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"Night Watch" counts as a police procedural. Honestly.
Well, we made it through thanksgiving and putting up the Christmas tree. Thanksgiving dinner at Pop-pop's girl's place, and lots of visiting with family. Also, a bootleg video of Frank 'Chicken' Perdue churning up the Charleston with Pop-pop's old friend Eunicelee. (The story goes that he asked her after the dance if she'd ever marry him, and she said, "Frank, when I knew you at school, I honestly thought you were the ugliest man I'd ever seen. And, fifty years later? Ya still are." I've never met either of 'em, but Pop-pop knows Eunicelee fairly well.)
I've really no desire to go over the rest of it, and I'm sure you'd just be bored out of your minds. Instead, more of Pop-pop's Kitchen Table Stories:
Pop-pop quit high school. Twice. Not due to intellectual difficulty, or any financial need, but because he was just so darn fed up with the whole place. (Eventually he went to Wye High, the big-city high school, instead, and graduated near head of the class, just to show everyone, but that's a different story entirely.) For example, on the first day of class one teacher looked up from the class list and told him, "Your cousin Fulton was the smartest student ever to graduate from this institution."-- and Pop-pop continues it -- 'You, very clearly, have nothing at all in common with him.'
Fulton went on to get a full scholarship to St. John's in Annapolis (back when it was a normal college) and pick up 'a doctor and then another doctor and another doctor,' and eventually a professorship at Johns Hopkins. Also, at some point in here, he disappeared for a few days, and was eventually found sitting in a boat in the reservoir above Conowingo Damn, bathing his bare feet in the icy water, "in order to thaw them out, you know." The police understood him to be 'subject to fits of melancholy,' and simply returned him to the care of his college. The folks back on the farm, however, were adamant that "he ain't never had any kind of fits," and came to the collective conclusion that "some of those freshmen, you know the sorts of things they they do," had taken him on some sort of hzing expeditionn and left him there, bewildered and cold.
He apparently spoke all sorts of languages, and every so often would appear back on the farm ond scare the bejeezus out of his younger cousins, tottering around on his now-toeless feet and saying things like, "I need to send these books back to Annapolis, I don't suppose you could teach me how to make a box out of wood?" to which the standard reponse was to deny everything and run for the hills. (Hey, even this generation's full-scholarship academicians know how to make a box out of would, Well, probably. With luck.)
He taught in Texas for a while, and gave my grandfather his new address. From then on it's mostly what Pop-pop picked up in local gossip, because he never actually wrote back to Fulton. Eventually he appears to have ended up "up North somewheres, married to one of them professor types-- real smart, and rich, too. She built him a whole set of rooms of his own-- couldn't stand him after a while, you know." The last Pop-pop heard from him directly was a rather sad and rambling letter in which he very humbly-yet-pontifically acked if he could, perhaps, stay at Pop-pop's place for a while. "She'd pretty much kicked him out, see, and he didn't have anywhere else to go."
Pop-pop replied with an outrageously mendacious description of his own utter destitution-- there was no way he could take him on, as much as he wanted to, why his own sons had to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor, Fulton understood, surely-- and gave him the address of Cousin Alma in Hebron, who was just rattling around in that big old house, all by herself, hint hint hint.
A few weeks later he got the news that Fulton had gone out into the woods with a rope and hung himself. Nobody was greatly surprised. Once Alma mentioned she'd had a letter from him shortly before he died, but Pop-pop never dared asked her if she'd replied.
I've really no desire to go over the rest of it, and I'm sure you'd just be bored out of your minds. Instead, more of Pop-pop's Kitchen Table Stories:
Pop-pop quit high school. Twice. Not due to intellectual difficulty, or any financial need, but because he was just so darn fed up with the whole place. (Eventually he went to Wye High, the big-city high school, instead, and graduated near head of the class, just to show everyone, but that's a different story entirely.) For example, on the first day of class one teacher looked up from the class list and told him, "Your cousin Fulton was the smartest student ever to graduate from this institution."-- and Pop-pop continues it -- 'You, very clearly, have nothing at all in common with him.'
Fulton went on to get a full scholarship to St. John's in Annapolis (back when it was a normal college) and pick up 'a doctor and then another doctor and another doctor,' and eventually a professorship at Johns Hopkins. Also, at some point in here, he disappeared for a few days, and was eventually found sitting in a boat in the reservoir above Conowingo Damn, bathing his bare feet in the icy water, "in order to thaw them out, you know." The police understood him to be 'subject to fits of melancholy,' and simply returned him to the care of his college. The folks back on the farm, however, were adamant that "he ain't never had any kind of fits," and came to the collective conclusion that "some of those freshmen, you know the sorts of things they they do," had taken him on some sort of hzing expeditionn and left him there, bewildered and cold.
He apparently spoke all sorts of languages, and every so often would appear back on the farm ond scare the bejeezus out of his younger cousins, tottering around on his now-toeless feet and saying things like, "I need to send these books back to Annapolis, I don't suppose you could teach me how to make a box out of wood?" to which the standard reponse was to deny everything and run for the hills. (Hey, even this generation's full-scholarship academicians know how to make a box out of would, Well, probably. With luck.)
He taught in Texas for a while, and gave my grandfather his new address. From then on it's mostly what Pop-pop picked up in local gossip, because he never actually wrote back to Fulton. Eventually he appears to have ended up "up North somewheres, married to one of them professor types-- real smart, and rich, too. She built him a whole set of rooms of his own-- couldn't stand him after a while, you know." The last Pop-pop heard from him directly was a rather sad and rambling letter in which he very humbly-yet-pontifically acked if he could, perhaps, stay at Pop-pop's place for a while. "She'd pretty much kicked him out, see, and he didn't have anywhere else to go."
Pop-pop replied with an outrageously mendacious description of his own utter destitution-- there was no way he could take him on, as much as he wanted to, why his own sons had to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor, Fulton understood, surely-- and gave him the address of Cousin Alma in Hebron, who was just rattling around in that big old house, all by herself, hint hint hint.
A few weeks later he got the news that Fulton had gone out into the woods with a rope and hung himself. Nobody was greatly surprised. Once Alma mentioned she'd had a letter from him shortly before he died, but Pop-pop never dared asked her if she'd replied.
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