“There were games that everyone played; and when there was music everyone sang.”

I have snow in my beard and self-reliance in my heart. Emerson and Twain seem as right as rain when you’re in an Ohio blizzard. To tell it; and tell it well….no help from the others.

“ 

“Peter Rugg!” said I; “and who is Peter Rugg?”

“That” said the stranger, “is more than anyone can tell exactly.”

“

The snow has come. It makes me like the word ‘ilk’. It is more than a metaphor you know…

A cold blanket of silence. A pause.

A moment to question why.

These ‘whys’ are mine, and I won’t share them here, that is not the point of this narrative. The point of this is meditative, and returns to one of my previous subjects. The art of deception. In short, why lie? Can deception equal art? Aesthetics often retreats to intent for justification, and if we illusionists follow that same reasoning…well…let’s wait a paragraph or two…

I knock about my grandparents house and hunt down books. Not so very different from what I do at home, but different enough that I have the time to do it properly. I have time to wander in these leaves and leave other thoughts to fall. I find funny little things, odd pieces, and words I fly away with. 

So here are the excerpts you crave, unless it’s your first time here. Believe me, you’ll know if you fit in soon enough…and for the rest of you, just a little something I dug up, something that exhibits the intent, and perhaps justifies what we usually ignore:

 ”An authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners-unless they are tenderfeet, greenhorns-know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them. At his best he is as grave as a historian of the Roman Empire; yet what he is after is neither credulity nor the establishment of truth. He does not take himself too seriously, but he does regard himself as an artist and yearns for recognition of his art. He may lie with satiric intent; he may lie merely to make the time pass pleasantly; he may lie in order to take the wind out of some egotistic fellow of his own tribe or take in some greener; again, without any purpose at all and directed only by his ebulliant and companion-loving nature, he may “stretch the blanket” merely because, like the redoubtable Tom Ochiltree, he had “rather lie on credit than tell the truth for cash.” His generous nature revolts at the monotonoy of everyday facts and overflows with the desire to make his company joyful.”

 That captures the spirit doesn’t it? The heart of what we do? I kept wandering through this book after finding that, it contains tall-tales, and ghost stories and american folklore. There’s even an essay by Mark Twain on how to tell a story that I know you’ll like. That is; if you ever hunt it down yourself. Some pleasures just can not be found online.

…and so I found a section in it called ‘Proverbs of a People’.

It contains the light and mirth of generations. Cold wisdom and hard lessons. I’ll read it all, and drink tea and watch the snowfall. I’m just another knot in the cord, and the presence of all these books is proof enough of that. What would those who came before tell me?

“Can you unscramble eggs?”

“Everyone talks about the weather but no ones does anything about it.”

“Every card in the deck and both of the seven-eleven bones are with you.”

 Tonight I’ll read O’Henry, if only because there’s a variation of a card trick and a candy bar named after the author. Now that’s a compliment…