Man, pictures take forever to load. We won't go over my
learning curve regarding editing them into a post.
My first thoughts on this little booklet are tri-layered.
That usually happens when I think about anything Grandma related. On the ME
layer, the booklet was written on school-type paper and then rolled up and kept
for, I'm guessing, 82+ years. It is yellowed, friable, and permanently curled
into a tube. It is also in the recycling, now that I've typed it up and logged
it here, with a copy on my hard drive in the genealogy folder.
I sort of resent the amount of time it took to do that.
There was a good bit of wrangling and weighting down involved in just getting
each page to lay flat for its turn at immortalization.
On the Grandma layer, it's both touching and sad that she
kept it for so long. She really did have an urge to create. She became more
than pretty good at drawing and painting, and did handicrafts her whole life. I
haven't seen any other stories, or much of her writing, besides letters and
wills. (I'll tell you about those some day.)
According to Uncle L, she supported herself and her
children, at least for awhile, by making felt "jewelry". It's hard to
guess how much time she put into that, though. She also made Barbie (tm)
clothes and fancy clothespin dolls.
Like I said, she had an urge to create. Unfortunately, she
also had an urge to go drinking with servicemen. (No, I’m not implying that she
got drunk. I have no clue about
that. I’m just saying that she liked to
go to bars and that her eyes would light up when recalling men fighting over
her.) So she never put in the time to get serious about trying to make a living
with her drawings.
The third layer is the voice of my Dad, complaining. At some
point he decided that his personal troubles were all her fault. After that,
well, let's just say he complained about her a lot. I'm not going to talk about
him much until I've got most of Grandma and Aunt D's stuff sorted. He's a whole
different kettle of guilt.
---------------
Now let's see if I have anything I want to say about the
story, itself. The plot is, of course, a hot mess. That's not a phrase I
usually use, but it's a phrase that I don't seem to be able to veer from using
in this case. It's a hot mess. I really hope that she was in the low end of her
teens when she wrote it. I wrote stuff that was just as bad in my low teens,
but I don't think I kept any of the really stinky stuff.
Of course, Grandma had more of a weakness for Romance novels
than I ever had, so she would have liked it for that. Grandma kept me supplied
with romance novels during junior high and high school, mostly with old style
Harlequins and Georgette Heyer. I kept them in Wrigley's Gum boxes (the big
packing boxes) under my bed.
At one point, Dad put his foot down, saying that if any more
came into the house, an equal number had to leave. I was fine with that. I
don't think I ever re-read them. Even so, when I moved away to college, and
donated them to the local library, there were more than a thousand of them.
(The library was thrilled. They became "honor" checkouts - not
tracked - and there were apparently a number of little old ladies who just
loved them.)
I read them as a cheap way to travel for a twelve-year-old.
The stories were always set in England Australia
I never read them as romances, or even novels of manners. I
suspect that Grandma did, though. For me, after the first dozen or so, it was
too obvious that the characters were acting out a formula. The people and
relationships never seemed real.
So - back to the story. The plot was a hot mess. The word
cowboy was never stated, but everyone but Belle (or Belle's) talked cowboy. The
hero shot the heroine and had to open up her shirt to discover that she had
boobs. With eyesight that bad, it was a wonder he hit his target. But everyone
else made the same mistake, so maybe in the time of the Flapper (the early
1920s), boobs were passé, even cowgirl boobs..
I will not speculate on how Belle got on a wanted poster,
why her father was kidnapped, or why everyone knew the owner of the Circle R
Ranch, but no one knew that he had a grown daughter. Wall Rock was the foreman
of the Circle R, for Pete's sake. This is a bigger oversight than missing a set
of boobs. I will also not ask what self-respecting Spaniard would name a town
La Crane.
She must have liked the name Wall Rock, because she started
so many sentences with it and never shortened it to Wall unless someone, say,
the Sheriff, was talking. And Wall was a special guy: able to hide his horse in
a clump of bushes, ambidextrous, and a soft touch for a sob story.
The heroine must have been wildly attractive for a woman
with no cleavage. He decides not to turn her in to the Sheriff for the $5000
reward before she even wakes up after he shot her . . . again. Even though she
had shot him. Rather than holding that against her, or even saying ouch, he's
ready to assume . . . what? I'd say he thinks she's too feminine to be a
criminal, but she just shot him. Then got shot without saying ouch herself. That sounds manly to me. Or maybe in The West, bullet wounds are just
the casual punctuation of conversation.
I feel so cheap taking pot-shots at this story. It was
obviously written by someone very young. At least I earnestly hope that Grandma
was close to twelve when she wrote it. She told me once that when she was
young, she and her best friend made a pact to run away to The West and marry
cowboys. This story would fit right in with that frame of mind.
As that kind of story, I think it's cute. "You'll need
a yarn and a pair of lies" isn't a bad line. Neither is "I stopped
him, but the pony got away with him." At twelve, there's plenty of time to
learn where to put apostrophes.
