a letter sent

[kareina]

 

I mentioned in my blog post about JMBards that I got a bonus houseguest I hadn't met, a friend of a friend. I have always had good luck with making friends with friends of friends, and this was no exception. This time, however, we are not only keeping in touch, we are playing an email game I used to play with my sister back in the late 80's (before she had kids and had no more time to send letters). We would exchange letters, putting a new word in the subject line of each message, which the recipient would then have to use in their reply. This was fun, and made for much more interesting letters, as one needed to work the assigned word into the letter in as natural a way as possible, and we delighted in giving the other words that we might not even know (this is how I learned the word callipygian, for example).

Having just sent a rather long letter (wherein my assigned word was "radicalized"), I will copy it here (lightly edited), too.

Dearest T,

Again days have slipped by with so much to do that I have neglected my correspondence. I like your use of time, writing whilst waiting in line, though the modern approach of parents picking up and dropping off kids so very different from how I grew up as to seem almost alien. Mostly I just walked to and from school, but when we lived in Germany, when I was in Kindergarten, I took the school bus. I remember one day when waiting at the bus stop with another kid and a third child arrived a minute or three after I did, and was wearing the exact same shirt as the one who was already there (it was striped, with narrow stripes in reds and greens and white), and we all laughed like crazy, as we had never seen anyone wearing the same shirt as someone else before.

I hadn't thought of that in many years, so your letter arrives as a gift, not just from the connection with you and learning a little more of your life, but in stirring up pleasant memories of days gone by.

I envy you the opportunity to work full time on your house! How lucky that he had something he was willing to part with that could be sold for enough to make his part possible. I remember how nice it was that we signed papers and got the keys to my house on 24 December that year (2022), as we were able to work full time for pretty much two weeks to get a couple of rooms cleaned up enough, the icky-oilstained carpets out, walls painted, and klickglov floors ("click-floor" is the literal translation, no idea what they are called in English) put in so I could move all of the boxes of my stuff into one of the rooms, and out of the house in Luleå so Caroline could move in.

What are you doing for your part of the passive income stream that makes house building possible? Renting to trail hikers sounds like a fun way to let your property help pay for itself. Though, if your mother and child have a good relationship, having grandma that close sounds like an amazing story-book opportunity, says one who only saw grandparents once every 2 to 4 years growing up due to the ever-changing distances involved with being a military brat.

Thinking back to the kinds of people my parents knew when I was little, they would probably be shocked at just how radicalized Beth and I grew up. She even more than I--she is the one who was arrested protesting the Gulf War when she was at Uni (they had barricaded access to a military base in the area). She was a starving student at a Liberal Arts College, (Hampshire College in Massachusetts), so when they offered her a government-paid attorney to defend her case, she said "no thanks, I will defend myself", and then spent the weeks before the trial in the University Law Library looking up precedents and doing everything that a well-paid lawyer would have done for her (but which she suspected, drawing on the popular caricature of public defence lawyers in popular media of the day, that the attorney whose services she refused wouldn't have made the time to do), with the result that the Judge dismissed the case.

I certainly have opinions, and I am happy to open my home as a landing point (long-term if needed) to people needing to flee from a government persecuting them, but I have never had the guts to be present at a protest, not being comfortable being in cities or crowds of non-SCA people (which is where protests tend to happen).

Luckily, I do feel perfectly comfortable in crowds of SCA people at our big events, so if we win, I will be ok with being royalty. Yes, that is how the tournament works. For Drachenwald there are two Crown Tournaments in a year, one in the spring and one in the autumn. Everyone who wants to enter sends in a letter to current royals and their "Seneschal" (the officer in charge of paperwork side of the Kingdom) expressing interest in entering, and certifying that they have read the relevant "laws" and meet all of the entry requirements, and that they are a pair who are entering together, one as the Champion, to put on armour and fight in the tournament (also called the Lists), and the other as the Consort, or Inspiration, whose job is to inspire their champion to victory.

Every really good fighter I have spoken with says that having a good consort really makes a huge difference on how they fight on a given day, and there is something about wishing to make your friend/lover/sibliging/inspiration/whatever Queen (or King, depending on their prefered gender) that makes it easier to find the focus needed to fight at the top of your personal skill level for that tournament. The couple then reigns together as King & Queen (or as a pair of Kings or pair of Queens).

Well, directly after the tournament, the fighter still sweaty and in armour, they are acknowledged as Heirs to the throne, and often crowned with a wreath of roses or similar right away. Then, hours later, after everyone has had a chance to get cleaned up, at Court they are formally invested as Crown Prince/ess, and they have some weeks to get used to that job and prepare for their Coronation. Our Crown Tournament is next weekend, in Germany. If we win then we need to quickly buy tickets to the UK the weekend of 12-14 June for the Coronation.

Then we would have some months as Royalty, including a trip to Finland in October for the tournament to select our Heirs, and then, in January at 12th Night Coronation, we would step down.

Those four events are obligatory for both members of the Royal pair, and missing one or more of them is grounds for not becoming a Count or Countess when you step down. So far, I have never seen an occasion where someone didn't fulfil those requirements, and thus everyone I know who has been King or Queen is now a Count or Countess. (doing it twice gets a bonus title of Duke or Duchess, there is no formal title for doing it more often, though some people joke that "slow learner" is appropriate, as there is a lot of work that goes with the job, in addition to the perks of being literally treated like Royalty.

What do I hope happens? That is a tough one. I think it would be fun to do, someday (and have long thought so), but life is, as always, busy, with so many project, so I often think "not yet", because while they are only required to attend those four events, most Royal pairs do their best to attend far more events than that, in as big a cross-section of the Kingdom as their travel budget plus vacation time permits, and while I love travelling to events, and the total number of events we make it to in a year might not change much, the "where" would, and, despite there being a Kingdom Travel Fund that helps Royals travel, it is still expensive.

So therefore I will fall back on my default answer "I hope that my champion fights with joy and with honour on the day", and I will accept the outcome, whatever it might be.

I hope you do make it to that event in Meridies this month! You will, if you look for them, of course find queerphobic people in the SCA, though fewer than there once were, as some unpleasant individuals have publicly and loudly rage-quit on social media as the organisation is too "Woke" (to which my friends tend to respond "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out"), but there are also many queer people in the group. There has been a large "household" called Blue Feather, which started in the 1980's for gay SCA people, which, has, of course, over time expanded to welcome everyone in the LGBTQ-etc community Anyone can join by just saying "I am Blue Feather", and we have a FB groups for it, one SCA wide, and one that is Drachenwald specific, both of which I am part of.

So, I encourage you to attend that event, or another, and then write and tell me how it went. How does it compare to Drachenwald? Do they make you feel welcome? What is the focus of that event? Arts? Fighting? Food? Everything? Is it one day, or over night?

Most SCA branches in the States have an officer called the "chatelaine" or "hospitalier" (or even sometimes "gold key"), whose job it is to welcome new people, help them find costumes or accessories to borrow if needed, and learn about the local area, so feel free to reach out to them in advance and say "I am new, visited a random event in Drachenwald". If you don't do it in advance, then at the event greet people with "Hi, I am new here, can you tell me about what you are wearing/doing/watching (or whatever makes a good similar conversation starter)"

Now I had better send this, the letter wound up longer than I had anticipated when I sat down to the computer. Take care of yourself, and your family, may your paperwork and house building go smoothly, and may there be many moments of random joy in your days.

Comments

cool

[redbird]

That sounds to me like a good intro, and it also sounds like you and your correspondent are picking (somewhat) reasonable words for the other person to include (rather than something like "consubstantiation" or "otolaryngology").

I went to a lot of protests before 2020, and it rarely occurred to me to be worried about safety attending, unless the weather seemed forbidding. It probably helps that I'm comfortable in crowds--mostly from long practice, though I know at least one person who was fine with crowds before the pandemic, and no longer is).

Re: cool

[kareina]

I think that I read too many stories written in the 60's and 70's in which riots broke out at protests, which was a major trigger for an unpleasant plot development...