October 2021
Author's Note
Oh, it must be close to two decades ago now, my first venture into writing fiction. The pieces were short but once written, clearly made a point. Parables. With the venture a marvelous subjective experience occurred for me: the phenomenology of flow. Characters emerged in my mind, eager there, beckoning for their stories to be written.
I discovered that I would write from a premise rather than a plan—a premise like a bland, middle-aged guy waking up to a lawn full of dragons. Then, as if I was a listener sitting at the feet of a guru, the story would unfold. I was reading it as it was being written.
This remains the first step in my writing process, progressed now from parables to novels. At the outset I don’t know where I am going, won’t know until I get there. Then, once arrived, well . . . that’s when the hard work of writing begins, making it readable for others.
So let’s start with that premise, the one I mentioned. I warn you though, as you read the following parable you might want to check out your front window . . . just in case.
Oh, it must be close to two decades ago now, my first venture into writing fiction. The pieces were short but once written, clearly made a point. Parables. With the venture a marvelous subjective experience occurred for me: the phenomenology of flow. Characters emerged in my mind, eager there, beckoning for their stories to be written.
I discovered that I would write from a premise rather than a plan—a premise like a bland, middle-aged guy waking up to a lawn full of dragons. Then, as if I was a listener sitting at the feet of a guru, the story would unfold. I was reading it as it was being written.
This remains the first step in my writing process, progressed now from parables to novels. At the outset I don’t know where I am going, won’t know until I get there. Then, once arrived, well . . . that’s when the hard work of writing begins, making it readable for others.
So let’s start with that premise, the one I mentioned. I warn you though, as you read the following parable you might want to check out your front window . . . just in case.
A Lawn Full of Dragons
Nelson woke up to a lawn full of dragons.
Actually, it was quite some time before he realized he had a lawn full of dragons. Nelson had wandered the house, scratching the back of his legs just below the buttocks through his pajamas, doing so in that absent sort of way that goes with the too-early-to-be-up but too-late-to-sleep sort of wandering around the house. He’d then made coffee, had managed to walk it to the table and had let its steam lubricate his eyelids and sort out his sinuses. All in all, he’d been doing quite well.
The dragons, on the other hand, on the front lawn, were doing famously.
Nelson didn't live alone. He lived with teenagers, teenagers still in bed having created spares in their high school schedule for first period of each day. And Nelson had a spouse, Jackie, who had already been out and back from a long morning jog. Her eyelids needed no steaming lubrication, the back of her thighs never gave a morning itch and her sinuses always worked perfectly. Upon her return, she ate fiber-filled cereal while drinking herbal tea, all the while gawking at him with his coffee and quite stale, but still-sweet, Danish pastry. On her morning run Jackie had left and returned by the back door. When she left for work she did so through the back alley, leaving early to arrive plenty before she needed to be there, as always well set for the day. Fate would have it that she would not see the dragons. They, as already mentioned, had set up their concourse on the front lawn.
The caffeine from Nelson's coffee and the sugar from his Danish combined to effect a nervous shudder which rippled through him. This was an encouraging sign. He leaned over to the radio hanging under the wall cabinet for the everyday china. Given that there were teenagers in the house, Nelson would have to switch the station from Powerhouse FM to his preferred station of oldies with recognizable tunes. His station gave the weather forecast at predictable times. There was something reassuring about the weather for Nelson, something comfortingly out beyond any sense of personal control when frontal systems and rain showers were discussed.
But listening for the weather was tricky business. If Nelson just heard the weather on the radio he would forget the forecast by the time he came to choose footwear for the day. Resourcefully, Nelson had worked out that if he got the morning paper delivered to the front door, and looked at that little box on the front page where symbols were used to declare sun or cloud, wind or shower, and if he did that at the same time as the weather forecast came on the radio, and if he worked really hard to determine if the over-the-radio and from-the-front-page forecasts were the same or different, and if they were different if they were somehow reconcilable, if he did all that, then he might just remember what—to a certain degree of probability—was going to happen that day.
To get the paper he had to open the front door. Of course, there were dragons on the lawn.
One of Nelson's neighbours had flamingos. They were nice because they stood in one place constantly, in one place on one leg made of thick wire which the neighbour had stuck deep through the sod. The neighbour, some sort of oddball teacher at the local college, had spoken to Nelson of the statement they made. Nelson hadn't followed much of what he said because Nelson was still trying to decide whether or not the pink colour of the flamingos complemented or clashed with the rust colour brick. Nelson had seen plaster gnomes on lawns too, evidence of craft-minded people learning to paint and fire as a regular evening's entertainment. Reassuringly, most gnomes also stayed in the same place, although one elderly gent around the corner moved his every time he cut the lawn—a practice which the still-sleepy-in-morning Nelson on his way to work found disconcerting, as if the darling little things had gone strolling overnight. All of this aside, Nelson, still clad in pajamas and a housecoat, peered onto his own front lawn and found it to be awash with dragons in dandy movement, in what could only be considered as frolic.
Bill's lawn next door, aside from an odd toadstool, was perfectly clear. Nelson immediately thought that somehow Bill must have done better with his chemical pesticide this year. This was the proof: overnight Nelson's lawn had become a veritable gymnasium for dancing, tumbling, gyrating green-backed, beige bellied, red-eyed dragons whereas Bill's lawn, while in need of cutting, was otherwise in the best of taste.
The light breeze that had felt fresh and invigorating in Jackie's face as she ran in the dawn-light played at the hem of Nelson's burgundy housecoat. Force of habit would have had him turn, close the door and retreat to the comfort of the paper spread out on the kitchen table with oldies playing in the background. But Nelson was too sharp for that—he knew that it was damn unusual for several dozen dragons to take up residence on your front lawn. The whole matter deserved, if nothing else, a closer look.
Bill also stood at his front door, grabbing his paper, looking at Nelson's dragons. Nelson looked over at him, looked back at the dragons, put the whole thing together and swore under his breath. Bill began to walk over and Nelson, in his housecoat, felt obligated to meet him at the property line. Getting there wasn’t easy. Dragons are incredibly unpredictable of movement, especially when you first encounter them. Nelson feared stepping on one of the smaller ones, or being knocked over by one of the bigger ones, or having the burgundy housecoat—which had been a gift from Nelson's mother and surely needed to be kept in good condition—having that burgundy housecoat seared by dragon breath.
Bill and Nelson took their customary positions, each back a comfortable few feet from that invisible line which separated Bill's well cared for and almost perfectly free of pests lawn from Nelson's absolutely infested one.
"You've got a good crop of them this year," Bill stated in a matter-of-fact tone.
The comment completely buffaloed poor Nelson. He had wanted to ask Do you see them too? but from Bill's comment it was clear that he did and to ask would only have made Nelson look as if he didn't trust his own eyes. And, the this year suggested that he had had dragons before and yet Nelson had no recall of them in the five years he had lived in the house.
"Yes, more than I expected," Nelson replied, choking a little on the dishonesty of his words—he had not expected fewer dragons, he had not expected dragons at all, had not even thought about a single dragon in the last twenty-five years.
"So how are you going to deal with them?" Bill asked.
Grossly unfair! thought Nelson. He had come to expect this sort of question from Bill who had a discomforting way of acting superior in the course of their chats astride the property line.
"I'm not sure," Nelson responded, conceding a point in the subtle verbal engagement between the two men.
"I've got some X-Term-N-8 in my shed. If you wanted you could . . . "
Both men watched a pair of medium-sized dragons tussling on the lawn. The creatures were just goofing off, but the fire from their breath was causing steam to rise from the dewy grass. Nelson began to resent Bill's implication that the dragons should be gotten rid of in the way of dandelions.
"I think I'll leave them." Nelson limply replied.
Both men ducked. A smaller dragon narrowly missed them both as it took flight, its leather-like wings making a whop-whopping sound as they lifted its scaled body into the air.
"It's the clover, you know." Bill asserted.
"Could be," Nelson agreed, not having a clue what Bill might be getting at but not wanting to argue for fear of displaying some sort of ignorance.
"I mentioned last year that your clover was getting out of hand, spreading. They must like clover. You should have dealt with it last summer." Bill was clearly an authority on lawn pests.
"I didn't know that . . . ", Nelson went to say dragons but held himself back, " . . . that they went for the clover."
"Well known, it is. I take it to read the back of the cans of pesticides in the hardware store. Good source of information. But that’s beside the point now. They're here. Old Mr. Dresser has fairie-rings. I told him not to water so often. It's a fungus you know, those fairie rings."
Nelson was disappointed to hear it, about the fairie-rings being a fungus. Old Mr. Dresser lived in the house on the other side of Bill's place. Poor Bill was caught in the midst of a neighbourhood quickly reverting to medieval times. Nelson looked over at Bill, caught that there wasn't much distress in his face and figured it wasn't bothering him that much, that perhaps Bill even was a little proud that his lawn—which aside from the odd toadstool that had a decidedly mythical look about it, his lawn was well-grounded in modern times.
Bill looked down at his paper, reminding Nelson that he still had that symbol encoded box on the front page to check against the forecast on the radio. If it was going to rain he would need wear his older shoes on the day. Bill sighed, began to walk back toward his front door. He looked over his shoulder and said in an oddly commanding, ominously grating, voice, "You'd better not be thinking of keeping one of them as a pet."
Indeed, until that moment, that particular thought had not crossed Nelson's mind. It would most certainly irk Bill if he did. Not one, but two, thought Nelson. One would be lonely, kept all by itself.
And thinking this, Nelson realized that as the dragons had come in the night they might just so quickly leave. This might be his only chance. Carefully he stepped into the middle of them, dodging the active ones, swaying and weaving out of reach from the scaly tails whipping around so playfully. As Nelson watched he saw that each had its own characteristic way of being—that some were more laid-back, others imposing, some had the natural gift of organizing and others seemed watchful and wise.
It took a long time for Nelson to pick which two he would have. He thought that he might want two who were quite different—a talker and a listener, or a risk-taker and one more cautious. Then he thought again and saw two young dragons who were both gifted in play. They laughed their dragon sort of laugh in a way that focused Nelson, that took him back to an earlier time of himself. He reached over to one, caught its foreclaw in midflight. Making contact Nelson saw the dragon's gaze suddenly take him in. He reached toward the playmate and connected such with it, one in each hand.
Almost immediately the air was filled with the whop-whopping of wings and the switching of tails and the breathing of fire and the scent of another time. The remaining dragons lifted off, perhaps ready to search for another patch of clover.
But Nelson and his two newfound friends, Nelson and his gradually dawning sense of a more playful self, Nelson with his pajama bottoms showing beneath his mother-gifted burgundy housecoat, this strangely renewed Nelson, turned back into the house. He was thankful that Jackie was gone and the alarm in the teenager rooms wouldn't ring until seventeen minutes before the start of second period. Nelson would call in to say he would be late for work, if indeed he was going to be going in at all.