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Inside the Taking Prank Chronicle
Personal reflections are most often incorporated in biography. But when I embarked on a journey to write a novel unrelated to the realism of my own lifetime, it became also a journey down memory lane, with irresistible urges to reach into dusty files and memory closets, to revisit old haunts and long-forgotten situations, searching to recall what had once been said or done, because that's where the juice of creativity, at least mine, has come from. It is a buildup of the micro-bits that become who we are. You get to select familiar places to repaint with new impressions. You begin reconstituting familiar faces, altering their features, disguising their reality, and giving them new roles.
Resurrecting memories of places and events and blending these with new contemplations, becoming reacquainted with personalities and their possible interactions from the depths of an imagination you never knew existed. I have introduced this Ichabod Applebee character; Ichabod is the given name of an ancient relative. The imagined fellow resembles the real one in character, but not at all physically or in stature. I have used another acquaintance as a lookalike. As I write, I anticipate that around each next corner a new twist awaits to be dealt with, or a recollection that will surface pleading for inclusion. If these appear as info dumps, tangents, as I call them, they are intended to add depth, realism and necessary aspects to weave into the landscape. As Dali has so aptly shown, it is what you can imagine, not what you're looking at that makes an art of it. A new face with legs and habits searching for a role: you get to create a new character whenever needed. There are characters in books that have endured for a thousand years, like Hercules and Isaiah, Beowulf and Genji. As a fiction writer, you become the parent and guardian in full control of every character. You dress them, decide what they can say and when, to interact with others, when they have their entrances and exits, whether they should be happy and when they should die. You write like a god of your own creativity.
In small ways, I attempt to recall bits and pieces of my own scholastic, business careers, and life experiences, finding these useful to illuminate the text with real or close to real-life happenings. When I was a young teen, for example, my Dad would drop me off on Saturday mornings at a vast mound of tailings from an extinct mica mine in Portland Connecticut, where I'd spend hours prospecting eagerly for mineral specimens, some of which I retain to this day. I was once given an Estwing prospector's pick as a Christmas present. In both Macom Farm and Copper Goose, you'll find a tie-in. After many decades, I still have it today, useful as ever, a memento cherished as is Jason's pick in the story; as well as a Brunton compass—not quite as capable as Jason's Trimble—but close enough. Again, as you read, you'll find connections. I later attended the School of Mines in Colorado and gained a basic knowledge of geomorphology and geology, and mining which I have exploited in the story considerably. As a more than idiotic engineering student I once descended, with two equally daft companions, down a series of incredibly hazardous hundred-year-old ladders with decayed and fragile wooden rungs, into open mine shafts leading to lateral tunnels of ancient gold mines that pockmarked the plateaus near Telluride Colorado. The utter stupidity of doing so still causes me to shudder today. Yet a tactile familiarity with the stark severity of ancient mine tunnels has proven more than useful in creating domains for the story.
I've twice visited the Newgate prison in East Granby Connecticut. I can recall still, the musky, dank and dreary prospect of being captive deep within the forbidding darkness of those tunnels. While there, I locked my younger brother in a cell set up for tourists to photograph. My Dad took one. Lew looked bewildered and terrified, certain he'd become the prisoner I'd said he had. Lantern Hill in North Stonington, Connecticut, is a five hundred foot high monolithic volcanic plug of nearly pure silica, heavily mined by American Thermos as the raw material for thermos bottles and combined into an aggregate used as facing for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. I've prospected there, finding magnificent pockets of milky quartz crystals. Lantern Hill is visible distantly from coastal waters, its white silicate eastern face resembling a beacon in the sunlight, a landmark useful as a waypoint in plotting a sailing course across Fishers Island Sound. Lantern Hill becomes Malachite Hill in Macom Farm and the site of Copper Goose—where quartz becomes copper.
On our family property in Norwich, Connecticut, where I grew up, we had a tiny wetlands area with a bubbling spring and running brook, though lacking the functional quagmires to be found in Prank. My brother Lew and I were nature's local gamekeepers. When we'd find a vagrant turtle, frogs we could catch, salamanders under rocks or sunfish we'd keep alive in a pail, we'd introduce them to our tiny swamp that became a zoo populated by creature pets with names like Belly the bullfrog and Swifty, a spry young snapping turtle who grew to near maturity until our neighbor Harvey Tibbels caught him for turtle soup. You'll enjoy when that begins to tie in. With my Dad, we hunted partridge in the fields and forests of Lyme and Franklin and at other Connecticut locales of pristine beauty similar to Macom Farm in Prank...terrains that lately have become builders' money pots and eyesores on the flowing meadows and abiding woodlands I remember.
In high school, I became a crack shot on the rifle team. Being able to post four rounds in essentially the same hole was unimportant in life but exhilarating at the time, a feeling that arises often in the books. I could—once upon a time—nail high-flying crows on the fly. Although any resemblance to real-life individuals is purely coincidental; in the story, there are several character developments that do resemble people I have known and admired, even loved. For example, while working as a news reporter, I became acquainted with a society columnist who wrote wretchedly of personal matters she'd uncover...much to the dismay of anyone finding themselves exposed in her column. Sarah becomes the epitome of Phylis Nyden in the story. Professor Harold Meynard is a gesture of gratitude towards the splendid teachers and professors who have motivated and enriched my mind. In particular, he reminds me of my high school math teacher, endearingly known as ‘Pop' Congdon. He'd taught my Dad also. Pop was the inspiration that sent many of his students on to top engineering institutions and into professions that have shaped many aspects of our lives, even today—people like I Wang (Wang Laboratories), Allen Latham (Haemonetics), Sidney Frank (Grey Goose), and Edwin Land (Polaroid). Like Prof Meynard in the story, Pop Congdon was flamboyant and unpredictable. Being slammed with a flung chalkboard eraser for being wrong with an answer was not unusual. Pop left us with memorable sayings that his students can recall at will. Sayings like the sum times the difference is the difference of the squares. Or another...sine cosine cosine sine cosine cosine sine sine and the last one's minus. What they mean today, I have no idea. Two other teaching icons at NFA shaped my love of language and inspired my early writing efforts. Ma and Pa Reed made us compete with each other to find the right words to say things best. If I am able, it is because of them. In those days, teachers became like family, learning was intense, and political distortions were nonexistent. When you meet Mary Aldrich, she is a composite of several stalwart friends of my Mother, women of exemplary character, strong-willed and similarly charming, but with far superior morals. Andrea Cole may not exist in real life, but men of all ages and inclinations will wish she did. Jason Lang thinks and acts in ways I might had I the talents to do so. A family friend of questionable repute once lived in Stonington, in a large gloomy home hidden far down a long driveway with two gates. A figure in a past relationship once claimed a dubious kinship to Nathan Hale. I was obliged, therefore, to visit the Hale Homestead in Coventry, Connecticut. You'll find a tie-in in Macom Farm. Two deceased relatives once owned cottages in a Methodist Campground, in Plainville, Connecticut. I've resurrected memories of that enclave, which continues to thrive today, as resembling the Township of Prank, which, in contrast, only barely survives.
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I was part of management at the famous shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. We built nuclear submarines, naval surface ships, Apollo Tracking ships, and later LNG carriers. We'd considered a Cray mainframe but decided against it. Corporate had built a vast computer center in Connecticut nearly the size of a football field, populated with UNIVAC processors with a combined power that today would fit in a beefed-up desktop. When the shipyard closed in 1984, every piece of technology and everything else to the bone was declared surplus, junked, or sold at pennies on the dollar. I intercepted stuff that was headed towards a landfill, accumulating more than enough to fully equip a real estate office I had founded to replace my shipbuilding career. One shipyard manager so resembled images of Abraham Lincoln that I have cast him in the role of Ichabod Applebee. I knew and admired a Chief of Security at a prominent Naval base who has become the model for Dog Parsons. While entertaining shipping clients, I have dined and occasionally stayed at the Ritz Carlton, Boston. I have had enriching experiences of dining also, on venison at the Locke Ober eatery, and my kids when young acted like famished urchins when allowed to feast at the Boston Marriott's Long Wharf buffet. All are venues woven into the story. My own home today is partially furnished in the arts and crafts style, and we have collected appealing art for many years. My personal aspirations for a Wyeth, a Hopper, or a Sargent are reflected in Andrea Cole's enthusiasm for Mary Aldrich's astonishing collection. I have owned a Peter Hunt furniture piece and still have a copy of his cookbook. Long before computerized and metered agricultural drip systems were developed, my Dad created one for his own gardens, using rubber garden hoses in which he inserted copper rivets with holes...it worked beautifully. He also built a Gro-lite enclosure for my Mom's African violets. Again, these are significant inspirations of modern improvements that illuminate the story. I have known an enigmatic individual from whom I have drawn certain habits of Nathan Brown, who acquired at least twenty-five multi-unit brownstone mansions along Boston's Commonwealth Avenue and owned a building with a gallery on Newbury Street. I've dined at street cafes there, including the one I selected for Sammy Constantino to spend his long day's vigil.
While I was working in real estate, the tactic of threatening eminent domain to acquire private land was several times discussed but fortunately avoided after negotiated values of coveted parcels became satisfactory to besieged owners. I have argued with mega developers against building cookie-cutter homes, for greater elbowroom, for more green space, for more architectural diversity, to little avail. In my real estate career, I was fortunate to have as clients several national community builders of the caliber I've attached to Sullivan Corporation. Searching for land for major developments was at the heart of my real estate efforts. In Massachusetts there are several extraordinarily handsome communities whose mere existence I attribute to my own endeavors. I refer to them as my monuments. Had I stumbled on Macom Farm in Prank, I presently wonder if I would have had the foresight then to see its potential? I'd like to think so, had the timing been ripe. The big one I lost out on has inspired my vision of The Hale Tower. Nathan Brown's business acumen resembles that of a fellow in my friendship group in the 90's who was acquiring low-income apartments in the same manner as Nate Brown. Anthony Ozga had stomach-wrenching stories he'd recite over beers and pizza about tenant behaviors. Tony died too soon. I miss his humor and his candor still. He left behind an estate of tenement buildings with no debt. My imaginings of the turbid state of the Prank community are recollections of my experiences while traveling overseas on business to developing countries where upper-tier living standards were often below those of American slums. My knowledge of southern New England harbors, especially of Boston's Harbor Islands, of Newport, Rhode Island and the Connecticut coastline comes from nearly fifty years of coastal boating and sailing. I've overnighted several times in view of Boston Light, at the same anchorage selected by Jason with Andrea. Unlike Nate Brown, I've never owned a Porsche nor have I driven one, but my best college buddy owned a 1970 Jaguar XKE Convertible, bright red, the same shade as Jason's BMW. I'd had access to the key practically anytime...until the day Charlie drove the long sleek nose of the Jag under the rear bumper of a stationary truck trailer.
While living oceanside in Marshfield, Massachusetts during the eighties and nineties, local narcotics smuggling was so rampant that it had become a hilarious enterprise and an ongoing comedy of local cops and smugglers. Most everyone in town knew something but no one chose to piece it all together. I still recall running on a beach populated with soggy eighty-pound bales of marihuana dumped in haste when the United States Coast Guard had shown up in hot pursuit of a local runner, and of nasty cocaine packets being smuggled to local docks in the guts of daily catches of big fin tuna and swordfish, transferred from offshore boats making regular runs through international waters from Miami and points in between and southward.
The school pride acknowledged by faculty and students at Bell University is a microcosm of the amazing pride that students, faculty and alumnae share for their beloved Norwich Free Academy NFA from where I was graduated and where both my parents taught. As an aside, I have written this story while seated at my Dad's old desk, one formerly used by an earlier NFA principal, Henry Tirrell. Dad disclosed how he'd once been disciplined in front of that desk for arriving tardy after he'd been out bird hunting early on a school day morning and had brought his shotgun and a pheasant to class. I also have the shotgun, which his father had built while a talented local gunsmith.
It's been said that given enough time, even a monkey can write a book. Likewise, given enough memory recall, everyone is a book that can be written. Taking Prank has nothing to do with any aspect of my real life, yet it incorporates endearing details like those we all store away, that only resurface when imagination is at a loss without them, like watching my infant brother attempting his first crawl upstairs and wondering what if he didn't make it? Actual moments, encounters, and collected treasures are reimagined and remodeled to fit in, like the peculiarity of a hand-cut strap hinge on the door of a rotund Quaker barn at Heritage Plantation in Sandwich, Massachusetts, that grew a silo and became an important element in the story. The spellbinding alto of my parents' devoted gardener, appropriately named only Alto to us, will be revived later, in my recall of Alto's operatic voice, in the guise of Endicott Johnston, who casts a new spell from a quaint farm in Gettysburg, a spell that resounds across the pasturage and mesmerizes even cattle and from there resonates to ancient enclaves as far away as Jamaica and Barbados.
When a new novel is published, it is truly an untrodden journey that you as its reader are the first to take, one that the writer has created and lived within, so is no longer able to enjoy the fresh experience of it all.
You are invited to read, learn, enjoy...and hopefully, discover moments that will rekindle your own memories, as it is our memories that keep our minds alert and our hearts beating.
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As Madison County Registrar Michelle MacKenzie observes in the book, "Might deeds have their own souls, Mr. Geoffrey? After all, isn't it from the land of God we came and to which we must return?"
"What God gives, can he take it back?" She asks. "It seems unclear."
"It is, isn't it?" Geoffrey replies.
"It's been splendid, Michelle, talking with you."
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