One Lap

Date: 9/15/2013

Day: -12

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

 

The Colonel finds himself with a head full of Drood. 

This circumstance is courtesy of some friends who provided the excuse for spending a month with that most interesting half novel: Drood, Edwin: The Mystery of, as the Army would put it.  

Drood.  

Droooood.  

No one ever created names like Mr. Dickens.  “Don’t step in the Drood.”  “You know, and I say this as a friend, a little plastic surgery would remove those unsightly Droods.”  “Droods are being worn longer in the back this year and in very sudden plaid.” “Oh no! They got Louie …  right in the Droods!”  

"Droodlocks.”

One could go on, but out of human kindness, one should not.  You are invited to define the noun Drood and pass it along here to be passed along.  America wants to know.

The book is particularly interesting because it is a novel by a great story teller, completed ready to publish up to what we are told is the exact halfway point; at which point the author died.  Ink, the story goes, was still wet on that last page when he checked out.  

Should you send time with E. D.?  Perhaps.  Dickens is not to everyone's taste.  It is clear that he was writing to fill empty columns in a monthly magazine.  Like much of Mark Twain, his story feels a bit elongated at times.  But, since it is Dickens, it is a great story with absolutely wonderful characters.  Mr Sapsea, the jackass, is perfect in every way except the content of his character.  Stony Durdles and Deputy, who stones him home, are again perfect and could have sprung from no mind but that of Dickens.  I flatter J. K. Rowling when I say that some of her characters carry a whiff of Dickens about them.

The game of Drood, inevitably, is to propose a solution to the mystery that is congruent with all the information Mr. Dickens gave us without stepping beyond the spirit of the thing.  Both the zombie apocalypse and space aliens are popular right now, but they don't fit my idea of 1850's rural England any more than does Abraham Lincoln in 1850 with a bloody ax out looking for the not quite sufficiently dead.  (What a bad movie that was!)

It will not, perhaps, be a surprise to you to learn that the Colonel -- after a month marinating in the book -- was visited by the ghost of the Mr. Dickens. He was not wrapped in chains like Marley, but appeared mummy-like in swath after swath of uncompleted manuscript pages with tomes, not money boxes, bound tight about his body.  He was followed by a regiment of barely visible characters staring at him reproachfully, Bill Sykes Nancy first among them.  As a result, the Colonel possesses the only real and true answer to the riddle.  

More about the trip and exiting items from the One Lap emporium next time.

Wellington Boot, Col.