CHAPTER 6

Billy Ray Barnwell here, while my nose was healing I decided to read back over everything I have written so far which you prolly won’t believe this but according to the computer comes to over six thousand words, Mr. Morris was right after all, and it was a real eye-opener for me because I learned something about how inspiration works, I didn’t realize it before but I’m pretty sure the seed for the story about my horse Silver in Chapter 3 was planted in my mind when I happened to write the phrase “one-horse town” in Chapter 2 and then I just kept pouring the words onto the paper like I said I was going to do and soon, I don’t know why, I was telling you things my father used to say and as the French say, vwah-lah, Chapter 3 just sort of appeared out of nowhere, it just popped out fully grown kind of like Athena I think it was did from the forehead of Zeus according to Bulfinch’s Mythology, which if you have never read you ought to run right down to your public library and check out. Those old Greek and Roman guys were pretty smart, I learned a lot of neat stuff in Bulfinch’s about Echo and Narcissus and Arachne and Tantalus and a whole lot of other folks besides, Vulcan the god of the forge and Persephone which rhymes with Stephanie and not telephone to name two. I guess the Greek language is still managing to hang in there, especially for people who happen to be from Greece but I hate it that Latin is dead, did you know that someone with a lot more spare time than brains went and translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin? well they did, it was called Winnie Ille Pooh but as my old work buddy Tom Bledsoe says about his days in Latin class, “flunko, flunkare, flunkuisti” and I imagine his experience is prolly more common than you might think, well I must say I don’t think we have improved any since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, all kids care about today is stuff like American Idol on the TV and Britney Spears clones and P. Diddy and drugs and driving their parents bonkers. And sex of course. Hey, maybe things haven’t changed that much over the centuries after all, we just don’t talk about it in Latin any more, except in my family we sometimes did, when my uncle would get really disgusted he never cussed, he would say “sum esse fui” and then smile mysteriously, for years I thought he was saying “so messy phooey” and even Mama would sometimes say “heek hike hoke hoo-yus hoo-yus hoo-yus” and begin to giggle. I asked her to write that down one time and she wrote “hic haec hoc” in one vertical column, if that’s redundant you can just go ahead and report me to the Department Of Redundancy Department, and then she wrote “hujus hujus hujus” in another, I thought A it was a very strange thing to do and B it looked more like hick hake hock than heek hike hoke, and C why a J would be pronounced like a Y is beyond me, I asked her why she put it in two columns like that and at first she didn’t answer but when I said Mama aren’t you going to answer? she said “I respectfully decline” and began to giggle again, I guess I come from a strange breed, I wouldn’t know, I never met but one of my grandparents, so anyways instead of giving up I have decided to continue pouring the words onto the paper, God bless you Mr. Morris, well as Tigger in Winnie the Pooh would say, Ta Ta For Now, I wonder what that is in Latin, and I just want to say here that like my uncle I never cuss but where I spit grass never grows again, oh by the way I have decided not to go into real estate and this is illy-Bay ay-Ray arnwell-Bay igning-say off-ay.