Tad Williams

Tammy Leigh Brooks shared an experience she had with chickens when she was a little girl. As you know Tammy Leigh is considered one of the best potters in the South, specializing in chickens. Here is Tammy Leigh's letter…

spoke with my mother about the "headless chicken " incident...She said I was 4 years old so it's probably my most vivid memory from my early years...   we moved to this neighborhood when i was 3.. my mom went back to work in a furniture factory and i was sent 3 doors down to a baby sitter.. Viola, the sitter, had lots of neighborhood children to deal with. She didnt have much money and lived, to a certain extent, off the land and ATE chickens she raised. i am sure i probably watched in horror the first couple times as she would grab a chicken and wring it's neck...all of the squawking and feathers flying was most unnerving for my tender animal-loving heart...then she would put that chicken's neck on the chopping block...and grab her trusty axe and chop chop chop!!... then the chicken would run around wildly with no head… just blood squiritin' from it's neck... flip flopping all around.... scaring the life out of lil tammy leigh.. Viola would then put the chicken in a big pot she had outside and add lots of boiling hot water for the chicken to soak in..before plucking the feathers...when she had to make trips back and forth to the kitchen inside the old house, that was my chance to finally do right by that chicken...so i grabbed that dead, headless chicken and gave him a proper buriel in the sand pile the cats pooped in.... back then, old Viola loved to make these "switches" form hickory sticks or whatever hurt the most...she would "switch" our legs and i still remember the stinging red marks as a result.. this was 1964, so babysitters did that stuff back then and it was acceptable to most.. well, i knew that when she found her supper was no longer in it's hot pot, she would be LIVID...so i climbed up my favorite apple tree...sat up on a limb where she couldnt get me...and waited til i saw my moma came home form work..viola was so mad and demanded i get down out of the tree..i can remember to this day ..being red-headed and defiant and telling her "SHE was NOT MY MOMA!"...and that i was not budging... viloa soon tired and went inside...probably to figure out what was for supper instead of the chicken.... and i remember trembling from adrenaline yet SURE i had done the right thang...and still horrified from the whole event..but i waited patiently til i saw my mother's car pull in the driveway ...and i run my little self home crying and telling her the whole story...she just loved on me as she always has.. i never got a "spankin" or a "switchin", and viola chose to not kill any more chickens around me! i could never really "like" this woman when i was young...and for damn good reason , in my opinion..but years passed, and i realized she was just preparing food like she always had..she was just doing the best she could do....it was a way of life ...but, obviously, not for me. Creating these roosters and just "rooster heads", takes me back to those days...i loved all those chickens and guineas down deep in my tender heart....and i still do...i must celebrate the beauty of these creatures, and they will "live on" in clay and all their glory...and hopefully be loved by many....   ok ol roff....that's the story... i didnt realize i was THAT young... just a note to....my mom said i was the cutest lil redheaded toddler who decide not to crawl at all, i started out running at 8 months old....and been running ever since!

We have a turtle. His name is Serpentine, and our cleaners – who are dear people, and have their own intriguing story – gave him to Son and Daughter as a Surprise! Gift, along with a companion, who was named Emerald (the kids named them.) One of our family stories is about how we promptly dropped 800 bucks in the next few days, keeping these turtles alive. They’d been acquired (it’s illegal but too small to be policed) from a Latino street market in Los Angeles. Actually, that rather added to their appeal for me.

The turtles when they came were tiny tiny things, barely hatched, and they had this disease and that disease, and we were required to torture them by giving them antibiotic shots in their armpits. Omigod! but that was traumatizing. In the end, non-growing-shell did for Emerald. She died in my hand – it took 20 minutes or so, the actual process, which fascinated my writerly eye, even as it broke my mama’s heart.

We had a funeral. I found turtle poems on the web for the kids to read. I struggled with this, thinking nothing quite good enough, but I did not foresee the brilliance of Boy, who when he was reading the poems turned them into a moment of drama almost equal to that scene in Four Weddings And A Funeral, where the Auden poem is read at the funeral. (Hooray!!! for the ruling TODAY in the CA Supreme Court, by which marriage is extended as a fundamental civil liberty to all who wish to marry. I’m so happy for my twice-removed sisters-in-law!!)

And then, to compound the brilliance, Boy gave a spontaneous eulogy in which he described the meaning of the little turtle’s life, in the context of her few short weeks and what they were to our family and how he personally felt about her brief and flickering time with us. OMG, but it was an astonishing and rich performance – Royal Shakespeare Company Youth Corps, are you out there and listening?

ANYWAY – so now we have the solitary Serpentine, and he seems quite happy to be on his own, judged by the nightly swooping and circling through the water, so that his shell goes bink against the side of the tank. He’s now kind of huge, in fact, he’s onto his third tank (4 figures of expenditure after the initial eight hundred…). We know he’s male because of his looooong fingernails (all to do with mating.) And he’s totally spooked by us all, leaping off his bits n pieces of tank furniture and plunging into the water the moment someone comes by.

AND… he also watches me.

He does so with an intelligence that I find quite compelling. I move in front of his tank, and he chooses various viewpoints from which to examine me. Tonight I scratched my nose, up close to him, and the action absorbed him, watching my movements. Was he trying to figure out what was happening – what nose-scratching might mean in turtle-world? I talk to him and I’m fairly sure he hears my voice, both above and through the water. He’s pretty interactive, and it’s cool hanging out in front of his tank because of that. He’s such a jolly little chap, playing in the streams of water that come from his filter, or sunbathing on his stone platform beneath his lamps. Sometimes he knocks against the tank, if he wants food, or even attention. He certainly likes to make inquiring noises when I’m meditating in my living room – they’re like this:

?????

All of this animal obsession in our household feeds into The Dragons Of Ordinary Farm. It’s late at night. I’m listening to the intense Fatboy Slim: Live On Brighton Beach, which Tad bought me for Xmas, and it makes me miss London. And now I’m off to get another glass of wine.

I loved this correspondence – that’s why it’s here.

Begin message:
From: Daniel Adezio
Date: May 14, 2008 5:51:06 PM PDT
Subject: Leah Adezio

Dear Mr. Williams, my name is Daniel Adezio. I know this is very late in doing but I just found out about your tribute to my mom in Aquaman. You see, ever since she died I haven't been able to bring myself to read Aquaman. I was in the Wikipedia today looking up Garth when I came across the character you made for my mom. At first I couldn't believe it until more searching uncovered the truth. I want to thank you so much for immortalizing her. Especially in a way she would have loved. Thank you once again.

Daniel Adezio

Begin message:
From: Tad Williams
Date: May 14, 2008 6:37:10 PM PDT
Subject: Re: Leah Adezio

Daniel, I wish I'd known your mom in person instead of through her devotion to the Aquaman characters. Everyone I talked to had so many lovely things to say about her that she must have been a very special woman. Making a character for her was just a small thing to do, but I'm glad you found out about it and I'm really happy that you approve. Thank you for telling me so.

All best wishes,
Tad

We are crazy working hard. Slow on the blog front because of that. Here, as rapidly as I can, are me blog thoughts of the moment, in pieces, because all other work can’t be, so to speak.

For both of us, it’s writing-frenzy phase. You have to build up to this stage of things, you’re completely absorbed/in love/in dreams/down the rabbit hole, you have to be the despair of your friends who buy you tickets for stuff and you never even return their calls, the only things happening are loving the kids, gassing the gophers and work work work work work. (And a bit of yoga.)

We’re listening to the new Portishead album, “3rd.” It’s beyond radical. It’s extreme, extraordinary.

Am obsessing about the work of Gabriel Shaffer, whose work is somewhere between outside, self-taught and lo-brow.

In the vault I’m posting a grab (if I can) of a work by Yinka Shonibare, entitled “The Sleep Of Reason (America).” I swear this is Gideon Tinker from Ordinary Farm.

Dinner is currently an entertaining time round in here in pretty grizzly fashion because Tad persuades Daughter to eat her carrots by providing the death narrative of the carrots. You can’t catch me, I’m the carrotbread man…

“Meanwhile, it's worth remembering Stewart Brand's meme: ‘Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive...That tension will not go away’” – this is quoted in the LJNDawson.com newsletter The Big Picture – and it’s an excellent, nay, CRUCIAL, site for any publishing professionals concerned with technology and all that’s new out there.

Current household joke whenever life kicks us in the butt : CHARLIE BIT ME! (Cryingly funny...)

Reading: The Brief Miraculous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) because his short fiction is mind-blowing, and the new Nancy Farmer, The Land of the Silver Apples, because I loved her The Sea of Trolls. Both a bit disappointing on the beginnings, but sure both will prove amazing. Just finished Twilight. Yeah, I get it. Admired it muchly.

Thanks to Jessa Crispin at Bookslut, proof of the fine minds of graffiti artists in Northern California: This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming "ISBN 486-28495-6” for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.