St. Elmo?
Another AI-free tale from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths
St. Elmo?
Having mentioned Mr. Stringfellow I realize I’ve probably aroused some curiosity among the more perspicacious of my readers, and who am I to deny anyone satisfaction? Not I. Not I.
The immediate question on most of your minds, obviously, is whether Stringfellow is an illeist. In point of fact, he is. Just like his red-furred namesake on Sesame Street®. Which, we have to admit [do we not?] makes conversation kind of strange. Kind of strange.
“Stringfellow believes this,” or “Stringfellow thinks that,” is one thing when offered up by an impartial observer, but when it emanates from the, so to speak, “horse’s mouth,” it begins to feel otherworldly.
Just imagine it. [I am at the moment.] A romantic interlude between Lou and Elmore. (I know I previously characterized him as somewhat more psychologically balanced than Lawrence, but only in, more or less, one dimension—the aforementioned disregard for hypocoristic abbreviation of his name.)
We find our (now former) couple post-diddle (which they did, as some do) cuddling in afterglow (or state of exhaustion, depending on how one wants to frame it and also, one notes, depending on the level of exertion exerted).
Lou says, “Let’s get married, Elmo honey.”
Elmore says, “Stringfellow has reservations.”
Lou says, “About marriage?”
Elmore: “Stringfellow looks at matrimony as something of a Rubik’s Cube. A puzzle to be solved, resolved, brought around, not leapt upon or into.”
Lou: “But you say you love me.”
Elmore: “Stringfellow does indeed. Stringfellow thinks the world of you. Stringfellow is, in point of fact, wild about you. Wild, wild, wild.”
Lou: “Then why not marry me?”
Elmore: “Stringfellow will take it under thoughtful consideration.”
And so on. One is led to wonder what she saw in him, and it really is no shock that things just didn’t work out. Hence Lou’s current single status.1
The name does leave one puzzling, does it not?
We know for a fact that it isn’t a made up name, like, say, “Snaprat,” [If this doesn’t ring a bell you’ve been jumping around in these stories.] because we know that John Stringfellow is a historic personage who built at least one more or less working model of an actual flying machine. Though the obvious counter argument would be that every name is “made up” at some point, and, in that case, what did Stringfellow’s ancestors do to merit that one?
It strikes me that a stringer—i.e., one who strings, might come to be known as a string-fellow. Was someone in the family past a kite flyer?2 A yo-yo maker?3 A luthier?4 An Italian trading-bead hobbyist? A fisherman tying up his catch? A first- or second- on the school team? A mild-mannered correspondent for a great metropolitan newspaper? [Look! Up in the sky!]
It’s really pretty astonishing, when you stop to think, how many definitions “stringer” has acquired since its first use in the 14thcentury. It isn’t this way in, say, French. In that lovely romantic language a stringer is referred to as a “raidisseur,” which reverse translates into “stiffener,” clearly a reference to a piece of lumber. They don’t say raidisseur when they mean correspondant or correspondante. A fisherman hangs his catch on a limon de poisson. And so on.
You see? Much less confusing. And words like raidisseur or poisson just roll off the tongue, liquid and languorous.
Where were we? Oh, right, I’m supposed to be telling you about Elmo. There is always more to the story.
Elmo is a bit of a fire-bug, truth be told. He’s been that way since he was just a kid, and that candle didn’t burn out, as say for Elton’s “Norma Jean” (whose “candle burned out long before her legend ever did.”) Fortunately for more people than we can accurately state at this late date, Elmo’s skill at kindling flames fell well short of his sinister ambitions. As a fire starter he was no thaumaturge. It is great good fortune that he was never a Boy Scout. Only two houses were totally consumed, though I guess we’d need to count the feed store in his list of successes. (This is deeply ironic, given that Louise Tenenbaum is a firefighter.)
(If she’d only known!)
I was present the one time he was actually caught in the act, at 15, trying to burn down my neighbor’s woodworking shop. He got a very stern scolding, rest assured.
In his clearly fevered brain he is inclined to refer to his efforts as St. Elmo’s Fire.5 But he is, again “clearly,” not anywhere close to a saint.6 [It feels a little odd to be writing this at 2 a.m. on All Saints Day 2020, to tell the truth.7] Still, I think you deserve to be warned.
If Elmore Stringfellow is in the neighborhood, mind the garden hose.
I’m saddened to report that his “mischief” was inspired by his assigned chores as a boy in an unenlightened household. Rather than carting their garbage to an appropriate Place of Disposal—living in a rural area without regular trash collection— they burned it. And when Elmo was of an age to—at least in theory—be trusted with matches, that became one of his weekly tasks.
He’d empty the wastebaskets into a paper grocery bag and collect the plastic [plastic!] kitchen bag, which contained tin cans, bottles, meat wrappers, empty cottage cheese containers, dry ballpoint pens, twist-ties, fast-food styrofoam clamshell burger containers and worse, and go out back to the 50 gallon oil drum with holes punched in for air flow and set the whole mess on fire.
As you can well imagine, the smell attending the combustion of that admixture was simply horrible, but Elmo loved the job; the snap, crackle and pop; the flames; the transubstantiation of matter into ash … and, smell being one of those psychological triggers … perhaps the most powerful … to this day the odor emanating from combustion of mixed materials wafts him back into childhood bliss. He sets fires for the odeur.8
I don’t think I told you this before, but it bears repeating.
In 11th grade I had a bit of a crush on a girl. [Hey, it happens to the best of us.] It was a short-lived thing: We only had a very few necking sessions, heavy petting, but not that heavy. I mean, we didn’t diddle or go anywhere remotely close to that. So, maybe, medium petting? I do seem to recall once nibbling her ear.9 But the thing is, she used a type of shampoo—I do not know the brand—that had a particular and quite distinctive scent.
All that receded in memory, as such things will.
About 45 years later, while shopping for groceries in the pet food aisle (my youthful “petting” having resolved into cat fancy), a woman walked past me as I was debating whether to get a bag of “natural” or “indoor” kibbles—oh my, the decision trees we inhabit—and that smell carried me all the way back, in an instant, to those times on the sofa in that rumpus room …
See? I came this close to throwing my arms around the woman, hugging her to me and passionately kissing her, nibbling her ear, et al., ancient adolescent verve nearly overwhelming my long-established good behavior and mature reserve.
[I made that last bit up. All that actually happened was a fit of wistful remembrance.]
The power of scent is why we have phrases like “I followed my nose,” though that’s also a truism unless you’re backing into things. Evolutionarily it makes sense that our noses should be pretty sensitive, since determining whether something is non-toxicly edible—or whether, say, a very large cat has been marking your surrounds—can be a life or death matter. You reject the chicken wing that smells “a little off” or you look around for large paw prints and you survive to sniff another day. If specific recall of the brown-eyed girl you kissed once upon a puppy love comes along for the ride, well, there you are. They say Dog Only Nose, but that’s not so. We do too.
And then, when the burn drum waxed fullish—due to the tin cans, glass bottles and what not that didn’t combust—plus the irreducible ash, Elmo’s intermittent chore was to dump the contents in the creek. In the creek!
It’s really no wonder he turned out the way he did, given that sort of parental guidance. I have to wonder what happened, and when, to a family that once sported an inventor of some minor renown to reduce them to such a sorry state.
Then again, we can’t know, at this remove, whether John Stringfellow’s intent was to crash his airplane into a wall.10
If that was, in fact, the case … well, it explains a lot.
Elmo’s aberrant behavior has also caused more than one forest fire, most notably during a drought in 2003 when he was camping over the July 4th weekend and fired off about $300 worth of skyrockets and Roman candles.
Something upward of 8,000 acres were torched in that go-round. Sadly, from his perspective, the smell was principally that of combusting wood, so the thrill was greatly diminished.
I hasten to add that Elmore Stringfellow is not all bad. Like Lou he is also a firefighter, which is how they met. He has helped douse hundreds of blazes, resuscitated heart attack victims, even rescued kittens up trees. [Making him a saint as well as a sinner? I am hugely in favor of rescuing kittens, though why they are outdoors in the first place escapes me.] This apparent contradiction is more common than one might imagine.
According to our friends at Wikipedia®:
“Firefighter arson is a persistent phenomenon involving a minority of firefighters who are also active arsonists. Fire- fighting organizations are aware of this problem. Some of the offenders seem to be motivated by boredom, or by the prospect of receiving attention for responding to the fires they have set. It has been reported that roughly 100 U.S. firefighters are convicted of arson each year.”
It isn’t clear whether Elmo’s particular attraction to the smell of burning plastic—which is, of course, the overarching odor of mixed combustion—is a significant factor in the phenom. He may be a one-off rara avis and like our friend Ambopteryx, bound sooner or later to hit the wall of social contumely.
Co-workers at Station Three have learned to live with his illeism. Arson, I imagine, would be a bridge too far.
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Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [172[ See Footnote 171 if you skipped ahead.
2 [173] flyer cerf-volant
3 [174] fabricant de yoyo
4 [175] Etc.
5 [176] Which, as you well know, is another thing entirely, being the blue glow that sometimes shows up at the tip of a sharp pointed object such as a mast, spire, chimney, aircraft wing or nose cone, an atmospheric phenom, usually seen during thunderstorms when an electrical field causes ionization of air molecules. Also sometimes seen on the tips of cattle horns, though this did not occur in the exciting cover story of Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo, (Brave Ulysses Books, 2019.) But it could have if I’d known about it at the time I was writing that one.
6 [177] St. Elmo, otherwise known as Erasmus of Formia, is the patron saint of sailors and abdominal pain. He preached around Rome in the late 200s and ran into some opposition from the head office. Emperors Diocletian and Maximian Hercules had him repeatedly captured and tortured only to see him repeatedly escape. On one occasion he was first beaten and whipped, then coated with pitch and set afire. He survived and escaped again, only to be recaptured, re-tortured, and have his intestines pulled out and wrapped around a windlass. This proved fatal. I think it’s a lesson for us all.
7 [178] True fact. Nov. 1, 2020
8 [179] The French would be appalled, I feel sure.
9 [180] Evident tooths are never far from mind.
10 [181] See page 118. [In the print edition.]
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Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
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