Memory Day report

For my Memory Day report I interviewed my Grampa because my mom and dad are dead. Grampa says he has the longest teeth of anybody in the city and it’s about time somebody asked him about them. I asked him about his teeth but he told me about the city instead.

Grampa says when his Grampa was a little boy, more than a MILLION people lived in the city. He said every room in every tower was full of people all day long, and there were more people crammed in the streets, and even people living in the tunnels before they flooded.

I told him that made no sense because where would they grow their cals? He said there was only one garden in the whole city in those days, and it only grew grass. He said that people from other cities gave their cals to our city.

Outsiders brought us cals because the men in the towers were so powerful that if you made them mad they could destroy your whole city, so whole cities gave them cals, just like we give cals to the Maya at Lower City Hall.

Grampa said that the cases we find sometimes were special radios called fawns. Fawn radios were like ham radios but you could talk to just the one person you wanted to without anybody else listening. Everybody had a fawn so you could just fawn up anybody in the world and talk just to them, so people would only fawn over the most precious people in the world to them, which is why we call children little dears.

And besides fawning each other, anybody could read any scrollie in the entire libarry without asking the libarers first, and even they could write their own scrollies on the fawns, and also everybody could read and write.

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I said that sounded pretty sweet, but Grampa said everybody spent too much time fawning and not enough time doing important things and that’s why we don’t have fawns anymore.

Grampa said that maybe people in China still have fawns. He said I could ask the libarers about it, but you can’t trust whatever answer they give because there’s a reason we call them LIE-bearers.

Grampa said that the tunnels under the city were where the trainers lived. The trainers always knew where to go without being told and they would give the people rides inside them, and the people didn’t even have to trade anything for it. Everybody who lived in the city had a special symbol that let them go anywhere they wanted to whenever they wanted to.

Outsiders had to pay to ride the trainers, or else they could never leave the tunnels.

I have seen pictures of a blue trainer on the wall of the children’s room at the libarry and he is always happy and smiling. Grampa said trainers still came into the city sometimes when he was little, and they didn’t look like that. I asked him why they stopped coming and he said they might still be down there drowned in the tunnels, but he also said that trainers could go underwater just as well as across bridges so I figure they are still swimming around down there.

Trainers are like dockers except instead of being pulled by dogs they are pulled by other trainers. Grampa said that some people outside the city still have gaskers that drive themselves, like in the movies that the libarers show on the big screen at the Maya’s Mansion on holidays, but it doesn’t make sense to waste gas going places in the city when a dog team can get you anywhere in less than a day and you can camp in the Empties if you have to.

Grampa says it’s too dangerous to camp outside the city because everybody has guns, and in the winter they hunt cityfolk and eat us. That’s the other reason we call kids little dears.

Grampa said that when his dad was a little boy, people didn’t even worry about guns because they could go to Azipol and the Dagda could take out the bullet and give them special medicine to stop the infection, so nobody ever died of getting hurt or sick from a little cut like they do now.

I asked Grampa where the people went. He said that some of them died but most of them just went away to die somewhere else.

I asked him if he thought people might ever come back to the city. Grampa said that if I keep practising with my spear and studying Old Engleez then I could be as powerful as the men in the towers were, and then people would come back to the city and bring us food again. I like spear fighting but Old Engleez is boring and the spelling doesn’t make any sense.

Grampa said that soon he’ll be dead too and then nobody will have teeth long enough to remember these things, unless they listen to my Memory Day talkie. I told Grampa that some day I will be Maya, and then I will be in charge of the libarers, and I’ll make them tell everybody about what my Grampa remembers instead of their usual LIES.

Thank you for listening to my Memory Day Report.

Transcribed to scrollie by Libarer Stiv, 1/13/03