Why did I pick them as a central theme in two of my books?
My answer is that they interposed themselves, much like a pet cat sneaking under the sheets in the middle of the night. Regarding the two specific books in which they appear, there are two different tales to tell. I’ll start with Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, then address Stonewall’s Head later.
When I began the project that became Wanton Dreamer, there were no dominoes. They put in their first appearance as I wrote the dream about Tony’s father spending his afterlife playing dominoes with a dinosaur. The game of dominoes and the presence of a player blowing smoke out of his ears seemed to go together in my mind, no doubt because of the chain-smoking railroad man who taught my family the game. So that image inserted itself in the book, and the dinosaur morphed into a shape-shifting version of the Celtic god Lugh.
At that point, there was no search for the meaning of a mystic source of ancient knowledge. No hidden font of wisdom, such as one finds in Celtic runes. But the potential of creating such a source, parallel to but different from runes, quickly suggested itself to me. How many times does a writer get the opportunity to create a new source of mystic knowledge? The number combinations available in the humble set of dominoes offered boundless opportunities for a rune-maker to create a new type of mystic divination, a combination of runes and numerology.
So, as I kept rewriting, dominoes became embedded in the project. For a short period, the book was even called The Domino Trilogy. I had to write a new beginning, to show that rediscovering their meaning had been Lugh’s goal all along. In part three, I had to pin Tony down in a bed to force him to dream and concentrate on the meaning for each one of twenty-eight dominoes.
I will close this post with a passage from the book near the end. It involves Tony’s discovery of the meaning of the 5-6 domino, in which he recalls when his father, suffering from dementia, had reacted with joyful animation to the playing of his favorite music from My Fair Lady.
As I sort through this episode looking for clues to a domino, I have to review which ones are left: the 3-6, the double-six, the 2-5, and the 5-6. I finally discover my answer: My Fair Lady opened on Broadway in 1956. So the 5-6 must be the domino.
What does it mean? The 5-6 is the juncture of the local universe with the greater universe…. [As he lay dying in a] nursing home, Father was going through the rough equivalent of an airlock in a space ship, one that separates two incompatible worlds and provides passage from one to the other—the spirit-lock, where the pressures are too intense for physical structures to survive, and only the spirit can pass through. This is the vortex where the world Father was leaving met the world he was about to enter.
Which could explain the look on the man’s face that was carved into this domino centuries ago.