Composed by Dr. G on Mar 11
Olive Branch
We saw that familiar small key-chain bob and float of its own accord across the basement’s dirt floor, then it swung about, and disappeared around the corner. Another quiet cackle echoed back to us. We all stood, a bit dumbfounded, Lenore with headgear still fastened tight, the tin moon flipping past her left eye.“It took it, it took the keys!!” exclaimed Lenore.
“Where did it go?” asked Lucia.
“I don’t know – I didn’t see it. “
Both Lucia and I turned our heads to face her in disbelief.
Lucia asked “What do you mean you didn’t see it, you always see “it”
“I didn’t see it.” Lenore responded sadly
“You didn’t see it!” Lucia jumped up and down – “don’t you see, the headgear works, it works with just the wind up shutter, we don’t need the electricity! Now we just need to reverse the process!"
So, this is how my youngest child, incorporating existing frames, Swiss clockworks, High quality German polished lenses, red-straining filters, high impact copper alloy rods, quadratic graph manipulation and a cut smoked herring tin, developed her “Spring-wound Shutter Optic Spectacles” (Ukranian patent # 21,145). It is these glasses, along with this experience, that has made all the difference. It is the reason we embarked upon our family trade, it is how we came to seek out the distant branches of our family tree, it is how we came to mend fences with the small creature that lives in our home and call him by name: Thistletin Bogswallow XLII. These weathered grey walls and this overgrown garden, with it’s rusted iron gates and looming oak branches have become a refuge for the fast vanishing magical creatures, as they seek sanctuary from the creeping coal smog and cold concrete of industrialization. Perhaps most importantly, it is how people the world over have come to know the name Galubrious for more than the fine tooled leather and inlaid mother of pearl buttons of fine instruments of the free reed aerophone family.
For the time being we had found peace, be it for a short while. It became clear to me that our house boggart had been appeased when I awoke the next morning to an odiferous, musky bouquet. Looking at my distinctly middle-aged, but dare I say pulchritudinous form in the bedroom mirror, I found my shaved mustache kindly replaced with a neatly trimmed chunk of woodchuck fur glued firmly to my upper lip. Though some may have taken this as an offense – I took it as an aromatic olive branch.
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 11
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 08
» Please Provide Your Valued Opinion
The Contraption
While I poured over my books in seclusion, Lucia had some how persuaded her older sister to submit to a barrage of testing, to ascertain precisely what Lenore could see and why. When the light in my office had begun to fade, I looked up from my reading. I found the silence of the house un-nerving and so climbed the stairs and entered the girl’s room to find Lenore’s cranium crowned by an enormous ring of instruments, gages and lenses, her sister dashed about with a small screwdriver, making adjustment and directing lenses and shutters across her sister’s pupils by way of a series of tiny gears running at a variety of angles and speeds. She penciled down the readings on the gauges in her red velvet and flower encrusted daybook before winding up another apparatus, and setting more gears and dodgers whirly-gigging away. Her sister stared blankly – but not unhappily - forward at the flowered wall paper, her head topped with a nest of wires, the copper ends of some plastered firmly to her scalp, the yellow hound yawned disinterested at her feet. It took a few moments before they noticed me standing in the doorway. Lucia only stopped for long enough to wave a hello, before splicing two copper wires together a few inches away from her sister’s right ear.“It appears” began Lucia, “that Lenore’s flicker fusion frequency is far beyond that of most other people. She can perceive as many as 150 hertz per CRT, nearly double what the rest of us can take in, allowing her visual physiology to track the path of an object moving at high speeds.” Lenore picked up the electrical plug off the floor and proceeded to the socket on the opposite side of the room. “And, I have also discovered a secondary heartbeat – nearly undetectable, like a murmur - floating underneath the primary one. I believe these abnormalities allow her vision to slow down the perception of objects moving at a very high rate of speed – each individual flutter of a hummingbirds wing, for example. or the fast arch of a badminton serve, or auntie Eileen’s bobble tree loop stitch when knitting. Using this device to halve the rate of sight, her visions may disappear.”
“Well” I answered back thoughtfully – “wouldn’t that prove an impediment to her birding, badminton and knitting skills?”
Lucia rolled her eyes at my little joke, and continued on as if I had said nothing. “If we reverse the process, and increased the rate of our own perception, we would increase our own persistence of vision – we could see what she sees.”
Lucia thrust the plug into the socket and the contraption on Lenore’s head whirred to life, she continued to stare straight ahead. Then there was a great jump of sparks, a smell of burnt ozone and hair, and the room went suddenly dark. Embers fizzled on the floor and the room filled with the dog’s barking and yelps from Lucia as she tripped across the floor. Lenore struggled to remove the device from the top of her head, her dark silhouette danced like a Javanese shadow puppet before the parrish blue square of the bedroom window. I rushed forward and tried to pry the device from her head – but it was impossible to find the fastening latches in the dark – and she simply dangled, feet kicking, as I tried to shake her out of it, a good foot and a half above the bedroom floor.
“Stop” she yelled – “I’m fine!, I just got a little scared is all.”
I lowered her apprehensively to the ground, ran to find a lamp and re-entered the room. everything was cast into a warm glow with long shadows– and there was a palpable silence, with the exception of a whirring and clicking as the wind-up portion of the head gear continued to wind down. A bent half-moon blinder cut from a smoked herring tin continued to orbit her head, a little off kilter.
The girls were in no mood to be left upstairs alone in the dark, so they followed me – by the light of the kerosene lamp – as we made out way downstairs and into the basement to find the fuse box. By the lantern’s glow it was hard to discern which of the glass fuses had blown to black as we peered forward at the circuit box in the dim light. As I reached out for the box there was a sudden click and a flash from the root cellar, and a blinding light bounced around the basement imprinting the outline of spider webs and the circuit breakers on my eyes. I made a random grab for one of the fuses, popped it out and shoved a penny from my pocket into the empty socket. Success! Current surged through the line and the single bulb dangling from the center of the basement ceiling sprung to life, bathing the cellar room in light. A faint, self-contented chuckle of laughter bounced off the cold walls, and we spun around to find it's source.
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 08
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 04
» Please Provide Your Valued Opinion
Window from the eastern portico of the Chapel of the Bloodied Cedar – constructed at Castle Malwood in 1107 and dedicated to William Rufus the Red.
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 04
» Please Provide Your Valued Opinion
Rufus the Red
Instead of sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting for the click of the shutter in the darkness, I sequestered myself in my phrontistery, where I carried out my studies. pouring through volumes of research, I studied the characteristics of those people who had the special ability to see the others; known by many as the “sight” or the “whim”. Children were most likely to see mystical creatures, also the aged, but this was often attributed to the sporadic cartwheels of developing or deteriorating minds. It was reported that many Anglo-Saxons sporting red hair commonly had the ability, but my research revealed that those red heads claiming to have the sight shared more than physical features, they had a common twisted root in the family tree: King Rufus the Red.Not only did the king have red hair, he was said to have a fiery disposition and a wild streak of insanity; having some 27 gilded and stone encrusted cages built to house his pet yams. Tucked behind a vintage jar of pear and lemming chutney in the musty archives of the library annex and larder at Windsor, I found an old diary. It included an account of the Queen’s bodice lacer’s foot maid who claimed that Rufus’s birth was not the result of a royal marriage, but instead the offspring of a rare chance encounter of his mother with a lusty wood sprite. The result was a king with split allegiances, and a disturbed mind, he taxed his people heavily to purchase great tracts of dark and enchanted forests on both sides of the Channel. He took no queen, but records show his presence at the baptism of a red-haired male child of a Bristol barmaid at Canterbury Cathedral. It is said that the refusal of baptismal rights by Anselm, abbot of Bec, led to the cleric’s persecution, and the deepening of the King’s distaste for organized religion. The day before he was to sever his ties with the church and take the young barmaid as his queen, the king took his brother hunting the last pair of great bustards in the New Forest. It was there, at Brokenhurst, that an errant arrow skewered his left eye and another accidentally pierced his heart as he passed a group of hooded monks. Though they employed the great medical advances of the time: the thumping of the head with cedar bows, the king soon expired.
According to my research a considerable number of those blessed with the “”whim” could trace their ancestry back to that same Bristol barmaid, and many sport great shocks of red hair. Accounts are unreliable, and many children are hushed up by parents who rightfully worry of being branded as witches, but the ancestry includes the great Yorkshire families of Wright and Griffith, as well as my own great great grandfather; Ichabod Galubrious.
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 04
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 02
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 01
» Please Provide Your Valued Opinion
Peace offering
A sharp call from my daughters brought me down the wooden stairs and into the basement. We crouched together in the dim light and investigated the wall. Out of the small opening wafted a cool draft sprinkled with the scent of dog’s feet and Roquefort cheese. I knew we were treading on thin ice here. We had obviously found the boggart’s new home and did not want to risk infuriating him further. But the wild, impetuous academian side of me took over, and I bounded up the stairs and dusted off my cardioelectrochronometer, a device I invented during my research days to detect the smallest rhythmic presence of a heartbeat, and with it in hand dashed once more down into the darkness.When I returned I found Lenore staring intently into the hole.
“I see Him” she whispered, "he's sleeping."
“You haven’t touched him have you?” I inquired nervously
as Lucia and I bent forward and held up the lamp. We saw nothing but what appeared to be a nest of mismatched socks, handkerchiefs, flower sacks and silk ties. Lucia and I glanced at each other and said nothing. This was not an unusual occurrence. Many times Lenore had been brought to tears when those around her failed to see the magical world she, herself, found easy to intuit. We both remembered Lenore’s exclamations of delight in front of the Zambian ambassador as she witnessed Fairies riding field mice in Lady Pigpickling’s sunken garden at Grey Gables. There was also the time when we took our family’s summer vacation in the Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp and found her wandering in the light of the full moon, dressed only in her nightgown. Her enormous hazel eyes wide open, staring into the darkness of the oak branches and hanging moss as we extricated her from the waist deep muck. Rubbing her legs down with salt and pulling of shriveled leeches from between her toes did not dampen her enthusiasm as she recounted following the “glowing orb and enchanting song of the willow-the-wisp” as we listened, blurry eyed in the grey of the early dawn. It had become apparent long ago that she was operating at a different wavelength than the rest of us.
Since I had last used the cardioelectronchronometer my youngest, Lucia had made improvements, ratcheting up the sensory membrane by installing a secondary drum magnifier, and stabilizing the lower bed using a milled alchemy of brass, aluminum and high tensile pine sap. The results were impressive. Turning on the knob and passing the wand over the opening set the dials jumping. Despite what the rest of us could, or could not see, there was life behind the wall. And this was the place for us to present our peace offering.
I ushered the girls to the workshop and asked them to start constructing a decorative platform for the offering while I slipped back down stairs to scrape soil and take air samples. After I had labeled and stored away my glass vials, I exited my study to the ringing sound of hammers and coping saws. Despite her youthful age of six, Lucia had a fine set of woodworking skills, and had amassed an impressive collection of carpentry tools. In the half hour I had been taking samples, the girls had managed to make an impressive little altar out of rose-wood, tiger maple, and a cigar box, It was expertly dovetailed and incorporated a number of found objects – including the tip of the lightning rod that had until recently graced the top of our house. I decided not to ask how they had retrieved it and instead admired the fine craftsmanship. At the very center sat a small niche - where the keys dangled seductively. To finish it all off we hand rubbed the wood with a block of Stilton cheese, a detail we were sure the boggart would appreciate, and hung the contraption on the wall opposite the opening in the dimly lit root cellar.
But the researcher in me could not be tempered, and after putting the altar into place I tied a small thread onto the loop in the key ring, passed it through a horseshoe nail, around the doorknob, over a small lead pulley, and onto the shutter switch of a Kodak Exactashot 1522 press camera – the most sensitive, and quickest camera available in the American market that now incorporated a few improvements Lucia had made to the shutter mechanism. I felt confident we would soon have photographic evidence of our little friend.
Composed by Dr. G on Mar 01