When Magic Blows in from the West

In Tulipville, the magic blows in generally from the west, as that is the prevailing wind direction. Even those who study magic professionally cannot assert its source with confidence, although some pretend they can. It is noted that magic from the west has delightful odors of the wildflowers in the high meadows, and so some think it is a sort of divine nectar. But that cannot be the full story, for less commonly the wind carries magic from other directions, in which there are no mountains, and which, as one would expect, does not smell of wildflowers.

The western magic is generally at its most potent in the spring and early summer, and is of a pleasant nature. Bouquets often appear in the air, particularly in populated areas, and fall slowly to the ground without the hurry of unmagical things, to the delight of young lovers; and some older lovers as well, for Cupid spares them an arrow or two. And the children love to chase stray flowers as they float above them along sidewalks and garden pathways.

In the darker months, a colder wind blows magic more often from the north, and it is of a more fierce, although generally not frightening, nature. It is particularly then that the animals begin to speak. And the mice complain bitterly of the cats; and the cats complain that the mice do not taste good enough, and wonder that they do not eat more cheese; for there is a haughty cruelty to the feline species. And one may well feel sympathy for the mice, but the truth is that they take up habitation and do not pay rent; they would be safe enough in the fields, at least from the cats. And there are certain landlords that, if the law were amenable, might take the same approach to their other underperforming tenants.

As the fall gives way to winter, the presence of magical creatures increases. Particularly notable are the dragons. These are not like their better known and more ferocious cousins of the north; instead, the dragons of Tulipville tend to be smaller, little larger than a horse, mostly vegetarian, of poor eyesight, and, if I might say so without seeming disparaging, not terribly bright. So that the main dangers they pose are devoured hedges and accidental dumpster fires.

Indeed, the wyvernian flame hazard leads to a seasonal increase in the Tulipville fire department. The accepted approach is to trap them with jewelry, to which their fascination is endless, and to place them in cages in the local baseball field, which is vacant in that season. Fortunately, the baseball field is of uncommonly large dimensions for a town of Tulipville’s size, which truthfully is little more than a village; not because the game crowds are particularly large, but because the magic of that season causes the ball to carry, so that if the field was not enlarged singles would easily become home runs, to the detriment of the game. The scope of the field makes it convenient for dragon containment.

The dragons, for their part, do not seem to much mind their entrapment, as long as they are left the small pile of treasure which bought their captivity. Fortunately, when the dragons vanish in the early spring, as the winter magic wears off, their wealth is left behind, so that the Tulipville town government is able to acquire it on a rental rather than purchase basis.

It must be a matter of careful attention, however, that the Tulipville dragons, while otherwise dimwitted, are very astute in matters of gemology. They are not fooled by pyrite, nor by glass however wonderfully wrought; and anyone who attempts such a subterfuge should first remove all flammables, such are the snorts of indignant fire.

It is a peculiarity of Tulipville’s magical terroir, found nowhere else to the best of my knowledge, that books sprout there of immense significance. Certainly, anyone who read Kubla Khan in youth may have thought that somewhere this poem must be completed, and many more like it; and it is a sadness of literary development to find that neither of these things are true. But in Tulipville, they are true. There also, in the Library of Tulipville, one may read the lost plays of Sophocles and his contemporaries, of histories otherwise lost to history, and the proceedings of the Alexandrians. In modern matters the Library of Tulipville is also quite notable. If one wants, for instance, a few more digits of the proton-to-electron mass ratio than is known at CERN, it can be found in Tulipville.

The Library of Tulipville is affectionately known as the Lute, a strained play on its acronym. While nowhere officially acknowledged, this usage is so engrained that the instrument itself always appears on Library banners, to the puzzlement of tourists. And, by extension, the music of the lute is popular in Tulipville.

The books of the Lute, being magical and jealous of their uniqueness, resist all copying in bulk, aside from in the minds of their readers. Thus it is, as those who follow such matters know, that for many academes a pilgrimage to Tulipville is a necessity of their profession. So much so that while the primary business of Tulipville is the export of flowers, as the town name suggests, the second is the import of scholars, as travel expenses to Tulipville are requested in many research proposals and are approved with little difficulty.

It must be said that the Lute is a source of great pride to Tulipvillians, who have in any case a bookish nature. Tulipville springs forth literary clubs as other locations do hair salons, and its social and intellectual life is built around the library. There is scarcely a resident without a library card, or an active selection of books; so much so that the suspension of a library card would be the source of considerable rumors and finger pointings, and a social shunning of someone who, at minimum, has a possibly contagious bad fortune; and the actual revocation of a library card would be akin to excommunication.

The influence of the Lute is such that it is often said, with the seriousness that can only be conveyed by a joke, that there is not so much a Library of Tulipville, as there is a Tulipville of the Library.

And here we begin to understand the remarkable power of a most remarkable head librarian. Ms. Wilkerson, or Mrs. Wilkerson as she prefers to be called, is a tall woman of thin build, without being gaunt. Her height is accentuated by her penchant for wearing her hair as a beehive. In times of high magic, it often actually is a beehive, and the insistent buzz that surrounds it might cause the scholars to issue a heartfelt ’shhh!’, were it not that one does no such thing in the direction of Mrs. Wilkerson. It might be thought that she would find this phenomenon annoying, but no one dares ask, and she never seems perturbed.

She is so regarded that when Mrs. Wilkerson passes, the hats with which Tulipville is replete are respectfully doffed.

It somewhere came into Mrs. Wilkerson’s mind that scholars, particularly of the male variety, should wear tweed jackets, always with an elbow patch. This is stated in no policy or guidance, but those who appear without such apparel find the issuance of their library card mysteriously delayed, or their lending period mysteriously shortened, in either case to the detriment of scholarship.

In due course, some colleague, presumably not a competitor for the same grants, takes him aside to explain the facts of the matter. There exists in Tullpville an extensive business in tweed jackets for precisely this reason. And, as supply and demand operates in Tulipville as it does elsewhere, I must confess that the prices do much to support the town budget, which depends more on sales than property taxes. Perhaps for this reason, the Visitors Office has been quite reluctant to provide travel guidance on this matter.

It may be wondered how Mrs. Wilkerson, whose various peculiarities will be further discussed in due course, came to such power. The answer is that the books themselves selected her. The Lute does not open unless she opens it; the books themselves do not open unless checked out in a manner approved by Mrs. Wilkerson. This magical appointment makes her position unassailable, and as permanent as she wants it to be. Mayors may come and goes, but Mrs. Wilkerson does not.

The Library is the common, almost only, venue for the social meetings of the town. However, its scheduling service is antiquated and unreliable, leading to the occurrence, less rare than it should be, of two events overlapping in their appointments. Some think it overly charitable to attribute this to error, and that instead Mrs. Wilkerson, although she seldom smiles and never laughs, has a particularly sharp sense of humor.

In one memorable case the meeting of the Moral Rectitude Union was double-booked with the local chapter of the International Goblins Society. Neither group having an inclination to give ground, or to complain of official mismanagement at the risk of their library cards, the two meetings were held in parallel.

And when the MRU raised a carefully planned motion to petition the town council to ban certain children’s candies, the goblins in attendance, regarding themselves as duly enrolled in both meetings, voted it down. And similarly for all other MRU business. So much so that the MRU newsletter account of the proceedings resolutions, or lack thereof, bringing unexplained surprises to the readership, produced many strongly-worded letters to the MRU President, Mr. Wilson. These same readers, however, would have had more to concern themselves with if any of the goblins present had understood MRU parliamentary procedures, in which case several new bylaws would have passed to pernicious effect.

Conversely, the goblin motion to raise the quota for startled children passed over the objections of the MRU, who were unable to produce defections from the goblin community, as did all other of their business; for those of true moral fiber are always outnumbered by magical miscreants.

One might think, if one knew little more of the MRU than what has been related here, that it is of little influence in Tulipville, or even a source of humor. And it is certainly true that Tulipvillians, while of good manners typically, are not generally as precise in their moral calculations as the MRU would wish, and are little inclined to consult the helpful reference tables provided by the MRU.

Against this, however, it must be stated that Mr. Wilkerson, while of milquetoast demeanor, is of stoat morality, and in fact serves as Treasurer of the MRU. It is reasonably thought that a word from him might cause a library card to become defective. And so it is that the standard of righteous behavior becomes much higher in his presence.

There is an opinion in some circles that the MRU is in spirit a club of self-impressed, opinionated busybodies with an overly well-exercised eye towards impertinent advice. But this is far from true. They are the intellectual descendants of Spinoza, who first reduced moral calculations to axiomatic proofs. And the MRU has so advanced this technique, and so diligently applied it, that its moralicians, as they wish to be called, continually establish with rigorous exactitude that certain things, previously thought harmless, are in fact sinful and in need of censor. These results are generally published, after anointment by peer review, in the Journal of Moral Repugnance.

It may be said, to praise the diligence of the MRU, that their moral proofs are detailed and lengthy; and that in consequence of them and those of similar institutions, the Journal itself has considerable weight, not only figuratively, but also literally. And, particularly when bound together in annual collections, it becomes therefore a danger to librarians lest it be dropped on a foot. For reasons of workplace safety, therefore, every journal must be rated in terms of its risk of bruising toes; and this rating is known, for evident reasons, as its impact factor, which is quite high for the Journal of Moral Repugnance. But these are purely technical matters, and I would fear I did digress, were it not that it has bearing on our story.

It came to pass that on a warm spring day, when the magic blew in from the west, Mrs. Wilkerson had laid out for her husband a bow tie, jacket, and bowler hat in anticipation of a polo event.

“Do they match?” Mr. Wilkerson asked doubtfully.

Familiar with her husband’s bent of mind, she responded simply “It has been peer reviewed.”

To which Mr. Wilkerson could provide no response, the matter having been established with an assurance that he would feel guilty to question. But he might have been tempted to ask, for clarification, “In which journal?”, had not his natural diffidence taken over.

The afternoon proceeded with pleasant ambiance, the couple dining with friends on a low balcony overlooking the playing field, with Mr. Wilkerson somewhat distracted that his bowler, resting uneasily on an adjacent hat pole, not blow away.

Until, that is, the matter of dessert came up.

Here Mr. Wilkerson was placed in an uncomfortable awkwardness. For while he was well-known for his love of rhubarb pie, and the Club would generally bring it to him unasked, recent developments at the MRU had made its consumption impossible.

The advance of the moralicians into culinary matters had led to a rigorous proof that rhubarb pie, and only this of all pies, was inherently sinful, and could not be consumed by any with moral convictions. Mr. Wilkerson, with an acute and sensitive intuition, had long suspected that this pie rested on weak ethical foundations, however thick its crust might be. He had, however, suppressed his doubts on behalf of his cravings; but with the recent publication of MRU findings, he could no longer justify such a pie to himself.

“Is there anything different I might like for dessert?” He asked the waiter.

“Our new tapioca pudding is highly regarded. Would you like to try it?”

And here our waiter, having precisely this desert on hand for another Club member, but willing to make a course correction in view of the presence of Mrs. Wilkerson, placed the pudding in front of Mr. Wilkerson for his inspection.

“Has it been peer reviewed?” Mr. Wilkerson asked after sniffing it doubtfully.

The waiter, taking Mr. Wilkerson for a dope, as perhaps he was, but nonetheless the First Laddie of the Library, as he was sometimes known, and therefore not to be trifled with, searched his mind for an appropriate response to such a ridiculous question.

“It was the subject of a journal article which established its deliciousness at p less than point zero one,” he finally managed, being endowed with a certain amount of statistics.

Summoning his courage, Mr. Wilkerson roused himself to ask the question he had dared not to his wife: “In which journal?”

Here our waiter, not to be found out, responded with cucumber calm: “In the Royal Proceedings of the After-Dinings.”

This journal, whilst unknown to Mr. Wilkerson, and in fact not existing, seemed to him from the name to be of such a respectability that its likely impact factor caused his toes to wince. And in bending over to massage them, he banged his head against the edge of the table, causing the aforementioned dessert to land in his hair.

Mr. Wilkerson had scarcely begun to mop the drippy substance off his pate, when he was interrupted by athletic developments. On the field, the magic was coming in strongly from a rising breeze, and whilst it would have been out of season, one of the horses appeared to be on the verge of transforming into a griffin. Or at least, it was looking at its fellow horses with a voracity that cannot be considered appropriate for a herbivore. It was therefore led off, and the pause in the proceedings was used as an excuse for an unscheduled divot stomping, the field having been kicked up more than usually by the intensity of the game.

Without further ado, responding to the call of duty, Mr. Wilkerson slapped his bowler on top of his head, partially disguising his culinary mishap, which however continued to drip out from under the brim, resembling poorly-trimmed sideburns, and joined the other spectators on the playing grounds for the ritual of dirt clod repair.

For those not familiar with the sport, it must be said that until this time, the custom of wearing tapioca during divot stomps was very rare, not to say nonexistent. And Mr. Wilkerson was at first viewed with some curiousity.

But as no questions are asked of Mrs. Wilkerson, so by transitivity are very few asked of Mr. Wilkerson. And Mr. Wilkerson carries himself always with a calm, unruffled dignity, in circumstances however absurd. It is perhaps for this, more than anything else, that Mrs. Wilkerson married him. I refer not to his animal characteristics, which had some bearing, as must be said, but at the same time, not said.

And so it came swiftly to pass that the assembled stompers suspected themselves of having missed a notification, and to be guilty of a faux pas. One of the company being well acquainted with the cook, a vat of the sticky substance was acquired, so that all might adorn themselves as Mr. Wilkerson was and so not feel ill at ease.

I am grateful that in my antiquity I have had the opportunity to relate the origin of the custom of wearing tapioca during divot stomps, which might otherwise be lost to history, as even the books of Tulipville refuse to carry it.

Here I must end, and humbly thank my readers, if such there be, who bore through with me to the end of a tale which I fear must grow tedious. For I have nothing to relate but the passings on of Tulipville, which can be little different from those of other small towns that dot the countryside.

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