queen anne's lace and a toblerone [retro]

meta

Hello PNP'ers, and welcome to the third entry in my retros series, in which I revisit past stories, share inspirations, influences, choices, and – sometimes –brutally criticize myself. These are a way to realize the ‘meta’ content of the Clancy Steadwell character in a way I hope PNP’ers will find intriguing, satisfying, and – most of all – honest.¹

The story subject to retrospection in this edition: queen anne's lace and a toblerone.

I consider queen anne's lace and a toblerone to be the first earnest entry into my Substack catalog. The previous stories were either hastily written, in a form outside my normal parameters, or generally not something I would consider representative of my larger work. I hadn’t yet found my voice on Substack, and it took me some time to step back and figure it out.

If you look at the published date of this one compared to the previous story, you’ll see about a four-month gap. I took the entire summer to read other Substackers, several novels and short story collections, and generally hone in on what I wanted my fiction on Substack to be.

(Some will notice I skipped retro'ing my piece orbital 7. Written for Brian Reindel’s speculative fiction Lunar Awards competition, it’s formatted as an email from a resident stand-up comedian on a luxury vacation space station to his wife and unborn son as the station experiences a Titanic-like disaster. I do like that piece, but I found it hard to really come up with some interesting vignettes for a retro. Do check it out and let me know if you would like to see that retro eventually.)

If I were to someday collect my Substack works into a short story collection and self-publish them (yes, I’ve thought about it), then queen anne's lace and a toblerone would be the first one I posted that I think would make the cut. It’s also the first in the first person and thus lends itself to speculation as to what is plucked from real life or not.

In fact, there are a few comments on the original post about this being a ‘memoir’, and I take that as a compliment. At the very least, it seemed real, and – even if the events did not really happen – it means I tapped into whatever wellspring of consciousness from which whatever we describe as ‘truth’ derives.

Stories like it are the reason I wanted to do these retros pieces – and the ones I imagine subscribers are most interested in me retro'ing, if only because they are more familiar with them.

Let us retrospect…

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When my dad died

Thus, it begins. I’ll start with this: my dad is not dead.

Like most white dads, my dad for some reason enjoyed conversations about the best route to drive anywhere.

But, my did is white, and he does do this.

Route 7 South is quintessential Vermont scenery.

I’ve hinted at some things before on Notes that clearly mark me as being from the Northeast of the United States. I’ll leave it a mystery as to whether I’m from Vermont or Upstate New York (they’re interchangeable, sometimes, but don’t tell that to anyone from Vermont). I think I was vividly able to describe some aspects of both.

When I’m at an Andersen’s, gone are the Vermont-y things that lured me to Vermont. They are replaced by a feeling of resigned contentment in the face of hometown familiarity: employees in the trademark Andersen’s dark blue polos and visors; food under revolving heat lamps on the counter; an old couple sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups in a booth; a New York State Department of Transportation worker with a high-vis jacket, hard hat, and grimy hands grabbing some beer from the cooler at 11 am; a travel nurse emerging from a mid-morning visit to the public (and unlocked) bathroom. I am in the Capital District of New York.

Here, though, in describing Andersen’s, at the time I was not quite sure of my methodology in using semicolons. Upon research, my instinct to do so was correct. This technique is called serial semicolons or super commas, and apparently, you want to do it when you have commas inside of a list, so those commas don’t get mixed up with the commas delineating the list. Although, I only use other commas in one of the list items. Perhaps a bit hack to resort to listing the phenomenon here, but there was a lot I wanted to convey in a short space about this convenience store.

Andersen’s, by the way, is not a real convenience store. But literally anyone from the area mentioned knows exactly what it is based on. (It was mentioned in the comments that Wawa – a convenience store from the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. – comes to mind. An apt comparison.)

I struggle with choosing how to spend money, despite in the grand scheme of things having little dire want for it. In general, I am a very poor practitioner of capitalism, even when it comes to something as simple as choosing an on-the-road snack.

This is definitely me in real life. It also introduces an economic theme to the story, which I pointed out in my previous retro has become sort of a recurrence from me. I find I am rarely able to avoid it.

Veddersburg, New York

This will be a frequently visited place in all my stories and is practically a character in the novel I am working on. An amalgamation of several places, but fictional.

That’s why it was important for me to hang out with my friend Carlos. Everyone needs that one friend who has the more lenient parents.

I’m finding another frequent theme of my work is the transformative effects of diversity in a child’s life and in the world around them. Not just ‘diversity’ in the typical woke sense of the word, but exposure to a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and people who lead culturally different lives than that of their family. the other guy was me definitely has an undercurrent like that, and I’m working on another one now in which that is the main theme.

The road along the cemetery was lined with these white flowers that are always around in the summertime; my dad told me they are called Queen Anne’s Lace. They do have a sort of lace-like pattern to them, but I think, in the end, they’re just a wild relative of the carrot and nothing so glamorous as the name implies. They were drooping over the shoulder of the road, almost horizontally from a small hill that led up to the cemetery. My aversion to the white line meant they were hitting my chest and the front of the bike at regular intervals, thwap-thwap-ing me like Victorian handkerchiefs in an 18th-century approximation of a car wash as I rode down the hill.

These flowers, which I have always found quite beautiful, were the genesis of this story. For some reason, they symbolize death to me, but it’s a very subtle symbol, I’m not actually sure where I got that from. There is something ornate and sort of delicate about them that echoes the mentioned father’s mentioned cognizance of the fragility of life. As it turns out, the color white is symbolic of death in many Eastern cultures. I like the description of them as Victorian handkerchiefs and the car wash simile. Not sure where that came from. And I don’t often use onomatopoeia – in fact, I usually despise it, for some reason – but here I do a little thwap-thwap.

My front tire made the faintest of hiccups as it traveled squarely over the chipmunk's back just as the vehicle passed on my left.

This whole part where he hits the chipmunk is based on me doing this exact same thing, albeit on a bike path and not the side of the road. I was also a man and not a child when it happened, but still: It. Felt. Horrible. I knew I’d have to stick it in a story someday. I’m not too sure about how there are two chipmunks and only one of them gets hit. I think that was maybe unnecessary. This is actually how it happened in real life for me. But this is one of those examples where maybe true events can be messed with in order to streamline a narrative.

The rest of my Toblerone melted into my jean shorts before we got back home.

Now, what gives with the Toblerone thing? This aspect of the story was supposed to be about how transformative events can lead to sensory remembrance, which in turn become associated with brands, and in the capitalist society within which choice is supposedly an integral part, even tragic happenstance like death can lead us to new buying habits.

How that came across, I am not sure. Simplified, I guess I could say that our consumerist choices become one with us, like the melted Toblerone. Of course, the imagery provided also does make it look like the narrator shit their pants, so take from that what you will.

But I do like Toblerones, even though I don’t usually buy them. In truth, I did achieve this affection for the candy via the older brother of a friend, although that older brother of a friend was probably not so cool or different from me as Jose was from David in the story.

We got into the Subaru.

The surest way to know they are from Vermont.

She laughed, then sighed. I stroked her shoulder while she drove. Smiles and laughter in the face of emotional turmoil; just one of the many kinks of personality we shared that made us fall in love.

Okay, there are officially too many semicolons in this story, but anyways…

This last part of the story – almost an epilogue, really – reveals a lot about the relationship between the narrator David and his wife, Rachel. There’s something quiet, calm, and mature about their relationship that I first discovered here, and that is definitely borne from real-life experience.

Some may be disappointed to know I am not actually married, but I am in a long-term relationship that has taught me many of the important dynamics between these two characters. The next two stories I wrote, khakis and o.k. hammock, are more centered around their relationship, and I explore what’s between them even further.

Overall, queen anne's lace and a toblerone still feels a bit rough around the edges for me, certainly at least in terms of structure.

It’s not quite tight enough – while I like the complexity, the many themes I described earlier are dueling with each other a bit too much, perhaps, and with the experience I have now on Substack, I would have maybe separated the death/chipmunk/lace portion from the Toblerone/Andersen’s portion into two separate stories.

The death of the father could have been mentioned as they returned to the hometown and drove down the same hill David rode down with Carlos and Jose (perhaps on the way to the funeral home or something) and compared with the death of the chipmunks and overcoming fear at the top of the hill. In that version, the kids wouldn’t really have to be going to Andersen’s, they could have been going anywhere really.

The Andersen’s/Toblerone thing should have been spliced into a story with a theme of homecoming and the unconscious loyalty we have connected to brands in a capitalist society that I described earlier. That’d probably be the harder one to flesh out.

It shows how Substack has changed my thinking on things. Ultimately, I think I wasted too many good ideas in this one, kind of long story. At the same time, I quite like the writing here and the voice of the narrator, and while not fully fleshed-out as it would become in subsequent stories (the ‘David’ narrator returns in both stories khakis and o.k. hammock, and I believe he is the child in the other guy was me), I think readers picked up on the tone and enjoyed it.

Certainly, at the very least, they wanted more: this piece picked me up more subscribers than any other story, so if you’re a follower but not subscribed, maybe this one will convince you.

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thanks for reading. what did I miss? read ‘queen anne's lace and a toblerone’ and let me know if there’s anything else you’d like covered.

which piece of mine would you like to see retro’d next?

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