Wannaska World Wednesday, August 08, 2017

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Wannaska World Wednesday, August 8, 2018, brought to you by Maurices, where it's Summer Sweater Week! The weather can go north any time in Wannaska World, so be prepared. Stop in and slip on one or more of this week's featured sweaters in air conditioned comfort: the "Alpaca", the "Artic Fox", the "Polar Bear", and for the selective shopper, the "Indomitable Snowwoman". 107 3rd St NE, Roseau, Minnesota 56751.

August 8 is the 220th day of the year, with 145 days remaining until the end of the year, and 236 days remaining until April Fools Day.

Earth/Moon Almanac for August 8, 2018
Sunrise: 6:07am; Sunset: 8:52pm
Moonrise: 2:45am; Moonset: 6:47pm, waning crescent

Temperature Almanac for August 8, 2018
           Average      Record       Today
High       78               99            85
Low        56                43            75

August 8 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Happiness Happens Day
• National Frozen Custard Day
• National Sneak Some Zucchini Into Your Neighbor’s Porch Day
• National Dollar Day

August 8 Riddle
I am the beginning of the end, the end of every place. I am the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space. What am I?*

August 8 Notable historic events, literary or otherwise, from On This Day

• 936 German king Otto I the Great crowned, no relation to our hero
• 1609 Venetian senate examines Galileo Galilei's telescope but were afraid to look through the eye piece with the Spanish Inquisition watching
• 1673 Dutch battle fleet of 23 ships demands surrender of New York City
• 1882 Snow falls on Lake Michigan - you may need that summer sweater
• 1898 Will Kellogg invents Corn Flakes
• 1945 President Harry Truman signs the United Nations Charter
• 1961 Verne Gagne beats Gene Kiniski in Minneapolis, to become NWA champ - someone should remind John
• 1963 Verne Gagne beats Fritz Von Erich in Amarillo, to become NWA champ - fans become suspicious of two-year anniversary coincidence

August 8 author/artist birthdays, from On This Day

• 1814 Esther Morris [Esther Hobart McQuigg], American suffragist, anti-slavery activist, and 1st female justice of the peace
• 1884 Sara Teasdale, American poet
• 1896 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• 1984 Molly Roselle Stenzel

Words I looked up this week: bathymetry, bosky, cockerel, compline, demonachize, theodolite

WannaskaWriter and Jack Pine Savage contributed installments since last Wednesday, so today's installment of Wannaska World picks up where theirs left off:

2018.08.02 WannaskaWriter
Otto snuggled deep into the edgy comfort of all the old worn out dirty magazines his mother told him he shouldn't look at that he had squirreled away in his tree house, thinking of when he and Wink used to hunt rats down along the railroad tracks in Wannaska.

They'd get up early on Saturday mornings and sneak out of the house before anyone was truly awake. Otto would have to carry Wink because of the click-click noise her claws made on the linoleum that would be sure to wake Otto's mom who always slept with one ear and one eye open for anything amiss in her house, even though Otto's dad, a man's man, slept in his own little bed opposite her ready to spring out of it at a moment's notice. Otto's dad was more than one woman's hero. But more on that later.

Closing the door silently, Wink and Otto would steal from the house and, giving it a wide berth (because of his mom's bionic hearing abilities), they would slip under the backyard fence, being careful not to tear Otto's clothes nor gouge out one of Wink's eyes, into the dead end alley, whose shallow ruts were impregnated with layers of coal cinders thrown there over the back fences of the other neighbors for many years, and make their way four doors down (i.e., four houses) to the Winnipeg, Wannaska, & Warroad Rail Road tracks, where, on either side of it for miles, lived t'ousands of monstrous rats that fed on the stuff that fell out of passing boxcars whether it was engine block leakage from crushed salvaged cars on their way to Winnipeg, or eelpout juice oozing out from the towering titillating tons of dead eelpouts dredged up under duress from the far-flung fathoms of the Lake of The Woods by the commercial eelpout fishing industry in Warroad, or the clippings from strange foul-smelling floor sweepings that were bagged and baled every night then loaded up through the overhead door of the Wannaska Convenience store along the river's edge by the railroad trestle.

Wink knew what was up.

2018.08.03 Jack Pine Savage
Otto let all these memories, far and near, flood his brain’s memory pathways, because he did not want to think about that bark and that voice. One was eerily familiar. The other more than a little scary. Then, when he had run through his twelve years of memories, he became curious and turned his attention to the broken silence and allowed himself – this time voluntarily – to settle into the rift between the cheeks of dark emptiness. Once he focused his awareness on that emptiness, that silence, again the deep emptiness broke, interrupted by an enormous wind rushing into his face, blowing back his dark-brown hair, and making his eyes sting. Then, again, this time borne on the rising wind: one bark and one syllable spoken in a girl’s voice: “Aught.”

If Wink had been there, Otto thought, she would know what to do: bark and growl doing her protection job even if she was mightily alarmed. Nothing would keep her from her duty. The bark expanded into repetitive yaps, snarls, and yips. Strangely, no dog appeared. Then Otto knew: he would recognize Wink’s vocalizations anywhere. “Wink! Oh, Wink! Is it really you?” Otto felt just a little silly, but that feeling was greatly overshadowed by his eagerness to continue the experience.

“Wink, Wink, come here girl.”

Silence once again pounded on Otto’s ears. No answer. The wind faded away. Otto’s tears welled up, as he decided these tricks of the late hour and the wind fooled him into thinking this breaking morning might be the best day of his life. He bent his knees hugging them to his chest, and let his head sink onto his arms.

“Otto, is that you?”

Again, the girl’s voice.

Wannaska World 2018.08.08
"Y'aught be a bit more quiet afore y'all get used to bein' in the fold. M'name's Izzi. Whoer you?"
"Wink? You out there?"
"M'name's Izzi, an' Ah's here to help y'all, hayseed. Whooz Wink?"
"Wink is...was...my dog..."
"Yer dawg. That splains everthin'. Pleaz tell me yer name, an' whar y'all live - State of the Yoonyon an'all - lest yer a farner - soz I kin tell ya what's hapnin."
"My name is Otto, and I live just outside Wannaska, in Minnesota. Where do you live?"
"Otto...mind if I call y'all 'Aught'?"

Izzi explained that she lived on a ranch just outside Oologah, Oklahoma, that she was also 12 years old, that she also had a mother with bionic surveillance sensory capacities, and that she also "had a dawg and a heap more critters who'er m'best friends." Then, she fell silent. Without saying so, Otto and Izzi each felt relief learning that the other didn't live in the city and that they had a lot in common. All the same, as a true Son of Wannaska, Otto trusted - in order of priority - his reason, his senses, his intuitions, and near the end of the list, what others told him. So he pulled his phone from his pocket, and pressed all the buttons; to no avail. E v e r y t h i n g remained b  l  a  c  k.

"Izzi, what's happening? HOW is this happening?"
"Good fer you, Aught! Y'all kin only git yer smarts about the fold by askin'. This here's a differnt wrinkle from yer day ta day, whar time and place don' really measure up the way it's generally reckoned - no pun intended."

Izzi suggested that Otto get on a computer some time soon and learn about latitude, longitude, meridians, the day/night terminator, and Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, "For yer basics." According to Izzi, almost all humans - I.S. for "Invasive Species" as she calls them - can experience time in one of two ways. Izzi elaborated:

"Yer average I.S. lives in a time of personal history, more place than time, whar everthin' iz  either 'bout the past or 'bout the future. Nairy one-in-a-million I.S. spend mor'n a total sixty seconds o their'n 'tire lifetime in the other kind'a time - the moment. But sum us'r differnt. We kin larn to 'bide a good piece of our time in the moment. That's what yer doin' right now with me." 
"But Izzi, HOW does this work?"
"Whell, Aught, this is whar it gits t'be sumpin' of a study. Like the rest of us in the fold, y'all have a gift for 'bidin'  in moment-time, and the more time y'all spend in moment-time, the more thin's open up. Thar's only so much y'all can thank about moment-time to larn it. Mostly yer gonna have to larn with us just bein' rye-cheer an' now, but Ah kin tell y'all this much..."

Izzi then told Otto about the ways that space and time bend and curve in the very smaller and very larger sizes of the universe - the sizes that most I.S. cannot directly know for more than an instant without their "gadgets" or before their instants of moment-time collapses back down to dull, ponderous march of past-to-future-to-past-to-future - step by step by tedious step. Izzi told Otto that she and Otto were communicating through a tight, temporary fold in space and time, a fold only available to two people who can dwell steadfastly in moment-time, and who are far enough apart for large space-time to fold those places together.

The Son of Wannaska felt both elated and conflicted. In addition to her bionic surveillance capacities, Otto's mother lived to speak truth to power. She taught her son to be wary of claims to authority - especially religious authority - and fold sounded a lot like flock. Being his mother's son, Otto voiced these proclivities to Izzi.

"Nope. Ain't nothin' like that; nothin' atall."
"But who's in charge?!"
"Y'all are cowboy."

"What's your dog's name, Izzi?"
"Jinx."

At that very moment, the stars appeared in the sky above Otto's treehouse, and he checked his phone. <12:01AM>
Otto dropped the rope to the ground and walked the long way home along the meandering waters of Mikinaak Creek, feeling imperceptibly, unquantifiably less alone that he had only just a moment ago - once upon a midnight.

Wannaska World is a community writing project, where story ideas or contributions left in the comment section or elsewhere on Wannaskan Almanac will be incorporated into ongoing installments.

Be better than yesterday, learn a new word today, and to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow.

*The letter E