Remembrance

So basically I'm doing breakdowns now. Which meant opening a full calendar and seeing what day things fall on.

And oops. Remembrance Day is the 11th. So I went back and added a poppy to a previous scene. Talk about Easter Egg, though. There's a coin collector named Kishan. He is not described, although he seems interested in the history of Indian Independence movement. He also is wearing a flower made of red cloth in his lapel.

That would be the Khadi poppy, worn in remembrance of Indian troops who died in World War I. As opposed to any other red poppy in a lapel, without taking notice of the kind of cloth.

Anyhow, basically the novel covers the last three weeks of November, from the 4th to the 24th, with an epilog happening somewhere nebulously after the 29th. And now I know most of what happens on those days.

I know it seems a slapdash way of outlining a novel. But the method is working for me.

***

All this social distancing and hand washing stuff. It is reminding me of something from my paratrooper days.

See, an Army parachute comes in fast. We were taught to roll when we hit the ground so we didn't get hurt. And they trained us a lot on that. Constantly. Every single jump we'd go over it again.

So one of the barracks legends going around was that the Army had done some tests in the 40's where they found out if a soldier did an absolutely perfect PLF -- the Parachute Landing Fall -- they wouldn't even need the parachute.

Unfortunately, you just couldn't get the soldiers to do it perfectly. Not enough of the time. So that's why we still had them. But the Army kept training because they kept hoping.

And that's what I think about all this masks and sanitizers and so on. That someone is saying if people would just do it all perfectly, there wouldn't be a pandemic.

Just do it perfectly. Every one. All the time.

As easy as that.

(What's that you say? You'd have to go outside to get sanitizer and wipes and masks and gloves? On public transport which is now restricted because many of the local stores are closed? When there isn't any in stock and anyhow you can't afford it because you aren't getting a paycheck this month? Yeah. Easy.)