I Have Abraham Lincoln's File

Or rasp. Sort of.

Fifty or so years ago, my great aunt gave my father Abraham Lincoln's file. It's about fourteen inches long, and has a handle into which a metal file is inserted. Now, you're thinking..."That's cool...what's it worth?"

Nothing, I think, except fifty years of amusement.

You see, the essence of this file dates to Lincoln. But over the years, handles have split, and been replaced on the files. Files have dulled, and so they've been pulled and put into perfectly good handles. The file it its current form is old, and banged up, but I'm certain Abraham Lincoln never saw it.

But he had a file...and somebody got it...and passed it on from hand to hand.

So, here is the question that has stuck with me for fifty years. Is this, or is it not, Abraham Lincoln's file?

Begin Again Again

This is a rock formation in Salina, KS. Picture me sitting under that big rock on the top. See my little face on the right?


It's Monday, that day of the week when I decide to mend my ways. Once and for all.

Tuesday will come soon enough and the rationalization will start about why it's inconvenient, or hard, or too hot or too cold...embarrassing or pointless. The beauty of rationalization is the creativity it inspires. There is no end to the possibilities.

But, for today, it's Monday and I've done some laundry and some dishes. I've checked my calendar and have decided that I really must get my hair cut tomorrow.

It wasn't always like this. When I was working, Monday was for cringing. I would feel the weight of the thousand pound rock that hung over my head, waiting to drop. The hot breath of deadlines and unmet expectations was on my neck.

When I was a public relations executive in Chicago, I realized one day that each day I would do exactly as much work as the new stuff that arrived in the course of the day. That is to say, I'd jump in to my day, writing and calling and meeting and strategizing...all the while new projects were lining up like a new rank of soldiers.

At the end of the day, I had exactly as much to do as I had done.

There is actually a school of warfare that arranges troops like that. A shoulder-to-shoulder row would be backed by another and another. As the front row members would drop, the next guy behind would step up to take his place.

Ideally, the column would be able to advance and march over their fallen comrades, and thus win the battle.

But in my work life, it was often the case that my troops were pinned down, meeting the foes but not advancing a foot. It required enormous energy and concentration to hold that position. I would sometimes wonder whether holding the position was something like winning. It wasn't losing...at least I wasn't losing ground. But I wasn't making much progress in taking the hill.

Now that I am no longer working in the wider world, which still embarrasses and annoys me, it is much harder to measure my progress and advancement.

Am I holding the line by just doing what I want to do? I paint, I write, I've been making quilts for my granddaughter. I read. I go to endless doctors' appointments. I go to the gym.

Missing is the thousand pound rock, which makes me feel suspiciously guilty, but I'm getting over that. It actually feels really good to not have a rock hanging over you.

But what is the measure of the days? How do you decide whether you had a good day or a merely average one? The answer to that question will almost always get you a stupid answer. People assure me that I'm doing exactly what I should be doing, and maybe that's true. I'm not bothering anyone, and I'm not aware of being in anyone's way.

All of this points up the danger of using outside measurements to decide on one's value as a human being. The fact is, those measurements are meaningless, anyway. But it's hard, so very hard, to give them up. It felt good to be important. It felt good to have three meetings stacked up. It felt good to hear the phone ring and be late for something else because you were busy. The seduction of the exterior world is sweet and addictive.

Giving it up is exactly like breaking a long-standing addiction.

I'm working on giving up the long-standing addiction to food that is not good for me, and I discover that I will side with the addiction in every battle. What a blessing I never developed a taste for street drugs. I'd be drooling in a gutter or dead. There is something in us that loves the rush of the forbidden.

And when, in your life, you are given the time and leisure to do whatever you like, the forbidden races to the front of the line, ready to ask you to dance.

I’ve Been Thinking About Murder Lately

I’ve Been Thinking About Murder Lately

                       

From time to time I consider how one would commit a perfect murder. But lately it has occurred to me that it probably happens all the time.

I have at least one example in my own life…third hand, twice removed, around the corner of memory. It’s one of those reports from a cousin who was friends with some other remote relatives who knew about it.

There was no resolution to this probable crime. No one really knows what happened. Certainly no one was ever charged with anything. The clues were scarce and as flimsy as cheap toilet paper. And now the crime is so far back that it has long since faded from everyone’s memory. Almost. But it sticks to me like that cheap toilet paper, stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

At least one of the reasons this likely murder has faded is because the woman who died was so colorless…so stunningly unimportant. A few family members were distressed for a while, but now very few even remember her. Even when the crime was fresh, it was pretty easy to stop looking for the culprit…at least once the looking got hard.

For the purposes of this story, I am going to wildly change the settings and the relationships and the locations. The nut of the story is as close as I ever heard it, but I will do my best to make it impossible to trace. Anything you read here that you think you could use to trace the story is a lie.

There once was a young-ish woman I’ll call Dottie. She didn’t make much of an impression on anyone. She was married but had no children. She lived on a small farm in the back of beyond somewhere in that vastness of prairie that is western Kansas or Oklahoma or Nebraska. There were two or three small towns within about a half hour drive…a mid-size city was about an hour and a half away, so there was something like civilization on the horizon – somewhere.

Her husband, who I will call Roger, was a likeable-enough fellow of no particular impact who sold insurance to farmers over a wide area. He drove to his appointments, alone for hours in his car. He was unreachable most of the time, checking in with his regional office for messages several times a day.

It is important to note that this goes back to the 1970s, long before cell phones. His job was pretty simple – drive from farm to farm to talk insurance, then return the calls of anyone who needed to talk to him.

Dottie was resolutely ordinary. Her life was centered on the farm and she didn’t go out much. The few times I saw her at big extended friends and family picnics, she wore jeans and plaid shirts. She was pleasant enough, but she never had anything memorable to say.

Just like her life, Dottie was plain – not pretty, not ugly – just somewhere in the middle. Thinking back on it, you would have been hard pressed to describe her – average height, weight. You wouldn’t have remembered what color eyes she had.

But, there was one sort of remarkable thing about her – her hair.

She always had a “do”, based on tightly curled hair, teased and sprayed in the style of the period. We mutually resented our straight hair and joked about it. My response was to let it grow and wear it straight and long. She kept hers short, tight, and unnaturally curly. I called it her “hair hat” which she pretended to find funny. I doubt she was amused but then who would know.

That’s about all I remember about her. I saw pictures of her house. It was her “project” with Roger. I thought it was an albatross – an ugly one at that – that took the place of any other interests. It was an old, white farmhouse surrounded by tumbledown outbuildings and a sagging barn. It had been abandoned for years on property owned by some relative, and the place was sold to them for back taxes.

This was their “back to the land” move and capitalist venture all in one. They thought they’d make a bundle when they got the house done and sold the place. In the meantime, they could farm the land to support themselves. I doubt the plan was working.

They were remodeling the house room by room so nothing was ever quite completed. It looked like a jumbled mess to me. They rented out some of the land and farmed some themselves. Given enough time and good weather they might have made it pay but, then again, maybe not.

In the pictures I saw, the house looked like something in a Hitchcock movie. The setting was stark and vaguely disturbing if you are bothered by emptiness. There was nothing between the house and the horizon except rows and rows of cultivated dirt.

To get there, you took the interstate out to a blacktop farm road, then you would turn twice more…each road getting more narrow and worn. A few miles on, you turned down a gravel road, tight for passing cars, impossible for farm machinery.

Further on down a ways, you turned at their mailbox, crooked in the hole, which was far enough away from the house that you’d probably get the mail when you came home at night.

So far as anyone knew, Dottie and Roger just went from day to day, season to season, doing one ordinary thing after another. But one day, we got word that Dottie had disappeared. She was gone. Just like that.

There was nothing remarkable even in her disappearance, except the disappearance itself. Her purse was still in the house. So were her car keys, and the car was parked out front by the faded red shed where it always was. Nothing seemed disturbed inside the house. As it was described to me, that’s what gave a couple of the officers the creeps. There just didn’t seem to be anything wrong, except that Dottie was missing.

Almost all of her personal things were still there. The only thing missing, in fact the only thing missing in the whole house, was the collection of pink foam rollers she used every night to curl her hair. No doubt you remember those curlers - bright pink foam around a pink plastic stem that snapped into place. Oh, they’d curl your hair all right, and they didn’t dig into your scalp like brush rollers. However, they were (and are) unattractive and probably the best form of birth control this side of saltpeter. (If that ever worked to tamp down erections, which I always doubted.)

And so Dottie and her hair rollers were missing.

Roger was out on the road that day, making his usual calls. It took him awhile to get home, but when he did the state troopers and the sheriff were there.

From what I was told about the situation, they asked all the usual questions. Did she have any enemies? Was anyone threatening her…or him? Had he seen anyone hanging around the place? Did she seem upset or worried about anything?

They looked around and agreed that while it wasn’t all that tidy, it wasn’t all that messy, either. There were dishes were in the sink but then Roger was out of town so maybe Dottie hadn’t bothered with them.

They checked phone records, they talked to anyone they could think of who might know something. No one did.

They looked at Roger’s sales calls. Nothing raised any questions.

They checked the finances. They owed some money, but everybody did. There was nothing unusual in that, there was nothing unusual at all.

It was established that the couple was friendly enough. They had some acquaintances in the area but they didn’t mix much with the locals.

Dottie’s sisters in the city were the only ones who pushed the investigation, at least in the early days. According to their cousins who were friends of mine through my own cousins, they thought Roger probably did it.

They didn’t have any reason to think so, really. But somebody had probably done something to Dottie. Probably that something was awful. Roger seemed as likely a suspect as anybody.

After all, there were limited possibilities. Dottie could have walked off, but that just didn’t seem like anything she would do.

The next possibility is that a stranger did it. Certainly there was plenty of opportunity for a stranger to come up to the house and snatch her. But why take her? Why go there? Why drive all that way down all those roads and lanes? Just for Dottie?

And so that leaves Roger.

There was one school of thought that maybe Roger came home and surprised Dottie with a lover and killed her. Possible…but then you have those missing hair rollers. Would she have met a lover in her rollers? Doubtful.

Also doubtful was that Dottie had a lover. Who would want to bird dog someone so utterly colorless as Dottie? This was no siren. Her scent, if she had one, would probably not arouse mad passion. I doubt whether even Roger felt a thrill of excitement when he turned at the mailbox.

Eventually, any leads had petered out, as they will do. Finally there just wasn’t anyone left to talk to. Dottie’s family was upset, I suppose, but then she’d been away for a long time and no one really missed her all that much.

It was pretty easy to get on with things. There was no real property, except for the farm. Nobody wanted it enough to fight over and, besides, it was Roger’s.

The last I heard, Roger stayed on at the farm, still selling insurance and working the land in one way or another.

And that’s about it, but murder stories always need to come to some conclusion. Here is mine.

I think Roger did it. I don’t think there was a lover involved. I think her constant embrace of the ordinary finally got on his nerves…her with her nothing to say ways and her tight little curls and the constant hair rollers. I think he finally had enough with the unfinished house and the dishes in the sink and the vision of the future rolling out day after day of more of the same.

I think it all got to be too much. And so…just once in his unremarkable life he rose to red-hot, killing passion. I think he wanted her dead, very dead. I think he killed her with a kind of joy, with a soaring feeling, strangling her…watching…looking into her nondescript eyes and seeing what little light was there finally go out.

I think he loaded up her body and drove to one of the brushy gullies that are out there. He had miles and miles and miles to choose from…and he knew all of the back roads to take. He would have dumped her clothes somewhere, or burned them. The animals would do the rest of the work for him.

After he was finished, I think he was drained of the only passion he had ever felt. In his case, it was murderous. I think the every day routine felt welcome after that one release. I think he was glad he didn’t get caught.

I suppose the moral of this little story is to make sure you kill someone nobody cares all that much about, and who won’t be missed all that much when they are gone. And make sure that no one can really imagine doing such a thing.

It’s such an ordinary little crime sometimes, murder.