– Dedication –

To the Winds of Heaven

In my mind’s eye I see the image of an ancient Egyptian scribe with black wig and clinging white tunic standing in front of a large floor-to-ceiling opening in some massively stoned pyramid-like structure – this opening thrillingly unrailed, scarily high, and desolately overlooking a vast and empty desert far below.  He is pictured in profile, with his sandalled left foot firmly on the stone floor, his right poised on its ball, and the flat of his left hand on his chest in a gesture of desperation and hope. He is looking wistfully at a piece of papyrus, just released from the still-opened fingers of his outstretched right hand, flutter high above where the lone and level sands stretch far away.

In defiance of the unjust and dismal prospect of imprisonment for the rest of his natural days in this remote outpost, engineered by the nefarious machinations of his hated court rival and sworn enemy, the scribe has let forth the papyrus in the unsure and uncertain desperate hope that his friend and master the Pharaoh would somehow get it, release him from his incarceration, and restore him to his blissful seat of honor and glory.

Or it went something like that, according to what I could glean from skimming the text and captions.  It was one of several pictures entwined in the long, drawn out “Mystery of the Ancient Papyrus” that continued off and on in sections of a page or two for a total of forty-seven times  from the beginning to the 403rd page of Father’s 1916 Chatterbox book.

This was one volume in a World War I era series of annual entertainment and enlightenment books for boys that I would call the unacknowledged ancestor of a recent best seller The Dangerous Boy’s Book – curiously, like it, also English but adapted to appeal to an American audience.  Not just stories, but instructions on how to do important things like prepare a campfire, fold a flag, understand military medals, make your own crystal set – which Father said he and his brother actually did, and used this proto-radio contraption to the thrilled amusement of their parents, who had never heard sounds captured wirelessly from the cosmos before.

As a boy, I loved looking through these books, but I did not have the patience nor the endurance to read through any of the stories that would require such a long chain of start and stops, and certainly do not now, especially with these pages being as brittle as the crisp, brown fallen leaves of Autumn.

The image of this poor scribe captures what I feel about sending my trifles out into the vast and enigmatic expanse of the internet: a vain and desperate hope, hope against hope, that my words will somehow fall into the right hands – into yours, gentle reader! – and engage your mind, raise your spirits, touch your heart, tickle your wit, maybe even elevate your soul, but certainly not overreach your patience nor your endurance.

Kind of a crap shoot, I would have to say, but that’s my hope, and so, as the caption to the picture reads, “I commit these words to the winds of heaven!”  And it’s an ill wind that blows no one good.