Hey y’all! Welcome
back to Flowers on the Fence Country. Pull
a chair up to the table and grab a coffee cup. Been awhile, I know. Time has a way of movin’ on, and before you
know it—pfft! The whole day’s gone. Or in my case, the whole
week. Okay, the whole month. Or the whole last six months. Oh, things have been going on, you
understand. It’s not having nothing to write about that’s the problem. It’s finding the time to write about it.
So let
me re-introduce myself briefly. My
name’s Gail Roughton Branan, has been for 39 years. I’m a Legal Assistant by day, specializing in
trouble-shooting. Find me some trouble,
I’ll shoot it for you. Been doing that for 39 years, too. At night and on the week-ends, in what’s laughingly
called my “off” time, I write books. As Gail Roughton. Using that name, well, it’s sort of a love
song to my Daddy. Besides, nobody can
spell Roughton but at least they know it.
Branan, on the other hand, has a multitude of spellings, and B-r-a-n-a-n
is not the first one that comes to most folks’ minds.
Writing
books doesn’t work like most folks think it does. You don’t sit down in front of a computer and
start typing and just type and type and type.
Well, you can, but only if you’re typing “See Spot run” or the like over
and over again. You have to pause and savor, listen to the voices in your head,
follow directions from the characters. Sometimes it does come in fairly long
straight-forward streams but mostly it’s a stop and start process. And even if it’s coming in a straight-forward
stream, writers are also doing that thing everybody else does. That thing
called living. Life intrudes. Children and grandchildren and
friends and pets have to be tended to, listened to, laughed with, fed, hugged
and kissed. And thank heavens for that, because without living life, how the heck would we write about it?
My
family’s particularly tight-knit. My
youngest son Lee’s the only child far from home, he’s a Navy Corpsman,
currently stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, but even so, he checks in
regularly—at least with his brother and sister, with whom he skypes
regularly. My oldest son still lives at
home. And that’s fine with all of us. He hasn’t found his other half yet.
That’ll come and of course when it does, he’ll move out. In the meantime, he has
a great job, pays his own bills, comes and goes as he pleases, I don’t wash or
fold his clothes, wait on him hand and foot, or cook him anything special. Or
cook much, actually. If I do, and he’s
home, he’s welcome to join in. It’s an
arrangement that works well. We’re all happy.
My
daughter lives right up the road and works afternoon and early evenings. My
son-in-law is a deputy sheriff so his hours aren’t what you’d call
consistent. Ergo and therefore, my
husband Randy, already retired, is chief cook—well, scratch that, he doesn’t
cook—and bottle washer for our seven year old grandson and year old
granddaughter. He says it makes him feel like a “useful engine” (ala Thomas the Tank Engine, young grandchildren
tend to keep you abreast of all popular cartoons). Hence, my nights are
particularly hectic, but full of prized moments.
Our
grandson Austin received a Kindle Fire HD from Santa Claus this year. He loves
it. It only leaves his hands when manually pried therefrom, which my daughter
does every morning before school. She slips it into the bag holding Austin’s
after-bath comfy clothes and brings it with her when she brings Kinsley and her
bag to Randy.
There’s
no way Austin doesn’t know where his Kindle is. So I was a bit surprised to
receive a call from my husband Thursday around noontime.
“Did
Austin forget his Kindle last night when I took him home?”
“Nope.
It was in his hands when he walked down the steps to the truck.”
“Then
what’s this one on Patrick’s bed?”
“I guess
Patrick got a Kindle and didn’t mention it yet.”
“Oh. But
it’s not Austin’s?”
“Nope. He
was still gamin’ away when he got in the truck.”
I walked
in that afternoon to total disaster. At least, Austin thought it was.
“Grandmama,
Grandmama!! My Kindle’s broke, you got to fix it!”
I looked
down at the screen. Then I looked
again. Sure ‘nuff, the screen was full
of indecipherable gobbedly-gook. I looked closer. Spanish?
He’d managed to change the language settings, no big deal if you knew
where the settings were in the first place, but I didn’t have a clue as I don’t
have a Kindle. I did have some basic
Spanish, but none of these words seemed to fit.
“How’d
you do that?”
“I don’t
know, I picked it up and my games
were gone, and I tried to get ‘em back! And I hit some buttons and I got an
email from some person I don’t know and I don’t know what it said, and now it
looks like this and I can’t play my games,
Grandmama, fix it!”
“Baby,
that’s outta Grandmama’s league. Mimi (Austinese for his mother, no one knows
why) or Uncle Patrick can fix it, but Grandmama’s not that good.”
“But Grandmama—”
“No
buts. Grandmama ain’t touching this with a ten foot pole. Where’s your case?
We’re just gonna put it up and wait for Mimi or Uncle Patrick.”
“Grandmama—”
“Austin! Case. Now.”
“Okay,
okay, on the piano.”
I went
and looked. Nope. No case. Patrick’s room, probably. And then it hit me.
Patrick’s. Room. Where a Kindle had been charging on the bed.
“Austin,
it’s not on the piano. Did you even take
your Kindle out of your bag after Granddaddy picked you up from school and you
got home?”
Doubt
flitted across his face. “Yesssssss….I
think I did.”
“Randy,
did you call me this morning and tell me Patrick had a Kindle charging on his
bed?”
“Oh.
Crap.”
I raced
for Austin’s bag. Definitely a squarish
hard object contained therein. I pulled
out Austin’s Kindle, safely tucked inside its lime green case.
“Would
this be yours?”
Sunshine
glowed from the face. “Thanks,
Grandmama! Look, all my games, and now I
can play and—”. Dark, incoming clouds
pushed out the sunshine. “Oh, no!!
I broke Patrick’s Kindle! I broke
my uncle’s Kindle! Oh, no, he’s gonna be
so mad at me!!!” Austin wailed for
all the world like the uncle he had wrapped around his finger from birth (he
had both his uncles wrapped around his finger at birth, actually) habitually
threatened him with loss of life, limb, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“No,
he’s not. Uncle Patrick can fix this in a heartbeat, Grandmama’s just not techy
enough to know how. Don’t worry about it.”
He subsided
and resumed the important business of helping the Digimon somethings convert
into something else (I think) and the nightly routine continued. Every now and then a new shadow slipped
across his face.
“Patrick—”
“Patrick
is not goin’ to be mad at you. He can fix it.”
Randy
left to take the troops home before Patrick came in from work. Hmmm.
How best to bring this up? While I was cogitating my approach, Patrick
walked in his room.
“Did
Austin find my Kindle?”
“Wellllllll, yeah, he did. Sorta. I didn’t know you had one, when’d you
get it?”
Patrick
laughed. “Couple of days ago. Bet it
drove him crazy. It’s got a Password and
he don’t know it.”
“Wellllll, that’s not entirely—accurate.”
“What
the hell?” Patrick looked blankly at
his screen At the foreign language thereon none of us spoke.
“Austin.
He thought it was his. And he—kinda changed the language settings. To Spanish,
I think.”
“He
couldn’t have, it’s got a password.”
“The
same one you have on your phone?”
“My
phone’s a swipe pattern, this is a password.”
“You
need a better password, son. He felt terrible, he said you were gonna be so mad
at him.”
“He did not think I was gonna be mad at him.”
“Yeah,
he did.”
“He was scared?”
“Probably
not, but he knows how to put on a good show.”
“Okay,
let’s see what’s up.” Patrick sat down and got to work. “But this ain’t
Spanish. Don’t know what it is.” Nimble finger flips. “Oh, good Lord! It’s Portuguese! The little pipsqueak! How did he do that? Okay, all fixed. Wait a
minute! This can’t be right. Where’s
all my apps?” More finger flipping. “He’s reset
it to factory settings! It’s like I just bought it! It’s not even registered. How the heck
did he do that?!”
“Never
underestimate the power of a seven year old in search of his games.”
“Well,
maybe when I re-register it—ah! There they are. The Kindle Cloud’s downloading ‘em all back
on.”
Bless
you, Kindle Cloud.
“Okay,
all fixed. So he got by my password,
changed the language to Portuguese, and then reset the whole thing to factory
condition!”
“Like I
said, never underestimate a seven year old who thinks his game apps are gone.”
The
small dramas in life are the sweetest. I
went back to my laptop and heard Patrick on the phone through the door, on the
phone with Austin.
“Okay,
it’s all fixed, everything’s fine, don’t worry about it, okay? You just gotta
tell me one thing. How did you get by the password?”
I
smiled. Just another night in Flowers on the Fence Country. Another story to pass
into family folklore. The night Austin
decided we needed to speak Portuguese.
Y’all come back now, hear?
