And If It Were For Warday, Martha And I Would Never Have Met.

This book is respectfully dedicated to October 27, 1988, the last full day of the old world.

So begins the Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka novel Warday (ISBN 0030707315) set five years after a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Needless to say when the parties are fighting with nuclear weapons you want to be somewhere else when the shooting starts ... but the authors insert themselves into the novel and make it a documentary of interviews, documents, and statistics of the post-war world where there are more survivors than you might think, and quite a few make a good living ... but still, it's The Day After (an NBC movie that came out about the previous year, 1983, also about the aftermath of nuclear war) writ large.

It's too bad there are so many live particles still around the North Central States. I wish we could have seen the Dakotas. A trainman put it very vividly when I asked to be ticketed to Rapid City or Minot. He consulted his timetable, then looked up at me. "Them places are gone," he said.

My wife Martha's born and raised here in Minot (home to Minot Air Force Base which would make it a prime target), and in addition she'd have been eleven when Warday happened, whereas in Florida at the time I would be within a month and a half of seventeen. Lest it seem I'm being unnecessarily morbid, here's a list of some things from Dates In History that did happen October 28, 1988 (a Friday):

• October 28, 1988 "Jurors award $147,000 to Tacoma parishioner seduced by her minister"
• October 28, 1988 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gives $10 million to U Wash library
• October 28, 1988 The French drug manufacturer Roussel Uclaf states that it will resume distribution of the so-called abortion drug RU-486. 

I confess, I did always wonder what the "RU" meant. Am I?

The last two days I've had to stop by Martha's workplace before dropping Sarah and Jeffrey off at their grandparents' place. Yesterday we had to go in back where Martha and her coworkers Becky and Steve were working on assembling new telephone directories for Trinity -- and she's even made the edition as "Printing Services Assistant"! -- and the kids wanted to help, and for a few minutes they did. I even got into the act because I felt like I was just standing around. THIS morning they were reaching a file in a top drawer and getting into a fight over who got it first or something like that ... I'd stepped out to the van because I needed to get to work and hoped they'd follow me, but it took ten minutes for them to do so. It's ok ... I called and left my stepmother Susan in Florida a message -- I hope to hear from her again, I've been terrible at keeping in touch.

I admit it, I didn't expect to get into Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (ISBN 9781455510184) the way I did -- essentially, the author once again inserts himself into this 2012 revision of the nineteenth century by relating the contents of a journal the sixteenth president of the United States is supposed to have kept about his hunt for vampires ... yes, the fanged ones. Apparently they've been (or had been, according to the novel) here in the Americas since the first English settlements and are acting especially on behalf on the South in what would become the Civil War. So it's the headlines behind the headlines ... seriously, it only took a few hours put all together. Will I come back to it the way I come back to George Orwell's 1984 which turned sixty-six years old yesterday? (The title's from a simple inversion of when Orwell planned to publish it in '48; life happened -- most likely the TB he died of -- and it didn't come out until the following year.) We'll see, I'm getting younger every day.

And today is also Donald Duck's eighty-first birthday, David