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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.d
Subject: Re: {ASSD} Bad News: The Eulogy
From: Russell Hoisington <writing@thekeyboard.com>
References: <Xns9751705ABC0BFhoisingrstory@208.49.80.124> <6ak2t1p76beqht7grm4676ls4c9b897rd7@4ax.com> <3913t1tul2sk7detos2i6omtirgu5gut9u@4ax.com>
Organization: The Writers' Block
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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:53:34 EST
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 23:53:34 +0000
===================
Stasya T. Canine <stasyatk9NOSPAMED@juno.com> wrote in
news:3913t1tul2sk7detos2i6omtirgu5gut9u@4ax.com:
> On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 13:09:25 -0800, Denny Wheeler
> <dennyw@TANSTAAFL.zipcon.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:02:39 GMT, Russell Hoisington
>><writing@thekeyboard.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>I may be scarce for a few days.
>>
> Heartfelt condolences, neighbor. That's the sort of news nobody
> needs.
>>
>><slight veer>
>>
>>I don't think being scarce is your best move. Come to la Taverna
>>and throw a wake.
>
> <scene shift>
> Stasya and Mahika quietly head for the broom closet. They get out
> the cleaning supplies and make certain the stage is clean and
> ready for use.
>
> Once finished they place a chair and set a microphone on it.
>
> A sign is taped to the chair in plain sight:
>
> "Reserved for Russell Hoisington.
> Please do not use until he's finished with it."
----------------------------------------------------
La Taverna's doors wink into existence, disgorge startled guests, and
wink out until needed for the next arrivee. Without fail each guest
gapes at the room, checks the date and time on the black-edged
invitation, and glances to the clocks about the room. Clearly all
are startled by the decor.
La Taverna's main room is festooned with an odd assortment of red,
white, and blue bunting; black, red, and yellow bunting; banners for
German beer and wines; balloons; and red Razorback Hog hats. Mobiles
hanging from the ceiling dangle mathematical equations, including
Einstein's matter-energy relationship, along with planets, stars,
comets, trees, frogs, fish, microscopes, periodic tables, chessmen,
and green dragons.
Refreshments await at the tables: glasses of German wines and beer
and cups of instant coffee. The centerpiece of each table is a pile
of inexpensive trinkets that would appeal to sixth- and seventh-
graders: animal-shaped erasers and glitter gel pens, peelable
stickers and beads, crystals and decorative rubber stamps. The
placemats are an assortments of mandalas, crossword puzzles, coloring
sheets, chessboards, true/false tests, and fill-in-the-blank exams.
Two rows of sixth- and seventh-grade girls form an Honor Guard to
either side of the stage's screen. The merest glance confirms that
these young ladies with their red-rimmed eyes and tear-streaked
cheeks aren't Girl Scouts. Indeed, their posture indicates any one
of them could teach The Dreaded Four Girl Scouts a lesson in manners
with one hand while eating a casual lunch with the other. Their
merest glance is a warning that no disrespect will be tolerated.
The screen shows two photographs. The first is a black and white
picture that looks as if it were scanned from a cheap government
document. It shows a slender young Army Captain with dark wavy hair
and intense eyes. The second is the same man, but he is older and
heavier, with an extra forehead or two and a graying mustache. He
looks much like the crossbreeding of Hollywood's stereotypical German
Burgermeister with everyone's favorite grandfather. And he looks
like a man who is absolutely content with his life.
The lights dim. The patrons take their seat, and the second picture
changes. It now has a cartoon speech balloon that has the
Burgermeister saying, "Tell me a story."
The Honor Guard snaps to attention as Russ moves to the stage's chair
and takes his seat. No one, not even the Texans or the Canadians,
believe for one second that the Honor Guard's actions were for Russ,
for they were not. He adjusts the microphone, looks over the crowd
gathered, and smiles. He brushes the corner of an eye, and then he
speaks. And this is what he said.
-----
Please accept my deepest and most sincere thanks and appreciation for
the kind words and thoughts posted since I announced the death of one
of our extended family members two weeks ago today. I have relayed
your condolences to the family.
Most of you are asking each other why this place looks like a party
instead of a funeral ceremony for our late Guest of Honor. The
answer is, "You obviously didn't know him."
I knew the person known to us as Billy Forest the Third for thirty-
five years, plus or minus about one week. I credit my success in
life to my twelfth grade English teacher. I credit my enjoyment of
life to that man on the screen.
He came from a military family. His father and both brothers were
Army officers. He's named for a Civil War participant. The family
settled in Florida, on the southern end of Tampa Bay. And to squelch
the growing rumor, there's no proof that they settled on that end to
put distance between themselves and Soupy. He graduated from the
University of Arkansas, where he was forced to learn Southron. That
foreign language experience paid off when he had to learn German,
because his wife does not speak English.
He'd had an interesting Army career before we met One of the more
interesting items was his severely shortened tour in Vietnam after an
ammunition dump explosion critically burned his legs with white
phosphorous. Although he spent a lengthy time in a stateside
hospital recovering, he always made light of the subject. One of his
nicknames for himself was Captain Phosphero, and for a while I
thought he would post his story under that name. Billy never availed
himself of the opportunity for self-pity.
I expect everyone in this room will say, "He wrote only one story,
and I didn't read it." That may be, because he tried to sound like a
"writer" instead of himself, but you've read his words, which I've
also scattered through out my rambling here. If you've read more
than five of my posts at random, you've no doubt seen my tag line,
"No problem is so great that it cannot be successfully ignored
through the rigorous application of dynamic apathy." I am here to
honor the inventor of "Dynamic Apathy," his term for the technique he
used to defeat your humble host and others during our lunchtime games
of "Emperor of China" when we were service school instructors.
He had a significant impact on my writing as well, both personal and
professional. That last word includes my stories as well as my
business reports. Whenever I'm stuck for a way to phrase something I
ask, "How would Billy say that?" If I concentrate on the phrasing
and rhythm in my contributions to the Girl Scout Nookie stories in
particularly, I ask myself which of us wrote them. Other than the
deliberate bad writing, of course, though I confess that some of the
horrific similes in "A*F*T*S" were his suggestions after he reviewed
the story for me.
One story is entirely his fault. When we were stationed in Maryland,
we lived in the same apartment complex. I used to walk with him the
two blocks to the corner drug store where he bought his "Wall Street
Journal." One day he spotted something on the "Adult Literature"
rack and instantly coined the phrase, "Child Molestor's Handbook."
It became a catchphrase between us, quickly becoming "CMH" or
"CMHB." After three decades of pondering, I finally came up with a
story for that title. (Let me point out that I didn't write the
handbook; I wrote a story in which the handbook was a device, just as
Stephen King didn't build a homicidal car and Larry Niven didn't
build a circular world around a distant star.)
When I needed a catchphrase for Wynter, Billy's frequently voiced
"DRAT!" immediately came to mind. Sometimes I think my only
contribution to that series is Suzie Middleton's, "Well remind me to
look surprised next Tuesday," but even that invention was in answer
to "What Would Billy Say?"
Back when I was playing "Baldur's Gate" with an adventure party based
on six real people, he had had a bad day thanks to other faculty
members and had sent me a message containing the four words behind
me: "Tell me a story."
I immediately cranked out the first of several flash stories based on
that adventure party. They are the ones I am expanding into my
"Forgotten Helms" stories, and the dwarf "Gryphon Lehrer" therein is
actually our own five-foot-seven Billy. "Gryphon" expresses Billy's
"non-preference for females having excessive height;" those which he
referred to as "Russ-Sized Monsters."
I use many Billywords and Billyphrases that he invented, often
without thinking that the reader/listener doesn't know what the heck
I'm talking about, and then I have to explain what I meant.
Our own beloved suzee over there took me to task for using the word
"misteak" a few weeks back. That is a Billyword. And if he didn't
invent my use of "speling eror," he certainly inspired it.
Several of you already use something he once invented to describe
low-quality movies: the term "redeeming pornographic value." It was
first used in the context of "While the characters were not
believeable and the plot was nonexistent, at least it had RPV." It
wasn't long before he was using the term to describe the attributes
of the fairer sex via the term "RPV-Enhanced," or "RPV-E."
Speaking of movies, he once devised a rating system based upon VHS
tape lengths and his wife, Evelyn. His system was
SP - Sufficient Porn
LP - Limited Porn
EP - Evelyn's Programs
In 1974 or 1975 he was reassigned to Germany, where he finally left
the Army and promoted himself to "Civilian Edumacator." He married a
German nurse and stayed there, though he taught school in Florida for
one (I think) year during the interval when we were out of touch.
He returned to Germany as a teacher for the Department of Defense
Dependent Schools (DoDDS) and worked his way up from "the bottom,"
teaching 12th grade math, to "the top," teaching 6th grade math. In
his words, "Sixth graders are the best to teach because they are old
enough to have interesting minds and young enough to listen when you
speak."
When that happened, he became unequivocally content with his life.
His words included, "They'll have to make me retire at gunpoint,"
"I'll teach as long as they will let me," and the unfortunately
prophetic, "They'll have to carry me out of there."
A few years ago they changed him to sixth grade science. He really
wanted to teach math, but the important thing was that he was
teaching, and it gave me an opportunity to butt in because we were
now on my turf. As the youngest brother, himself a high school math
teacher, points out, Billy thought mathematics at a level we couldn't
comprehend, though he could easily teach the basics to sixth graders.
The recent thread about tesseracts reminded me of his oft-stated
possession of a "third eye" that could see fourth-dimensional
objects. Unfortunately, he passed from us while I was attempting to
get him onto Usenet, where he could join us and contribute to that
thread, as well as others.
Billy was the ultimate educator. His interest wasn't personal
recognition, it was preparing his students for the future. He turned
down awards and recognition from his peers. I hate to use that p-
word because he had NO equals in that school and few, if any, in any
other schools. Billy had no need of awards to tell him what he
already knew.
He was an avid reader. Roger Zelazney was probably his favorite
author. But the books that had the most recent impact were Terry
Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series and Mary Gentle's "Grunts." In
the former book, the final shield around the Lord Rahl were the Mord-
Sith, women fanatically devoted to him and willing to dispense any
amount of pain necessary to protect him. You see arrayed behind me
Mister Forest's Mord-Sith, dressed in the nondescript school uniforms
he referred to as "blue polyester garbage bags."
In the latter book, if ever you were the Guest of Honor at a soccer-
like Orcball game, you never repeated that honor because with one
swift sword-stroke you became the donor of the ball. In the eyes of
Mister Forest's Mord-Sith, anyone with the opposite plumbing was an
Orcball waiting to donate. Anyone EXCEPT Mister Forest.
So, in Mister Forest's Science Classroom, the order of battle was
Mister Forest, the Mord-Sith, lesser females who should keep their
distance, disposable materials, germs growing in the sink traps,
Orcballs. If you didn't understand that, the Mord-Sith were happy to
explain it to you via the Billyphrase, "'Shut up!' they explained.
'Or esle.'" Other teachers, too, were somewhere near the bottom and
approached him at their peril.
His most memorable descriptive thought was, "There's something
inherently satisfying about moving down the hallway like a nucleus
surrounded by an electron cloud of pretty girls."
Those trinket centerpieces on your tables refer to an informal
student rewards system he started that soon took on a life of its
own, not unlike the governmental bureaucracies which he despised.
Billy was respected by his fellow teachers, but loved by his students
because he was, above all else, a professional. Too many teachers
and administrators believe in mass punishment in a system where many
think the students exist for their amusement. Billy was the advocate
for the students as individual human beings. He saw the distinct
difference between the requirements of the rules and the requirements
of justice, and he did what was right instead of what was required.
Only the "miscreants" were "dealt with harshly" by Mister Forest.
The chesspiece decorations aren't to recognize our own beloved cmsix,
who, I've been informed, has suffered his own tragic loss and
certainly has my sympathies and condolences. Those decorations are
there because Billy sponsored the Chess Club. The one time you knew
he was lying was when he complained about the humiliation of losing a
game of chess to a sixth grader. Billy understood the value of board
games to teach thinking beyond the next minute, and not just chess
but many other games as well.
He was sneaky like that. You thought you were just having fun, but
he was teaching you something. His classes were that way, too,
incorporating practical exercises where the students taught
themselves concepts under the pretext of having fun. And he did that
fully recognizing and embracing the fact that typical sixth- and
seventh-grade students have the attention span of Night Hawk, far
shorter than the length of time allocated to each class period.
So, gentlebeings, before I bid you farewell, join me in a toast to
someone who died doing what he loved more than anything else; who
died the way he wanted to, if somewhat prematurely; who found his
paradise in this world; who led by example; who diligently worked to
make the next generation prepared to take over. Then go party and
have a good time, because that's what he would want. And he also
wouldn't mind if you decided that tomorrow you, too, would do your
own part for the betterment of the next generation. It's gonna take
a LOT of people to fill his shoes.
In this toast, I include not just Billy, who would never want to hog
the stage the way I have repeatedly done, but also Ruthie and the
others we have lost from our midst. "Ladies, Gentlemen: to absent
comrades."
-----
Russ cradles the glass in his left hand, performs a smart about face,
crisply salutes the photographs of Billy, and heads for the stage
door exit, complaining about the mysterious airborne allergen that is
making his eyes water.
Stasya approaches with reverence and removes the chair as the
curtains close.
--
Russ
--
No problem is so great that it cannot be successfully ignored
through the rigorous application of dynamic apathy.
Stories at
http://storiesonline.net