Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

As a writer I like to eavesdrop on conversations.  Sometimes those conversations make their way into my writing.  Sometimes those conversations are so outrageous they are almost too good to be true.  Yesterday, I overheard one of those too-good-to-be-true conversations.  I was driving my truck back from a party.  My daughter Emma and her friend, Allie, were in the front seat with me.  They were both wound up on sugar.  That happens when you’re eleven years-old and excited and have eaten an ice cream cone and three lollipops in just under one hour.

Allie is a talker.  And I realized a long time ago that she likes to make up stories.  She began the conversation as we drove past a flea market on the highway:

Allie:  I can’t go to the Fiesta Mart anymore.

Emma:  Where’s the Fiesta Mart?

Allie:  Tulsa.  I went there once and they won’t let me go back.

Emma:  Who won’t let you go back?

Allie:  The Fiesta Mart people.  You know how there’s this law that you can’t discriminate?  Like you can’t discriminate against a person because of their color or because they’re a cripple or because they have religion or because they’re a Gypsy?

Emma:  Yeah.

Allie:  Well, I went to Fiesta Mart with my cousin who’s a cripple in a wheelchair and they let her in but they wouldn’t let me in.

Emma:  Why?

Allie:  Because I’m a Gypsy.  I’m 98% Gypsy and they won’t let Gypsies inside because they think we’re stealers.  It’s discrimination.

Emma:  I didn’t know you were Gypsy.

Allie:  Yep.  98% percent of me is. I’m a genuine Romaine Gypsy.

Emma:  Romaine?  Like the lettuce?

Allie:  I don’t know about the lettuce part.  (pause)  But I do eat salad when my Grandma threatens that I’ll have to sit at the table until I finish.  It has to have Thousand Island Dressing.

Emma:  You’re weird, Allie.

Allie:  No, I’m not. (pause) But you know what is weird?  When dogs have worms and they scoot on their butt across the carpet.  That’s weird.

Emma:  (laughing) Yeah, that’s weird all right.

Allie:  I’m just a Gypsy, I don’t have worms.  I don’t steal, either.  But the Fiesta Mart people still won’t let me inside.  They think I have bad thoughts in my head.  My head is only full of cupcakes and ballerina shoes and tiaras, but they don’t know that.

Emma:  You should sue them for discrimination.

Allie:  I will once I’m grown up.  You know how my cousin got even with the Fiesta Mart people?

Emma:  How?

Allie:  She stole a toaster from them.  Right off the shelf.  She snuck it out behind her back in the wheelchair.

Emma:  Did she get caught?

Allie:  No way.  She’s a good stealer.

Pause.

Allie:  She’s not a Gypsy either.

I pulled up in front of Allie’s house and she got out of the truck.  We said our goodbyes and Emma and I watched Allie walk up the path to her house.

Emma:  I don’t think she’s really a Gypsy.

Me:  I don’t either.

Emma:  But I did see two toasters in their kitchen the other day.

Old Photos and Letters

I was rummaging around in my attic and found some old photos and letters that are a hoot.

This is a picture of me in first grade.  I was six years old.   The photo fails to capture my orneriness. (1968, Commerce, Oklahoma)

This is a picture of me the following year in the second grade.  The little sailor dress I was wearing was my favorite. (1969, Commerce, Oklahoma)

This is a pic of me and my little brother, Eddie Lee.  I’m seven, he’s two.  I’m riding him around on my Shetland pony.  The pony’s name was Topper.  That’s my Grandpa, Arles Ferguson, in the background. This pic was taken on his farm in Big Cabin, Oklahoma.

This is my favorite photo of my Grandma and Grandpa, Arles and Hazel Ferguson.  This would’ve been around 1935.  I don’t know where they were, but they look like the Joads.

This is my favorite photo of my Grandma.  It was her high school basketball picture.  (1930. Big Cabin, Oklahoma.)  I’m totally loving the uniform.  This was when the rules of women’s basketball were half-court and a player wasn’t allowed to take more than three dribbles before passing.

I also found a couple of letters I wrote when I was eight and going into Third Grade.  This first letter was written to my Kindergarten teacher after I saw her one Saturday at T.G. & Y.  I gave it to my mother to mail to her, but obviously she didn’t.  In the letter, I reference a fight that I got into and beat a boy up.  I also wrote the letter with three different colored pens.  Here’s the letter, verbatim, complete with misspellings:

Dear Mrs. Watts,

Hi!  You were wrong.  I do remember you.  Edie Lee Knox Junouir is doing O.K.!  How are you?  I hope you are fine.  Well your husband also.  I am in third grde.  I was sad when I found out that you had moved.  It’s about time to switch colors.  I want you to know I will remember you all my life.  There are a couple of pictures on back.  Oh yes I can still remember when you went out of the room for a while.  Well Rusty started calling me names.  Well I asked him to fight me!  He said yes!  I beat him up.  After that he didn’t say a word to me.  May God bless you.  Layce

Here’s a scan of the picture I drew for her on the back.  I know you can’t see it too well and that’s probably a good thing.  It’s titled “The Burgur Man.”

Here’s another letter I wrote that same summer when I was eight. I wrote it to my mother.  My brother, Eddie Lee, and I went to Colorado with my Grandparents for a month.  They had a Winnebago that we drove from Oklahoma.  They towed a little Subaru car behind the Winnebago.  (this is all backstory for the letter)  I think you’ll agree I have an innate sense of drama and commas have always given me fits.

Dear Moma,

How are things?  Done anything new?  Anything been exciting?  Talking about exciting, up here in the mountains of Colorado, theres been a lot of exciting things, for instance, on the way up here we were driving on wet pavement when Grampa said “I wonder how the little car is coming along?”  Well I was going to see how the car was doing, When all of a sudden Grampa hit a bump and I lost my balanse and I slashed my little toe on the ice box, it bled a long time.  I can’t get on most of my shoes because it’s swollen.  It’s hard to breathe up here too.

Love,

Layce & Eddie Lee

That’s all I’ve found so far.  Do me a favor – if you all don’t hear from me for a couple of days, send Saxon to search for me in the attic.  I’m probably buried under some old photo boxes.

Tats Too: The Case of the Devil’s Diamond – Book Trailer

Tats Too, the sequel to Tats, is now on sale at BellaBooks.com!

 

Click HERE to watch the trailer

The Power of Incrementalism

“Life is always getting the way.”  That’s one of my favorite quotes.  It’s from the book “Fools Die” by Mario Puzo.

That pretty much sums up how I feel most days.  I love to write, create, make-up stories, weave words together to see what pattern they make, but somehow life always seems to get in the way.  Every day I wake up with the best of intentions.  And every day, I feel pushed, forced, to do everything but write.  I have to clean house, I have to take Emma here or there, I have to take the dog to the beauty shop, I have to grocery shop, I have to go do manual labor at one of my rentals… The list goes on.

Cleaning house is one of the chores I hate the most.  We have a pretty big house, actually far too big for just three people, and cleaning it takes a day of work.  I decided a year ago that instead of spending one full day of the week wasted on this chore I would instead clean just one part of it every day.  I would spend thirty minutes or so a day on one area like the downstairs bathroom, the next day the kitchen…  In other words, I would clean the house incrementally.  It works, too!  The house is always clean (more or less) and I didn’t have to dedicate a whole day to keeping it that way.  Thirty minutes or so out of each day seems much more manageable.

So, I started thinking… what if I applied this Power of Incrementalism to my writing?

Some days it was hard to get started writing because I was thinking about the whole book I needed to write.  That chore seemed to big to tackle.  I would lose spirit before I even got started.  What seems much more manageable is writing 500 words a day.

I put this plan into action last Thursday.  Come hell or high water, I sit down every morning and write 500 words.  The words fly out of me, taking less than thirty minutes to type out.  Usually, I ’accidentally’ end up writing seven or eight hundred words.   In only seven days time I have 4,600 words written on a new book.  I also wrote around 2,000 words on a book I already had started.  And I still got all my “life” done, too!

The way I figure it if I write 500 words a day, six days a week (I’m resting on Sunday) that will make a total of 156,000 words every calendar year.  That’s approximately two books a year.  Two books written just 500 words at a time.

That’s the power of incrementalism.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…

(This blog is  461 words long.   Only 39 left to go!)

Rest in Peace – Stanley Kowalski Gardner – January, 1995 – April, 2012

This morning I said goodbye to my best friend of seventeen years, Stanley Kowlaski Gardner.   Stanley had brown hair all over his body, four legs and a bark that could scare any predator.

I first met Stanley at the Glendale, California pound.  I had gone there looking for a cat, but when he ran up to me and asked me to take him home, it was love at first sight.

Stanley was a playful pup.  So playful, in fact, that I lost dozens of pajama pants, several pair of shoes and all the baseboards in my house.

He was a dog’s dog, masculine in every way.  He bravely guarded my house and my daughter.  With Stanley on the watch, our house was always free of snakes and butterflies.  He loved McDonald’s hamburgers.  Except for the pickle.  The pickle he would nose off the bun and scoot under the microwave cart for me to clean up later.

Stanley adored my daughter, Emma. From the moment she first came home from the hospital he never left her side.  Each time she messed in her diaper, he would bark at me to change it.  He tried to teach her to do her business outside, but it never took.  He taught Emma to laugh when she was seven months old.  He would chase his tail, running in circles, and she would squeal her pleasure and clap her hands.  When Emma was five years old, she dressed him in her Halloween costume.  He swallowed his manly pride and allowed her to parade him around the house dressed as Snow White.

He loved cheese, hot dogs, hamburgers and popcorn.

He would hate me telling you this, but one time he chased a possum under my house and got stuck.  He could’ve gotten out by backing up, but he was too scared.  It took three hot dogs to convince him to back out the hole he went in.  Another time he was running around the house in circles – just for the pure doggie joy of being able to run – and he smashed into the plate glass sliding door.  That took four slices of American cheese to coax him out from under the gazebo so I could make sure his skull wasn’t cracked open.

He sat on my toes while I wrote a dozen plays, a dozen more screenplays and three novels.  He liked to hear me read the words out loud.  He never criticized.  He urged me to write more, and better.

He had his own whistle call.  He never failed to come running when I signaled him with his special whistle.  He loved other dogs unless they came to his house.  He loved to clean my ears.

He was my best friend and confidante.  He listened to every problem I had and never judged me when I made a mistake.  He was liberal with his advice and generous with his kisses.  He was my best friend, my guard, my shoulder to lean on.  I will miss him for the rest of my days.

Stanley Kowalski is survived by his wife Darla Sue Gardner, his friend Honey Bear, and his two-legged family, Layce, Saxon and Emma.

Somewhere on the Other Side is a little brown puppy, running through a meadow, chasing butterflies and barking at snakes.  He eats hot dogs for lunch, hamburgers for dinner, and basks in the sun waiting for me to join him on our next adventure.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

You know how they say truth is stranger than fiction?  True dat.  My life has taken a turn for the strange(er).  The events of the past couple of weeks I could never make-up in a million years.  And if I were to make them up and put them in a book, nobody would believe it.

Here are the things that happened in just a two week period:  my motorcycle broke down.  My exercise bike went kerplunk.  A piece of siding fell off my house (from 40 feet up!).  My washing machine decided it was tired of all that spinning.  And my hot water heater rusted out.  And this is all just at my house.  I own some rental properties and here’s the low-down on those:  Got a roof leak in an apartment.  The D.E.Q. (Department of Environmental Quality) cited me for a leaky septic tank and gave me 10 days to fix it.  A tenant moved in the middle of the night and left all his crap behind – plus he left behind a broken air conditioner, a broken toilet, a broken heater, 3 cabinet doors are missing, and there’s a ginormous hole in the wall. (Can anybody guess why he put black electrical tape over all the outlets?)  Another tenant doesn’t feel the need to pay rent.  He actually told me he’d work off the rent by changing the wax ring in the toilet.  And at 8 a.m. one morning, a woman appeared on my doorstep.  She’s the girlfriend of another tenant of mine.  She informed me that at 5:30 a.m. that morning the F.B.I. swooped into Tahlequah in a helicopter, broke through my rental’s front door, bashed out a window and arrested my drug dealing tenant.  Oh yeah, they kinda left a mess behind, too.

And, you know what?  I didn’t once cry over any of this.  True, Saxon had to take me for a couple of long walks and calm me down, but I didn’t lose it – not once.

I fixed the motorcycle, the washing machine and the hot water heater.  I fixed the roof.  I took three truckloads of garbage to the dump from my disappearing tenant and fixed all the crap he broke. (He put the electrical tape over the outlets because he forgot to take his meds and he thought I was spying on him through the outlets in the apartment.)  I served an eviction notice to my other tenant and told him not to worry about the wax ring.  I hired the septic tank to be fixed.  I took my daughter to the orthodontist to get x-rays for braces on her teeth.  I got a new door installed and sold that house.

I still need to deal with the siding on my house, my exercise bike, and the window.  I am selling the fridge and stove out of the Feebie house (anyone out there want to buy either of those? I’ll make you a good deal.)

You want to know the best thing of all?  Tats Too comes out May 15^th.  (You can pre-order on Amazon.)  And I don’t want to guilt anybody into buying my newest book, but my daughter needs those braces really bad.

So, if you all run out and buy a copy (maybe a second copy for your friend while you’re at it) I promise to not only fix my daughter’s teeth, but I’ll post pictures of some really cute kitty cats on my Facebook wall.  In the meantime, if you need to get hold of me – I’ll be on the extension ladder forty feet in the air tacking the siding back onto the house.

Lesbian Children’s Story

I cannot believe that the Goldies overlooked my beautiful and touching lesbian children’s story, “Pat and Sally.”  So, I am re-posting it here, free of charge, so that all may enjoy!

Pat and Sally

by Layce Gardner

See Pat?

Pat is a dyke.

Pat is packing.

See Sally?

Sally is femme.

Sally has a purse.

Sally has a pretty purse.

Pat buys Sally a white wine spritzer.

Sally drinks.

Drink, Sally, drink!

Pat is packing.

Sally dances by herself.

Pat is packing.

Sally drinks more.

See Sally dance?

Pat is packing.

Sally goes home with Pat.

Pat bends Sally over.

Go, Pat, go!

Pat is packing – boxes in her U-Haul.