[Grand Deceiver]

Tolkien....I have read The Hobbit and LOTR so many times that they are now sort of a Comfort Blanket to me..If I need to go to sleep and cant..I grab any of them and open to a random page...it puts me right to sleep. I first read the Hobbit in 4th grade..then had the entire LOTR read by the end of the summer. At that age the mind is pretty imaginative..I have to relate the following account.

I grew up in the Mts of Western North Carolina..Closest neighbor was well over a mile away. Mts, Woods, Creeks, Wildlife...very much Shireish or just plain old Middle Earthish to a young kid.

Heres the scene..Mid Winter, Cold Overcast Misty day, I in my sweatshirt with a pullover hood(so I could pretend to be a dwarve with the hood) and a wooden mallet from a croqets (Sp?) set (my dwarven warhammer) and a wooden lid off of a tomato basket (my shield).

I'm sneaking my way through the woods kiling imaginary Ors and wargs..I descend a path wich leads to the bottom lands down by the river. Now this particular set of bottomlands is a place of high weeds, stump piles, burnt stump piles and the dumpng ground for many a farm animal that had passed on..so there was an abundanceof bones and skulls laying around. A pretty goodplace to imagine the evils of Sauron.

Now I in all my dwarvish glory passed from one set of bottom lands to another wich contained a Sawmill in the process of being built. There was a huge deisel engine on a stand wich ran the saw covered by a large sheet of black pLastic. As a kid I turned the corner and in the distance through the mist and fog I see a large black shape..my young mind doest see pLastic..it sees within the shadows and textures at least three Nazgul bent over, wind blows and they move a little ..turning and looking at me...

needless to say..my feet did not touch the ground for at least a half a mile!! So much for Dwarvish Glory...and so much for the wonder of the young kids fun and imagination..

Damn those were good days.