Imagine how you'll feel

The GARAGE SALE

At a garage sale on South Hill, I saw a deer. A price tag was tied to it. I couldn’t read it though. The deer kept moving around the record player, behind the wading pool and a lamp. For a moment I wondered how it would do in our yard, but I bought a toaster instead.

TRANSPARENT APPLES

They grow on glass branches on trees that almost aren’t there. You could bump into one if you’re not careful. Sometimes all you see is the shadow of a tree. You’ll need to hold out your arms like a sleepwalker, feel for the switch and turn the tree on like a chandelier, making every ripe apple glow.

PRAYER

Oh, how we wait for an answer, as if the crooked aerial on the roof overhead can catch your voice, as if, if not that, the wind will deliver your message to me served in an old-fashioned way.

A FIRST-RATE FOOL

Once I read some stories on Eastlake Avenue. Like a first-rate fool, I thought up a great gag that was sure to wow the crowd. A pair of glasses with no lenses. Without knowing it, I went through the same routine as a 1936 comedy. Only no one was laughing. Anyway, I tried. I have enjoyed my time here among you and I have done my best to entertain you.

A HORSE NAMED CARL SANDBURG

An old white horse is riding the elevator of the Leopold. Nobody knows how it ended up in there. The crowd in the lobby watches the arrow as it rides between the floors. For a moment it rests on the 11th floor, then it’s moving two stories down, then somewhere else again. By night the people have gone, except for the clerk at the desk who has grown used to it.

Saluting Laura Vasyutynska

Saluting Good Deed Rain cover artist LAURA VASYUTYNSKA, whose amazing artwork has appeared on 5 of our books so far. Different Planet (2017); Homeless Sutra (2019); Almost Animals (2018); Fable (2018); Cosmonaut (2021):

MOVIE TIME

Saw two good movies lately: Il Sorpasso (1962) and Girlfriends (1978)

Pestus Cleek

Fans of villains will appreciate the one in COSMONAUT. The busy-body nightcrawler named Pestus Cleek. (Thanks to JGenius for coming up with that name!) Pestus is sure Yuri Gagarin is the start of a space invasion...until his hero Ulysses Grant appears beside a parked Plymouth Skylark. For more, read the book! I promise you'll like it. Here's a page spread from the novel featuring Pestus Cleek:

COSMONAUT Title Page

From the back cover of COSMONAUT

COSMONAUT

Cover of the next new Good Deed Rain novel: COSMONAUT. The story of what happened when Yuri Gagarin landed in America. Painting by Laura Vasyutynska. Her 5th cover with GDR. Book due to be published in August.

The FAKE DOG

We were at the park when I saw the fake dog. At least that’s what I told the kids. I pointed out the odd way it ran. They weren’t sure. It was obvious to me anyway there was a person inside. Finally, I had to know for certain. I crossed the playing field. Big footprints have flattened the clover, but the fake dog was done running. It was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper.

TOURISTS

Each weekend, we dress the part, and explore the town as tourists. We point at things and take a lot of pictures and we like to ask directions. We pretend astonishment by things we’ve seen for years. Pretty soon we’re going further, to places we’ve never been. With all our practice, we will know how to act.

TOPEKA FLYING BEDS

The flying beds are guided carefully across the night skies by radar. The people dreaming on them are going all over the world. Lights rushing back and forth in the stars. During the daytime, there isn’t as much traffic. Mostly babies in cribs and old men lucky enough to crawl under a blanket in the middle of the day.

SUSPENSE THEATRE

Our neighbor stands at the curb holding a piece of paper in his right hand. He looks down the street and checks his watch three times in a row, shuffling back and forth on the sidewalk. A few cars pass. If something doesn’t happen soon, he’s going to go back inside and shut the door and we might never know what he was waiting for.

The PETER SELLERS REPORT

Why would we be talking about a school report forty years later with the sun shining on Alder Street and a view of the bay full of sailboats? It’s fun to think of comic calamities when you’re walking with a friend. South Hill has some big, elegant homes from a time when they made them that way and a camera could glide along the curb and stop at a well-tended garden where a well-dressed old man in his last movie is smiling at the leaves and flowers.

CHESHIRE CAT in TRAINING

When they’re just beginning, it takes effort to balance. A branch seems awful high in the air and it’s not just sitting they need to do. This one was only a kitten and it faded in and out with every tentative step. A smile was something it could only manage when the job was done.

NEIGHBORLY

Sunflower likes to lean over the fence on green elbows, nodding with the breeze, unfazed by the honeybees, with a good view of the backyard, offering neighborly advice on the state of our home repairs, lawn care, and the summer weather in general.

DREAMLAND

What are they doing in Dreamland? I can see a street with palm trees, hear the motorbikes and someone sits at a table with a teacup, writing a postcard. I can’t quite read the words. I’m caught in the wings of a

The RABBITS

I woke up early and looked out the window and wouldn’t you know, a rabbit was out there on the lawn. I don’t know what they do. Do they have a lifestyle? So much is hidden between the times I see them. For all I know they’re directing everything.

The WIND PEDDLER

The wind keeps opening the door and looking in, searching for something, disturbing the curtains and the dog on the floor who opens one sleeping eye.

Good Morning, Johnson Dracula

Sleep is turning into alarm clocks all down the street. The night has crawled in with him, purring like a black cat. He rests in the basement in a casket seasoned with dirt from Transylvania. When he wakes at midnight, he carefully brushes his tuxedo clean. He’s never seen the morning, but he imagines this is what it’s like to face another day at the job.

August Macke

For Garth Williams, of Golden Book fame

The SQUIRRELS' BUTLER: Ordinarily you wouldn’t expect to find a butler standing next to a redwood tree. Tuxedo, sunshine, black dress shoes on a bed of needles. He kept guard beside a long string that led up two hundred feet of red bark. Like a studio apartment in the clouds, they lived in luxury. The sound of the little silver bell meant they wanted him; they were ready to start the day.

ZaSu

My 3rd recommendation for summer reading is Zasu Pitts' book of recipes "Candy Hits." I've only started it, but it looks like a real treat.

Schubert

Thank you Vincent Price for inspiring the creation of this Good Deed Rain book published in 2017. Contains 5 out-of-this-world adventures. Including The Schubert Story about a magical dog that speaks like Katherine Hepburn. (Loyal readers will remember another talking animal in the 2020 novel Old Salt: a seagull who talks like Cary Grant.)

Joe

Another great book for summer reading is Vincent Price's The Book of Joe. This one inspired me to write a novel: The Schubert Story which appears in my compilation book Different Planet.

Howard

What am I reading on the beach this summer? That's easy, first off there's I Caught Flies for Howard Hughes. A very entertaining and inspiring story. Ron was lucky enough to live it and tell the tale.

The Counterfeit Peach

There’s always someone willing to open Frankenstein doors to unspeakable fate, like the counterfeit peach. Dulled by soundproof walls, the racket of spindles and levers, rollers, platen, treadle, a flywheel that creaks round and round, each fruit is manufactured and held up to a magnified eye. They’re good enough to trick the man at the newsstand, or the waitress tired on her feet. For a little while. Oh, but it can’t last. It’s an old story with a moral too: there’s no way to truly replicate a peach, for that only nature can create.

A Box of Peaches

Instead of money, the economy is counted in peaches. Today we are rich in them. We each have one, then I put the rest in a safe behind the painting of Wallace Stevens.

page 28

Sneak peek at page 28 from the spaceman novel...stay tuned!

mynah mood

Many moons ago, you couldn't walk down the Ave in Seattle without running into mynah birds and macrame.

Tribute to Ignatius

Good Deed Rain salutes a Great American, Ignatius J. Reilly:

manners

If you don't know the rules of good manners, you wouldn't be able to solve this odd Encyclopedia Brown mystery:

JOE FRIDAY

I waited at the curb for Jack Webb to pass on his bicycle. It was a hot day, he was serious, concentrated on the road ahead and getting wherever he was needed to be. Towards evening, I saw him again, riding the other way, coming back home I suppose. As far as I can discern, the only thing he picked up along the way was a sunburn.

corner cloud

Another great record by Marisa Anderson

peek at next book...

Yuri Gagarin crawled under the parachute, into his spacecraft, onto his chair. A little lamp was on. He kept the hatch open. There were planets he had been to where he wouldn’t do that—just think of those giant mosquitoes on BXE13M. They dressed as encyclopedia salesmen and knocked on the door and promised him the wonders of their world for just 50 rubles a month, and the first volume was free! It was a good deal, but he managed to resist their pitch.

editing light

Found perfect music-world for novel editing, Marisa Anderson's "Into the Light" record

book #49

GOOD DEED RAIN update: I just finished writing my Encyclopedia Brown tribute novel. Every new book is my favorite, I think you'll like this one too. So stay tuned!

beets

Waiting on our doorstep this morning--beets left by our farmer neighbor! (You can read more about him in The Puttering Marvel)

calling all bees

The butterfly trees in our yard are starting to bloom.