Halloween. The TV is re-selling Freddy Krueger and Michael Meyers. We think of full moons and the mythical dangers of vampires and werewolves. Makes me think of the factors that make horror stories the most frightening. For most it is not the imaginary creatures. It’s not the improbable Texas Chainsaw guy.
The most terrifying, the very essence of horror is not the bogeyman. It is the stories about ordinary people, ordinary objects that turn sinister and lethal that scare us the most. We expect everyday life to create stability, a sense of normalcy. We find safety and comfort in the routine of our life. It is when the familiar becomes malevolent that we experience real terror.
So why I am telling you these things? I am preparing you as I recommend one of the most compelling reads I have ever completed. The Barn by Wright Thompson features a simple wooden structure in Sunflower County Mississippi. An old seed storage barn. Unpainted. Worn. Could anything be less threatening? And yet –
In 1955, this unremarkable structure housed the torture and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till. Visiting from Chicago, the young black boy was the target of a white woman’s accusation that set off his murder. Two white men dragged Emmitt into that innocuous building. They beat him into an unrecognizable mass. They dragged him to the Tallahatchie River and shot him in the head. They tied a 75-lb cotton gin wheel to his neck and threw his body into the river to hide their deed.
From that point runs a stream of lies, a coverup, a protection of others involved. But the truth would not be hidden and Till’s own mother, in raw grief, demanded her son’s casket be open to “let the world see.” That barn still stands, unmarked and unremarkable. It is the monumental cache of a true horror story and a nation’s shame.
While I read The Barn, I thought of the hate, running like a poisoned river, beneath our social foundation. True, there have been strides made and laws passed. Yet, even so many years after this atrocity, that current of evil continues to run deep in this country. Masked by a veneer of political correctness we may have given ourselves permission to believe was no more. But at no time in my memory has that hate risen to the level it achieves today. I think of the school massacres, the grocery store killings and the house of worship murders.
The true horror of ordinary things turning evil is that it forces us to confront the fragility of our reality. What could be more ordinary than your child attending school, your going to the grocery store or attending your place of worship. The mundane becomes monstrous, not because it has changed in any obvious way, but because it has hidden depths of danger we never suspected. This type of horror thrives on making us feel vulnerable in the places and with the things that are supposed to offer us comfort, leaving us to question the very nature of the world around us.
The Barn rips back the veil. We see the perpetrators seeking to undermine the institutions we believe in. We feel that cold shiver of fear that our faith might be unfounded. We feel exposed, alone and vulnerable.
The power hungry wish to scare us into believing that they alone can protect us from the imaginary monsters they have assembled – much like Frankenstein’s creature. We cannot let fear steal our reason but we can stand together. We will “let the world see” we will not be overcome.
I encourage you to read The Barn. It is a cautionary tale about the endurance of evil and our part in combatting it through the preservation of memory and our responsibility to fight against it.
I graduated in the first graduating class of Salisbury’s James M. Bennet High School. That fall I entered Salisbury State College which had just risen from the designation of Maryland State Teachers College in 1963 from a “normal”, or two-year college for elementary school teachers. The school evolved to a fully fledged four-year institution with expanded academic programs, varsity athletic teams and the SSU Foundation.
The choice I made for my freshman English requirement made all the difference in my life. I learned only after my selection of Mary Gay Calcott’s English 101, that hers was a class to avoid. Too hard other students said. You can’t get a decent grade they complained. I was worried.
So I did what I always did when confronted with criticism of my themes or style. I defended my position. Ms. Calcott and I were not seeing eye-to-eye and my grades reflected it. After a few papers, I saw clearly the flaws in my work.
Then, she did what she always did, she spent time hours with a student, when I asked for help. She recommended examples; I read them. She gave me exercises; I practiced. She was not the student-punishing ogre I had imagined in all the chatter I heard. I had begun to learn to write.
In her advanced classes Mary Gay Calcott opened a path to a literary world I had never experienced. I would love that world throughout my life. It gave me endless pleasure in reading and appreciating the craft and imagination.
She gave me an even greater gift in demonstrating how to harness my own imagination into cogent narrative. She introduced me to storytelling. How to breathe life into characters. How to spin a tale to capture readers’ attention. She gave me confidence in my ability.
I now have two books: Driven and Objects of Desire. Both in the Rita Mars Thriller series. I’m working on my third. Driven captured an award from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Objects has launched to amazing reviews.
Since my days at “SSC”, I have always been grateful for meeting Mary Gay Calcott. I was fortunate to have recognized the value of what she was offering me. I carry those long-ago lessons with me every day.
Now as I remember Mary Gay, I recall the words of Gibran: The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. Amen.
My friends – are you as weary, worn and woeful as I have been watching the news of the run-up to the 2024 presidential vote? After a few seconds of the news, I get that itch to switch. I compare the current political news to gavage, the term used to describe the force-feeding of ducks and geese to achieve a ten-times normal sized fatty liver. The end product is a delicacy for humans; not so much for the sequestered and fattened water fowl.
We are drawn like those cliched moths. We moan and complain about the one hundredth view of a politician’s speculation about whether it is better to be eaten by a shark or to be fried by an electric boat. We are flummoxed by the idea of childless cat ladies as an inducement to vote. And we cannot sync the rationale for whining about rally crowd from someone who would be leader of the free world.
Then there’s the guy from one of the richest families in the country scraping roadkill to eat and who later abandons the carcass in Central Park. And how about the female candidate who “turned black.” How in the heck does one do that I think to myself. How would Darwin explain this?
Unnerving and undeserving of our attention is what I say. So how do we counter with something to restore our own mental health with the promise of something uplifting, something hopeful, something just plain more, well, normal.
I submit we should take smaller glimpses of that “must see” political tv and go for the gold. Do it for the sake of your sanity and emotional wellbeing. While we’re not Coneheads, let’s go to France and the Olympic Games.
Ok, I’ll cede you the weird opening ceremonies with a hooded runner carrying the torch, a bizarre rendition of “The Last Supper” and Marie Antoinette, grasping her own severed head. BUT -Celine Dion singing “Hymne à l’amour” at the Eiffel tower sent shivers across the world.
We are able to see Katie Ledecky in performances of a lifetime in women’s swimming. In that same greatest-of-all-time vein, Simone Biles wowed with perfection through the gymnastics moves that only she can perform. We watched a hopeful and sometimes flawed men’s gymnastics lifted to the medal stand by Michael Nedoroscik, the University of Michigan unicorn who rose to the moment on the pommel horse. I was so happy for the women’s high jumper, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who will carry the gold back to her war-torn Ukraine, that I cried. And can you not be moved by Julien Alfred and Saint Lucia’s only Olympic medal in history, a gold?
We needed this Olympics, dirty Seine or not! Like oxygen, we need to see there is beauty and grace in the humanity who populate this orb with us. We need to see that hate does not make us strong or good at our chosen field. We will not believe that grievance will drive us to win because we are witness to the camaraderie among Olympic competitors, the support of one for another, countryman or not. And we will not go back to any time where fear dominates and freedom to be is stripped to leave us empty and wanting.
In this country we stand at a crossroad and we look for a way forward. We will choose a right path and we will not look back.
It was a Sunday afternoon in June. The temps and the sun and the sound of a baseball game on the television reminded me of those meals I looked forward to every week when I was a kid. The inviting aroma of pan-fried chicken wafted through my grandmother’s kitchen and lolled through the dining room. Thick-sliced, just picked tomatoes mounded from their plate on the dinner table. In the fridge was a pitcher of brewed iced tea. The potato salad sat heaped in a serving bowl comfortably slathered in my grandmother’s secret ratio of mayo to mustard, a touch of sugar and a sprinkle of celery seeds. And biscuits . . . oh, my. I lolled about in this dreamy cloud of culinary nostalgia until I began to contemplate cooking for myself.
I started thinking about recipes. I started thinking about the great dishes my grandmother and father could whip up without directions using just their unique sense of proportion and seasoning. I started thinking about the food fiascos I had single-handedly instigated with my lack of any of the above. I sat down until the pipe dream of my cooking could cool and evaporate. Close call! What the heck was I thinking?
It may have started with my contemplation of mystery novels that involved cooking, some that even included recipes. Who wouldn’t love The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joann Fluke where the Cozy Cow Dairy milkman lies dispatched in a scattering of cookie crumbs? Or how about Glazed Murder by Jessica Beck in which our amateur sleuth opens and runs the “Donut Hearts” coffee shop very peacefully until a dead body appears at the shop’s door. Ah, deserts and just deserts in the context of our favorite treats.
If you’re a Chinese food fan, there is always Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chen, part of “The Noodle Shop” series. Coffee anyone? Honey Roasted by Cleo Coyle offers us a clever coffee shop owner matching wits with murderous chefs in the cutthroat world of restaurant startups. And my fave would have to be Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette – you know that murder victim is going to be found in the freezer! And if you want to sample the wilder side of edibles, try A Half-Baked Murderby author Emily George about a pastry chef who opens a cannabis bakery; her beloved aunt becomes a murder suspect and our baker must disprove those half-baked theories of her aunt’s guilt.
As I contemplated these tasty reads, the urge to whip out a rolling pin and attempt the perfect crust grew dimmer until they were not even a speck on my event horizon. I could still savor the stories, the twists and sprinkling of clues without donning an apron and plunging into the too-deep end of a Kitchen Aid mixing bowl. I took a deep breath and started thinking more like my old self about cooking – and eating! Now where could I make reservations and get that dream Sunday dinner?
An undefeated season meets a singular phenom who could drop a shot from mid-court. March Madness Women’s Final was a three-ring, three-point thriller and we could not look away. It was legendary play from surefire hall of famers. Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark drove to the goal, opposing teams but united in belief of their skill, their discipline and their power.
One fine day in 1891, Dr James Naismith, was lolling about in Springfield, MA trying to think up a sport that one could play in the winter. His boss, head of the YMCA International Training School, Luther Gulick, gave Naismith 14 days to think up a game to counter the rowdy energies of young men with little to do in snow-bound New England. Gulick wanted something that required vigorous activity but that did not take the physical toll of the immensely popular game of football. He wanted an indoor game – way too cold to play anything outside – and that game was to be more skill than brute force.
Five minutes later Senda Berenson, physical culture director at Smith College, was meeting with Naismith. Berenson began teaching basketball to her student in hopes the activity would improve their physical health. Of course, this was the Victorian era so every man jack of an athlete, would-be athlete and plain old misogynist had something negative in comment on this development
Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee and known as the father of the modern Olympic Games called women’s basketball “indecent.” Then again, he also decried women participating in any sport. He declared that the Olympics with women would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and indecent”. The “Games”, he said, were created for “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” with “female applause as a reward”.
Oh, give us a break! Another road to success barricaded by short-sighted males with personas as fragile as a soap bubble. Unadmitted fear in the male psyche coursed like a heat-seeking missile. How could men compete with women for the spotlight? Unimaginable to the dim and unallowable to the ones who recognized reality.
By gosh, they threw everything but that proverbial sink at us. Scroll back to the 1967 Boston Marathon. In 1967, women weren’t allowed to officially enter the Boston Marathon, so Kathrine Switzer entered that year as “K.V. Switzer” to hide her gender. Two miles in, an official tried to eject her from the course. She finished anyway, becoming the first woman to complete the race as an official entrant. Women weren’t officially allowed to enter the race until 1972. Women’s marathoning wasn’t part of the Olympics until 1984.
And were we glued to the TV in 1973 to watch a tennis match? We were. On a September night in Houston, Billie Jean King smashed an ace for women in sports with her defeat of Bobby Riggs, a self-described male chauvinist pig. King subsequently organized a meeting that led to the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association. She threatened to boycott the 1973 U.S. Open if male and female champions were not paid the same, which led to the Open becoming the first major tennis tournament to offer equal prize money.
Shoot forward to a few weeks ago, Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark planted another flag in our craggy climb to recognition and equality. Unhampered by the “nervous fatigue” warning from starched collar Victorian men. Bowing to none who forced women’s teams to pay their own way until Title IX, they played. They played to a packed house of 24M, almost double the audience for NCAA Men.
That skirmish is over, the giant leap taken. It could not have been without the play of hundreds of women who went before. I still remember when I played guard in a tunic, a dress; I couldn’t even cross center court and there were six of us. It was a soft game for people perceived as too soft to play the real thing.
Basketball and the sports arena is but one metaphor for women’s emerging role. We will bring the full court press. We will block shots aimed at keeping us subservient. We will not go back to anything where we are “less than.” And we will vote to secure our gains and continue our forward advance.
“I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.” —Calamity Jane
Valerie Webster and Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller in the spotlight via Author of the Day interview.
Make your next book club event an author event with a writer who’s lived the cases, developed the crime fighting technologies. Contact Valerie Webster today.
