Patsy Pridgen

Remember my last post about anachronisms, those careless references in fiction to things that belong to another time? Writing Ms. Dee Ann, a novel set in 1979, was fun—I could refer to Jimmy Carter being in the White House, for example—but tricky—I had to watch out for those anachronisms.

In one scene, I have Dee Ann confronting her friend Marilyn about her marital infidelity. Dee Ann demands to know “the whole truth” about Marilyn’s long evening out with a book salesman at an educators’ conference the two had attended.  Marilyn, while denying any wrongdoing, nervously begins to twist the chain of her long gold necklace.

“Marilyn,” exclaims Dee Ann, “you got in that night at three a.m.! I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck….  You couldn’t have been sitting in the Beef Master Inn eating dinner half the night.  I’m sure the place closes by midnight or so.  Or at least the restaurant does.  I don’t know about the inn part.”

The chain Marilyn is twirling gets tighter and tighter around her neck. I love the image here of the necklace becoming a noose, the truth choking Marilyn as Dee Ann confronts her.

While writing this scene, I got an idea. Why not make that necklace an add-a-bead? I had one of those long chains with the gold beads myself back in the day.

But exactly when back in the day? Time to google.  Alas, all the sources agreed:  those preppy gold add-a-bead necklaces were popular in the early 1980s, a couple of years after the time of the novel.

I could probably get away with it, but somewhere out there, an alert reader might pick up on the anachronism. Not important enough to use it—or change the year of the novel to accurately accommodate a reference to the old add-a-bead necklace.

Marilyn’s necklace remains simply a long gold chain.

In college, while other students were learning skills that would help them earn a living one day, we English majors would sit around in our classes looking for anachronisms in literature.

An anachronism is something that appears in a time where it does not belong. For example, we would find a passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in 44 BC, where Cassius says, “Brutus: Peace! Count the clock,” and Cassius replies, “The clock has stricken three.”

The anachronism here? Mechanical clocks had not been invented in 44 BC but were common in Shakespeare’s time. Gotcha, Shakespeare! We lit nerds felt so clever.

Recently, an editor of Ms. Dee Ann, my novel in progress, got me. I wrote a scene where Dee Ann goes to the Kut and Kurl for a new hairstyle and tells her beautician, “Veronica, I want to look like Olivia Newton-John in the final scene of Grease.”

“Honey, I seen that movie and I know that hairdo,” Veronica replies. “I think we can do it. You know, you kinda look like her in the face too. This is gonna be fun.”

The problem here, my alert editor pointed out, is that the novel was set in 1977, a year before the movie Grease came out. She suggested either I set the entire story a year later so Dee Ann could use this reference, or choose another hairstyle.

I was fond of the Grease reference. I liked not only the hairdo part but Veronica’s comment that Dee Ann resembled Olivia Newton-John. I felt with that reference I got a lot of descriptive bang for my buck.

I moved the date of the novel ahead two years, 1979, figuring Grease probably took a while to come to the one movie theater in the little town of Narrow Creek.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. The luck of the Irish was certainly with me the day I joined the Rocky Mount Writers’ Guild.  We’re a diverse group of people with one thing in common:  we like to write.

There are usually eight to ten of us who gather the second Thursday night of each month. Each meeting begins with a prompt (more about that in a minute), and then anyone who has brought something for critiquing reads it to the group.

If you like to write and don’t mind sharing with a group, come join us. Click on my contact page (Contact Patsy) and send me a message, and I’ll give you the specifics of our next meeting.

Let me finish with what I wrote at one meeting in response to this prompt: you’re sitting in the street waiting for a man to come out a door.

Bet my Daddy never thought I’d track his sorry ass all the way to New York City. But here I am, big as life, in the back seat of this yellow taxicab waiting for him to come out the door of that café across the street, where his landlady told me he eats breakfast every morning. 

“The Pancake Palace, corner of 57^th and 9^th,” she said.  “Can’t miss it, hon.  You must be Sarah Jane.  Your father talks about you all the time.  Tell your mother to come in and meet me.  What? Oh, she’s waiting in the cab for you?  Maybe later then.”

Yeah, I told her, Mama’s in the cab. But she ain’t.  She’s back home, six feet under, where my daddy put her.  And now I’ve come to see about some justice.

Wow, talk about debunking a hero. I have always admired Albert Einstein—who hasn’t—but after reading The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict, I’ve taken a second look at the scientist most often credited with E=MC2.

The book is fiction, but it is based on the very real Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, a gifted Serbian mathematician and physicist. Einstein met Mileva Maric in 1897 while they were both students at the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, an elite school for the study of science and mathematics in Zurich.  Mileva Maric was the only female student in the class.

As the story is told in The Other Einstein, Mileva unintentionally sacrifices her own ambitious dreams when she marries Albert.  Thinking theirs would be a union of intellect as well as love, she aids him in his early studies, significantly contributing to the theory of relativity.

Albert Einstein uses her brain but not her name, giving her no credit on his famous reports that built his reputation and eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. He treats Mileva as a traditional early 1900s wife, relegating her to cook, housekeeper, and childcare.

And he is unfaithful to her as well, eventually causing their divorce when he consorts with his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, who eventually became the second Mrs. Einstein.

A most interesting read, but how much of this is true? Articles I found on the Internet acknowledge there has been debate as to Mileva Maric’s role in Einstein’s work, especially in the question of whether she co-authored his 1905 paper on special relativity.

But many of the sources I read go on to say there is no hard evidence that Mileva Maric was instrumental in her husband’s work. These critics say that letters Einstein wrote to Mileva speaking of “our work on relative motion” are just the babblings of a young man in love.

Who knows for sure the extent of scientific contribution by the other Einstein, Mileva Maric? No one, it seems.  Still, The Other Einstein is an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

Thirteen years ago, when my newly formed book club was mapping out its first year of reading, one of our original members declared, “Okay, ladies, just let it be known:  I’ll read anything except throbbing thighs and heaving bosoms.”  We all got a good laugh, but I was glad she spoke up.  I don’t like modern romance novels either. 

By the number of such books on the market, however, it seems somebody does.  Sales of romantic and its naughty cousin erotic fiction for 2016 were estimated at $1.5 billion—yes, that’s billion with a “b.”  It’s the top-selling sector of the book market, beating science fiction, mystery, and literary novels.

Wow.  If only I could bring myself to write such stuff.  But I can’t write what I don’t want to read.  I barely got through the first Fifty Shades of Grey, which I felt compelled to check out of the library to see what all the hoopla was about.  I don’t know what happened to Anastasia and Christian after book one, and I don’t care–unlike lots and lots of other people, who bought the second and third volumes of the trilogy and went to see the movie.

I’m afraid Jane Austen has ruined me.  My romance novels have to be gentle, full of intrigue and social commentary.  I sigh over Mr. Darcy, now forever imagining him as Colin Firth portrayed him.  Ever so much more refined than that kinky Christian Grey.  And I’ve yet to see a modern-day romance with anything close to the great line that begins Pride and Prejudice.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” 

Oh, my.  I think I just felt my bosom heave. 

As that great philosopher Jimmy Buffett sings, “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”  I so agree.

I often incorporate humor in my writing by depicting the absurdity of life.  And in the South, you don’t have to look very far to find something—or someone—absurd.  In the scene below, taken from a chapter of my novel-in-progress, Ms. Dee Ann, an unsophisticated woman named Bertha is being interviewed as a potential babysitter by the narrator Dee Ann, a young mother who is soon to start a part-time job.

“I know my home ain’t nothing fancy,” Bertha said. “Me and Buddy don’t have much. We spend what Buddy makes on the young’uns.  You know, when you have young’uns, you ain’t gonna have much else.  Course I wouldn’t trade ’em for nothing.”  Bertha paused a moment after this declaration of motherly love.

“So’s I told Buddy that to help out some, I thought I could set myself up keepin’ babies here at the house for these young mamas what’s got a job,” she continued.  “Babies is my specialty, you know.  I plan to call my business Bertha’s Babies.  Don’t that have a nice ring to it?”

Bertha searched my face, obviously wanting approval.  “Yes, that’s a very catchy name,” I said.  The two B’s did give it alliteration, I thought.

I noticed something else.  Bertha wasn’t giggling. She had smiled plenty and her wandering eye had rolled around some, but I hadn’t heard a single silly titter out of her yet.  But Sensible Bertha suddenly vanished.

“You know, every year I enter that Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes, but I don’t never seem to win nothing.  Do you think that contest is real?”  Bertha leaned toward me as if I had the inside scoop.

“I guess there are winners,” I answered, somewhat flustered at the turn the conversation had taken, “but the odds are something like, oh, I don’t know, one out of ten million that a person’s number would be drawn.”

“Well, no wonder I don’t never hear nothing back from them folks.  One out of ten million!  Who knew?  Boy howdy, it’s a good thing I done decided to keep babies instead of waitin’ for that ship to come in.”  For the first time that day, Bertha giggled.