San Anselmo, March 31, 2004: A year ago, I began online publishing of the Adventures of Bloggard. Over 360 micro-stories have now been added to the bloggosphere, recounting people and places from my past, to create a sketchy autoblography.

Visitors here have found stories both happy and sad, serious and absurd, familiar and exotic. I use Marcel Proust’s method. From the scent of a madeline cookie, he recalled a bygone Parisian age. I do the same, except that I wake up and smell the coffee, as I have been advised to do by so many well-meaning people, and the stories themselves range over a century up till today, from Texas to California and beyond, and yes, even to Paris.

However, given this meandering method, some folks might like things more orderly, and some folks might like things brief.

For these people, and for visitors who might enjoy a review, here is a photo album with snapshots of the last year, and of a lifetime. I’m told that there will be a test at the end.

Henrietta, Texas, 1922: Tutti-Fruity

Henrietta, Texas, 1949: The Gypsies by the Slough

Henrietta, Texas, 1951: Wizard in a Cave

Henrietta, Texas, 1952: The Canyon

Henrietta, Texas, 1954: Diplomacy

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: Derley Davis and the Dew Drop Inn

Henrietta, Texas, 1958: A White Sport Coat, and Rocket Fuel

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1963: The Skydivers

Shady Shores, Texas, 1964: Band of Thieves

Denton, Texas, 1964: A Photograph of the Future

Denton, Texas, 1965: The Corduroy Coat

Dallas, 1966: The Abandoned Road

St. Louis, 1967: Carrie Street Station

Southern England, 1968: A Cottage in East Grinstead

Phnom Pen, 1969: Bravery

Hurnville, Texas, 1971: Young Fool

San Francisco, 1974: The Apartment From Hell

San Francisco, 1975: Phil Groves and Raskin-Flakkers Ice Cream Store

San Francisco, 1976: The Thumbtack Bugle

San Francisco, 1976: Network Answering Service

San Francisco, 1977: Mick Jagger’s Secret

San Francisco, 1978: The Robe

San Francisco, 1979: The Musical Idiot

San Francisco, 1980: 3304 Geary Boulevard

Newport Beach, 1985: The Christmas Present

San Francisco, 1990: The Chapman Stick

San Rafael, 1996: The Wacko

Paris, 2001: Koko Taylor in Paris

Mount Shasta, 2003: Leaving

Mount Shasta, 2004: Tulip, Gone

In a week, I’ll be 60. It makes one pause, or even stumble. One then asks, where does the time go? Perhaps these little stories hint at an answer. And thinking back on those times present and past, it makes one wonder … what will happen next?

But perhaps time is twisted. Perhaps it’s really running backwards, and we, trapped in that flowing stream, cannot see the true direction of things. Perhaps what is to come has in fact already happened.

Or, as a dear friend once said, perhaps not.

USA Today newspaper, April 1, 1998: In a full-page advertisement today, Burger King Corporation of Miami, Florida, has introduced their new “Left-Handed Whopper,” especially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans.

According to Burger King, the new whopper contains the same ingredients as their popular Whopper hamburger sandwich; however, all the condiments have been rotated a full 180 degrees, for the benefit of left-handed customers.

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.

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.

A tip of the Bloggardo Hatlo to Spike Magazine, for their nice review of Adventures of Bloggard. They said:

“[The Adventures of] Bloggard – This one is truly random. Odd, amusing snippets from that [bygone] America. Or ‘True stories and lies. Wisdom, foolishness, and sometime epiphanies,’ as they put it.”

Mount Shasta, 9am: A week ago, about this time, our dog Tulip passed away; Yesterday and today have been hard, remembering, and also remembering last Tuesday when we awoke exhausted, with a hole in the morning.

While we sat at table over coffee, late-sleeping Tulip should have come walking, stiff and stretching, from the bedroom while we said “Good morning!” and “Here she comes, here she comes!” That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Have you ever noticed how, in tough times, syncronicity appears, and consciousness alters?

When Tulip was boarding at the animal hospital, we knew she’d be ill on her return, and in our rented house with carpeting, we’d need to keep Tulip in the kitchen with its durable floor.

Adrienne called the Noah’s Ark petstore, and spoke with the owner, a blonde woman we’d never met. However, the week before, the local newspaper displayed an article on cat rescue folks, and in the photo this same woman sat with a cat who looked exactly like Komodo Kittie that we’d placed with the Humane Society.

Adrienne wanted a baby gate, to close the kitchen from the carpet. The pet-store lady said she’d ask a woman named Chris at the Humane Society. “She’s a pet communicator,” said the pet-store woman, “I don’t know if you believe in things like that.”

Adrienne, very much, does.

In fact, musing with me the day before, she’d wished she knew a pet psychic, and when the pet-store woman reached Chris, Chris said she could help, and asked for Adrienne’s name. Chris already knew who she was, and the pet-store woman said, “Adrienne? Oh! You’re that Adrienne!” The story of Komodo Kittie had made the rounds, you see.

Chris said that her dog Nikki would help guide Tulip when the time came. And Chris then reminded the pet-store woman that there was a nice gate stashed in the back room of the pet-store, which had been forgotten.

“That’s right!” said the pet-store woman, and invited Adrienne to come over. Adrienne drew Angel Cards, and they said “Creativity” and “Spontenaity.” I don’t draw Angel cards, but every day I check the Fortune Cookie built into this site. Although the fortune is randomly selected from my quotes collection, quotes appear which I swear I’ve never seen before.

In the afternoon, Adrienne said she didn’t know how she’d go on, without Tulip. And in my office, the fortune cookie selected a quotation from Adrienne herself. “Don’t stop,” it said. “Just keep moving. — Adrienne Gallant”

The pet store gate was double-size. This was good, because we needed a double-size gate. Adrienne asked how much it would cost. The woman said, “Just take it. Take it with you.”

As we set up the gate, Adrienne again tried to reach the pet communicator, with no luck. And when, a week ago, the sun rose on Tulip’s last day, and when Adrienne rose in that early light, she pulled an Angel Card. It said, “Grace.”

The vet we reached on the phone agreed to come and set Tulip free of that broken body. She was a vet new to us. She was named Dr. Roberts, or actually, Dr. Grace Roberts.

While Dr. Roberts was preparing the injections, the phone rang. We didn’t want to talk, but it just kept ringing. “Go answer it,” I told Adrienne, “We don’t want it ringing.”

There, at that last moment, was Chris, the pet communicator, with words of comfort. Adrienne thanked her, hung up, then sat on the floor, and we stroked and spoke with Tulip as she passed away.

Later in the afternoon, from Chris Adrienne heard that Tulip was being escorted by guides including the dog Nikki and a horse, and that the journey would take three days. Adrienne tears up, telling me. “I wanted to tell them that Tulip couldn’t run very long,” she says.

During these three days of Tulip’s journey, we’ve been told to encourage Tulip to keep moving. And once she gets where she’s going, then she’ll be able to come back and visit us. Well, that sounds like a good idea to me, because I like her a lot, and miss her terribly. All this week, I hear Adrienne crying. “Keep moving, Tulip,” she says. “Keep moving.”

Two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, Adrienne told me of peculiar dreams. In the earlier dream, she and Tulip were walking and they met two strange dogs. These sound frightening, for they were tall, wild, stiff-legged, with dark coats and glowing pale blue eyes. Yet she and Tulip were not afraid. She awoke.

They’re guides, she thought.

In the later dream, again she and Tulip walked along a path, and topping a ridge they came upon a field, a field much larger than a football field, and upon the wide green grass, hundreds and hundreds of border collies were running, walking, playing, prancing, as far as you could see.

Adrienne spoke to Tulip, on the leash near her hand. “Look, Tulip,” she exclaimed, “All your cousins!”

But Tulip was no longer on the leash.

The leash was empty. And in the dream, Adrienne cried, knowing that Tulip had gone. Tulip had joined her cousins, out upon the sweet green grass.

Playing, running, prancing, I can see Tulip, blending with all the others, black and white and joyous, running with all the border collies of the world.