Cabin on the Coast Question

StoneOx17 at aol.com · 30 May 2008, 14:24 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: StoneOx17 at aol.com (StoneOx17 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 10:24:00 EDT
Subject: (urth) Cabin on the Coast Question
Message-ID: <c3b.36d892a9.35716800 at aol.com>

In a message dated 5/30/2008 8:50:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
davetallman at msn.com writes:

> I expect that nothing physical happened between her and the King 
> on that first visit when he left a damp towel. He just made her an 
> offer and got her thinking. She made her decision the next morning 
> when she left Tim asleep and went out to find Daniel.

This is a great discussion.

First, and a very minor point, I think Lissy used the towel and not
the King.  The King would have stayed outside.

Second, I think Tim was tricked.  I think the fairies can only take 
people who are willing.  This is a trait commonly attributed to  the
Fair Folk, and the King says "I'll have no unwillin' hands about me
boat."  

Was Lissy willing?  She may have been thinking about it, but had 
she said "yes" yet?  I expect not.  The King says "We'd sooner 
have a broth of a girl like yer Lissy than a great hulk of a lad like 
yourself, but then too, we'd sooner be havin' one that's willin', for 
the unwillin' girls are everywhere - I don't doubt but ye've seen it 
yerself." 

So here's a tentative timetable.

1. Tim and Lissy arrive at the cabin, make love, and fall asleep.  
Later that night she goes out for a swim, and meets the King,
who makes her an offer.

2. Tim goes out for a morning swm, and when he comes back,
Lissy admonishes him for going out without a suit. (Why?  She
did it earlier. But maybe it's different if there are fairies  around.)

3. Tim and Lissy spend the day together and have the cookout
on the beach. She realizes how much of a male chauvanist he
is.

4. Lissy wakes up in the morning, and goes out to talk to the
King and try to decide whether to accept his offer.

5. Tim wakes up, notices Lissy missing, and after talking to
the police and calling his father, swims after the King's boat
and trades himself for Lissy.

4'. Tim swims back from the ocean and twenty years service,
and Lissy wakes up and mistakes him for Big Tim. Notice 
Tim sees the remains of their cookout fire when he reaches 
the beach, so this comes after 3 in the timeline. (So Tim would
indeed be wearing his trunks.)

While writing this, I had another idea. I'm now inclined to believe 
the offer Lissy was entertaining (and had in this case quite
possibly accepted) from the King was more along the lines of 
a one night stand than twenty years in Fairyland.

**************Get trade secrets for amazing burgers. Watch "Cooking with 
Tyler Florence" on AOL Food.      
(http://food.aol.com/tyler-florence?video=4&?NCID=aolfod00030000000002)

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net