| Who is Lady Caeryon? Well, first, the name.... Yes, it's pronounced the same as "carrion." I'm "dead meat." Lovely, ay? The name was the unintentional creation of "my very bestus friend in the whole wide world," Tom. (In my case, since my marriage, that has been modified to "my very bestus friend in the whole wide world to which I am not married." Whew!) We call each other "Bestus" (plural: "Besti") for short. There will probably be a lot of my Bestus in this mini-memoir. When I lived in Tennessee, Tom came up from Louisiana for a few visits. Since we both consider All Hallow's Eve our favorite holiday, our visits to one another often coincide with Hallowe'en. As my birthday is All Saints Day itself, Tom often refers to Hallowe'en as "Carolyn's b.d. eve," so we have traditionally celebrated my birthday Hallowe'en night. This visit was no exception. We had spent the usual hours getting in costume, he as a vampire and I as a green-skinned, fairy-tale witch. Now, these labors were always fuelled by a certain amount of alcohol, and this year was no exception. I had made a nice new cape for my witchy-poo, so I bebopped downstairs to the apartment parking lot and proceeded to whirl around to demonstrate how well the new cape twirled. Heading down the stairs behind me, Tom tried to call to me, but it came out "carrion" instead of "Carolyn." Alcohol will do that. Well, seeing as I was green-skinned with a big wart on my nose at the time, the mispronunciation seemed appropriate enough, and the name stuck. I fancified the spelling a bit, since I've always been far more fond of bones than viscera. I guess I owe the "Lady" part to a combination of things: having been reared in the South, where traditionally all women have been called "lady" until proven otherwise, and the SCA tradition that all members are gentles of some degree. No peasants in the Known Worlde and none here! I was born in 1954. Now, those of you who also grew up in the late Fifties and the Sixties can sympathize with me. Our folks liked Ike. Cars had big-ass fins. It was "Howdy Doody time." My mother tells me that, before I could stand on my own, I hauled myself to my feet by grabbing the bars of my wooden playpen in a deathgrip to watch the very first Captain Kangaroo. I was mesmerized. I watched the good Captain for years. Not, I know, an auspicious beginning for a lover of the Dark. So I loved t.v. as a child but I was also a voracious reader. My childhood reading was a mix of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Dickens, Conan Doyle, the Nancy Drew books, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Oz books. Fairy tales. Mythology. Ghost stories. I loved creepy stories! Classics like "The Monkey Paw." And Poe. Anything by Poe. It was a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mysteries. In the third grade I discovered Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity in my school library. This was the pre-computer days, of course, when library books had those quaint little pockets glued in back to hold the card you signed when you took a book out. The Clement book hadn't been checked out for years, but, by the time I left Southside Elementary, my signature covered the rest of the card. I adored that book. It was my secret treasure. No one else read it. It was the first book I'd ever read where an alien was one of the heroes. The notion that the outsider, the odd one, could be a sympathetic character took hold in my already kind of odd brain. It was a minor epiphany. I had never been much for toys. Oh, I loved erector sets, Lincoln Logs, electric trains, chemistry sets.... I was the first kid on my block with a dissection kit. (Okay, I was the only kid.) I was, like so many girl-children, horse crazy. My room was decorated in early horse. And my favorite toys were tiny molded plastic horses. The kind tiny plastic molded cowboys and Indians rode. I would build palaces and towns with Lincoln Logs, shoe boxes, any junk I could get my hands on, and my horses lived in this world. But they weren't just horses. They were magical. They flew. They talked. My favorite was a white colt with only three legs. I had found him at the cemetery, where we used to go to "clean off Grandpa's slab." I spent many a weekend afternoon on my knees beside my grandfather's grave, scrubbing the huge granite slab that covered it with Comet and a handful of Spanish moss, an excellent scrubbing tool that we pulled down from the sprawling old oaks that grew in the graveyard. After we had scoured the oak flower stains from Grandpa, the grownups would stay at the graveside and talk while I wandered around and looked at the graves and their markers. And it was on one of my ambles through the graves that I found Dracula the three-legged horse. Okay, it wasn't exactly an original name. But the other thing that set my talking, flying horses apart from their mundane equine cousins was that they drank blood. And my little Dracula, while a royal prince of the line, had to fight for his right to be initiated into the blood-drinking thing because of his missing leg. Being gimpy, he was a proponent of the "brains over brawn" theory. It was an odd sort of story. Oh, it was derivative, but I think I was eight or nine, so I might be forgiven that. The details are long gone, but I must have told some of my classmates about it, because it became a recess ritual that a handful of them would gather around me on the playground and be regaled with the latest episode. I'd sit in a swing or a cement bench and they 'd plop tailor-fashion on the ground around me. I had discovered the power of the storyteller, the Irish shenachai, and frankly I loved it. For a shy, geeky, science-loving, fat-girl bookworm it was an amazing discovery. I was one of those kids who basically lives in her head. I acted out the stories in my mind with my menagerie of plastic creatures. I galloped and cantered up and down our alley as one of my vampiric steeds. I was a very good student, a quiet kid with few friends and no close ones. I didn't need them. I had books. And a ChemLab. And a microscope. Encouraged by my small success as a storyteller, I started to write down my stories. I filled notebooks with them, but I kept them to myself. The first story I wrote for a class was a tale about a corpse that sits up in its casket to accuse its murderer. Okay, it was a stunt set up by the detective in the story, but it worked. If my teacher thought it was a bit weird, she kept it to herself. After all, I was the quintessential good girl. I did everything I was told, never got in trouble. The closest I came to rebellion in school was refusing to use a ballpoint when we were first allowed, in second or third grade, to use ink at school; I showed up with a bottle of ink and a fountain pen. Over the years, I brought home great report cards. I made honor roll. I made Honor Society. I got a Merit Scholarship Letter of Commendation and was a Regents' Scholar. I graduated in the Top Ten of my class. I was most parents' ideal of the perfect girl child. But I was always more comfortable with a book, a pen, or a sketchpad than with other humans. Or with animals. I was always bringing something home. I wasn't afraid of bugs or spiders or snakes. I loved doodle-bugs, the little gray roly-poly bugs that curl up into balls. I'd put them in little boxes and carry them around in my pocket. When we went to the river, my brother and I'd catch minnows. We'd keep them as long as we could in jars at home. When they died, I'd make tiny coffins for them of aluminum foil lined with silky fabric scraps. We'd bury them behind the garage with a short service, prayers and a reading and maybe a hymn. I still loved t.v. And the Sixties were weird-kid television heaven! The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Lost in Space, and Star Trek. And a trinity of shows that have probably influenced more odd-ball kids than even Star Trek: The Munsters, The Addams Family, and Dark Shadows. I adored Morticia Addams. Lily Munster was a little too sunshiny for me, but Morticia was all delicious darkness. But I rushed home from school every afternoon to watch Barnabas Collins and the spooky, if campy, goings-on at Collinwood. I wanted the ring, the wolf's head cane, the cape. Morticia looked like a vampire, pale, exotic, and, as I realized even at 10, sexy. Eddie and Grampa Munster looked like vampires. But Barnabas was the real deal. And if he wasn't enough, we had movies! Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, the Hitchcock films, and the wonderful, scene-chewing Vincent Price. Ah, Dr. Phibes.... The House of Wax.... He wasn't a screen vampire, but he was always as creepily elegant and urbane. And he quoted Shakespeare! Oh... probably "to be continued" :) |