A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out …

… and the rest of that opening sentence for Part II of T. S. Eliot's poem “The Waste Land” covers thirteen more lines, so I will stop here and let you read the rest yourself! As I said yesterday, without realizing it in the late 1980s, with my idea for a group of heroes – Lifeline – in a world where the American Civil War had never ended, assembling first in the Confederate States of America and then traveling the world in search of allies and funding for a revolution … oh wait, that hasn't happened yet; first the rebels known as Gameplan, Belladonna, Touchstone, Flux, and Oasis get defeated on their third attempt by several mercenaries hired by the CSA from the genetically enhanced Breed based out of our world's Australia. And either the head of or another one of those mercenaries is the woman sitting on the throne. I think. It's been a while since I've returned to this dream scape of mine.

If you were offered a cure for yourself, or at least what some people perceive as wrong with you, would you take it if it meant you would “fit in”? That's the dilemma facing Lou Arrendale, the protagonist and narrator of Elizabeth Moon's novel The Speed of Dark (ISBN 0345481399) in our near-future world where autism like he has can either be corrected in the womb or, if an adult chooses, can be corrected through a surgical procedure that will require … well, relearning everything that makes you who you are (or made you who you were) minus the autism. Moon's got an autistic son herself, so I hope she'd have some perspective writing this firsthand and, if I may confess, I found myself in one or two places questioning if I were autistic! If the only qualification is that you see the world in patterns more than an “average” person does and perhaps are not the most sociable person in the neighborhood, then I'd question whether we're either all autistic or none of us.

And I'm sure that I am overly simplifying the matter, for my ignorance of autism – other than knowing people who are – is considerable. Nay, vast. Likewise today's voting for a school bond issue to pass here in Minot which got voted down last December. You can appreciate what Minot School Board is saying, that we need to improve the schools that exist and be ready to build new schools for anticipated students coming in to reduce overcrowding … but the tradeoff in higher property taxes in this first of THREE coming bond issues. It sounds simple which side to vote on today, but it wasn't. I can only go with my gut. (Incidentally, both Martha and I – she took Sarah and Jeffrey to school and went to vote at the city auditorium afterward – were checked in to vote by the same person, who turned out to be Martha's fifth grade teacher at Sunnyside!) And most of the time – at least, more so than I used to – I trust that I know what I'm doing.

The kids and I were home last night eating whatever we could find in the house; I was considering getting something and baking it at home with some extra money I had from a young lady I helped, but Sarah and Jeffrey would not agree on what to buy so we went home with nothing. Which is ok, for as I said we had food at the house. Martha after getting off work had planned to buy groceries to refill our cupboard anyway. And she did – really impressive what you can do when there are a lot of supermarkets and grocery sellers in town with everybody trying to be the lowest priced and highest quality! Competition is good, very good, and I need to participate in more than I do, I'll say it. Weight's keeping steady, I'm getting better at finding my kids when they play hide-and-seek with me, and Jeffrey's skill at Feudal is fantastic!

Checkmate, David