Check out the lefthand sidebar. Sherry’s book has a release date and an Amazon page! How much more official can you get? Doesn’t look like it’ll be available for you Christmas needs, but you know you’ve always wanted to start an Epiphany tradition in your home.

Seriously, we’re very excited.

Charles L. Crow, Professor Emeritus of English, Bowling Green State University, is also impressed. He’s written:

Professor Truffin’s elegant study defines a literature about school days.
Since the Gothic always reveals an alternative history, the hidden underside of experience, these are not the bright happy times of school anthems and graduation speeches, but a history of power abused and trust betrayed. Schoolhouse Gothic makes us looks at education and American literature with new eyes. This is an important book, and it will be widely read and admired.

I hope he’s correct in his predictions.

Grandparents’ Day was on Sept. 7. In keeping with my being late for just about every holiday, public and private, here’s my homage.

I only have one grandparent still living (Hi, Nana!), but I have fond memories of Granny & Grandpa, and Papa. On this Grandparent’s Day, I’m resurrecting a poem I wrote in the fourth grade. One of the finest of my juvenile works, I present to you,

Grand Ol’ Grandparents

Grandparents are sweet,
And so very, very neat.
They live threw some grand times
And carry some grand chimes.
They carry memory
And maybe some History.
They ride the first car,
And become my star.

Grandparents are smart
And eat raspberry tart.
They sleep, sleep, sleep,
And are sweet, sweet, sweet.
They won old, old rocking chairs,
And have stories of their afairs.
They have an old wood tub,
And stuffed animals to rub.

—1980

As I get older, I marvel at the sagacity I displayed in recognizing the wisdom of eating raspberry tart.

…my true love gave to me…

a Fender Standard Stratocaster HSS and Fender M-80 amplifier.

Rock on!

Yesterday was quite the day for competition in the Truffin household. In addition to the Bucyrus Bratfest, Sherry and I each were participating in competitive sporting events. [NOTE: I didn't actually see any of the Bratwurst Festival events this year. Sherry and Wade report that it was up to its usual fun. I DID get to have some of the Methodist women's bratwurst casserole, and it was as good as ever!]

Huzzah! for Sherry
After a very long hiatus, Sherry returned to the running races. She ran in the Findlay “Up, Up, and Away 5K,” evidently held in conjunction with a hot air balloon festival. Before I tell you how she did, I feel compelled to point out that Sherry was competing with two major handicaps: on Tuesday she tweaked her back, and it’s been very sore all week, and, as if the back pain wasn’t enough, her mysterious stomach pains seemed to be making a come-back.

However, despite these physical obstacles, Sherry perservered and ran the race set before her. She ran the 5K in 29:13, which works out to 9:25/mile. Not bad. She also placed 11th out of 21 in the 35-39 Female age group and 239th out of 372 finishers.

So, HUZZAH! Sherry for a race well run!

Bratfest Open

While Sherry was out running, Todd drove over to Bucyrus for the inaugural tournament held at Aumiller Park. The course is quite nice, with a Jekyll and Hyde character. The front 9 holes are tight, wooded holes that are all basically short. The back 9 is rather open, still with trees, and mostly loooong. I finished the first round +8, and I was feeling pretty OK about it since I didn’t have any holes that just blew up on: 8 pars and 8 bogeys. Given my usual tournament performance, I felt I was off to a good start.

The second round, however, was once again my giant killer. Interestingly enough, I only finished up 2 strokes worse than the morning, but it felt much, much worse since I had both a double and triple bogey. Fortunately for my finishing place, it seemed that alot of the other players had rough second rounds as well. I ended up taking 5th place out of 17 with a +18. My prize was a disc shaped bottle opener and an Innova Valkyrie disc.

So, over all, I think the Truffins did pretty good.

So, Tuesday, Sherry and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. (Yeah, us!) We celebrated by attending back to back Cleveland Indians games. Before the eyes roll back in various heads, it must be understood that going to ball games and following the Indians has been one of those “couple” things that we do. Sherry loves the Indians as much as I, and we love loving them together. Also, one of the big events of our honeymoon was attending a Toronto Blue Jays/ Orioles game. So, the Indians games were both enjoyable in their own right as well as a reminder of our nuptiual celebrations 14 years ago.

My folks joined us Tuesday night, and we ate at the phenomenal Flying Fig restaurant in Ohio City. Mom claims that her short ribs were the best meal at the table. My gnocchi, seared scallop, and veal meatballs wanted to argue, buy Sherry’s soup, seared tofu, and scallop were clamoring too loud, and Dad’s amazing hanger steak kept waving a hand and saying what about me?

After catching “The Fatty Wagon”–a shuttle bus run entirely on recycled vegetable oil–to the game, we settled in for a nerve-wracking pitchers duel. In the end, both pitchers were outstanding, and we went home disappointed with a 1-0 loss. The evening ended with a nice walk across the Lorain-Carnegie bridge, which gave us beautiful views of the Cleveland skyline.

Last night, we returned to the Jake, meeting up with some friends from TU. The rain stopped just in time for the game to begin, and we once again settled in for a tense pitchers’ duel. Fausto Carmona turned in a brilliant performance, and the Red Sox’s Beckett was almost as sharp. This night however, we were rewarded with an Indians victory, 1-0.

Two games, two nights, two 1-0 ball games. Some stat junky figured out that the last time the Indians lost a 1-0 game and came back to win with another 1-0 game was in April of 1942, 65 years. Not a bad way to celebrate an anniversary, watching a once in 65 years event.

I now have to go have my left ear drum replaced. Sherry is not afraid of root, root, rooting for the home team.

Sherry’s essay “‘Terrors of the Night’: Salvation, Gender, and the Gothic in Go Tell It on the Mountain” is being published in a collection of essays celebrating the 50th anniversary of James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel. The collection is a bit pricey (encourage your library to order it!) but you can now pre-order it at the publisher.

I just got the news this morning, but perhaps soon I can coax a short synopisis of the piece from Sherry. Anyone interested in an insightful analysis of one of the most effective conversion experience depictions in fiction should be drooling.

ps: go visit sherry.truffin.com

There’s been some confusion amongst the family and friends about the status, number, and make of our new family member, so I thought I should clear up whatever I could.

• The cat’s name is Knightley. However, that is subject to change. If you remember, Emma was first named Flannery, but I kept calling her “Fannie,” which is one of the Morefield’s cats. Other names that rose to the top of our lists were: Spike, Thursday, and Marlowe. Sherry seems to be edging towards Marlowe should Knightley fall through. Of course, much of this will be moot since…
• Knightly is about 2 years old. He was brought to the Humane Society as a stray, so the folks there didn’t have any real gauge of his age. During the check-up with the vet, he concluded that Knightley was roughly 2 years old. This makes him the same age as Emma. He is a tad bit bigger, weighing in at 8.1 lbs to Emma’s 7.5.
• Knightley is a boy. In fact, he is very, very much a boy. I’ve never seen a cat with such large…well, you know. Thus far, the only other think about his maleness is that his urine STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN. Fortunately, he keeps his stink in the box. I have a feeling the Truffin litterboxes will be cleaner than they have ever been. There was a small concern that people might think we named him after Keira Knightley. While Keira is a fine actress with certain feline characteristics, she is a GIRL. We named Knightley after the character in the Jane Austen novel Emma. See, Emma and Mr. Knightley.
• I don’t believe that Knightley has stopped purring since we brought him home on Thursday. He is an extremely sweet cat who is always looking to have his head rubbed and to cuddle up. Don’t know yet if this is normal or if he’s just really happy to be out of the shelter.
• Emma has been doing as well as might be expected. She still hisses at him every chance she gets, but they have spent much time in the same room together, and Knightley seems to be accepting the fact that Emma is in charge.
• We have only adopted ONE cat at this time. Sherry saw a very engergetic yet sad orange tabby kitten while we were picking up Knightley; she very much wanted to bring her home. I thought it best to a) only bring one cat at a time into the house and b) only have two cats for reasons of smell and my allergies.
• We did go into the selection process wondering if we should get another orange tabby. We dearly loved our Tigger, and we’ve both seen other orange tabbies that were wonderful. In the end, however, we just spent time with the available cats and let them speak to us. Mr. Knightly won us over.

Well, that’s about it. We take him back to the vet in two weeks for his final round of shots, but right now we’re just getting to know each other.

So, after a late night of computer bashing and a long morning of publishing frustration for Sherry, we headed out at 1:00 to the Seneca County Humane Society to find a friend for little Emma. People have been asking us what we were looking for in a new cat, and both Sherry and I were having trouble even thinking about it. Tigger and Emma both kind of fell into our laps. Tigger belonged to the son of a woman with whom Sherry worked, and Emma was found on the grounds of the Tiffin University art building. In both cases we were given a “go/no-go” sort of choice. Walking into the Humane Society and getting an animal is a totally different proposition.

After signing in, we were directed to two rooms where the cats were kept. There were somewhere between 20-30 animals ranging from small kittens to full-grown adults. Unlike Sherry’s last visit there with Pat, we were immediately greeted by a dozen mews and cats reaching through their little doors to make contact, begging to be petted. Immediately it became apparant that this decision was going to be difficult. “This was supposed to be fun,” I moaned. Instead, there were several wonderfully adorable creatures begging to be loved.

After going through the two rooms, we filled out an adoption application, got some info on a few of the cats that really got our attention, and decided that we needed to go for a drive to clear our heads. We were both a bit overwhelmed by the weirdness of “shopping” for one of God’s creatures. The only time I’ve felt weirder was when I’ve checked out adoption websites that have ads for kids with copy written like you’re picking out a car. We even stopped back at home to see what Emma had to say about things. She indicated that she really wanted a boy. So, we narrowed the field down to three: there was a cute black kitten and two orange and white kitten/cats that we thought we’d look at again.

Upon returning to the Humane Society, we were informed that our application for adoption had been accepted. In that short period, I’m not sure what information they could have accumulated to accept or reject us, but it felt good to be accepted at any rate. We just had to pick. We asked a few questions about our shortlist. They had all been strays; that was about all the info they had. We confirmed that the two orange and white candidates were male; they were unsure about the black kitten. We decided to visit with the orange and whites for a bit first–the staff would check out the black kitten. The O&W’s were even more adorable out of the cage: they purred and cuddled and assented to our petting. As we were cuddling these adorable creatures trying to decide which one we’d like to take home, one of the staff informed us that the black kitten was female. That was disappointing.

We put the O&W’s back and looked around again. Our attention was grabbed by two adult black cats that had escaped our notice the first time around. Upon inspection, one was definitely female. The other black cat–in cage #8–was very, very male. It might be the most male cat I’ve ever seen. He was very gentle and friendly. While Sherry visited with #8, I went back to the desk to inquire about his information. As soon as I said #8, everyone at the front nodded and said something nice about him–”He’s one of the nicest cats we have.” “Isn’t he the really neat one?” “Oh, he’s wonderful.” Like all the other cats to which we were drawn, #8 is a stray, and they really have very little information about him. I returned to Sherry with the information, and she wanted to know if how I felt about taking him home.

So, there it is. We’re adopting #8. He’s an adult–which was interesting since we’d been looking mainly at kittens or just over kitten-age cats. Generally, he’s a very black black. He does have a very small white splash in his crotch area, and in the right light he seems to have reddish-brown highlights in his rear area. The Humane Society arranged to have him neutered tomorrow, and we will bring him home Thursday afternoon.

Now we just need to name him. Sherry’s looking at something out of a gothic romance. I said that’s fine as long as it isn’t Heathcliff or Rochester.

So, 13 years ago at this time Sherry and I were eating supper in a McDonald’s on our way to Ashtabula, OH where we had reservations for our first night as a married couple.  We would spend the next few days in Niagra Falls and Toronto, taking in Phantom of the Opera and a Blue Jays-Orioles game. I do remember being very glad we didn’t have the big party brouha that went on and on into the night. (more…)

It’s been a month since His Orangeness left us.  Sherry still wakes up missing his heft on her head in the morning, and I still miss his insistence on having his belly rubbed.  Emma has slowly come around and is chasing things again although it’s clear that she is lonely.  Our trip to Chicago was the first time she’s ever been alone for a significant period, and she was quite pitiful when Pat came to check in on her.  It’s clear that we’ll need to get her a friend.

She has a checkup today, and then next week we plan on heading over to the Humane Society to see if we can’t find her a friend.