My Daughters-in-Law

Alert: This is another one about family, not the Civil War or my Civil War novels.

This weekly post is late because our younger son Ben was married last Saturday. The wedding took place in the Methodist church here in little Lockhart. It’s the same church where Ben was baptized, pretty much even the same spot on the floor. The bride was beautiful, naturally, and the ceremony packed with bits that will be warm long-term memories. Even the bagpiper will be remembered, although his first blast on the pipes was enough for the two-year old flower girl to let out a scream, do an immediate about-face, and hightail it back down the aisle. The mothers of the bride and groom sang a gorgeous duet together, and I got to watch our older son and our niece serve communion to their 95-year-old grandfather and their slightly younger grandmothers.

It was a wacky weekend, full of family and noise and preparations and gatherings, planned and spontaneous.

The tooting bagpiper led the wedding guests in a walking procession two blocks down the street to the reception venue, which was a 3-story building on the old town square, a structure that started as a wagon factory around 1900. Since Lockhart is the barbeque capital of Texas, the dinner menu consisted of slowly smoked beef briskets and hot link sausages, along with Shiner Bock Beer and Becker Wine, all from Central Texas.

But this post ain’t really about all that Texas vanity, or even the wedding. It’s about my daughters-in-law.

Nita and I raised two sons and no daughters, so my experiences with young women haven’t really had the chance to expand beyond viewing them as an alien species. Yes, I’ve learned a lot about the other gender from my wife, and I do have a little sister, she who as a wee child once clobbered me in the forehead with an iron railroad spike (the dent is still visible).

Happily, our sons’ wives haven’t taken up weapons against me. Rather, they’ve impressed me and even indulged me.

On October 10, 2010, that was10-10-10, Ben ran the Chicago Marathon. Todd and his fiancé Maggie went with us to watch and spend a holiday weekend there. During the race we rode the subway (El?) from one spot to another to catch a glimpse of Ben going by. We went to the finish line in a park, along with tens of thousands of others, collected Ben, and then went for Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Between bites, Maggie, who has never been a runner, announced she was going to run a marathon next spring in Dallas, and of course Todd would too. Todd groaned, and I smiled and thought a sarcastic, “Right, sure you are. All twenty-six, point two miles. Right.”

The next March, Nita and I watched Todd, Ben, and Maggie finish the Dallas Marathon. And they’ve run several half-marathons since then. I’m impressed. The girl has grit, and I like that.

Enter Ben’s fiancé Meredith. She’s not a runner either. But she won me over the day she announced she wanted to take part in a Civil War reenactment as a soldier, to put on a smelly wool uniform and march and shoot alongside Ben and me and Todd. She did it and was great. Another gritty girl has found her way into our family.

So…I’m learning about young women and have become enchanted with my daughters-in-laws.

Three points stick in my mind about their species:

First, they make our sons happy, just as Nita has made me happy for the past 44 years. Bless them all for that.

Second, they are making our sons better men. Our sons are often slobs, and the positive influence of Maggie on Todd is apparent, and I fully expect Meredith will have the same impact on Ben.

Third: They bring forth grandchildren for Nita and me. We are now the grandparents of three, and loving it. Yes, Ben is Meredith’s second spouse, and she brought two gorgeous little daughters to this marriage. In reflection on that, life is all about trying to do the right things, but making mistakes anyway, forgiveness, and renewal. I had a short failed marriage as a twenty-year old idiot, and Nita was there for me afterwards, so I sure can’t criticize Meredith. But I sure can love those precious little girls.

Next week I promise to get back to the Civil War.

 

Faith Naked At Gettysburg

I mentioned last week that I’m now writing the mid-novel chapter about the Battle of Gettysburg, and it’s a part of the book I really want to get right. It was the pivotal battle in the war and any future novel readers who know anything about Civil War history will quickly be put off if I mangle the facts about the most well-known battle of the war.

On a recent evening I did finish the first draft that covers most of the action of Captain McBee’s company of Texas infantry. I went to bed and let the draft simmer overnight. The next morning I reread it and made some corrections and “improvements.”  Then I dutifully e-mailed the draft to the five other writers in our local critiquing circle to have at it.

The circle met last Thursday in an upstairs room in the local library, during a rare thunder and rainstorm here in Lockhart.  And, boy, did my critiquing friends thunder and rain all over my draft. We’ve been doing this to each other’s manuscripts for going on two years now, and we have built up a pretty good level of trust in each other’s good will. Before we knew each other very well, we mainly provided helpful copy editing of misspellings and grammar problems. Having five smart writers comb through a newly written chapter, marking all the little things is a huge help.

More importantly, as time passed and we learned each other’s writing styles, we’ve come to point out things like gaps or inconsistencies in the story line, unnecessary sentences and paragraphs, shallow character development, and confusing or awkward phrasing. We’ve gone beyond “grading.” But it still gets my attention when I get home and see so many red pen marks  decorating a page of my manuscript that it looks like a Christmas tree.

One of the best criticisms about my new Gettysburg chapter was, “Where’s Faith and Levi? It’s like you are writing two novels, side by side. Somehow, even though it’s a battle, your other main characters, who we know aren’t soldiers, still need to be in this chapter, since you say it’s important.”

Got it. And I did it. I couldn’t put Faith in the battle line, but I could have her lover, Captain McBee, at least daydream about their romance, entertaining himself as he marched with thoughts of the steamy aspect of their hard-found relationship. That’s the Faith Naked part. (Have you noticed that in family magazines, newspapers, and blogs like mine, and even on TV, the term “steamy” has become a popular code word for R or X rated descriptions or portrayals of sex.)

I was washing yesterday’s dirty dishes just now, thinking about “Faith naked” in this blog post. Is mentioning a sexy part of my new novel appropriate to my blog? I could ask Nita, but she’s babysitting our grandson, and I wouldn’t ask her anyway because she’s more conservative about such things than I am. 

So here it is: I’m not in the military and I don’t do long marches, but even after four decades of marriage, I still pass the time on long drives home from military reenactments with “steamy” thoughts about Nita’s and my romance. Sometimes those mental images go way back to our twenties, and certainly include nakedness. I'm old, but not dead, after all. I don’t know about you lady readers, but I think a guy who claims he doesn’t daydream along those lines is either lying or senile, whether he’s twenty-something or sixty-something.

Having brought daydreams of Faith to Gettysburg as a pleasant mental diversion for John McBee on his way to the battle, I did find a way to physically put Levi into the Gettysburg action. It’s a way that fits the battle setting, fits his role as a McBee’s body-servant, and even is a good foreshadowing of things to come in this book, and in the final third book of the McBee saga.

Three other suggestions from my critiquing circle sent me back to the keyboard:

First, they said keep your main character in the middle of things. Don’t let events or the generals shove him aside. Keep the focus on the guy you’ve been grooming us to like, the guy who is the center of the story. Wow, there was a slap in the face, because I thought I was doing that, but if my writer circle companions didn’t see it that way, then I needed to look again. And reading with fresh eyes, I have to agree.

Second: Put more grit, more smells, more blood and guts in the battle. That one sort of surprised me, but the point is well taken, and certainly not hard to do.

Finally, they all said to not use the words “boulders,” stones, and “big rocks” so often. I looked up synonyms for “boulder” and only got rock, stone, and “sarsen” And who the hell knows the word “sarsen?” I didn’t and don’t plan to use it – unless a dozen blog readers write and say, “Heck, yeah, I say sarsen all the time when I’m driving through the Rockies. What’s wrong with you?”

The image at the top of this post is a drawing by Edgar Degas, the French painter who became famous in the second half of the 1800’s, and whose fictional brother is a secondary character in my first novel, “Whittled Away.”  Since Faith naked is the title of today’s post, I thought you’d enjoy the 1800’s drawing that was inspirational to me while writing both novels. Sometimes I’m easily inspired.

The Endless Deck & The Unclimbable Hill

Five days ago I started prying the thirty-five ten-foot long decking boards off the thirty-year-old deck frame at the back of our house. Then, with son Todd’s help, we pieced together a new wood frame of fresh 2x6 boards on top of our old cracked cement patio, adjacent to the old deck frame. Finally for the past three days, Todd, good neighbor Wayne, and I have set, sawn, and screwed on some sixty-eight brand new decking boards to create a new dance hall sized wooden deck that’s fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long. All that effort is to have the new giant deck finished in time for the late April wedding weekend of son Ben and his fiance Meredith.

You can see the nearly-finished product, and I confess I’m pleased with how it came out. It took longer and cost more, as all home projects do, and would have taken even much longer than anticipated, except for a hesitant question asked by sweet Nita. She was holding grandson Jackson and politely listening as I explained how every long board had to be measured, cut, and laid in place to get a sharp straight edge on both ends of the deck. I stressed how tedious and time consuming, but necessary, that sort of fine carpentry work was.

When I shut up, Nita asked, “I don’t understand why you are taking the time to measure and cut each board. Why not just set them, screw them in place, and go back later with a circular saw and cut off all the end pieces at once?”

Duh.  I know Jackson didn’t say it, but I still thought:  From the mouth of babes…

So that’s what we did from then on, and it more than halved the time needed to place and secure each board. I just finished sawing off all the end pieces at once, and it’s OK. Thank you, Nita.

The only other noteworthy point about the construction of the endless deck was carrying forty-six 16-ft-long boards one at a time from the garage, through the kitchen and breakfast room, and out the French doors to the construction site. We didn’t sideswipe a single glass on the countertop or break a single glass pane in the door.

Novel-wise, I have finally written the first draft of the great failed attack on Little Round Top at Gettysburg. In this chapter, Captain McBee and the Leon Hunters are in the maelstrom of the second day of the famous battle that kept the USA united and was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

In real life, the Fifth Texas Regiment was among the eight or so Confederate regiments that attacked at the critical point (the far left end of the Union "fishhook" position), at the critical time, or more correctly, an hour after the critical time. A successful attack across the aptly named “Valley of Death,” then up the slope of Little Round Top really might have won the battle, and changed the course of the Civil War. But we know, of course, that the attack faltered and failed.

Gettysburg is the first battle failure for McBee and his men, and it was a bloody affair for them. I’ve pulled out books of memoirs and the stack of old Gettysburg magazines I bought at the park back in the 1990’s.  I found four different detailed articles in the magazines focusing on different defending Union regiments that held the ridge and the Confederate units that were attacking. I’ve studied maps, and have thought back to my own four visits to Little Round Top to walk the ground. As a novelist whose characters are players in a very well known bit of military history, I want this chapter to be right.   

I’m also striving to make the Gettysburg chapter fast paced and personal, to show one critical slice of the battle through the eyes of a few men who I hope my readers have come to like. 

Finally I want the chapter to show just how close it was. Or maybe it wasn’t close at all. It depends on who is talking. Regardless, when people finish reading about Captain McBee and Company C at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I want them to shut the book and say, “Damn, that was a horserace!”