Friday, July 31, 2009

A Plan

Tommy UK told Tammy this morning who he believes his birth mother is. Together they have come up with a plan to get her to admit it. Tammy suggested at first that he should just go and tell her he knows she is his birth mother . She probably would agree and that would be that. But Tommy UK is afraid she would simply deny it. She would tell him you couldn’t trust hypnosis and he would never know for sure. So Tammy reluctantly agreed to go along with his plan.
Before he puts the plan into action he intends to tell Eino and Mrs. Trumble and get their support. He feels that he is almost there. Soon he will know why she put him out for adoption.
He wonders if she didn’t love him, if she hated children, if his father did something to her. He has so many, many questions that only she can answer and he can hardly wait to get the answers.
Petrovich is hard at work on the translation of another driblet. Mrs. Trumble is hoping that whatever horrible thing it predicts will not happen until after Pigeon Days. Her worst nightmare is a parade of demons down the main street on the day of the big Pigeon Falls Day parade.
The ghost tours continue pouring money into the Pigeon Falls economy. It would seem that people who chase ghosts are too rich to be effected by the economic turndown or they are willing to use what little resources they have to be here. The museum ghost concert fills up every day. The great invisible piano player continues to play and the shoes keep dancing. The money generated from the morning concerts is enough to keep the museum open all year round, except for the two weeks in December when the ghost seems to take a Christmas vacation.
Nancy continues to search the internet for a new lower cost source for her saffron. She really does not want to raise the cost of her saffron buns in this economy.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Hypnotism

Tommy UK was hypnotized yesterday. The hypnotist took him back to when he was a baby and then asked him to look at his mother’s face. Tommy’s arms went out and he said mama. There was a big smile on his face. Then the hypnotist told him he would remember what he saw and counted him back out of the trance. Nancy asked him if he remembered and he smiled.
“I know who my birth mother is “, he said. “ And I know where I heard that tune.”
The hypnotist , however, warned him that the memory under hypnosis is not always accurate. “Sometimes people try so hard to please the hypnotist that they create the memory.” he said.
Tommy UK , however, is convinced he knows who his birth mother is but until he gets her to admit it he isn’t telling anybody. Well he might tell Tammy, Eino, and Mrs. Trumble but that’s it.
Constable Ican has found a 4 wheeler that fits the tire tracks at the robbery. He is fairly convinced he knows who the robber is but now he needs a search warrant. He has to drive all the way to the County Court House to get one. Not having a local judge is so inconvenient when you’d like to close a case. On the other hand the chance of his suspect being tip off that he is coming is much less this way. He doubts that anybody on the county court even knows him. So he will spend all morning getting the warrant and then he and his assistant will spend the afternoon searching the house.
Lucile Smiith gave her Liars’s Club story yesterday. She got an 8.125 , probably not good enough to make the cut if scores from past years are any indication. She claims that the judges she got were just low scoring judges and that her story “ I remember when the soup turned blue” should have been at least a 9.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Stella

Constable Ican found Stella Olson sitting on her 4 by 4 and smoking a cigar. For a moment he thought he had his robber but then he discovered the wheels on the four by four didn’t match the tracks in the plaster cast and the cigar was the wrong brand. Stella wondered if he could help her get the “infernal machine” running because she couldn’t get it started. In any case he crossed her off the list.
Tommy Tw’s friend arrived yesterday and they invited Tommy UK to come over to Nancy’s house for the experiment with hypnotism today. If everything goes right by tomorrow he will know who his mother is.
Nancy’s house used to belong to her great grandfather the crazy inventor. One feels sure you remember him as the inventor of the self zipping zipper. You close the bottom of the zipper and the zipper zips itself. It only required one C battery . It worked pretty well except you did have to unzip it yourself. It never did catch on but Nancy has a sample of it on display in the invention room alongside the self adjusting suspenders.
Fortunately for Tommy UK the hypnotism will take place in the study not the invention room.
Pastor Joan who is in the sixth month of her pregnancy went for her regular check up yesterday. Everything was fine. It looks like she is going to have one healthy baby. She hopes to work up until the baby is delivered or at least as close to that time as possible. Her husband is rearranging his schedule so he can be home for two weeks before it is due and two weeks after.
Mrs. Henry Impola has offered to baby sit when the baby comes. She is a very active member of Last Lutheran and a widow.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Emila

The Liar’s Club Big Lie Contest started today with Charlie Bosco’s story. Here it is:

I remember when Emelia Thompson moved to Pigeon Falls. I suppose most of you have forgotten Emila . She was the kind of person it is easy to forget. She lived in what is now the Thompson place in the older Rugmeyer house. That house , of course was torn down after the event. All traces of its existence have been removed.
Emila was into the occult. She spent her days reading very old books in very strange languages. She was constantly muttering phrases nobody could understand. When I was a little boy I thought she was the most interesting person in the world. She seemed to like having somebody watch her work on her spells so she tolerated my visits. I saw things you would never believe. She said something in Latin, I think it was Latin, and a big frog turned into a rose. Really a frog turned into a rose. She gave it to me and I gave it to my mother. She never knew she was wearing a frog when she pinned that Rose to her coat. It was so beautiful.
The next time I went she turned a pile of rocks into snakes. Scared me half to death. I hate snakes. She just laughed and said some words and the snakes became a plate of grapes but there was no way I was going to eat even one of them. Wonder if they turned back into snakes in my stomach.
The last time I visited she had drawn this funny shape on the floor and we stood inside of it. She warned me not to step outside the shape and then she said the eeriest words I have ever heard . They weren’t Latin or any language that I could discern but they were words. Suddenly outside the shape this thing began to take shape. It was covered with fire and it had this horrible laugh. She said some more of those strange words and the thing disappeared. She told me to go home.
I decided then never to go back but I watched as the house was slowly covered by a strange fog. Every day the fog got worse and worse until you could barely see the house. Then one day as I was walking by I saw what looked like a fire in the fog and I swear I saw that demon flying round and round. In the morning the house was gone. Emila was gone. The odd thing is there were no ashes, Just a basement where the house had been.
Well the Town Council voted to secretly fill up the basement and pretend none of this ever happened. But I was there and . I have a picture I can show you of the house covered with fog but if you look really close you can see the demon light in the upper window,
Yes , I remember when!

The voting group gave him one 10, eight 9s, and one eight. So his final score was 9. A good beginning for the contest.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Just Another Day

Pigeon Falls only robbery remains unsolved. Constable Ican has been hard at work but the only pieces of evidence he has is the plaster cast of the four wheelers tire prints and a piece of a cigar. Today he is taking the list of four by fours that he got from Eino ,who does most of the maintenance in town, and is going to visit all twelve people on the list. He hopes to get lucky and find one of them smoking a cigar.
Tommy UK is waiting for Tommy TW’s friend to come so he can get hypnotized and perhaps learn who his birth mother was. While he is waiting the song she sings in his dream keeps going through his head. He thinks he has heard that melody somewhere.
All over Pigeon Falls people are digging out their old timer costumes and getting them ready for Old Time Week during Pigeon Falls month. The town will look like it did a century ago.
The Liars Club is getting ready for its local Big Lie contest. The theme this year is “ I remember when“. They already have twenty entries.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Sunday in Pigeon Falls

Over at Last Lutheran Pastor Joan is working on her sermon for the day: Here is part of that sermon:
People get hungry that’s a fact of life.
There are things that scare us and that’s a fact of life.
Hunger and fear are basic to us as humans. They were basic to the people in Jesus day as well.
There was a time when a crowd came to see Jesus up in the mountains. It numbered over five thousand and they were a long way from town. It was the kind of crowd that CNN loves to pan its cameras over and say things like “ Thousands showed up far from town today to see the Prophet.” But there was no CNN and no television.
The crowd was hungry and the disciples knew they didn’t have enough to feed them so they wanted them sent home.
But Jesus saw their hunger and he fed them.
Now notice Jesus didn’t say “ Sit down and watch me do a food miracle.”
He didn’t even claim that what was about to happen was a miracle.
He just took what was there and fed them.
He cared about them.
The crowd didn’t see him as God they saw him as a constant food source.
They wanted to make the King of the Universe King.
So Jesus left.
Many of those people probably went home not even knowing there was a miracle.
A loving God had met their basic need. They didn't even know it.
Sometime later the disciples were in a boat out on the lake when a storm came up.
It was frightening.
Lots of people drowned in storms like that.
So Jesus went to calm their fears.
He walked on the water.
But this scared them even more. They thought he was a ghost.
The truth is God in Christ loves us enough to want to feed and comfort us.
Sometimes we are afraid that he has forgotten us.
But if we watch we can see Him coming to us in the storms of our life.
He won't fail us.
He loves us.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

The Robbery

Yesterday was one wild day in Pigeon Falls. A masked man robbed Wink’s Woods in the middle of the day. He made the clerk put all the money from the cash register into the bird house that looks like the White House. Then he took it and left through the back door. He ran into the woods where he had a four wheeler waiting.
Everybody is upset. This does not happen in Pigeon Falls. Giant spiders happen, big wooly elephants happen, dragons happen, bouncing heads happen but masked robbers do not happen. They just don’t. It has wrecked the image of Pigeon Falls as a little normal UP town. The next thing is somebody will rob the Credit Union and then Jack’s Sauna. Why even Last Lutheran isn’t safe.
Constable Ican Gettum showed up five minutes after they called him. First thing he did was ask for the tape from the security cameras only to be told the cameras were fake. They were just there to scare off shop lifters. From the people in the store he collected as much information as he could. The robber was anywhere from four feet to eight. He was either white or black but could be Latino. He was missing a tooth and his teeth were perfect. The only thing they all agreed on was that mask looked like the one worn by the Lone Ranger. They also couldn’t agree on the gun with some thinking it was really big and others thinking it was rather small. They gave him a stock picture of the birdhouse he stole.
Then Constable Ican bought some plaster powder that was part of a kit for making garden plaques. He charged it to the town. He used the plaster to make an impression of the tracks of the four wheeler. At the same time he found the end of a cigar that might have been left by the crook. He had worn gloves so there were no fingerprints.
Ican took what he had back to the office. The robber knew the store. He knew which room had the back door. He had parked his four wheeler in the right place and one could guess he knew the woods. Ican began to think it was a local person and not a passing through robber.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Memories are made of this

Tommy UK stopped into Nancy’s for a cup of coffee and a saffron bun. Nancy told him that her husband, Tommy TW , has a friend coming that might be able to help him with his dream. His friend is a professional hypnotist who specializes in memory retrieval .He has written two books that serve as the guidelines for those who want to learn the procedures.
He will be here sometime next week and if Tommy UK wants she will introduce him and Tommy can share his problem. Under hypnosis he might see the face of his mother clearly. Tommy quickly agreed to try and now hopes this will be the break he has been waiting for.
Mrs. Trumble is having a terrible time trying to find a star to head up the Pigeon Days Parade.
She is now so desperate she is turning to her list of politicians. Even there , heading up the big parade in Pigeon Falls is no political plum. The local people don’t pay much attention to political parties but are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. A Republican might be willing to come to show the people that the party cares but there are very few important elected Republicans in Upper Michigan. This is particularly true in the year of Obama.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

A n Assistant

The new jail has somebody in each cell this morning.
Mrs. Pemberthy brought them a great breakfast and the Constable should be letting them out soon.
Last night Robert Maki, he’s in cell one, broke a chair over the head of somebody who called him a communist for supporting Obama’s health plan. By the time Constable Ican arrived at the Fly Inn he had broken two more chairs. The Constable seemed to have very little trouble subduing him and hauled him down to the jail to sleep it off.
In the other cell was Fred McManis who threw a whiskey bottle though a mirror at the Happy Pigeon. Fred is an ex-Marine and was harder to subdue.
This morning Constable Ican has bruises and pains he didn’t know came with the job. After Robert promised to pay the Fly Inn for the chairs he sent him home.
But Fred was a different story. Ican offered Fred the assistant Constable position on two conditions:
1. He stay sober
2. He pay for the mirror.
The new assistant would be responsible for patrolling the two bars at night. He had the strength and the training for the job.
So Fred is now the new assistant constable.
Tonight Ican will take a long soak and them splash on plenty of lineament.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The new jail is ready. The town hired “Pre-Fab Jails Inc” to build it and it went up in a week. There is an office for the Constable and one for his assistant as well as two cells. It has electronic locks and all kinds of alarms. For all of that it is only intended for housing convicts for a day or two. It will be a place to put an unruly drunk overnight or a real criminal waiting to be transferred to the County Jail.
Constable Ican Gettum says it is the best little jail in the Upper Peninsula and he is very happy with his new offices.
Pastor Joan noted that it is right across the road from Last Lutheran so it will be easy to visit those in jail.
Mayor Trumble has slated a ribbon cutting ceremony for noon tomorrow. It will also be a chance for the sober community to meet the new Constable.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

More dreams

Last night Tommy UK was just at the point in the dream where he would see his birth mother’s face when he suddenly woke up.So he began to wonder if he is afraid to see who it is.There is the possibility that He might not like his birth parents as they could be somebody like the Petrovichs. There really isn’t anybody in town that he really wants to be his birth mother. He feels so confused and just a bit frightened..
When he had the newspaper route he used to have cookies and cocoa with Mrs. Trumble and tell her all his troubles. Now she is so busy running the town that she has little time for him. But today he got up early and went down to the Town Hall to tell her his troubles just like the old days. He explained to her that Nancy, Eino, and Pastor Joan have all told him you can’t trust dreams. But Tammy says he will know when it is real. He also told her he is afraid his birth parents might be unlikable.
Mrs. Trumble listened , something she does well. Then she smiled and said “ I’m with Tammy . You will know and if they are at all like you they will be likable."”
As he left he heard her humming to herself.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Tommy's Dream

Poor Tommy UK. He keeps having the same dream over and over. He is held by his birth mother. She is rocking him and singing to him but he can’t see her face. He tries but it is as if she wants to hide it. When he caches a glimpse it looks familiar but he doesn’t see her clearly enough to identify her. But there is something about the voice and the sound.
So Tommy went to Pastor Joan this morning and told her how troubling the dream was. She told him to be careful. Dreams are not reality. He might place in a dream somebody he knows like Nancy , his adoptive mother, or even Mrs. Trumble. But that wouldn’t make them his birth mother. The song might be a real memory but the voice could just as easily belong to somebody he sees every day like a school teacher. This was not at all what Tommy wanted to hear. It was not good news.
So he went to see Eino. If he thought Pastor Joan was disappointing Eino was even more so. Eino told him you couldn’t trust dreams at all. They were not rational. They were images created by the mind and it was very doubtful, according to Eino, that they touched on reality at all.
When Tammy found him sitting in the boat house he was almost despondent. She told him to ignore Pastor Joan and Eino. It was his dream and he had to decide if it was real or not. She felt in his heart he would know.