The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [17]
LSC: For a while you were getting around on a bicycle. That's devotion to reading, risking getting run off a narrow black-topped road in order to reach the library. But that was after I entered your life—or you entered mine—thanks to some faceless bureaucrat who put us both into Section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington.
LMB: Dear God, you even remember the section number? Scary . . .
LSC: Do you remember trying out for the school talent show by singing Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"? The silence after we finished could have swallowed a planet.
LMB: I'm so glad we didn't make the cut. . . . The experience of making the attempt was likely good to have, I suppose. Maybe. Actually, I still don't like getting up on stage, come to think.
LSC: It's a good thing we found each other—no one else could have put up with us. (Although I must admit to having been immensely gratified at sitting around a conference recently, singing Lehrer songs with the other writers!)
LMB: Well, we didn't know fandom existed till after high school. In junior high we shared our love of books, watched favorite television shows and fell in love with their heroes together (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! Star Trek! The short-lived TV version of The Wackiest Ship in the Army!), and became each other's first readers for the (mostly highly derivative) stories, scripts, and poetry that boiled up in both our heads—we were inspired to write because we loved to read, and because stories poured through our heads, welling up uninvited from wherever these thoughts come.
I introduced you to SF and fantasy, and you introduced me to history and archaeology. This was the early 1960s, and American television was filled with World War II shows. It was all around in the culture. We shared books like Escape from Colditz, which was about WWII prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany. I think it is because we were trapped in high school and the idea of breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. "Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom. . . ."
LSC: One of our history teachers was a big fan of the movie Stalag 17, so I suppose the thought of breaking out wasn't exclusive to the students. I well remember writing a brief piece where I was magically transported from the crowded halls of the high school to the Pelennor Fields, hearing the horns of Rohan in the dawn.
LMB: My Tolkienesque epic, embarked upon at age fifteen and never finished, at least has the dubious distinction of having been written in Spenserian verse, the result of having read The Lord of the Rings and The Faerie Queene twice that year.
LSC: It was you who introduced me to Tolkien, something for which I'm profoundly grateful.
LMB: I bought an Ace pirated edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on a family vacation to Italy, and found the ending to be a huge disappointment; it just sort of trailed off. Oh, lord, I thought, it's one of those darn dismal British writers. . . . There was nothing on the cover, spine, blurb, nor after the last page that indicated there was more, except for a brief reference buried at the end of the "about the author" paragraph to it being a heroic romance published in three parts. Marketing was more primitive in those days, I suppose.
Half a year later, it was with overwhelming joy, still remembered vividly, that I found its two sequels. I don't remember the names of most of my high school teachers, mind you, but I can still remember where I was sitting when I first opened up The Two Towers and read, with a pounding heart, "Aragorn sped on up the hill . . ." My father's home office, the air faintly acrid with the scent of his pipe tobacco, in the big black chair under the window, yellow late-afternoon winter light shining in through the shredding silver-gray clouds beyond the chill bare Ohio woods