Departure Changi

 Ovidia--every other Tuesday

I'm in Changi airport waiting for my flight to London--first stage to Crimefest Bristol!

There are certainly worse places to try to scramble together a post--Changi Airport just regained it's 'world's best airport' title after losing it during the pandemic.

I think a lot of that's due to the policy of putting in lots of greenery. There are over 600,000 plants found across the main terminals of Changi Airport today!

Plants and water ease the stress of travel and are good 'feng shui' too!

This is the water lily garden.

During the Covid shut down, these garden displays were maintained for the morale of the frontliners who were still required to show up for work.

Actually the first Singapore airport to be declared the “finest airport in the world” was the Kallang Airport when it was opened in 1937.

Built on the former mangrove swamps of Kallang Basin, Kallang Airport was modern for its day--a two-storey terminal building with a viewing gallery and a circular control tower in the middle, covered airplane hangars on either side of a circular grass landing field. It also had a slipway for seaplanes.

But the really memorable experience today was meeting a lady in transit from South Africa to Japan who'd lost her phone. One of the worst nightmares of traveling. She couldn't contact the driver she'd arranged to pick her up in Japan, she couldn't reach her husband in South Africa to let him know she was okay... She left some of her bags with us while she and other people (both staff and other passengers) retraced her steps--Skytrain, loo, coffee counter, lost and found... but nothing. 

And she had put it in airplane mode for her flight so she couldn't even call herself!

Luckily there's a happy ending. Another transit passenger made her do the rounds again, asking instead of just looking and it turned out the coffee counter barista had found it and put it away. He made her show him she could unlock it (fingerprint) before he returned it to her. 

He said to her (joking... I think!) 'Madam, you must be more careful, have you learned a lesson?' and she said, 'I've learned Singapore is the best place to lose a phone!'

I suppose there are worse things to be known for!

I'll write more when I've got to Crimefest--this time what I'm looking forward to most is meeting Stan, Zoe and Caro! 

Herbert Dennis Cutler

Annamaria on Monday

Who?

 

Well, if I don't tell you, in my experience you won’t easily find out who he was,

 - certainly not by googling him.  The only response I got about Herbert Dennis Cutler was from the British National Archives in Krew .  

You can get copies of a few records that look like this:

 

 Yours for three pounds-fifty each.

 

To spare us all such expenditures, I will tell you what I know.

In 1914 and 15, the Brits in East Africa had a big problem.  Since the moment war was declared, the Konigsberg, a powerful low-draught German warship, had been wrecking havoc with their blockade of German East Africa to their south.  And by the end of 1914, their Gerry nemesis was hiding in the Rufiji River delta, where the water was too shallow for the typical Royal Navy ship to go.  But the K's guns were powerful enough to reach British targets.

After months of trying to block the Konigberg's escape route or fire shells that would reach it, Admiral King-Hall had a bright idea.  Suppose an aeroplane could drop a bomb on the bloody beast.

 And so Equatorial Africa's first Naval Air Service was born.  

King-Hall started to search for an aviator and a plane.  Enter Herbert Dennis Cutler, a Londoner who was earning a meager living, barnstorming in Durban, South Africa.  He came with his own plane - a Curtiss, American-made hydroplane and most important, his fearless attitude.

Planes in those days were made of wood and cloth.  Pilots sat in the wicker chair with their legs hanging out.  Cutler's was a rear-mounted, single-engine job with pontoons instead of wheels.

Our man, Herbert quickly accepted a commission in the Royal Navy Reserve, loaded his plane onto a supply ship, and headed north.  No one, not King-Hall, not Cutler himself had any idea that he would become the very first pilot ever to attack a warship.

In late December 1914, he took off for the Rufiji with a home-made gelatin bomb, but given the difficulties of staying aloft in the hot-sticky Equatorial air, the heavy bomb was too much for the tiny engine to carry.  Cutler had to return to the airstrip immediately, leave the bomb behind, and make his first mission objective one of reconnaissance: to find the Konigsberg's exact position.  Unfortunately, he had barely gotten his craft above the trees when the radiator started to leak.  Cutler managed an emergency landing on a small river island out of reach of K's big guns.  He was taking a refreshing dip in the river when a rescue party on a steam launch got to him.

The broken radiator could've ended the mission right there, were it not for an imaginative sailor on one the British ships, who remembered reading that Henry Ford and the maker of the airplane, David Curtis were on friendly terms.  There were Ford motor cars in Mombasa, and perhaps a radiator from a car would work for the plane. With a little bit of adaptation on a car radiator, Cutler was back in business.

Cutler made three more missions, all scouting expeditions. In the end, he located exactly where the Konigsberg was hiding. He made his last attempt under fire from Germans on the ground. By then, everyone was pretty sure, that – given the overheated air – the tiny plane, which wasn't much more than a kite, would never be able to carry bombs. Cutler crash landed on his last mission.  A rescue party found his plane, but not Cutler in it or nearby.  All assumed that the intrepid pilot had drowned or been eaten by a crocodile.

It wasn't until the war was over that the truth came to light.  Cutler had managed to swim to shore, was captured by the Germans, and remained their prisoner until after the armistice in 1918. Nobody really knows how he spent his time after that, but his death is recorded. He died in London in 1963.

The Konigsberg was eventually destroyed, but that's a story for another day. 

THIRD UPDATE: Love Letters to the "Murder, He Wrote" Husband

 

Jeff–Saturday

 

I had planned to be back on Mykonos by now, posting photos showing preparations for the onslaught of summer.  But a horrid stomach bug sidelined my plans and delayed my departure until next week.  That left me to search for a topic to discuss.  I found it in a newspaper article prominently featured in Greek and UK newspapers.  

 

It’s the latest development in a story I first covered twenty-three months ago reporting on a murder so horrendous that it shook the Greek people to the core. [See, Murder, He Wrote for an extensive description of events.] So much so, that Greek National TV interrupted coverage of the Euro football championships to broadcast details of the confession.

 

It involved a 20-year-old British-Greek wife and mother, Caroline Crouch, murdered on May 11, 2021 in the presence of her pilot/flight instructor husband, Babis Anagnostopoulos, and 11-month-old baby.  The original story, as told by the husband, placed the blame on a band of brutal home invasion thieves claimed to have entered their suburban Athens home at random.  He accused them of being Eastern European foreigners—so ruthless that they also strangled the couple’s dog.  The crime spread fear across the nation over the potential risk to each family’s safety in its own home.

 

On June 16, 2021, after eight hours of police questioning, Husband confessed to the murder, claiming his wife told him that she was planning to leave him and take their baby with her before he “blurred” and killed her. In other words, a crime of passion, not premeditated.

Thirteen months ago, I updated that original post [See, UPDATE: Murder, He Wrote], describing in detail a new twist asserted by Husband on the verge of trial.  He now claimed to have acted “in a fit of rage” over Caroline’s “mistreatment” of their baby daughter and that he’d acted to protect the baby. As the press reported at the time, Husband was desperate to avoid the life sentence and minimum twenty-year imprisonment imposed for premeditated murder. Not to mention an additional likely ten-year sentence for killing their dog.

Seven months ago, I reported that a mixed court of jurors and judges didn’t buy it, and unanimously found husband guilty of the premeditated murder of his wife and strangulation of their dog. [See, SECOND UPDATE, Murder, He Wrote]

 

On June 16, 2022, the court sentenced Husband to the toughest penalty possible under Greek law: a life sentence for the premeditated murder of his wife, a jail term of 11 years and six months for the brutal killing of the family’s pet dog, and a fine of €21,000.

 

Not surprisingly, Husband appealed the sentence and is attempting to paint himself as a model prisoner, dedicated to helping his fellow inmates, and having personally intervened to end dangerous interactions among inmates.

 

At the time I wrote, “Why do I sense this story is not over?”

 

It isn’t.

 

Headlines in Greek and UK papers report Husband is receiving “bags of love letters” from Greek women. Here are excerpts on that story as reported in Greek City Times.

Prison officers are having to sort "bags" of letters for Babis at the high-security jail in Malandrino.

“We read, as is protocol, all the mail and have been left astounded,” one guard speaking on condition of anonymity told The Sun Online.

“They are written by women, Greek women, who say they are in love with him.

"They believe he is innocent, that Crouch’s murder wasn’t premeditated and everything happened in the heat of the moment.”

It came as Anagnostopoulos was brought to the appeal court today [April 24, 2023] in handcuffs as he tried to get his sentence reduced - before the case was adjourned.

He is attempting to argue there were "mitigating circumstances" around the brutal murder.

His lawyer, Alexandros Papaioannidis, has previously argued his client is a “model prisoner” who “reads a lot and works in the prison canteen” and should not be punished for a crime “that was never premeditated."

….

The appeals hearing which is expected to last months, was unexpectedly cut short on Monday.

Anagnostopoulos told the court that Papaioannidis, his lawyer, couldn’t represent him because he had been “taken ill and is in hospital.”

The trial was adjourned until May 8.

That’s on Monday.  Stay tuned.

 

––Jeff

 

The Machinations Of A Moderator

                                                         

It’s the spring round of crime writing festivals and, thank goodness, I am not overly busy. I’m four events down and three to go. Out of them all, there’s only two that don’t warrant an overnight stay, a flight or a five hour train journey (one event needed all three) and that means the dog has to go to kennels, I have to pack a case, I have to cancel clinics and sort out patients. Just generally try to get organised.

And then I have the printer fear.

I wake up at night with printer fear.

                                                   

                                                                    Evening All. Let's be having you!            

I’m not sure of it’s a thing but I think it is, and that it probably has a name.

Nonprinterphobia.

It’s the fear of going somewhere, doing an event, with the notes not in the right order, or on the same page, because not all the printing was done while there was access to the printer.

                                         

                               A badly behaved panellist putting the fear into a well behaved panellist.

Today is that day. If I don't do the typing  and the printing today, it won't happen. The event is a week tomorrow, but time moves on, and it's either today or not at all. By close of play today I want a nice coloured A4 file with numbered, ordered pages of words to say.

Now, I am grilling four very lovely crime writers next Saturday. I’ve read the books, I have the bios, I have the intros, I have a joke about bitcoin ( It is possible to make a joke about bitcoin!). I have looked up murder rates in the different countries represented on the panel, I have things to say and questions to ask.

                                      

                                                                   Grilling for him.

It's a well worn topic, The Enduring Appeal of the Police Procedural, so I've tried to find new angles and new questions.

I need it all set out in front of me. The questions for each, the overall bits, a wee list of names that I tick off as they speak so I know that I have them all talking and a Chatty Cathy isn’t taking over and I notice that Dorothy Dormouse has said nothing for half an hour. It’s often useful to have already thought of the answer to the criticism that a  book might get. ‘This is a question for so en so. Don’t you think your book just shows men in power abusing that power over vulnerable woman?’ The author, very confident and articulate in the green room, crumpled. But in reality, the situation as described in the book is one that happens, the author was merely giving details of a world we could never know about, and what goes on behind closed doors.

                                         

                                                                         I'm grilling him.

For all that I need my notes printed, some in bold, some underlined, headings, sub headings, I need to be able to navigate my way easily round the page.

At the last Bouchercon, I was chairing an event with five fabulous writers. It was a lot to handle, I didn’t know any of them. The subject was the Final Twist, How Far Can You Go or something like that.  I had the bright idea (??) of giving a summary of the book, a teaser, and they had to identify their own book.  It worked well. Until I got a thump on the leg from the author sitting next to me. I had forgotten to introduce her.

Mortified.

                                               

                                                                      I'm grilling her

But we laughed it off by saying that was the big twist  of the panel.

I had been sitting with her on stage before we started, I had shown her her intro and she liked it. Then I had placed that sheet to the side, because the notes had been handwritten, on five pages not one. Easy to do.

Some moderators work from a laptop ( fraught with fear that it doesn’t fire up or it runs out of battery),  some do no work at all ( why bother to put yourself forward to moderate??). Some are so bright, they don’t need notes. Or do they have them scribbled on the back of their hand the way they did at school in exams.

It’s  important though. Some writers have travelled a long way, spent a lot of time money for their fifty mins (less ten for questions), that’s 40 split between five authors, probably less that eight minutes each for them to say  enough so that the book stays in the mind of the audience all the way to the bookshop.

                                       

                                                                            Top billing!

And, the issue with kindle, is the lack of a cover image to wave around, so those authors have to work extra hard.

I know it's possible to go to the elsewhere and get pages`printed. That would involve pressing buttons on an unfamilar machine and I'd break it.

                                     

 I was very glad to see an experiened moderators notes, huge bold print, large asterisks/asterix here and there. He'd been caught out once by bad lighting and poor eyesight!

                                       

My Glasgow event, in the concert hall.

I'm grilling this bloke as well.

Who is he?

Is he trouble?

Caro

"MY BACK PAGES" Part One

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

As I was reorganizing some books and papers (i.e. moving them from one place to another, until I need that space and I move them back...) I came across some photos, including the one below. They made me think about my teaching life and how it has affected my writing life. 

  

My first teaching job

 

As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to study with two accomplished, working novelists—Doris Betts and Lee Smith. I was particularly close to Doris. 

 

 

My professor and mentor at UNC, Doris Betts

She was the first person I knew who made a happy writing life seem possible. Although she never finished college, she still received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a full Professorship and Emerita status at UNC. Her many writing awards and nominations (The National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, etc.) included an Oscar for the short film “Violet,” based on one of the stories from her collection Beasts of the Southern Wild.

 

She was by far the most well-read person I’ve ever met—I’m still working through the mimeographed list of books she considered “necessary for life”— managed a happy, sixty year marriage, was tough as nails on a manuscript but always had time for a chat, had a great, raucous laugh, smoked unapologetically, and wrote me the kindest recommendation I’ve ever received. Although she passed in 2012, no matter what I write, I’m always wondering what Doris would make of it.

 

Seriously good stories.

 

So I never took the old adage, “Those who can’t, teach,” seriously.

 

Until I became a teacher—a profession that chose me, rather than the other way around.

 

In 1981, I became the first single woman in her twenties to teach at the (then) all-male Deerfield Academy in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts—Jeff’s old stomping ground. I didn’t apply for the job. My friend Philip Galanes (some of you may recognize the name from his etiquette column in the New York Times) felt the school needed female teachers and wrote the Dean of Faculty at his alma mater without telling me.

 

Initially, I thought the invitation to fly up for an interview was a prank—until I received a plane ticket. I didn’t even have a resume and had to borrow outfits from my stepmother, since my university attire was jeans only. I treated the trip as a bit of a lark, since I didn’t want the job and I couldn’t imagine that, once they met me, they would want me either.

 

So, I was absolutely stunned to get an offer. It wasn’t what I’d planned for myself (I wanted to work in the music business), but I figured so many stars had to align for this to happen, it had to be fate. Somehow I was supposed to be there. I said yes.

 

So, while most of my friends headed to law or medical school or to burn up the NYC nightlife as junior bankers, at twenty-two, I moved in as the “dorm master” for a dozen seventeen year old boys.

 

Me and my first year of "dorm charges" on top of my two-toned, bumper-less 1970 VW Bug

It’s hard to contemplate now the extent to which I didn’t know what I was doing. Not only had I never taught before (imagine discussing The Scarlet Letter or explaining gerunds to this crowd), I had no concept of the responsibility involved in being in loco parentis for real. If anything happened to the students, if they became ill, if they hurt themselves while sneaking out to drink (which they always did), or if there were a fire, it was on me. Nothing will age you faster than running a fire drill for three floors of adolescent boys. 

 

At 22, I disguised myself as a 55 year old, full-on schoolmarm. What choice did I have?

 

In addition to my teaching and dorm responsibilities, they insisted I coach skiing. Apparently it didn’t matter that I had never skiied. This travesty consisted mainly of my low-level team yelling from the lift, “Plant your poles, Miss T, plant your poles!”

For six nights a week, I also served as head of a dining table for nine students. There, I was expected to carve, and equally distribute, whole roast beefs, whole chickens, and my bete noir, angel food cake. There was a collective moan when, on my first try with a knife, I collapsed the whole cake. My favorite student came to my rescue, explaining it was better to cut the pieces with two forks. 

 

Imagine all of these tables full of nine boys and one faculty member each...

 

I will never forget him. He first came to my attention when his name tag read “Trout Almondine.” He changed it every day, based on the nightly special at the Deerfield Inn. Another one of my students actually listened to me when I taught On the Road and ran away to Denver. 

 

Deerfield was so small, my post office box number was 3. . .

 

As a prep school teacher there, and later at The Hotchkiss School, I had absolutely no time to write. I worried that I wasn’t committed enough or didn’t have the talent to carve out time for myself. But years later, I wrote a script about that time in my life called Lunatic Lit which got me an agent.

 

So, like my teaching experiences in Australia, it lead me to more than few stories. I have been teaching now, on and off, for forty-two years, and I still find it challenging to juggle my schedule and especially—since I teach screenwriting—to save enough creative energy for my own work. Whether I “can” is not for me to judge, but I guess for me, “Those who teach, try.”   

 

With some of my wonderful students in Brisbane, in slightly more casual environments!

 

Looking back, if I may quote Mr. Dylan, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

 

---Wendall
 

 

 

 

A Tree Grows in Baltimore, and so Does a Book

 Sujata Massey

 

From where I sit, the view has changed. The windows which once offered views of my neighbors’ houses are now filled with nothing but green. The elms, oaks, and cherry trees have leafed out, giving a false appearance that summer has arrived. However, the temperatures in Maryland are still mostly in the fifties, not the eighties. It’s still coat weather. Still, how can my mood keep from jumping ahead?

 

Summer is a mindset shift. My hope for the next four months is that I’ll have a magical, intensive time writing and reading. It will happen two different ways: some of the weeks, starting in July, will involve leaving here to tour a few areas of the country; not a bad time to be gone, given that July and August are quite hot. Therefore, it makes sense for me to start thinking like it’s summer while it’s still spring. And this means it’s time to set up my treetop office.

 

To be clear, I’m not in a tree fort, nor is it one of those trendy structures you see in AirBnB ads. house built in a tree. I’m safely in my house, but also outdoors on roof level, writing on the house's western-facing sleeping porch.

 

I didn't know what a sleeping porch was until we bought this house. Basically, it’s an outdoor living area that was typically built during the Victorian and Edwardian periods in North America, especially in the American South, where summer nights are usually hot and humid, and the Northeastern states and Canada, where many summer cottages for the wealthy were built from 1890 through 1920.

Elevated porch sleeping areas was believed to provide protection against tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, as well as providing relief from the heat. Some people were able to afford mosquito wire (aka screens) that further protected family members from insect bites. They were very popular in the period between 1910 and 1920, when homeowners added them on as renovations, the way we might add a mudroom or a family room to a house today. Our house was built in 1897 with the sleeping porches an integral part of the original design. Old-time electric lamps hang from the porch ceilings, which seems more evidence that these spaces were intended for socializing, game playing and reading before bedtime. 

 

Our house is extremely symmetrical, and it has a matched pair of second story sleeping porches that are defined by grand, Romanesque arches. The porch on the east side of the house catches the sunrise, while the western sleeping porch is very hot and sunny from noon onward. Our house has a third floor that's just above the porches. Up there, we found two places with rotting wooden strips of porch and damaged railings that indicated a rough gesture of comfort for servants. We removed these balconies, which seemed more hazardous than lovely. We put in new screens on the second floor porches and repainted and retained them, and a whole new world opened up.

 

Although I can’t wait to set myself up on the sleeping porch, my back starts to twinge when I think about the floor maintenance. When I was cleaning the porch’s woodwork recently with Murphy’s Oil Soap and water, I thought of others who have done the same job the same over the last 125 years. In 1897, the neighborhood trees would have been seedlings, and without car traffic, there would be less airborne pollution. Yet, given what I’ve read in historical novels about household maintenance, the servants probably had to wipe clean the porches several times a week. I hate the pain of vigorous cleaning, but I can always stop when I want, ignoring a spiderweb or errant leaf. 

 

 

This week, I’ve made a lot of plans to clean the porch floor that have resulted in procrastination. The gray floors have so much pollen that they are pea green; not even my dog will lie down on the. After the floors are swept and mopped, I will lay down the outdoor rugs that I vacuumed before storing indoors over the winter. When I drag in the porch’s vintage rattan and wicker furniture, the porch is buzzing with energy that has nothing to do with our carpenter bees. 

 

Year round, I do my writing in the morning; there are tables or desks in various rooms to suit my whim. On the sleeping porch, I’ve used a cheap, child-sized plywood desk from second-hand shop that I didn’t mind leaving out all year. And I got what I deserved: the old desk is starting to sag from ten years of porch life.  This year, I’ve decided to junk the desk and replace it with a new desk that’s adult sized, and has iron legs and a surface made from mango wood, a sustainable, inexpensive hardwood that does better outdoors than most woods. And this desk should be nice enough to bring inside during the winter.

 

One piece I’ll probably never replace is an extra-long wicker chaise that I bought for $50 on Craig’s List. I had a very long fresh cushion covered in outdoor fabric made for it, and now it’s the perfect place for reading, and of course, sleeping. Its generous width and high back made it extremely difficult to pass through a door out to the porch. Therefore we bring in the cushions, but not the chair, in the off-season. So far, so good. 

 

But nobody really looks at the furniture. The best thing about the porch are views right into the high branches of the trees. I’m captivated as I see squirrels chase each other along branches and then jump like Olympic athletes to the next tree and finish up by springing onto our roof. Sometimes, a squirrel explores all the way up to the edge of the screen separating us. At the sight of me, or my tiny snarling dog, the squirrel shoots back to a safer zone.

 

The bird songs are quite exquisite, and I‘m sorry to admit that I can’t recognize the singers by name. When it rains, I sit in comfort while hearing the drama of falling drops and feeling the whooshing of damp wind against my skin. 

 

When we are outdoors among trees, we go into what scientists call soft focus. The trees and sky and animals become part of a pleasant blur. Soft focus frees the dreams lurking in the subconscious. 

 

My goal this summer is to write approximately 1000 words a day, seven days a week. Sometimes, the sentences pour out and the duty is all done by ten in the morning. Yet there are just as many days when the process is slower. 

 

I believe the only way to overcome my writing challenges is to show up for them every day. Just like the squirrels and birds come to the trees, doing their own important work. 

Source of My Writing Gene

 Annamaria on Monday

By rights (writes?) I should wait until Father's Day for this post.  But which Monday?  The one six days before?  Or the one after?  Neither seems appropriate.  Besides, I can't wait another six weeks.

When going through one of the many boxes of memorabilia I have stowed away around my apartment, I found a treasure trove labeled "Sam." Though my dad was American-born Salvatore Francesco, his first grade teacher, out near a coal mine in Western Pennsylvania, told him that he had to have an "American" name, so she renamed him Samuel Frank.  That moniker went into his first-ever government record.  And so he remained, even as a U.S. Marine, fighting for his country in the WWII Pacific.

Everyone called him Sam, even his children.  (His nieces and nephews, of course, called him Uncle Sam!)

Sam was a natural-born writer.  I know this because he told me that, once he learned to write words, he wrote on any scrap of paper he could find.  He was also, throughout his life, a wonderful teller of tales.  Since - thanks to his father's death when he was only nine - he only got as far as the fourth grade, he considered his writing inferior.  He was ashamed of his inability to spell well.  But he wrote stories.  I have a number of them, but today I am going to share a thank you letter he wrote to me and David sometime in the late 1990s or early twenty-aughts.  David had picked out a "golfers watch" for him as a birthday gift.  Here is what Sam wrote in response:

My Dearest Dave and Pat,

    How can I thank you enough for your birthday gift.  I am sure you both must have given up a great deal of your valuable time in selecting it.  I cannot think of anything more appropriate for a retired active man to have. In fact I don't know how I have ever lived without this wonderful gift.  A watch that gives you Hours, Minutes, Seconds, Date and Day of the Week, 12 or 24 hour format, 24 hour alarm with twenty seconds step tone feature, Hourly chime, Thermometer that measures temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit, Monitors tide changes, has a water-proof compass, a backlight for nighttime viewing.  However I do have a bit of a problem, after reading the instruction manual a half a dozen times.  I go by the Florida Institute of Technology when I go to play golf. I stopped in to see the registrar about enrolling in the spring semester.  He told me I was a month late.  I told him I was smart enough to catch up.  He wanted to know why it was so urgent that I enroll in the spring semester.  I gave him the instruction manual for the watch. After reading it, he said nobody is smart enough to understand this with only one semester.  My only regret is that I am going to give up one of my golf days.  But just think how much smarter I'll be after two semesters of engineering school.

The truth is how can I be more happy having the two of you as part of my wonderful family.  God Bless.

                                                        I love you,

                                                            Sam

P.S.  It doesn't make good coffee yet.  I am sure with more experience it will be acceptable.

He gave me - among many other gifts - my storytelling compulsion.  I wish I had his deft touch for being funny on the page!

THANKS, SAM.  I miss you every day.