Stone South Wind - I
A Journey to the Beginning
Prologue
The Correspondence of Marchessa Newberry – 9/27/2056 – Bennington, Vermont
Submission! Heaven's what a word - to go from one's inner thoughts; to public, like a frog. Is this what the American population, calls an elementary education? I do not think you know me, because, at our last gathering, nothing had come to my lips to say - and because I have brown eyes - and yellow skin - despite being named Newberry. That is all right, it is my lot in life to be unknown even by people who should know me. (I also have black hair with very little gray in it so far – a gift from my mother. And a gift inherited from some distant ancestor.)
Dug this up after Susie II mentioned that there were pieces that were not attached – and asked for all concerned to check any place where papers might be stored. Sorry, that is “Pennell Pittman's Journal from The Civil War”, and a bit more.
When I came back to my house – another mysterious change from the death of my two parents – and set alone in the attic, with dozens of papers, and searched through them. Most had no value at all, even to me, but I came to this package of papers which had been printed out on an inkjet printer – and had no markings of who actually typed them up. And a photograph of my great-grandfather and the woman who was his wife for 60 of those perturbations. The inkjet printer meant to me the copies were old because we have not had a printer like that in at least 25 years.
At least.
But the secret is that at least some of them are from my great-grandfather, and he probably had copies of Pennell Pittman when he wrote up his notes – before they were transcribed by someone else. They must have passed through my father's hands, who typed up some of the writing – but the inner notations were probably not his. I know this because I have a bookshelf downstairs of all of the books which my great-grandfather left behind for my father. The pieces might have been my grandmother, who has been dead for quite a long time.
Clicking the submit button is larger than you think because these papers go from a private pool of thoughts to something anyone can read, and decide for themselves – for example, which is older than Pennell Pittman, which he wrote himself, which is from the physicist, and which can be dispensed as of later origin.
I am sure that someone has a statistical package that will lead us in the right direction – but that is someone else's contribution.
This is my hope, this is my prayer – that someone will look at this and decide how much should be in the book that the group of you are writing on the physicist – and which can be lost as murmurings to history that have been ignored. A new generation of Americans – which have not yet forgotten the other mother tongues that we have – such as Hindi, or Korean.
Just as once upon a time, there were other forgotten mother tongues, which only shadowed the great American English.
That way, I can go back to a figure in the distance – which nobody knows, because nobody cares. It must be rather dull intown, I think I will take a trip to Paris – without the S the way people in France pronounced it – and get out of the imagination, and four kitchen walls that will never have their white wallpaper removed.
Leave this to you.
‘Chessa