Rothfeather Letter #3

Dearest Phyllis,

Once again I have been told that I am hopelessly in love with you. I would not have given any more credence to my father’s words than I had before, but he backs them up with such unarguable responses. In addition to a loss of inheritance, he says I have the symptoms of a boy wasting away for love. “If you keep up like this, my boy,” he said to me the other night, “I’m afraid we will have to bury an hairless young man.” (I think he meant heirless. We must remember he did come from England, which explains his inability at times to speak English properly.)

I wasn’t sure, Phyllis, what the symptoms of love were. Some ideas are pretty clear from the various novels I had read. But father squashed all of them and reversed them. I had always imagined a love-lorn lover to be meandering hither and thither, wasting away for lack of nourishment, plucking flowers at random, singing songs about death, despair, and other unhealthy psychological issues, and such odds and ends that are not normally found in the daily habits of men—such as, sometimes is told, work. Now my father said my habit of devouring a three-course meal for breakfast and lunch, and a five-course for dinner, my regular lounging around in the parlor, and my complete detestation for melancholic tunes and gathering colorful weeds were all signs of my advanced state of affections for you.

He could have fooled me. I’ve never felt so out of love in all my life. And yet, my father said that that is how it often appears. While I had my doubts, his inheritance argument won me over. Again I was steadfastly convinced that I love you. Perhaps you can see it between the lines if you look hard enough. Heaven knows I have a hard enough time seeing it myself.

It seems awkward for me to say these things when the novels had implied that I should be gushing with poetry and other sentimental sentiments. At this moment, however, the only I am feeling is a bit peckish. I think the maid has a cold steak in the icebox, which tempts like Salome’s dancing. By the way, do you dance like Salome?

Ghost written by George, Charlie’s friend,
Charlie T. Rothfeather.

Rothfeather Letter #2

Dear Phyllis,

Your response to my first letter raised quite a stir on my homefront. My father was absolutely livid. And he railed for days about my inability to win your love--as if I had not tried! What little he knows. I wrote some three hundred words professing my belief that it would be in the interest of both parties and both families if we were to tie the matrimonial knot. While you disagreed, you definitely could not have made it less subtle than by saying, as your too concise telegram read, "Go fish in another pond, bucko."

I hope you do not think I am being rude, but my father is quite persistent we marry. In fact, his paternal insistence took its typical path with threats of disinheritance. (I am beginning to believe that disinheriting me is the only tool in his arsenal.) "Son," he said to me the other night, "if you cannot win the hand of some foolish girl, how are you going to win over million dollar clients in the real world of business? Marriage, Charlie, is about finance, social status, and a hot dinner ready when we return home from the club." (He knows I don't like the club, so he said it only to annoy me.)

You know, maybe we would make a good couple. You don't agree with my father; I don't agree with my father. We already have common ground. Perhaps we can overlook the other petty differences, such as your being Baptist and my being Methodist. Dad said that your family's fascination with bible-thumping, shrill-shrieking evangelicals is a remnant of your family's Southern days. But, with disinheritance hanging overhead, I was convinced that it was a small matter.

The only really important matter is that the dowry is sufficient for my family's honor. Dad said he will refuse anything under $20,000 and assurance of that spacious territory when your own father kicks the bucket. As I believe that these terms will not convince you in the slightest and your father does not seem as anxious as mine to get rid of you, I have his permission to dicker over the dowry. I can cut you a fifty percent reduction deal if the wedding would include the governor, an archbishop, and three foreign aristocrats. The aristocrats I can easily find as there are dukes and duchesses coming over from England all of the time. They're always looking for some exceptional treatment as in their mother country they are a dime a dozen.

Of course, we could always re-consider eloping. I have a good friend who just did that and got quite a deal on wedding costs from the Justice of the Peace. Regardless of how we go about it, Mother has given me strict orders not to break your heart. Is that possible? I don't know as I am unfamiliar with these sorts of scenarios. I would much rather go golfing.

Dictated to my secretary, Alice, from a tent on the green,
Charlie T. Rothfeather

Your Don Quixote

Let me be your idyllic knight
Who ranges rough, unruly roads
That you may call me a worthy wight
For following the ancient codes.

Then I would from a rusted sheath
My battle-battered sword withdraw
And stand the hero on the heath –
Like Samson with an ass’s jaw.

And though my squire’s a foolish man,
My armor’s scuffed, my clothing’s mean,
My weapon’s blunt, my helmet’s a pan –
It’s granduer when you are my queen.

These all I’d wear, and worse. For you –
And all shall think myself insane –
I’d see a hundred men as two;
A sty with pigs, a rich domain.

I’d roar a challenge by your name
To any heathen hoard or drove
Of bleating sheep – they are the same –
Who mock the lady of my love.

I’d glare in death’s deriding eyes
And laugh aloud in merry scorn
At foes who keep with cackling cries
Some weak, unworthy oaths they’d sworn.

And with my horn, a tarnished toy,
I would defy each bragging star;
And, laughing, I’d the moon annoy,
By gloating o’er each well-won scar.

A fool – but let me be your knight
And walk the wild untempered hills,
Playing the fool for your delight
And tilting lances at the mills.

Rothfeather Letter #1

[NOTE: During my research at the university--I was taking chemistry at the time and spent much of my research time studying the effects of aging liquid rye and barley--I, after a long night in the lab, stumbled--quite literally--upon a series of letters from one of the sons of one of the great Midwest Tycoons. I am yet to discover the tycoon's name. His son is Charlie Rothfeather. He is no relation, as far as I could tell, to the other Rothfeathers or to the Wrathfeathers or to the Rothes or Wrotches. I assume, therefore, that these letters are not fictitious. Most of them are dated between 1921 and 1937.]

Dear Phyllis,

I am sure you are the first girl I have ever loved. My mother said that you are brilliant and my dad has a mind to disinherit me if I don’t find a wife soon. He said that my family is too good to end with me.

I remember the first time I saw you. Your dad’s previous bank—I am told the new one is doing much better—had just closed down and my dad met your dad, who is also a banker, as you most likely know. (My dad owns the building now, you understand.) From what my dad said, your dad has inherited a large bit of property from your granddad (your dad’s dad) which was his dad’s before him. It seemed he wanted to keep it in the family. My own dear dad did a little bit of research and discovered that that trek of land was now worth close to $300,000. That is a little more than loose change in my dad’s book. He told me that I loved you—I am inclined to believe him as I haven’t reason enough not to.

With such things in mind and the impending doom of disinheritance, which I simply cannot afford at this time, I have decided to ask you to come with me to the ball next Saturday. I promise that we will have a jolly time. Though I have never been there myself, a friend of mine—his name is Alfred something or other. I have only known him for two weeks and we met at the pub two blocks down from your house. I spend a good deal of my time there—told me to expect nothing short of hours of pleasant company in the presence of the finest ladies this side of the Appalachian Mountains.

Perhaps afterwards, we might go to the bridge. You know the one that spans the creek. It is commonly called Lovers’ Lane by the more romantically natured folk around. But as you probably are not interested in romance, I figured that we could just pop over to the bridge, I could propose, and we could scurry off to settle accounts with the preacher and our parents.

My dad thought we might elope. He says it’s cheaper that way and that it would save your parents, my parents, and ourselves a ton of money and perhaps a headache or two. I am willing to do whatever it takes to save me us any extra bother.

By the way, I should say before we get too involved with this, that I do make about $936.03 a month. This may not surprise you since, if I don’t say so myself no one will, I am rather bright and expect to rise in the company. My dad thinks so too. As he is the president of the company, I am in no position to argue.

From my desk at my work to yours,
Charlie T. Rothfeather.

P.S. I hope you don’t like vegemite. I had the horrid stuff once when an Australian gave it to me as a gift. I took one bite and almost vomited. After putting the stuff on several mouse traps, I have, however, discovered that rodents admire the stuff greatly.

How Pluto Lost His Status

It is a common fact that most of the great conflicts have been started over a single dame, called a damsel. (Only the Trojan War was fought over a married woman, called off limits.) The Revolutionary War erupted because the British capture Pocahontas. The Spanish-American War came about when some senorita, rumors say, ran off with Roy Rogers. And even World War II was started only after a British woman named Fraulein had tea with Mussolini.

I remember several years ago that Pluto was voted off of the planetary scale. I am sure the old fellow was quite put out. After being invented by some earthling almost 80 years ago, he had been sitting prettily—and perhaps quite coolly—out some several billion miles away as a planet. “It was an honor,” he once told me, “to be labeled as one and run with ‘big boys’ like ol’ Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and to be able to flirt with Venus” because he was considered a planet.

Actually, I think flirting with Venus got him in trouble. There he was winking his cold blue eyes at her and that whippersnapper Mercury—you need to watch those young fleet-of-foot fellows—became a little heated under the collar. “He left a memo at the Astronomers’ Club—that’s where the astronauts, scientists, and astro-physicists hang out while they’re waiting for an amateur astronomer to discover a new star for them to name,” an anonymous source at the College of Space and Stuff (alright, so it was the janitor’s assistant) told the unassociated press, “saying, ‘If this schmuck is not off my block by the time it takes me to take a spin around the sun, I’ll…’” And he never finished his threat because he was already around the sun for the another spin.

The astronomers—they’re excitable people. You report an asteroid descending towards the earth or tell them that some solar flares are jumping off the sun again, and you’ll have them scrambling for their calculators, gazing through their telescopes and writing down equations and counter-equations a mathematician can’t even fathom. Next thing you’ll know there’s a state of emergency and they will devise someway of throwing the earth in reverse to barely dodge a Hollywood apocalypse. They really are quaint old sorts who take their jobs quite seriously.

Anyhow, as I was saying, the astronomers gather for a convention and named it something important like, the 2006 International Convention of Astronomers for the Determination and Termination of Pluto as a Planet (ICADTPP). They sent an invitation to Pluto so that he could defend himself, but Pluto was too far away to hear and missed his queue. Regardless, between coffee breaks, someone—it was the janitor’s assistant again—made a motion to impeach Pluto as a planet.

The reasons were quite ludicrous. They said he was smaller than earth. Of course, that got Mars upset and he turned red. Venus didn’t care because she said she wasn’t small but “petite.” Mercury did not comment. However, to calm the raging god of war, who appeared to be blowing a blood vessel, they—that’s the janitor and his assistant—said that the other “smaller” planets would be grandfathered in. Therefore they wrote three volumes of footnotes with calculation and diagrams and statistics to make their claim look too complicated to be wrong. (It convinced me!)

Throughout all of this, Pluto had still not made his appearance. It’s hard to blame him since the messenger thought some other large floating rock was Pluto and gave that fellow the message.

The five scientists present—the rest were lounging at the hotel’s pool or were visiting the various clubs and other landmarks—thought it would be a good prank to pull on Pluto. So they agreed. And Pluto was ousted.

Of course, Venus wrote her dear John letter. “How would it look,” she said, “for a girl like me to be dating some overgrown asteroid or dwarf planet? I ask you.” She was never a very sensitive woman. In fact, she might have been once a New Yorker. For she always says what she thinks, or feels, and gets away with murder.

Correctness in Feminism

I believe men have developed the unique capability of being silent sufferers. Golf has helped in this. In that sport most words are hardly spoken above a hush and are often short phrases whose climax contains no more than four letters. This apparent mellowness has the characteristics of meekness. Women may say men are proud; I say men are meek.

It wasn't so very long ago when men were not so. Only about 10,000 years ago--I remember it as if it were yesterday--Thug sauntered out of his cave, yawned, stretched, and gazed steadfastly into the horizon with a gleam in the eyes only seen on recruitment posters or in a woman hunting for a husband. Neither flinching nor stalling, he stepped out into the dawn, his hand clutching a piece of oak like Babe Ruth.

"There goes Thug," a neighboring cave-dweller was heard to remark quite briskly, "off wife-hunting, I suppose."

That was, however, 10,000 years ago when men were too thick-skulled to know that one does not hit a lady and when the ladies were too thick-skulled to care. Things have flip-flopped now. Women slug their men and think nothing of it. Men simply think nothing.

While many men, glancing with that half-closed-eye look of a Britain summoning Jeeves for more tea, complain that women are "not what they used to be" and women, excitable as hares on a May morning, complain that men are "what they used to be," no one seems to see the real source of the problem. Of course, if you ask an adult, the blame, with Adam-like swiftness, is laid out against the children--"They're not what they used to be." That comes, nonetheless, from the parents, who, being more infantile than childish, are not as they used to be. Come to think of it, neither are the toys and the toymakers. In fact, nothing, except hypocrisy, seems to be what it once was.

I think, if I am still allowed to do so because heaven knows I am no longer permitted to hold and preach my own opinion for fear of annoyance, the problem is a shallow one. It's not shallow because the reason is shallow, but because the cause of the reason is shallow--man. As the old statement says, "If a women hears a tree fall in a forest, a man is still wrong." Firstly, I shall be very clear: women are right that men are wrong. But men are wrong not because women are right. Men are wrong because women are "as they used to be." Women have, since Adam became the first organ donor, wanted men to be manly and to be in charge. For that reason, while women may not have liked it, the daughters of Eve never held conventions to complain about Thug twacking his bride-to-be. That's not to say they enjoyed the beaming. Absolutely not. But they wanted the security. If Thug, their reasoning is, was bold enough to clobber his soon-to-be-Mrs. just once, he was bold enough to control a household and a host of children.

Regardless, Thug still remained a brute. He was so not because he wanted to control his house, but because he thought it manly and necessary to knock out his heart's-delight to prove his love. The principle is true, but the action is not. A woman, I am told, desires a man who can put his foot down, not on her toes but on the threshold of his house, and keep it there regardless of his brutish inclinations and her feminine whims and wiles.

Because of their desires, yesterdays feminists had always been fighting for a great cause--not the emancipation of women, but the masculinization of men. Carrie Nation began waving a hatchet not because she hated alcohol, but because men stopped waving clubs and had begun drinking to solve their problems. Susan B. Anthony began crying for population control not because she hated population, but because she hated a leaderless population. Both reactions were wrong for the right reasons. That is, however, how the feminists--and most heretics, for that matter--work.

As she turned away

As she turned away and parted,
"Love," I said, "is worth the grieving."
From the moment love-looks started,
As she turned away and parted,
We swore to be both faithful-hearted.
Who was I, poor fool, deceiving
As she turned away and parted--
"Love," I said, "is worth the grieving"?