Eternal Reoccurance

For Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
fiction
edward w pritchard

One day while walking on the tow path in Massillon, Ohio in the summer of 2008, I was talking to a young girl of 12, who told me she was Flora Wellman, and that her Father had helped to build the Ohio Canal in the 1820's and and later in the 19th century she had been the Mother of the famous American writer Jack London out in California.

She said she had grown up in Massillon Ohio as a girl, in the 1840's and frequently walked on the canal towpath, and she said she wanted to meet and talk to me now because she had heard me praise her Son's, Jack London's, story "To Build A Fire" to two prominent attorney's in Kent, Ohio at lunch a few weeks before.

She said the rules about coming to meet me here in Ohio were cosmically complex, and we could talk only for a minute, because she had to return to a different part of her life, when she was older, as a bride in California, soon. She did mention something about her son Jack London, that surprised me, and I had never heard before. Jack London had been involved with Coxey's Army in the 1890's, that marched to Washington DC for unemployed worker's rights, but not the original part of Coxey's army that left from Navarre, Ohio, near where we were now standing in Massillon, but a Western part of Coxey's army that left from Oakland California.

It is always nice to talk to and get the facts from an eye witness to historical events.