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.

My Redacted LIfe: Chapter Six (Cont._5)

As the deadline of April, 1971 neared, our office fell into somewhat of a routine. I still walked to work, my Navy raincoat assisting at times. I still read at night and was teaching myself touch-typing. Having finished my research on the Hot Springs office market, Tom let me try my hand at writing the report. I bought myself a brand-new BIC pen and went to work.

On this project, I first encountered a mental process that has blessed, plagued, and tormented me nearly 50 years. I often feel I can do anything, if I just set my mind to it. As this feeling now embedded itself into my psyche, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Beautiful stuff it seemed to me. I would make the profession proud. I wrote some more. Was there a Pulitzer Prize for planning reports?

With the gleam of self-satisfaction in my eyes, I handed my finished work to the typist and returned to supervising. A couple of days later, she handed the draft back for review.

It was awful, terrible, and filled with flowery claptrap, more a cheap imitation of Daphne du Maurier than a technical piece. I think Tom left one sentence intact, the rest died under a blood-like film of red ink. Would that I had kept the edited copy. It could occupy a spot in the museum they may build someday in my honor.

It did make me appreciate both humility and simple, declarative sentences. Perhaps life flourishes best in the invigorating and nutritional mixture of failure and re-trying. I still lack writing skills, but I did learn to distrust adverbs. That’s a good start.

Anyway, we continued to finish project after project and the bosses were happy. What else could I ask for in life?

On morning, I arrived at work early and finished my “Bear Claw” and coffee well before time for the others to arrive. I had perused most of the morning paper and decided to address a personal failure that had eluded me since I was 11 or 12 years old: solving the daily cryptoquote in the Arkansas Gazette.

This morning, something nudged a dormant set of cognitive genes and I felt a rush of insight. I had been going at it all wrong. The solution lay in patterns and forms rather than formula. As my heart pounded, the words, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far – Theodore Roosevelt,” appeared in pencil notes and erasure marks above the lines of gibberish.

Hot damn!

It began a lifetime of returning, from time to time, to attacking the daily offering, still carried in the dailies, particularly when I feel my mind needs exercise. I mention the event here only because it taught me that any success, no matter how small or trivial, builds a successful attitude. And boy, did I have one at that point in my life. Cocky I was. Lessons to learn I faced.

That day, though, we applied some extra enthusiasm and completed two more of the projects. Tom came by late in the afternoon, saw the progress, and called me into his office.

Having bade me sit, he formed his fingers and make a tent and stared at them. After a moment, he looked up. “Looks like,” he said, “we may accomplish something that, quite frankly, I never thought would happen.”

I smiled and said nothing.

He smiled back and said, “I think we’ll raise your salary another hundred dollars a month.”

“Thank you.”

“But don’t expect a raise every month in the future.”

“I won’t.”

Like hell I wouldn’t.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Two (Cont._12)

Now ends the month of freedom I enjoyed between service in the United States Navy and my entry into the free world of business. Which was better? Honestly, I don’t know.

My relationship with the Navy and the military in general developed into a classic love-hate relationship over the years. The military has gotten America into some messes since World War Two, and continues to do so. For that, I distrust some things about a standing army, and many things about an all-volunteer army. On the other hand, I know some very fine people in uniform and I believe they will cling to “the better angels of our nature.” America is far better off with them serving us.

I will leave it at that. As I have said over the years, with increasing honesty, I wouldn’t do it over again for a million dollars, nor would I take a million dollars not to have done it. I’ll leave the reader to figure that one out.

On the third day of January 1971 though, a Sunday evening, I sat alone in my large apartment at Fifth (Capitol Avenue) and State streets in Little Rock, Arkansas contemplating, as one might imagine, my future. I had gone down the night before and purchased a bottle of Ripple Wine at a liquor store on Broadway, gone for many years now. I purchased the wine in memory of shipmates who had shared it with me on lazy afternoons in the cabin of one of the navy boats in our care, with a trusted “bowhook” standing watch for nosy noncoms or officers.

An old phonograph I had found at the last moment before leaving home played the album Hot Buttered Soul by a man from Memphis named Isaac Hayes, already becoming a legend. I had purchased it at a Little Rock landmark called Moses Melody Shop during a walking tour of downtown Little Rock. That store, too, vanished years ago.

The experience would have been complete with the aid of what some shipmates (we called them “brothers” in those days) called “herbs.” But I had put that behind me. In fact, I had planned the evening as the breaking of my last ties with fast ships and going “in harm’s way.” Partway through the bottle of Ripple, I took out a notebook and scribbled some thoughts. Next morning, I read what I had written.

It was pretty much gibberish. I don’t think that my mind, at that point, could grasp the enormity of what might await on life’s next heading. The wine didn’t help. I’ve never written anything since after even the slightest drop of alcohol. Creativity is not a movable feast. It demands clarity, sacrifice, and solitude, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe Hemingway drank while he wrote, but ... he was Hemingway.

I finished the wine and walked to the window. A few cars slid by on Capitol Avenue. The city was going to sleep, and so should I as well. I secured my mental anchor chain with a “stopper-hitch,” and disassembled the detachable link holding me fast. Now freed, the “bitter end” slipped off, and I began to drift away from my moorings. I was free at last.

In bed, I couldn’t stop wondering about my life until this point. Lonely? No. I had four years of adventures and shipmates passing in the dream-fog to keep me company. And who knew, perhaps someone else was drifting to sleep, somewhere, wondering what the future might bring. Might our drifting vessels cross courses some day?

They might. Who could tell?

Morning Thoughts

Someone posted a query on-line the other day as to whether listening to an audio version of a book constituted “reading” it. I have to submit my opinion as “yes.” Having chosen a profession that involves heavy travel, I’ve “read” many a work that way, first on tape, then on CD, and now downloaded onto my cell phone. A sample of the works I’ve read include Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the condensed version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a number of Bill Bryson’s works, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, and most of the published books of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Some read better than others. Some carry more impact. For example, I found myself pulling into parking lots and delaying my arrival home in order to hear more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.

Fiction can prove tricky, for it becomes more and more obvious the extent to which modern writers violate the last of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing.” It recommends, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” It was easy to skip over superfluous jibber-jabber with tapes. One only had to punch the “forward” button as many times as necessary. With CDs, one had to skip tracks. Now, with downloaded audio, one loses entire chapters. It’s easier to tolerate the junk.

Worst, in modern fiction, are the ubiquitous and gratuitous sex-scenes. Dear me, in today’s America, anyone over the age of six is perfectly aware of what happens when two people succumb to the uncontrollable urges that the Apostle Paul warned about in First Corinthians. They occurred, he said, sometimes as a result of drinking the communion wine, but more often as a simple weakness to be avoided at all costs until the end of time, which was right around corner, a few months at most. Any righteous soul should be able to keep it zipped up that long and avoid the indecencies involved in the act, not to mention the eternal consequencies.

Oops, I’ve gotten off-track.

Facts are, there just isn’t much we can add in describing the act by now that isn’t portrayed nightly on TV. But we still try. I once had to endure a mystery novel’s sex scene that lasted from downtown Jonesboro, AR to well past Walnut Ridge, even with constant fast-forwarding past the most unseemly actions. Trust me, the description covered it all, and left one both exhausted and laboring under the strong belief that the two folks involved were each in desperate need of a hobby, one that didn’t involve a member of the opposite sex.

These days, I’m afraid, at least one sex scene looms as essential in a modern novel as the 58-minute car chase looms in modern movies. It wasn’t always that way. Consider the masters, the ones we really should be reading anyway. Here’s how Joseph Conrad described what we might call “The Grand Finale:”

“He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side. Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness—a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone —a command which Heyst did not obey.”

That’s from “Victory,” and no, I don’t think the scene spawned the name of the book.

But wasn’t it sublime? I don’t believe that even the Apostle himself would have begrudged that little bit of hanky-panky.

How this could lead to some of the
 scenes I've read is the true mystery.