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    That Glorious Child, Fynn
    That Glorious Child, Fynn
    That Glorious Child, Fynn
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    That Glorious Child, Fynn

    By Jonathan Miller

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    Lynn Strongin's book, "That Glorious Child, Flynn," is a cornucopia of stories about children north, south and Irish. The heartbeat is a special needs child, Fynn. In one sense he is one of the new indigo children, exceptionally gifted as well as otherworldly: smaller than other children, a mystical boy born with milk white curls which mysteriously turn black as coal in early childhood. It is also a love story between two women, Fynn's mother, Megan, who is haunted by her strange child, and Erika, born in post world war II Europe. Primarily, this book is an interwoven theme of how Fynn develops in his very specially imagined world. A poignant sub-theme is the friendship and love between the two women, Megan and Erika, expressed in a series of letters written to each other like bursts of star-fire. Open the pages of this book and fall into a tale that shows what happens to alter Fynn's fate and place in the world as he suffers through a violent event in his mother's life; indeed, a tragedy that alters the course of all their lives forever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCasa de Snapdragon
    Release dateSep 10, 2011
    ISBN9781937240936
    That Glorious Child, Fynn
    Author

    Jonathan Miller

    Jonathan Miller is the Secretary for the Kentucky Finance and Administration Cabinet. Prior to that he served as the State Treasurer of Kentucky. He has been named an emerging national leader by groups as diverse as the Democratic Leadership Council, the United Jewish Communities, and the Aspen Institute. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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      Book preview

      That Glorious Child, Fynn - Jonathan Miller

      That Glorious Child, Fynn

      Stories of Children, North, South, & Irish

      Greater Than, Lesser Than

      Lynn Strongin

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2010, Lynn Strongin. All rights reserved.

      Cover illustration Thin Air copyright © Mark Heine. All rights reserved.

      All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or recording without the prior written permission of Lynn Strongin unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. Address inquiries to Permissions, Casa de Snapdragon Publishing LLC, 12901 Bryce Court NE, Albuquerque, NM 87112.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      That glorious child, Fynn / Lynn Strongin.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-0-9845681-1-6 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-9845681-2-3 (hardcover)

      I. Title.

      PS3569.T72T47 2010

      813'.54--dc22

      2010047007

      This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      20101117

      Casa de Snapdragon Publishing LLC

      A traditional, independent publishing company

      Contents

      Windowbox to Accommodate the World

      I. Windowbox

      II. To Accommodate the World

      That Glorious Child, Fynn (A Caution Lamb)

      I. Fynn

      II. River Rising (When Human Comfort Lets You Down)

      III. Re-visiting New York

      IV. Fynn at Moon

      V. Prairie Insomnia

      VI. Insomnia in Appalachia

      VII. House Before Curfew

      VIII. After the First Death, There is No Other

      IX. Requiescat in Pace

      You Can’t Swallow the South Whole

      I. Lost Ruby

      II. Extinction

      III. Creoles

      IV. Kitty (A Sunday Story)

      Vermeer’s Yellow (Tulip-Fire)

      Prologue

      I. Honey & Apples (His Yellows)

      II. Brother Andres (Ann)

      III. Rembrandt’s Christ

      IV. Parchment

      About Lynn Strongin

      Recent Books by Casa de Snapdragon

      WINDOWBOX TO ACCOMMODATE THE WORLD

      To the Memories of Beth Nelson and Dr. Virginia Richmond,

      WE CREATE ALL OUT OF SPIRITUAL PAIN.

      ~ JACK YEATS, FATHER OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

      This book is dedicated in loving thanks to Jan & Art Brennan

      LYNN STRONGIN

      I. WINDOWBOX

      With her one arm that worked, she’d hauled two fifteen-pound bags of topsoil from her car to the planter to make a window box.

      It’s not that I lack strength, she’d told her friend Sophie, it’s that my left arm stopped workin’ long ago. Once, she’d had the confidence that perfect health brings.

      The financial strife was not chronic.

      Her impoverishment had come about gradually: family health had eaten up reserves. But she hadn’t always lived so lean to the bone: when Sophie met Nan, she had been strip-mined. She called it a setback. A few years ago, she’d owned a home in the fashionable part of the city where she sold real estate: her home was 4,000square feet with a lush, lovely garden. She now lived in a three-story modest apartment house in the same good neighborhood, but it was a walk-up with just a swatch of the bay if one craned the neck out the window a certain way. She’d worked for the Ministry of Finance and still had friends with double-barreled English names. She’d been to this club and that club—invited for some occasion. Particularly last autumn she seemed to be attending a number of funerals. She cut her own hair. She held herself well, five-foot-seven, with work worn hands and feet. Her teeth were brown from nicotine, but her smile was wide, Irish, and she gave the sense of being impeccably clean. Her voice was low and strong with a slight burr to it and more an English accent than an Irish brogue. She kept no bank account but simply paid her monthly bills—rent, gas, phone—by cash at the bank. She kept her cash in an envelope at home labeled Faith which she hid in the bookshelves. She’d kept little of her wardrobe which had once been hand-tailored by a seamstress in London and then Toronto who found nothing like the clothes they wanted so had them made to order. What she had kept was good: a white Edwardian pantsuit with long jacket and small buttons which set off her height well. She was five-foot-seven. She had a brown Zhivago coat to die for, a pair of soft leather boots in addition to two silk suits, one for summer, one for winter. The one for summer was blue - the color of the sky. The one for winter was ink, navy. Whatever she wore she wore with flair, the way she shoved back her Amelia Earhart dark glasses over her shock of white silver hair with bangs. She’d fling on a scarf for an accent. For dress down, she wore jogging pants and a sweatshirt that read Bourbon Street, Louisiana.

      When she met Sophie at the local sandwich shop, she’d just packed up her daughter and four children to return to Great Britain. It was the loneliest hour of my life. I didn’t feel depressed—only abandoned. I mean I can’t pack up eight rooms, four children and all the accumulated stuff of twenty years.

      She couldn’t, but—it’s just what she did, with her one arm that worked.

      She was white as a veil when they met: pale as a heavy smoker, and with that deep laugh.

      Packing up Noddy and Big Ears, putting all that furniture in storage, signing all those papers—she couldn’t, but she did. And now her family was all gone, on the other side of the Atlantic, the side where she’d seen the war strike down on London when she was seven.

      A man who had seen her recently- a young man, called her a real babe. She liked it and was amused at the same time.

      In the old days, before Sophie knew her, Nan had run that home with four thousand square feet and ten rooms. That was when her two Irish Setters, Patience and Firestorm, had been part of the picture. She simply said once, money had flowed like water; then, family health problems had eaten up the fortune. She’d given up a large house, two dogs, all of the furniture brought over on the boat from England as well as a lush garden.’

      ~

      The brainstorm of the window box struck just this summer.

      With her one arm that worked, she’d hauled two fifteen-pound bags of topsoil from the nursery to her car and then to the yard to create a window box. She felt triumphant with this sudden, mighty exertion.

      Her victory garden.

      It had impatiens, little lobelia, yellow and orange mums. It isn’t big but it’s cheerful and smelly, she summed it up. She left her computer, with its squeeze ball of black-and-white to relieve tension in the hand, a miniature soccer ball. She had turned her back on her right-angled window overlooking a swatch of the ocean in the grey building whose trim made her sad—and drove to the nearby nursery. Soon, it would indeed be well with her soul.

      She disliked what old age did—did to her: it reshaped the clear contours of her face, blurring them. Her hair once jet black (she had hazel eyes like all seven kids in her family back in Ireland) her hair had turned bright white. She was still black Irish but the black had been succeeded by white to blind. Little things irritated her, such as her daughter phoning from London.

      What kind of bubble-wrap shall I send your birthday perfume in, Mum? she asked and Could you please get me some of those how-to draw books you got the kids when they were young, as well as Graham cracker crumbs. I want to make cheese cake and the crumbs alone cost fifteen pounds in London!

      Of course, she’d look for these things.

      Look well after yourself, Mum, her daughter signed off. Nan retorted, better look after my temper.

      She hadn’t the strength to pack them all off—four grandchildren and her daughter with twenty years accumulation of childhood: Big Ears and Noddy. The very ones she’d knitted: but she had so done. What a great, dark, heroic winter it had been.

      She rose wearily to splash cold water over her eyes.

      Then, there was poor Colin. Just today, she’d learned the small-set butcher who cut their meat year in and year out had had a heart attack on Monday. A mild or severe one? At any rate, he was back Thursday talking about it: there were bills to pay, the rent was due as December rounded the calendar again—one more onslaught of the Christmas season. The holly and the ivy were already hung around his cheese-case and cold cuts.

      She gazed at the busy-card, rabbits in apartments cozily decked out: holes in a large tree trunk, like a piece of unscrolled wrapping paper from England, a gift from her grandson, Ian. Right beside the picture of her old cat, Baubles, who was Siamese and had bitten the dust the year the family moved back to London.

      Small things bothered her these days and she wasn’t in love—with whom? Then there was the simple matter of an oil-change for her car. The man at the gas station charged her one-hundred-and twenty-five dollars. She decided to make him account for himself. It wasn’t a cheap month for her. If he didn’t explain she’d tell him she was an investigative reporter, a phrase she kept to hand.

      Driving home she stopped at a second nursery where she bought two more pots of lobelia and broke down buying a beehive of impatiens. This was what hatched the idea in her brain of building up a whole garden corner there in back of the building with its wood-roofed car shed and insipid green trim. She remembered London’s Pride—and her own: thru cracks in the pavement, thru rubble strewn from houses exploded by bombs, it grew, up toward the sky everywhere, called the pride of London. During those days of the Blitz when she was only seven, she remembered men without faces, fighter-pilots who had been so badly burned their faces scared Nan; yet she forced herself to look and try to smile. There was a bandage with two holes where a nose ought to have been

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