Veteran’s Day 2024
November of 2000 was a month I’ll never forget.
I’d moved into the Peach House in Newcastle two years earlier; I was home-schooling my son and my daughter; and I lived next to a neighbor who was a pushy, uppity liberal Democrat activist. Her husband had had a drinking problem, and I grasped, early on, why maintaining sobriety was a challenge for him.
While she openly mocked him and his Serenity Prayer, I learned how to recite that supplication in the silence of my unfinished bedroom.
As the Recounts and Lawsuits dragged on, and on, and on, Post-Election Day, the Hanging Chads became the thin edge of the sword by which the fate of America rested. I got fed up and announced to Dear Husband:
“We’re going on a road trip.”
My two youngins were all enthused. The hounds, Bonnie and Bootsie, were less so, although Bonnie was always up (literally, on her dog carrier) for any long trip in the Ford Explorer: She’d get lots of walks along the way!
Our destination was Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, and, then, the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam on the return trip to Placer County.
The next 10 days were fateful for me, as well as for the United States of America. I can honestly say that I was unaware of the creative developments occurring within me. I did experience this journey as a spiritual voyage, one that would continue within me for many years to come. It persists to this day.
The glorious grandeur, the raw beauty, the freezing cold temps, and the isolation that I encountered — and enjoyed — in Utah, would later become amalgamated into THE DAWN. At that point in my writing life, I wasn’t doing much writing, except for grocery lists, remodeling-to-do-lists (pages and pages of them), weekly curricula, lesson notes, test scores, and, at night, long after the daywork had come to an end — jotting research notes in my Writer’s Journal.
For Christmas of 2000, I was given a gorgeous blanket jacket, made by Woodrich, in the USA. I wore it almost constantly, until the warmer temps in the spring forced me to don summer clothes.
I have to laugh at the hideous blue jeans I was sporting: ugly pants are hardly a sport for any woman. But I’d been experiencing noticeable difficulty in finding quality clothing for me and for my family. That quest for quality started in the mid-1990s. By the year 2000, the apparel industry in America had been outsourced, at a rapid rate.
I spent much of the ensuing decade, from 2000-2008, mentally, emotionally, and, at times, physically chasing pieces of America that were vanishing. A trip to the vintage clothing store in nearby Loomis was often fruitful, and fun, until the building burned down, one night, in a highly suspicious fire sometime in 2005.
In the midst of my work-load — home-schooling, home-churching, hound-raising, and reclaiming one acre of land gone to wrack-and-ruin, I formed friendships with other women who were home-schooling. Most of them weren’t bothered in the least by the changes taking place in America, in California, in Placer County.
A couple of vigilant mothers were frightened for the futures of their children. They responded by withdrawing from the secular world, and corralling their sprouts in a rigidly religious stable, a confined space from which their broncos and fillies, predictably, and naturally, busted out. Emotionally, I went right along with those young young adults. I’d been chomping at the bit — for many years — to reach greener pastures, more liberty, and more space!
To add to the rancid environment of mind-numbing escapism around me, my zealot nasty neighbor decided to take the 2000 election results and make them personal. I quietly abided her rude behavior and her snide insults, verbally and otherwise, to me. When, however, she extended her pompous pettiness and sarcastic jibes to my children, she made a mistake. From that point on, I spoke to her only when forced to, and, even then, it was a phony smile that I do not do well.
As my Dear Daughter has oft informed me: “It shows in your eyes, Mom.”
This obnoxious woman was the only resident on Peach Lane who did not hang out an American flag on 9/11, or at any other time.
Dear Husband valiantly tried to convince me that SHE is the loser. I maintained:
“We’re all losing in America because of her, and people like her, devoted to destroying America.”
I vowed to NOT GET CONFRONTATIONAL with this Code-Pinker. My insightful children must have thought: This is going to be interesting.
By September 2008, all of the undercurrents, cross-currents, and torrents of creative currents within me unexpectedly coalesced and flowed, untrammeled, toward the writing of THE DAWN. This novel wasn’t the one that I’d been planning to write. I’ll be frank and say that My Muse did all the planning. I followed suit.
During the summer of 2008, My Dear Friend was so despondent that she spoke of moving to Costa Rica.
“You can’t do that,” I told her.
It amazes me, how much she listened to me; and followed my lead, because I wasn’t aware of leading by example. I am, to this very day, touched by the extent to which I became her confidante, and her guide, in ways that I comprehend, more fully, only in the distance, and in the fullness of time, since 2016, when I had to, physically, leave her side.
During the summer, autumn, and winter of 2008, I truly did “reach out” (a phrase I intensely dislike) to this former work associate. I penned for her what I dubbed GUIDEPOSTS.
I sent those motivational essays to My Dear Friend, which she distributed to her colleagues. My husband passed them on to his work associates. After composing 5 or 6 of these thematic inspirational pieces, I realized I’d veered into My Voice for this historic novel about Occupied France during World War II.
The gauntlet got tossed and I took it up. I really had no choice: Every step, every decision, every action, every aspiration, every hope, and every goal in my life, up to that point, had led me to That Point.
And, after having passed on those pieces of inspirational advice, I ran smack dab into similar literary prescriptions by Jean Texcier and his “Advice to an Occupied People”, Conseils à l’occupé. I believed America in 2008 was mirroring the Vichy Regime. I’ve since witnessed a Petain puppet installed in the Presidency and then experienced the occupation of my own nation by foreigners.
Truth is always stranger than fiction.
During the autumn of 2012, after the e-publication of THE DAWN, I bought a wonderful gift of gratitude for My Dear Friend for her help, support, and advocacy of writing THE DAWN. We then spoke of how it all began. I mentioned those Guideposts. She informed me that she didn’t remember them.
I didn’t try to remind her. The summer of 2012 had been fateful for her, for me, for America.
Twenty years of living on Peach Lane, and having to discipline my forthright tongue, pre-edit my verbal statements, and channel — elsewhere — an abundant sense of fury that I felt toward an America-hater, a man-hater, a woman-hater, a child-hater, a hater — those character-building years, from 1998-2018, prepared me for dealing successfully, and safely, with the lunatic fringe in my country.
That derangement syndrome got its start with George W. Bush, aka the Devil, or the Debonair Devil: cowardly, weak ignorant bullies, with deeply entrenched personal disorders, pour all of their bile toward humanity into a political cause, a gimmick that uses a person and then disposes of him, or her, once the use-by date expires.
During those timeless years on Peach Lane, I learned when to keep my patriotic thoughts to myself. I learned to accept the unholy alliance that certain people gleefully make with demons to destroy their own souls. And I wrote THE DAWN.
Those hate-filled Americans, they hung themselves with their own chads.