We have a demolition crew on the roof. For 2 weeks I have been suffering for the 7 weeks I spent on the stool proofreading MOBY-DICK--a bout of sciatica again, not the crawling on the floor variety but the lurching from wall to back of chair kind, to the point that I who never take pills took an aspirin a couple of nights ago and took 3 last night (1 and then 2). I have been doing the 2 miles on the beach every day and doing the floor exercises prescribed for sciatica every other day and going through the Brokenwood Mysteries on disc and 2 delayed Midsomer Murders at night. But what will save me are the Revolutionary pension applications transcribed by Will Graves and my Cousin Leon (C. Leon Harris). I am going through now the 199 applications that mention hanging a Tory or Tories in North Carolina. Happily for me, I see pension applications from different Sparks cousins and a fine Prewitt cousin who came over the Virginia border to help round up particularly murderous Tories. It was NOT considered nice to murder a polite Whig in his bed at home. There were rules, sort of, but you understand why so many Patriots who slept in the woods near their houses when they were on leave, the hope being that the women and children would not be seriously molested without a family man in the house. This was a bleak time, and I am going to burrow down deep into it. I have forgotten that headline already. Jim Webb in BORN FIGHTING mentions several times the power of family stories he heard on porches. We were too poor and isolated for that, but I am creating my own family stories through the Internet. I wasted years on Richard Nixon and don't have years to waste now.
No comments:
Post a Comment