Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

OK, prospective Facebook and/or other social media prospective and aspirational friends, those who have occasionally favored me with ‘friend’ requests, because other friends/acquaintances of mine have friended you, most usually in trusting error … let me bluntly explain why I have not favored you with acceptance of your kind offer, or with replies to your messages. I am a writer, a scribbler of historical fiction and contemporary rural comedy – I am emphatically not a rock star, a movie actress, or filthy rich. As a collector of fans for such works of fiction which I produce, I am not interested in slavish adoration, merely a courteous and mutual exchange of good will and friendly if somewhat remote interest in each other’s lives, loves, interests and hobbies.

This goes double for other writers – Hi there, we share the same addiction to telling stories, and anxiously checking on our sales rank and our hopefully generous royalties in hopes of turning a hobby into a profession. Nice to know ya! (No, I don’t want to know the name of your agent, or your publisher. I moved beyond playing the trad-pubbed game about fifteen years ago.)

If you are a male of certain years, claiming to have some high-powered job, like a surgeon or a serving military officer of somewhat elevated rank, list on your profile that you are divorced, widowed or otherwise single and yet have no more than three or four pictures on your profile, including one of you with a cute animal, or sailboarding, or your graduation from some high-end uni, I am most emphatically not interested. Especially if;

– there are only those three or four pictures.

– you claim to be currently in some exotic locale like … Doha. Syria. Boston. Or until late this year, Afghanistan. Look, guys; I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

– if the picture includes you, or someone you represent to be you, clad in a military uniform with a nametag or patch on it, and that name does not match the so-called name on your profile …this merits an automatic delete. In the military that I used to belong to, not the fantasy one apparently inhabited by romance scammers, we used to call this ‘attention to detail.’ Lack of it can occasionally be fatal.

As an aside – general officers usually have no leisure time to screw around with their social media profiles or with pitching woo to unknown single ladies of a certain age. Such gentlemen might have a lot of pictures of themselves out there on the ‘net, which can provide fodder for the occasional romance scammer, which is why such characters show up so often among my friend requests. I understand that male models with a large portfolio online frequently have their pictures hijacked for the same purpose.

– there is a certain embarrassing lack of familiarity with Western naming conventions which often reveals itself in such invitations. I understand this kind of thing can be confusing to Third Worlders with radically different naming conventions. But a pitch for friend status with a radically unsuitable name, like a surname for a given name or vice versa … oh, sorry – gong! Not going to get specific with examples, as I don’t want these a-holes to sharpen their game.

– finally, addressing me as ‘dear’ or with any other terms of affection on bare minimal acquaintance through the medium of a private message through FB will earn an automatic banishment.

Consider yourself to have been warned – respectfully submitted,

Celia Hayes

(A relevant seasonal excerpt from my World War II novel, My Dear Cousin, which was completed and released last year at about this time. Part of the narrative is in letters, between two cousins; Vennie is an Army nurse serving in North Africa and Europe, Peg the wife of a Far East POW, waiting out the war in Australia, wondering for years if her husband is still alive.) The description of this 1942 Christmas holiday celebration in a military hospital was taken from this book.

Letter from Vennie to Peg, dated 26 December 1942, Postmarked APO NY, headed Arzew, Algiers

My dear Cuz:

We had our Christmas here in Algeria at the hospital and it was more beautiful and moving than I can describe. I should set the scene of it for you; the main hospital building has a central entrance hall across a small courtyard, with a wide staircase which goes halfway up the back wall with a dozen wide steps – there is a generous landing, from which two flights of narrower stairs go up along the wall to the second level. When I first arrived at this place, riding in the back of a jeep, crammed in with seven others, our legs hanging out every which way – I did not see this. It was as dark as a pit, and every inch of the floor of this hall was covered with stretchers of wounded. But as we took control of the city and calm and order returned. With hard work and dedication, our people have turned this back into a place of order and healing.

The wards are clean and airy, and the operating theater once again fully equipped with all the proper gear, brought up from the Army transports in the harbor. Our patients have clean linens and white sheets – blankets too, against the cold. You would not believe how cold North Africa is at night, during the winter!

We had such fun planning and creating a wonderful Christmas. It means so much to the men, and to us, so far away from home, and in a foreign and unfamiliar land. The comfortable rituals seem so much more meaningful. I believe that for the rest of my life I will remember this particular Christmas with much more clarity than those of my childhood, which seemed to all blend into one pleasant holiday blur, with not much to make any one of them stand out, not even the Christmases when I journeyed home to the ranch from Galveston.

Besides the candy that we made in the hospital kitchen – at least four hundred pounds of it! – the Red Cross director in Oran produced quantities of more hard candy, packets of cigarettes and small gifts for this enterprise, enough to fill every single stocking; all seven hundred of them! Our enlisted corpsmen at Arzew came up with tinsel slivered from the foil that X-ray plates come wrapped in, and many ornaments for the Christmas tree cut from empty tin plasma containers. A party among the Army engineers organizing the harbor went out into the country and cut a tall fir tree for us, which we put in the hospital foyer in a bucket of gravel and sand, just as we used to do at home. A sergeant among our patients (recovering nicely from an abdominal wound) was an art teacher in his previous life. He was busy cutting and folding heavy paper, and painting them with brushes and paint procured through the Red Cross (again, all honors to the director in Oran who found these items for us) to appear like lighted candles, pinecones, branches of evergreens, holly berries and leaves, and ornate bows and placards of Christmas greetings, to make garlands to adorn the lobby.

On the landing – which you must picture as being twelve steps up from the lobby floor – we had a small table, draped in white sheets, with more white sheets hung against the walls above, and a large cardboard cross, four feet tall, onto which we had hand-sewn purple bougainvillea blossoms was hung above it. (Purple was the proper color for the Christmas rites, so Muriel tells me. She would know, as she is quite devout.) The corpsmen had contrived a pair of elaborate candelabras, and filled them with wax tapers, and brought in some small palm trees planted in pots on either side of the altar, as well as two large vases filled with flowers behind the candelabras.

It was magnificent. Our Catholic chaplain, Father Powers began saying a solemn Christmas mass at midnight, at the foot of the altar. Any who wanted to attend were welcome. We had litter patients at the front, and ambulatory patients crowded in with the nurses and surgeons behind them. The choir of men – and they were all Catholic, Protestant and Jew together – began singing “Silent Night”. It was all so beautiful and deeply moving, Peg! I simply cannot describe to you how lovely it was. Although I am not Catholic and only indifferently Christian.

We had a small party afterwards, hosted by we nurses – with cookies and cocoa and then to our various beds. But in the morning, on Christmas morning, Captain Ro (Romanesco, our unit dentist) dressed in the Santa costume which we had made for him, of the same fabric that all of the Christmas stockings were sewn, and went around to all the wards, distributing Christmas stockings stuffed full of gifts: the candy, cigarettes and etc. I can’t even begin to express how happy the men were to receive these simple presents, or how thrilled we were, to observe their happiness. In the larger sense, we can really do so little for them, for those who have received crippling wounds, wounds which I fear may shorten many lives, or at least make life a challenge for them. But they were all so happy with their presents – as if they were all small boys, receiving the one thing that they most desired in all the world.

This simple holiday in a foreign land, in time of war, Peg – it all made it worthwhile to me.

All my love, to you and yours.

Vennie