Just & Up

My Lutheran preacher friend, Wayne, has made me alert for “just” prayers:  “Lord, I’m ‘just’ a humble man who’s ‘just’ trying to get by, so please ‘just’ hear me now, because I’m ‘just’ asking you for this one little thing.”

Usually there’s not quite that many ‘just’s’ used so close together, but I ‘just’ wanted to make the point that a nice little word used once is dandy, but used repeatedly is distracting and gets in the way of a writer’s or a preacher’s message.

Janet is a writing colleague who sent an interesting email this morning. She used a free software program on the internet to run a word count on her ‘just’ completed novel manuscript. The software revealed that she used the word ‘just’ 121 times. She unexpectedly learned that ‘just’ is overused by more people than 'just' fervent pastors appealing to the Lord.  

I was instantly curious and ran four chapters of manuscript from Redeeming Honor through the same software. ‘Up’ seems to be my ‘just.’ 

My characters apparently are forever walking ‘up’ the stairs, looking ‘up’ at each other, swinging ‘up’ into the saddle or climbing ‘up’ into a buggy. “Just go on up, he's waiting on you.” You get the idea.

I guess the point is that the word count software, which is free and instant in giving the results, is another great example of self-accessed technology making people better at what we do. Granted that the word count software isn’t telling me if my characters are likable, or if the plot is credible, or if I got my historical facts right, but it is letting writers like Janet and me probe for little distractions like too many ‘just’ or ‘up’ words.

Moving on, I woke ‘up’ this morning thinking about the chapter I’m going to write today. That’s fairly common for me, since early morning is when I do my best writing. I think. Coffee and keyboard when I’ve ‘just’ gotten ‘up’ ‘just’ seem a good pairing, as my sister would say. 

Nita is baby-sitting our grandson today, which is fine, except when she rolled out of bed, I thought, “Oh yeah, she’s taking care of John Junior this morning." The problem is our grandson is named Jackson and John Junior is the name of the baby character in Redeeming Honor. Oops.

I’m writing a Civil War novel, the emphasis on war. How a baby named John Junior came to be a player in the story is for another post, but the little guy’s presence has led me down some unexpected paths. Did mothers in Virginia use diapers in the 1860’s? When were baby bottles with rubber nipples invented? What if mother and child were separated, how would the infant eat? What toys were popular for babies in the 1860's?

Happily, I have an ongoing child development lab next door, where grandson Jackson is growing through his first year of life. I’d be surprised if Jackson’s actual birth last January and John Junior’s literary birth last February are coincidental. But, then again, I’m ‘just’ saying that romance, even in the 1860’s, leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to pregnancies, and pregnancies lead to babies, and babies lead to the demands of childcare.

What I’m seeing day-by-day next door confirms that parenting and childcare aren’t for sissies, even with stacks of parenting books, plastic playthings, disposable diapers, and so on. Babies still poop every day, cry when they aren’t happy, eat every seven minutes, and never sleep. Maybe that’s an exaggeration.

 On the other hand, as son Todd says, watching Jackson is like watching a campfire. He’s not really doing anything, but we 'just' love to sit and stare at him endlessly.

The Cumberland Gap & Murderous Champ Ferguson

Have you ever been through the Cumberland Gap, the pass over the Appalachian Mountains where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky intersect? I’ve not been through the gap since it’s not on the way to anywhere I’ve been. I’ve not driven on the road or hiked up the side of a mountain to see the panoramic view of the pass. And now that’s a niggling irritation, because the Cumberland Gap has unexpectedly become a key piece of geography to the plot in Redeeming Honor.

I’m tempted to jump in the car and drive there, but it’s a long way. Besides, I’m not writing a travel guide or painting long word-pictures describing the scenic beauty of the gap, I’m just putting some characters there for a day. But it doesn’t feel right to not have walked the ground where some of the action in my book occurs.  There are other places in my novels that I’ve also not visited, and each time I’ve felt that same frustration. It’s a fear that as a writer of historical novels, I’m not getting the historical part right, even if it’s part of the background.

Moving on, I wrote a post a while back about a feisty Texas Confederate officer who led a band of partisan cavalrymen. His colorful name was Clubfoot Fort.  I lamented that there won’t be a place in the McBee novels for him, since he fought in the wrong place, far away from the battles in Virginia.

 

Again unexpectedly, I’ve found another historical figure to fill the same role as Clubfoot.  His name was Captain Champ Ferguson, and he was one of only two Confederates to be tried in a court of law and hung after the war for crimes committed against the Union. (The other man was the commander of the prisoner of war camp at Andersonville).

Champ Ferguson was a violent, murderous man even before the war started. In 1858 he captured and tied a local sheriff to a tree and riding his horse around and around the tree, slashed the sheriff to death with a saber. During the war he led a band of partisans in upper Tennessee, lower Kentucky, and the southwest corner of Virginia, raising hell with civilians who were openly loyal to the Union, and ambushing small elements of the Federal army. By his own admission Ferguson personally killed over a hundred Union soldiers and Unionist civilians.

Ferguson’s role in Redeeming Honor won’t be minor, and it won’t gloss over the murderous nature of the man. I think readers will remember him, even if that memory causes folks to cringe.

Finally, today my mind is on the murdered Marines and sailor in Chattanooga. Bless the souls of those servicemen who are this week’s newest victims of the modern breed of suicidal guerilla fighter, terrorists who bring their war to our cities. Kamikaze fighters armed with AK 47’s, or homemade bombs, or plain old pistols.

Free countries have a hard time preventing that sort of terrorism. My brother, who lives in Chattanooga, and I argue about the effectiveness of a widely-armed, open-carry everyday everywhere, populace in preventing or stopping such terrorists before they can commit mass murder. He's an advocate of "an armed society is a polite society" train of thought. I'm not so sure.

As an old school principal, my thoughts often go back to the mass murder of the kindergarten students in their classroom a couple of years ago. Would armed teachers or an armed principal been able to stop the deranged young man? Or better, would the public knowledge that teachers might be armed have prevented the act altogether? No one knows. I can’t guess.

I personally hope we won’t return to the days of the Wild West with a hog-leg on every man’s hip or a dainty automatic nestled in the small of every woman’s back. (Wouldn’t that just spoil a romantic moment? One’s gentle but eagerly exploring fingers encountering the hard straight edge of a pistol grip instead of a sweetly curving soft patch of lady. No doubt it would prevent the need for a gal to ask “What part of no don’t you understand?”)   

I think toting guns along as we go about our daily business would be a giant step backward for our civilized society. But on the other hand, I don’t want my family to become victims of a random terrorist any more than the next guy does. For me it’s a tough one to call.

It’s 6:20 am on July 4^th, American Independence Day. At about this same time 152 years ago, the men in Hood’s Texas Brigade were enduring heavy rain as they served as part of the rearguard of General Lee’s Confederate Army.  

During the two days before, July 2^nd and 3^rd, the fate of the nation, the outcome of the Civil War, had been decided. Lee’s soldiers had failed on two consecutive days to break the Union “fishhook” line that stretched over the farmland for a couple of miles just south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Lee’s effort to take the war north out of Virginia, had failed for the second consecutive year, the huge battle at Gettysburg following a similarly devastating battle at Antietam, Maryland ten months earlier in September of 1862.

Although the Civil War would last another twenty-one months, historians looking back pretty much agree that Gettysburg was the turning point, the beginning of the end.

Last year, in 2014, I marched in a morning parade in San Antonio on July 4^th with my Civil War reenacting group, dressed as Confederate soldiers, in tribute to the Texas soldiers who “gave their last full measure” in military service to their state and to the short-lived Confederate nation. 

I can’t march in the parade today since our family is vacationing on the beach in Galveston, too far to join in. Instead of parading in smelly old Confederate uniforms, we’ll have a family parade to the beach with granddaughters Eva and Violet wearing their patriotic swimsuits and afterwards we’ll grill wieners and hamburger patties.

The other thing I did last year on July 4^th was celebrate Independence Day with our neighbors after getting home from the parade.

At 2:00 pm, the kids rang the big brass bell my neighbor has mounted in his front yard. That’s a tradition that goes back to colonial times when churches all across the nation rang their steeple bells in celebration of the happy, and unlikely, ending to our war for independence from Great Britain.

The second thing we did was to gather in a circle of lawn chairs while the adults took turns reading the Declaration of Independence out loud, paragraph by paragraph.

Last July 4th was the first time I’ve ever taken part in a group that read the Declaration to each other, and it was worth the effort. I got through my part without tears, barely. But I can be leaky faucet, and had to keep wiping my eyes when the next guy, Ben Mouser, took his turn reading. Ben joined our Civil War reenacting group at the age of fourteen and is now an infantryman in the US Army. He’s in Germany now, but last year on July 4^th, Ben had just returned from several months of duty in a far flung outpost in Afghanistan.

This photo is me and Sam Adams, who was a guest also, and Ben Mouser next to the Big Brass Bell. I guess you can tell that Ben is the tall one whose hair isn’t gray. We’re still wearing our Confederate duds without the jackets and hats.

Whether at the beach or in a parade or in a circle of friends and family reading the Declaration of Independence, let’s all take some time today to reflect that the United States of America is truly the hope of the world and the best place to live on earth, even if from time to time we squabble like cousins at family reunion.

Five-month old Jackson is up now and it’s time for me to go grab the kid so he can grunt and slobber on my shoulder for a few minutes of granddad time.

Happy Independence Day to “all ya’ll,” as we say in these parts. Hope you get to see some pretty fireworks this evening after a good day of celebration and maybe a short afternoon nap.