jodyrathgeb

    I recently have taken to reading my copies of The New Yorker in the wee hours of the morning. My body doesn't seem to want to sleep between 1 and 3 a.m., so I get up and read.
    It's a pleasant way of dealing with insomnia. The place is quiet, except for cat visits, and I don't get the vague guilt I feel when I take time to read from my "productive" daytime activities.
    I wonder, though, about how the situation of reading affects what I read. Eventually, I read most of each magazine, but at night I seem to be choosing the longer issue-based articles over the reviews and casuals, which I fit in during cooking and lunches, and the fiction, saved for pre-bedtime and stolen daytime.
    Do other people read different things at different times and in different places? Is the reading nook reserved for fiction and the office for professional journals?
    I do know that for me, the memory of certain books is often tied to place. I read Lord of the Rings one summer under the maple tree at the farthest end of my parents' yard, and still think of all those elves and hobbits surrounded by green leaves with blue sky behind. Any mention of Theodore Dreiser brings back memories of the student lounge on my college campus, where I read An American Tragedy with a paper cup of hot chocolate from the Campus Club by my side. And I associate the grislier of Andersen's Fairy Tales with a hospital stay when I was 8 years old.
    Fiction writers always hope that our work takes readers away from their present time and place and into the world we create. I want to believe that someone reading Fish-Eye Lens on a snowy day can feel the warmth of island life. But my own experience doesn't separate the book's world from my world. Instead, they connect.
    Is it like this for everyone? Readers, speak up. This inquiring writer mind wants to know.

    

    I used to like Halloween a lot more than I do today. I liked its slapdash simplicity in the days before packaged cobwebs, tools made just for pumpkin-cutting, commercial ghost tours, haunted theme parks and characters out of slasher films instead of witches and ghosts.
    Halloween was then just frivolous fun, a purely pagan ritual for kids and playful adults. Trick-or-treat wasn't an organized event, and everything was mostly homemade. No ceramic pumpkins: We carved real ones clumsily with whatever knife Mom would let us handle. You added some icing and raisin eyes to sloppily-made cookies for "ghosts." And costumes involved creative recycling rather than a shopping trip.
    My mother kept a cardboard box the size of a washing machine in our storage cubbyhole for odd pieces of fabric, old clothing, junky jewelry and broken half masks. This is where costumes came from. That meant that the Knott kids usually showed up at someone's door as hoboes or gypsies, although I do remember Mom once making me into a pretty good mouse.
    It was fun to participate in making these costumes, and we learned from Mom's ingenuity. I felt sorry for the kids forced to wear off-the-rack skeleton and Superman clothes. Anyone could buy a costume; creating one was better.
    I understand that times have changed. You can no longer safely send your kids out unsupervised after dark, even in your own neighborhood, and today's haunted house events are definitely safer than our dares to sneak into a crumbling barn or condemned home. But I would hope for more resistance to all the commercialism and a return to homemade Halloween.
    Ghost cookie, anyone?

    I have just finished reading A.B. Westrick's fine novel, Brotherhood, which is set in Richmond shortly after the Civil War. The book targets young readers, but it's also fun for adult Richmonders and history buffs, and I had a great time seeing how often the characters passed by my apartment's windows (albeit in another time).
    Looking at the book as a fellow fiction writer, I was struck by how much research had to go into it. Anne needed to find out just what was where in 1867 Shockoe Bottom and Church Hill; how people dressed; what teaching methods were used for the dyslexic; and the details of fine tailoring, among other things. I could easily imagine her poring over books at the Virginia Historical Society or wandering through the Bottom with an old map to get her bearings, all before writing a word.
    How different from the research I do for my fiction! My short stories, set primarily in the Turks and Caicos or fictional islands very like them, depend on details that are cultural rather than historical.
    So instead of libraries, I frequent bars and local gathering spots like the domino game at Sandy Point. I listen to the talk: the stories, the way things are said, the connections among people. I go to island events, and when friends gather at my house, I ask about events I missed.
    We sometimes talk about relationships, and a part of my mind sifts out differences from my American experiences. And from my questions, both asked and unasked, come the beginnings of short stories.
    I don't take notes on the spot; this research isn't that calculated, and I am, after all, in a social engagement, not an interview. But nothing is lost in the wash of information and attitude and cadence of language.
    I have been visiting and staying on North Caicos for 23 years now. You might say that each of my stories has required 23 years of research.

    Life in the islands turns a lot of things upside down. Here, shabby IS chic, coffee shops are just coffee shops (if you can find one), and keeping chickens is a lifestyle, not a trend.
    This is most evident with island vehicles. People here can be wowed by something flashy or new, but the best wheels are the survivors: beaten up and still chugging, useful and good on gas ($6.95/gallon at one station recently!).
    That describes Porter, a 2000 Nissan Frontier pickup that we bought just slightly used in Richmond and served Tom well until 2004. By then I was living on North Caicos, struggling alone first with "John Wilson," a lumbering purple Jeep CJ-5, then with Sunbird, a yellow Chinese-made scooter. I sold the Jeep because it was just too much vehicle for me, and the scooter remained hard to start and dangerous to drive on our sketchy roads.
    We had always thought of Porter as our island truck, so Tom drove him to Florida and shipped him off to me. I paid customs duty of $2,000 more than the Blue Book price. ("We have our own book," I was told. Of course you do.)
    It took a while for Porter to show signs of being an island truck, but eventually the bed cover cracked and tore, the interior roof lining separated and was ripped out, the window-mounted rear view mirror refused to stay put and the spare, once removed from its impossible position under the truck, remained in the bed.
    He was used to pull down a dead tree, carry loads of gravel and to give rides to countless hitchers.
    When I moved back to Richmond in 2008 and my time here became more sporadic, I sold Porter to my friend Mark McLean, who runs a small car rental business. He put the truck into his "fleet," where it remains a workhorse and a favorite of return customers (are you reading, Kenny and Cheryl?).
    Today Porter is even more the island truck - the ultimate island truck. The bed is beginning to rust through and when you turn on the ignition every light goes on and stays on. Just ignore them. Mark has taken excellent care of all the important functions, and the truck runs like new at 111,506 miles. There are even some surprises: the air conditioning and the seat belts still work!
    Pretty, fast, a status symbol? Nah. That's not island. Porter is island.

    My current reading - Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus - has me remembering encounters with the world of games, guesses and illusions.
    The era of tent circuses was nearly over when I was a child, on their way to big-business consolidation in roofed arenas, but where I lived there was still a solid tradition of carnivals, the more compact cousin of the circus. During the summer, each local fire department would have a weeklong carnival as a fundraiser. The food, bingo, chuckaluck and beer garden would be handled locally, but there would also be contracts for fireworks and a truck troupe that provided rides, games and prizes of pink stuffed gorillas, short-lived goldfish and junk "jewelry."
    The carnivals were usually referred to by the name of the sponsoring fire department or town: Crabtree, Midway-St. Clair, Carbon, Harold's. The exception was Red Devil, and to this day I don't get the name.
    My favorite of all these was the Carbon Carnival, held on my uncle's land and full of familiar faces. It had wonderful kielbasa sandwiches (though terrible cardboard pizza); rides ranging from a wicked Merry Mixer to a just-this-side-of-safe Ferris wheel (stories of it getting stuck abounded); and a cigar-chomping fireman who would cheat the chuckaluck wheel so that I could win three dimes.
    What I won there would soon be lost at the carny booths, impossible games of chance that required hooking and standing up a Coke bottle, knocking down heavy stacked "milk bottles" or tossing Ping-Pong balls to win goldfish.
    I knew even then that the games were rigged, but I was fascinated by the people who ran them: bored, greasy-haired men with tattoos; hard-edged women in tight T-shirts and studded jeans who would surprisingly slip you a beaded necklace even when you lost; and the kids, visibly dirty and poor but wearing expressions of superiority. "I belong to the carnival. You're just another stooge."
    I tried to imagine their lives, traveling from town to town in a caravan of trucks, putting together and breaking down these rides and booths over and over, camping out in this field and bathing in a bucket (yes, I peeked around their vehicles to see). No wonder they all had greasy hair ... the worst possible thing, to my 1960s pre-teen mind.
    I would have loved to talk with them, to discover this life beyond my tidy world, but I lacked the courage to ask questions.
    That would eventually change. I would grow into someone who is always asking questions, always curious about what's going on in the other mind and on the other side.
    It was just a carnival. Or maybe not. Maybe the essence of illusion, of magic. Of writing.