This is a writer thing, which I'm doing at the behest of
1. You go to one of your current novels-in-progress, and find the page number declared for this event.
2. You choose an excerpt beginning at the first complete sentence on that page.
3. You post it where others can read it.
4. You tell everyone what you like about it.
5. People discuss it in the comments.
My only problem is that Melissa has chosen page 123 this time, and although I have a number of novels-in-progress (including a few that have been in progress since the early 1980s) none have gotten to that page yet. Old Catholics has gotten to page 81, and it's the project on which I have the most momentum right now, though with all the jackhammering my mouth has undergone in the last two months, the momentum has been thin. Alana has given me permission to knock out the hundreds column and start with the first complete sentence on page 23. Remarkably, that one page stands together very well:
—–
“They have a church building. And a woman priest! Just like your Episcopal church. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
Suzy didn’t nod.
“So let’s make a deal. I’ll call Peter and ask him if he can help me with my laicization paperwork-if you’ll come to their church with me tomorrow. It’s right out Devon Avenue, near Western.”
Suzy puffed out her cheeks and considered. The steam rose from her cup in slow rosettes. “Ok. Deal. But I get to be the judge. If these people are crackpots, I grab your arm, and you leave with me. No questions. No objections. You get up, we leave, and we don’t go back.”
Rob sat silently, his fingers clenching in his lap, thinking of Mrs. Przybysz reading his aura, and imagining a deacon fishing in the cold-air vents for fugitive rosary beads. Suzy’s definition of “crackpot” might not quite match his own. Cutting deals with a brilliant woman like Susan Helms was a lot like gambling, and he knew how good he was at gambling. Making ordinary, rational decisions was hard enough. Taking bets–it was an invitation to humiliation. If this were not the woman he loved, and had loved in absentia virtually his entire adult life…
“Oh–and if you don’t call Peter, I will.”
Rob opened his mouth, afraid what his face would reveal, thinking of Suzy on the phone with his old friend. People had called them a “threesome” back at Loyola, and there had been enough resentment in that to yield more than a little relief in not getting a response from Peter Luchetti. Rob remembered once–was it 1972?–walking along the lakefront with his arm around 5’2” Suzy Helms, and 6’2” Peter on the other side, his arm on her back above Rob’s.
The feeling that rose in him that evening when he was back in his room–anger, jealousy, covetousness, whateverthehell it was–had scared him half-silly and sent him screaming for his confessor. His friendship with Peter was conflicted (and stale) but Suzy’s threat was not idle: Her father, bakery magnate David Warren Helms III, had left a cool three million dollars to the Archdiocese of Chicago upon his death in 2004. Cardinal Peter Luchetti did not answer just anyone’s phone call. But he would answer hers.
—–
Those who have followed my fiction at all know that this is a peculiar thing for me to write: No starships, no aliens, no AIs, no gunfights. It's about a Roman Catholic priest who resigns his parish position in Indianapolis to return to Chicago to the woman he abandoned for the priesthood thirty years earlier. He runs across a (very) eccentric Old Catholic community that includes an ex-con, a psychic little old Polish lady, a former call girl who became a priest, a young computer geek who has a side business converting churches into condos, and a bishop who spent the bulk of his life writing advertising copy. The priest's seminary buddy has since become Chicago's cardinal, and the new Pope–a reactionary conservative from Brazil–is hell-bent on bringing the American Church's liberal wing to heel.
I like it because it's been a necessary exercise in the things that I am not naturally good at: Characterization, nuance, and a story told without chase scenes. I've had to create characters who are eccentric but not ridiculous, and treat with a light heart a set of topics that, often as not, incites people to fury: Should priests be married? Should women be priests? Do we really need a Pope? And what really defines the Catholic idea? That's what I'm reaching for. I'm not sure how successful it will be, but I intend to finish it, and will get back to work as soon as I can chew without wincing, which should be any day now.
The massive urban renewal project that is the inside of my mouth got into high gear again this morning, with what I call a three-p procedure: It took six hours, with three pee breaks, and (I am not exaggerating !) fifteen separate injections of local anaesthetic. Uggh. The surgeon removed my lower horseshoe, which has been in my mouth since September 2001, and cleaned up what damage had occurred during seven years in place. Two fillings had to be drilled out and replaced, and all the teeth had to be re-margined. One tooth, while not infected, had broken into three pieces underneath the horeshoe (probably due to my perpetual clenching and grinding during the night) and no longer has enough structure above the gum line to be retained. It will have to be pulled, and later this year (once the bone heals) an implant post will be put in place to carry the eventual crown.
It took a few minutes of flipping through some books in my workshop, but I eventually found what I remembered: That one of my “boys” books contained a description of a tabletop X-ray setup. The book in question is The Boy Electrician, the first volume of many from Alfred Morgan, who later wrote The Boys' First Book of Radio and Electronics and its three sequels, all of which loomed large in my tinkersome youth. The Boy Electrician was originally published in 1913 and is now in the public domain. The 1913 edition has been reprinted by Lindsay Books and I consider it worth having. There was a significant revision in 1943 that added chapters on radio and a few other things, and as best I can tell, the copyright on that edition was not renewed and it too is now in the public domain. A 40 MB PDF of the 1943 edition is 
Morgan explains that you can either view images directly with a fluoroscope or expose ordinary photographic plates by placing an object to be X-rayed between the tube and the plate and leaving it there for fifteen minutes. This includes things like purses, mice, or…your hand. If you have the money, he also explains that a hand-held fluoroscope may be constructed by simply coating a sheet of white paper with crystals of platinum barium cyanide. It looks like the fluoroscope screen is used by basically staring at the X-ray tube with the object to be X-rayed between the tube and the paper screen.
It would be interesting to know just how many boys bought the tube and tried to make it work; though given that $4.50 in 1913 would be about $100 today, I doubt it was many. Nor do I know how toxic platinum barium cyanide is, but I'm guessing a little more than iron filings. (On the other hand, my 1962 chemistry set contained a little bottle of sodium ferrocyanide, which sounds much worse than it actually is.)
Just got back from Chicago and there's way too much to do (and I have a six-hour dental appointment scheduled for Thursday!) but I did want to report on something I saw on our trip that I haven't seen for a very long time: A shoe-fitter X-ray machine. People my age or older may remember going to a shoe store in the 1950s or earlier, and having your parents and the shoe store man look at your feet inside a new pair of shoes to make sure they fit correctly. I know I did this, and I vaguely remember the humming machine, but I suspect I was just too short to get to look into the machine myself. (I doubt I would forget a real-time X-ray image of my own bones. Urrrrp…)
plate (below) indicates that the power supply drew 7 amps and put out 50,000 volts at 5 milliamps. That kind of power will generate considerable radiation out of an X-ray tube, and the associated hazards eventually put an end to continuous-beam fluoroscopy by untrained operators, in shoe stores and elsewhere. The hazards appeared not so much to the occasional shoe store customer as to the sales reps who ran the machines and sometimes to professional shoe models who tested shoes for manufacturers using machines like this; one woman's foot was damaged so badly in testing shoes that it had to be amputated.
