Steve Marble -- NOTEBOOK

Thanks to the Internet, I now have friends and enemies throughout the

world.

Once upon a time -- back when the mail was delivered by the postman -- I

managed to disappoint, anger or confuse only those who picked up their

paper on the driveway or the local news rack.

But the Daily Pilot is delivered on the Internet along with everything

else, widening my chances of offending readers and throwing me into the

cross hairs of people I don’t know who live in places I have never

visited and believe in things I don’t understand.

A stranger in a strange land.

Sometimes the responses are quirky, worrisome, twisted. Sometimes they

are more of an aside, like the person is sitting right next to you,

patting you on the back, when, in fact, they are writing you from

Vermont.

Last year, I wrote a column about the city’s inability to grow grass at a

soccer complex in Costa Mesa. They’d been at it for months and just

couldn’t make a go of it. They could pave streets, prune trees and pick

up trash. But they couldn’t grow grass. And as a consequence, the kids

couldn’t play soccer.

Dan from Quincy, Ill. was the first to e-mail me.

o7 “Gypsum. Did they try Gypsum?”

f7 That was it, the entire message. Just a little tip floating in from

the Midwest. Gypsum. And did they use it? Now, I suppose they did. Never

really checked. But then you start thinking: Maybe he knows someone on

the city’s lawn detail named “Gypsum” and he wants to know whether they

used him because he’s the king of growing grass.

Someone named Rod from the Bay Area dropped me a kind little note after I

wrote a column about my personal sickness of being a Rams fan and the

bitter Monday mornings when I would realize, once again, that my team had

lost.

o7 “The Rams are losers and they’ll always be losers and you’re a

loser.”f7

Ah, that’s great. Thanks. I’ve heard worse, of course. Most Rams fans

have. But they don’t usually send mail to rub it in. And now that the

Rams have won their first Super Bowl, I’ve lost Rod’s e-mail address.

Such unfairness.

And so it goes. Someone from Michigan wanted to know why I used to drive

a Nissan rather than an American car. Someone from Texas wanted to let me

know where their son went to college. Someone -- several someones,

actually -- wanted to know if I’m really so dim that I actually thought

that Truman Capote, rather than Harper Lee, wrote “To Kill A

Mockingbird.”

You think of answering them, but then you just relent, absorb it.

Sometimes you find that you’ve turned a corner and plunged into a

neighborhood that is fascinating.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about the family dog -- Morgan. Morgan

had a trying puppyhood, I explained. We got her from the pound and tried

our mightiest to get her to shake off her demons. I recounted her final

days and the impact it had on my family. I tried not to get maudlin, but

evidently I failed.

Mac Bernd, the former Newport-Mesa Unified School Districtsuperintendent,

wrote me from Texas.

o7 “Shelley and I would take it very hard if we lost Haiku, our

Akita.”f7

Nancy Palme, a onetime Costa Mesa activist who now lives in Alabama,

wrote with some advice.

o7 “Caring for ‘secondhand’ pets is never easy. They always come with

some baggage.”f7

And, yeah, that dog came with a full forklift of baggage.

A guy from Scotland wrote that he’d lost a collie as a lad and still

pined for her. His e-mail, mostly memories of Bandit, filled my screen

three times.

A guy at an animal shelter in Boston wrote to say that he had copied my

column and passed it out to all of his workers and wanted -- with my

permission -- to distribute it to everyone adopting a dog.

And a woman from North Carolina, who’d lost a dog named Smokey, wanted me

to know that if I was really taking this loss hard, I could find comfort

and solace in a book called, “Rover’s Tales: A Canine Crusader and his

Travels in the Dog World.”

So now -- thanks to the Internet -- I have some poor bloke in Scotland

worked up in tears, an entire work force in Boston distributing my column

and a woman in North Carolina worrying over my well-being.

Sometimes the Internet leads you into a part of town where you really

didn’t want to go.

Last year, I wrote a piece about a series of children’s books featuring a

central character named Harry Potter. The books -- so popular they

dominated the thin air of the New York Times Bestseller List -- have been

attacked by some as having satanic undertones. I concluded in the column

that if kids read it, then something good’s probably happening.

o7 “Mr. Marble, you are obviously unschooled in the ways the devil

disguises himself ...”f7

That from a woman named Mary in Flagstaff, Ariz.

o7 “I liked your column, but I do feel sorry for you. I will pray for

you. I hope you do not have kids ... I have shared your column with my

church and all of us feel the same.”f7

Within days, I had received e-mails from -- I’m assuming -- the entire

congregation.

“o7 I know you meant well, but you should know that you are wrong. And

someday you will know just how wrong you are and then you may have no

hope because it will be too late.”f7

Again, a flurry of e-mails arrived within days. The next week, more came.

The week after, even more. And now, nearly four months after the column

was printed, the e-mails still arrive -- sometimes in big swooshing

waves, other times in little clinks and clanks.

And they may never stop. I know that now.

Sometimes, the Internet scares me.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor at Times Community News. He can be

reached at o7 [email protected] .