Snippets for future short stories

* Somewhere in what was once Congo Brazzaville an enormous Diesel-powered snow plow lies rusting in the tropical rain forests near Kinshasa. In the early years after the Belgians left, the Soviets tried to shore up Patrice Lumumba’s régime by massive shipments of military and industrial aid. They favored highly visible items, obviously for their propaganda value. One pet project of this sort was to build super-highways and for that they donated a complete road building unit which, of course, included what was the first essential machine for building roads in the Soviet Union—a snow plow. Lumumba is dead and so is his régime and even the Soviet Union is gone. Only that foolish snow plow remains, buried and decaying in the hot noisy jungle.


* During the Battle of the Marne, 8 September 1914, Ferdinand Foch, Maréchal de France, commanding the Ninth Army, which was being attacked and beaten back by the Germans under Von Hausen, said, "My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I attack!"
Previously he had said, "It takes 15.000 casualties to train a major general."


* In 1940 The LRDG found tracks in the Lybian Desert made by Fords of the Light Car Patrols of 1916.
Oil exploration teams in the Great Sand Sea regularly find tracks today made by 2nd World War armies.


* Long ago the little park just outside the Casino at Monte Carlo was where compulsive gamblers having lost all, would kill themselves. The concierge at the Casino knew that whenever he heard a shot coming from the park, he was to run there and stuff banknotes into the suicide's pockets, so that no one could blame the Casino for the death. All this ended when two enterprising American sailors fired two shots into the air, spilled ketchup on their clothes and waited lying on the grass until the concierge came running. After he loaded their pockets with money, they jumped up and fled the scene just before the police arrived.


* My neighbor, Stanley, was born totally blind. He remained so until several weeks past his fiftieth birthday when he underwent an experimental surgical procedure, which for the first time gave him sight. At first he was in heaven; the views, the people, the colors, the landscapes. On my way home from school one freezing winter day I spotted him in the little seaside park near our apartment house, standing motionless in the cold damp snow, just looking entranced at the stark bare trees. For the first time he was able to see his own wife’s beauty and it quite obviously kindled his love for her anew—one morning she came to the grocery store where I worked part-time before school and she was radiant...
But soon he changed. He became depressed by the poverty and the dirt he could now see. No one had ever told him about that; the reality of shabby and boring drabness all around us. They had only described to him the rare fleeting beauty, never the ubiquitous ugliness. Understandable.
He died not long after. On his way home from work in the Post Office, where he had worked all his life ever since graduating from the special school for the blind, he somehow slipped and fell under the “A” train coming into the subway station. Nobody could figure it out. When he was blind he never had had any trouble getting around safely.