The Wormlips Scrapbook

September 2005

The first dog we fostered was Felicia, who’d been saved from the pound that morning. “Felicia” is a perfectly fine name if you happen to be a petite, buxom woman with frosty pink lipstick, but not if you’re a dog.

To be honest, I wasn’t fostering her out of altruism. It was, to be politically incorrect, a rent-to-own situation: i.e., foster to adopt.

The first thing I had to do was to dissuade Felicia from killing the cats, an activity she pursued with joie de vivre 24 hours a day. The second thing I needed was an alternate name for her: one that would sound familiar to Felicia’s infected ears but that wouldn’t compromise my dignity when I had to call her at the dog park.

Morticia was beautiful, gentle and sweet, but if anyone ever needed Ritalin it was she. Here she is after I’d turned my back for 45 seconds; she’s, uh, reading my library book called Understanding Your Pet.

This is from the summary I wrote about her for the dog adoption web site:

If a kind, patient person will take the time to teach her good manners — how not to jump for joy when she meets someone new, how to treat the kitchen trash as something other than a treasure chest — he or she will be rewarded with an affectionate and loyal partner for life.

I neglected to mention another little habit of hers: prancing around with a cigar-like object protruding from her delicate black lips, after she’d paid a visit to the cat box.

The most fun we had together was during our visits to the beach.

Morticia stayed with us for a month as she recovered from spay surgery and some minor medical conditions. Every day I wanted to keep her, yet every day her enthusiasm for cat massacre remained undiminished. With leaden heart I took her back to Milo, where I hoped a catless someone would discover her. Only a few days later a family did adopt her. They apparently had the taste to deem “Felicia” too girly-girl but, if you ask me, “Nala” wasn’t any better. Even more unfortunate, she proved to be too much for that family and landed back at Milo. I hope someone patient has whisked her to a life of contentment.

Bookmark this post to...

In 1993 I wrote a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce a half-hour documentary about the John Henry legend and the small West Virginia town where it took root.

Dad was the one who told me about Talcott, reputed to be the site of the legendary race with the steel drill. He and I visited a couple times, climbing down to the railroad tracks and hacking our way through dense and prickly undergrowth to find the entrance to the abandoned Great Bend Tunnel.

The radio production turned out to be a gargantuan project, another of those five-cent-an-hour labors of love, and the last big documentary I did. Also probably my favorite. Steel Drivin’ Man aired in a couple of places, including All Things Considered, in ‘95.

I was asked to write articles for the NEA Web site and for a South African print publication about the process of producing the program. Here’s one version: Looking for John Henry.

Right afterwards — my first all-by-myself Web project — I decided to build a site about it. There was a lot less stuff on the Web back then — a much cozier place — so a lot of people found my site and contacted me for John Henry info. Among those were representatives from Disney, who’d decided to produce an animated short about the legend. One person who didn’t contact me but who apparently found my information useful in writing his bestseller [oops: did that smack of bitterness? sorry] was Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days. According to his essay on the Random House Web site:

I knew vaguely I wanted to do a modern update of the John Henry story. But I didn’t know much about him except for half-remembered details from the legend. So one day … I plugged the man’s name into a search engine.

Well, there are a lot of John Henrys, a lot of Johns, and a lot of Henrys. So I added various keywords such as hammer, steel-driving, etc., and narrowed it down. I didn’t find that much. Put such a search into Google these days, and you’ll get almost six thousand hits. But these were the early days of the web…

Anywho, the next thing I found was a web page for Ginna Allison’s radio documentary “Steel Drivin’ Man,” broadcast on NPR in 1995. Well, this was news. Until then I had no idea that there was an historical basis to the story. I had thought it was just a legend. Ambiguity! Conflicting stories! Now I was cooking with gas, or at least getting my grocery list together. I’m glad this page is still on the web, and hasn’t gone on to that Big Link in The Sky.

Now that I had a name of a town, Talcott, West Virginia, I started noodling around with that…

I would’ve loved a mention in his book’s credits, but oh well.

So… for posterity, here is that old John Henry site. There was actually an earlier (funkier but more interesting) version that I don’t have any more.

If I can ever figure out how to do audio for the Web, I’ll put the program up here too.

Bookmark this post to...

In his youth, Dad was six feet, eight inches tall. In this teeny picture, he’s dwarfed by one of his nemeses: star thistle.

Dad was an exceptionally active and self-reliant guy. Even in his sixties when his left leg started to get weak he didn’t slow down, though little by little a limp crept into his gait. Over the years, as he kept losing strength and then balance, he still managed to keep doing the things he loved. And what he loved most was wandering around the woods and caves and hollows of his beloved West Virginia farm.

When he was 78, Dad got the official diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Only then did finally lose the desire to fight his deteriorating physical condition.

He never complained — only apologized. His family and friends tried desperately to think of diversions for him. Since he liked playing on his computer and was exceptionally creative, I thought he might have fun piecing together a Web site about his farm. I bought him a domain name and built him a starter site.

I never got to find out if he liked the idea. ALS moves so quickly that within one month he went from being able to roll around in a wheelchair to being unable to lift his head. He couldn’t even see his hills out the window any more. Three months after that, he was dead.

But this silly little site I built him still exists, as does my lifelong love of the farm.

Bookmark this post to...