My Redacted Life: Chapter 39

When you live with someone, you learn things. My little wife with the long red hair and the splendiferous sashshay had secrets. When she wanted to make a design for something, she could draw. When she spoke, she spoke with neither confusion nor equivocation. She listened creatively. When she sat down at a piano, she could play anything from Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca to the song Jump Up from the James Bond film Dr. No. She had never told me. The realization shocked me, as did all her many secrets.

Then one day she wrote something. It was a masterpiece of clear, concise, declarative sentences. It made the point with neither flourish nor pretention. It led to more self-doubt on my part.

“Why don’t your write more?” I said.

“I don’t have that much to say,” she said.

I let it go. In the meantime, I had discovered that the well-known urban planning experts from whom I was to learn didn’t share Brenda’s writing skills. Sad to say, they had no writing skills at all, a fact that had first convinced me I was stupid. I would read a page of work and realize that I had no idea what the author had said. Sentences negotiated a tricky canyon of stilted hyperboles and headstrong allegories, circled back upon themselves, and landed topsy-turvy on a spiked bed of sharpened adverbs, only to encounter a sinister semi-colon that opened a door to more confusion. The typical planning expert couldn’t have described a bowling ball in five paragraphs without the overextended use of the word “efficacious” and a slathering of neo-traditional sentence structure.

A planner with a typewriter formed a fearsome spirit. Some stooped so low as to describe the size of an area using the antiquated terms "zygocephalum"—a measure of land based on the area of land a yoke of oxen could plow in one day. It grew worse with time. They made up words and phrases: complex and nonsensical ditties that made the public shake their heads in bemusement. They dubbed directional signs “wayfinding devices,” for example. They used the term “sense of place,” to replace the venerable standard, “No matter where you go, there you are.” Citizens lost that time-honored title that went back to the evolution of Common Law, and became “stakeholders.” Empowering them, it seems, was important, whatever it meant. A scary world, verbally speaking, urban planning is.

I struggled through the morass, sometime with little wayfinding assistance. I often struggled from a lack of effaciousness, limiting my search, like the drunk searching for his keys, to the areas most brightly illuminated. That eased the way.

At the same time, I struggled with a nagging suspicion that I had, perhaps, over-married.

Writing is like riding a horse.
You just saddle up and go.