Musings on a Midnight

I sit here with my companion, coffee - black, strong. Perhaps much too strong. It is needed to keep me awake whilst I ponder my next piece.

I hold pen to paper. A much too old-fashioned quill reminds me of my humble beginnings, but a trip to the local general store brought my writing instrument into the modern age - a Waterman, complete with the new ink feed. I stare at my desk tableau: still life with fountain pen.

The tablet before me is also fresh from the mercantile. Its blank surface beckons pen to page, with a necessary dip in the well. Black, inky cursive to a willing, virginal leaf. The lines will keep my too flowing hand even and legible.

What to scribe? The confessions of a once notorious outlaw pair? If so, where to begin? At the beginning? A once happy childhood blasted to pieces by war? Surely the papers were rife with such stories post-conflict, so no need to repeat here. A memoir of a childhood lost? Well, as either Mr. Heyes or Mr. Curry might say, it wasn't lost, just shot to pieces. (Hmm, I must not repeat myself, but their phrasings are difficult to resist.)

Skip forward then ... institutionalized adolescence. That of itself might find an audience, but I fear Miss Addams is exhausting the collective consciousness on it these days far more than I could add my own uninformed jots. Ah, a new direction, maybe - good youths led down the wrong road by vicious grifters ready to pounce, and their soon-to-be young accomplices taken under their wing with promises of easy riches, charmingly disarming doughy dowagers and other dubious and disastrous enterprises performed under duress. Hmm, or perhaps they were all too willing. (Note: Check that last statement with them; it would change the whole narrative.)

Now we arrive mostly at the age of consent, contractual and otherwise. They were lost by then, surely - wanted by the law for nigh on the next decade. Astonishingly clever, good-hearted but bad, until they found their way back. Perhaps tellings of the time away, prodigals finding their way home, or to the right side of the law. Not being able to convince their robbing brethren to join them on the greener side of the fence. Wait, this is not a sermon, but sounds as if any preacher worth his stripes could gather the flock with such a message on any sundry Sunday morning. No, this must be along the lines of something exciting: outlawry, thievery, hold-ups, the glory and glamour of a genius and a fast draw. Sadly, the real story is anti-climactic compared to the dime novels, and that is not my calling.

Numerous ideas have come and gone, discarded or filed away for another time. A fresh slant on overexposed characters is difficult, hyped as they have been of late in the rags.

Amnesty. That in itself should provide new angles but only conjures up rehashment of legend, derring-do of alleged gentlemen bandits, but no Robin Hoods they. That they shot no one in their thieving heyday says loads, but boils down to supreme contradiction: kind-hearted bad men? Were we to believe such a thing, we would have victims of circumstance on our hands. I presume even they would knock that on its head as mere speculation (if they knew what it meant).

Deadlines loom at midnight, and it is far too close on to the witching hour to start anything expansive. Something short will have to suffice. Perhaps another set of characters. I wonder what Mr. Twain is up to these days.

oooOOOooo

Note: Jane Addams was a late 19th/early 20th century social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize winner (1931) often credited with founding social work as a profession in the U.S.