And after the Jumble, I’d walk downtown, along the old main street, still at that time a two-lane highway running through the middle of the town. Of course, later, our little town was deemed insufficiently interesting, and the highway routed around the south edge, and our town withered further, but this was back when we thought ourselves important because the highway ran through town.

Downtown, I’d fetch the mail from the post office. On an exciting day, I’d find the new issue of Writer’s Digest, with new clues for breaking into the big time like F. Scott Fitzgerald. On other days, one of my short stories would be returned from a magazine, with a little printed slip.

These polite notes are called “rejection slips”. An entire legend has built up about these small slips of paper. I’ve heard of writers who papered the bathroom with them.

Would you do that?

I didn’t think so.

It would just be too disheartening.

But on the other hand, I didn’t throw my rejection slips away, because these are the only acknowledgements that the stories had actually been seen by someone at the magazine. We don’t know, really, whether the stories are read, of course. Maybe they have a fifteen-year-old mailroom boy whose job it is to open incoming envelopes, put the manuscript in your self-addressed, stamped envelope, add the rejection slip, and set it into the “out” box.

It could be that way. How would we know?

Of course, short stories, even then, were swimming upstream, against the tide. Once upon a time, before radio had stolen stories from print, and long before television stole stories from radio, there were lots of printed stories. First they appeared inside newspapers, at least we’re told that’s where Dickens and Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared. But in this country, after newspapers and the pony express had developed, magazines evolved. Big magazines, with pictures like Life and Look and Saturday Evening Post. And little magazines with pulp paper like Black Mask and Analog and Wild West.

This expanding market for stories, especially the easily-printable “short” stories, created a new artform, and this new artform gave high-school and college teachers an easy way to teach literature. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that I thought short-stories wonderful, even in those latter days when paying markets had shrunk to a spare handful of magazines, mostly snooty magazines like Atlantic and New Yorker and Esquire.

So, I wrote the stories. I sent them out. They came back with rejection slips. Bummer.

One day I was fed up, and I got an idea.

I typed up a new story. It was very short, only about five pages long. It was in all the correct form, typed just the way you’re supposed to do, with the title and author and margins and everything. The name of this story was “Tale of Quacking Duck.”

The only thing was that the entire story consisted only of the word “quack.” It had paragraphs and sentences and dialog, all correctly formatted, but only using the word “quack”. For example, a few paragraphs might look like this —

Quack quack quack quack, quack quack quack. Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack. Quack quack.

“Quack quack quack quack quack,” quack quack. “Quack quack quack quack quack quack?” Quack quack quack quack quack quack.

“Quack quack,” quack quack, quack quack quack quack, “Quack quack quack quack quack, quack quack!”

“Quack quack,” quack quack.

Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack, quack quack quack quack quack quack quack. Quack quack. Quack, quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack? Quack quack quack quack. Quack quack quack quack quack.

I kept a carbon copy, and mailed the original, with a stamped, self-addressed envelope as is proper, to the New Yorker.

Then I waited.

Sure enough, about three weeks later, in the post office box I found my returned manuscript.

Sure enough, it had a rejection slip.

But for the first time ever, there was a hand-written note on the rejection slip. This was a new high! I’d actually received a written note from one of the guys who’d read my manuscript.

“Nice try,” it said.

Jade Garden Chinese Restaurant, May 18, 2004: Adrienne said, “Let’s go to dinner!” and so we did. The food was good, and we were noshing on garlic prawn and rice and some peppery-hot thing.

And then the waiter brought our check, and there were two fortune cookies. I picked them up, and then remembered.

Adrienne saw me, and began to cry.

It’s been just two months since Tulip our border collie died in our arms. Now what you didn’t know is that Tulip’s favorite food was fortune cookies. In fact, back in San Anselmo, at Christmas-time before we moved here, I gave Tulip a present which was a huge bag of fortune cookies. It was a big hit.

Tulip loved to go get Chinese food.

Adrienne cried, remembering. I said, “We’ll just have to eat these fortune cookies for her.” Adrienne nodded.

I loved that Tulip, and then she died. It leaves such a hole in our lives, that she doesn’t come stretching to see us, waking late as we drink our coffee. Sometimes in the middle of nowhere, it comes back, and it hurts all over again.

The Secret Laboratory, somewhere in the Cascade mountain range: Initial results of my experiments, having reassembled the Megatar Laboratory, look good.

With my new factotum, Dallas by name, the first run of instruments — two TrueTapper Dragons — is proceding apace. I am cautiously optimistic that the new facility will provide enhanced production and speed of delivery to a world crying out for Mobius Megatar Touch-Style Basses.

And as my grandmother used to say, “Well, we’ll see.”