Paths

There’s a scene from Federico Fellini's (underrated in my opinion) Italian film, La Dolce Vita—"The Sweet Life"—in which the restless reporter Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is called to the home of his new friend Steiner. To Marcello, Steiner represents and offers an admirable life of intellectual pursuit away from the insane and immoral world chased by Marcello and other members of the paparazzi. The reason for being called to Steiner’s home is not admirable, though. The man has killed himself and his two children whom he had kissed goodnight in the same bed in a previous scene. Marcello must identify the bodies.

A somewhat similar theme appears in another highly underrated film, Educating Rita, a 1983 British offering based on a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. In it, the heroine, trying desperately to escape a dreary, mundane life, rooms with a vivacious roommate who seems to love and enjoy life and Gustav Mahler in equal and enthusiastic proportions. Yes, of course Rita returns home one day to find that her friend, the joyous lover of life, has killed herself.

Why bring this up on an otherwise cheerful morning? It’s just that I was thinking of people I’ve know who seem to have led impeccable lives. Mine, meantime, has been a constant struggle against addictions, rocky roads, underachievement, wastrel-leanings, and bad choices (except in marriage, profession, and friends). Somehow, I overcame the allure of sin’s bright colors and landed safely on a stable shore. Still, I wonder why I didn’t follow the leads of my impeccable friends and save a lot of time and heartbreak.

Then I think of these two favorite films and the epiphany comes. We just never know, do we, what demons rest in the souls of those about us? It wasn’t too many years ago that the top-ranking admiral of my beloved United States Navy committed suicide when enemies reported a minor infraction among the ribbons on his chest. He had risen from Seaman Recruit in a special program the Navy once had whereby promising enlisted personnel were selected for education and a commission. It seems that, no matter what his personal achievements accomplished, the Annapolis crowd never let him forget his humble origins.

We only have to look at the morning headlines to realize that life forms no straight path to either virtue or success. A brilliant but disturbed friend of mine described it thusly: “When you’re born, they give you a bucket. As you go through life, they fill it with … .” I won’t say with what he thought they filled it, but you get the picture. The last words I ever heard him say was that he was in a Navy “nut-ward” and had “given my bucket back to them.”

As the Bard of Avon once said, "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." It’s scary, but, on the other hand, perhaps there is someone out there with a very heavy bucket who is ready to save us from all this. If so, it’s best that we not form instantaneous decisions about them.

Who knows?

My Redacted Life ... having fun

I try not to, but I seem to learn things and associate things no matter where I go or what I do. Sometimes I think I drift toward empiricism, the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience. In my case, it seems that all knowledge is connected by a fine thread, that only I and gifted others can see. For example, how many could, as I did, connect a bunch of kids shooting baskets at the gym with public administration?

It happened like this.

We walked at the gym this week on a track that circles above a basketball court that is usually filled with young kids. We enjoy watching them as we circle, and circle, and circle. They exhibit universal good behavior though their talent levels vary. That doesn’t seem to affect their enthusiasm levels one bit. It makes our walking and thinking more fun.

This particular day, I noticed one thing. The kids there on that day just weren’t very good. Naturally, I began passing judgement. Some benign coaching might improve them immensely. I would be just the person to do it.

See that little feller? His strength is quickness and dexterity. Is he using it? No.

That one over there needs to build his arm strength.

Watch out son, don’t try all that fancy dribbling. Keep it simple.

Hey you, pay attention.

Then they all went a little crazy and started shooting from beyond what I think they call the “three-point” line. Most couldn’t even reach the basket. It led to a frenzy of wild shooting and much laughing.

This all led me think about my profession, how city governments don’t build on their strengths and concentrate too much on unrealistic population goals and not enough on building their people.

These kids weren’t going to get better. Lots of cities were going to languish. All for the same reason.

Maybe a lack of oxygen cleared some of my brain passages. Maybe not being transfixed to the Internet gave me a moment of clarity. Whatever it was, a thought came flashing, pure and pristine, from the depths of my darkness, like a blazing display of bravura from a Beethoven symphony. I had a thought. Everything would be okay. All was fine.

These kids were having fun. That was the important thing. They were enjoying freedom from adults coaching them, parents yelling at them, parents yelling at other parents, whistles blowing, and crowds booing.

They would get better. Some would become very good. Right now, they were discovering the joy of playing for fun. I’m sure that is a wonderful feeling, playing for fun whether you ever get to be a professional or not, playing for fun because it makes you smile.

I decided that I would go home and pick the guitar for a while. I wouldn’t ever get good at it, but it would make me smile and I wouldn’t be thinking ill of anyone while I did it.

I decided that I would stress to municipal officials next week that if practicing governance didn’t make them smile, they weren’t doing it right.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Fourteen

Mondays would come and I would be back at work. I walked a little taller now. I had my own client. Malvern was a nice town, not far away. They made bricks there and mainly minded their own business.

The city manager was a man named Ken Parker. We would form a friendship that would last decades. At the time, however, he was wary that I might do something to embarrass him or the city. That's never a good move in the consulting business.

Here’s how I chose to handle the mission.

After the deadline came for planning commission business submissions, I would pick up the material and analyze the cases. More often than not, there would be a request to change the zoning on a piece of property. I would look at several factors

- Would approval constitute so-called “spot-zoning?” This would involve a small parcel, the re-zoning of which would not be consistent with the land use plan and would grant benefits to one property owner that wouldn’t be granted to a neighbor.

- Would it conform to adopted plans?

- Would the re-zoning act as a destabilizing factor on the neighborhood, i.e. would the size, height, bulk, and traffic generated by the new use be inconsistent with the productive use of neighboring land?

- And, of course, who was making the request?

I would prepare a report, make copies, and we would mail them to the commissioners in time for the meeting. Wouldn’t you know it? The first time I did the report, the chairman of the planning commission made a request for a re-zoning. It was a bad one, but the chairman had married into power.

Being a fast learner, I honed a skill that would last me for an entire career. It involves a combination of doubletalk, misdirection, discombobulation, perplexity, and downright deviousness. I call it “implicit non-specific clarity.” Check it out. It’s in all the textbooks, I think.

Anyway, it worked. The commissioners didn’t bother to read my analysis. They simply approved the request as they would have had I charged up that hill with my guns blazing. I would live to fight another battle, somewhere else, on my terms, where I might have a chance of winning. Time changes the battlefield, patience promotes advantage, and circumstances even the odds.

I had learned that lesson from my former enemies in Southeast Asia. Good tactics and skill are not enough. One must have a winning strategy as well.

Yep.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen (Cont._3)

As the fateful year of 1972 progressed, a sense of stability settled in and I knew I had entered the proper field of work and study. It paid well. It accorded with my long-nurtured progressive leanings. It attracted the best of people into its ranks. If done properly, it could lengthen the life-sustaining period during which our planet suffered humans to exist. Simply stated, it satisfied.

It also abounded with political minefields.

I discovered that one day upon being ushered into the head-man’s office. Beckoning me to sit, he drew on a pipe he used to express gravity. I sat back.

“Are you ready?” He threw the question at me as if there were only one acceptable answer. I could decide to be cute and reply “Ready for what?” He wasn’t a man who tolerated “cute” very well. I chose my patented maneuver, honed by four years of military service. I call it “aggressive suck-up,” and it has only failed me a few times over the years, those mainly in marital situations wherein superior intelligence quickly demolishes subterfuge.

I leaned forward and said in my most sincere voice, “I’m sure that with your help and guidance, I am.”

This resulted in a long draw on the pipe and a slow exhalation of smoke. I waited. Who could possibly predict the outcome? Who even could guess where the hell we were headed?

After checking the ashes in his pipe, he looked up at me. “You’d best be.”

Again, my military training guided me. “Yes sir,” I said. Then I shut up. I knew from experience that the one who didn’t speak next would emerge the winner.

He studied me as if I were a figure in a museum diorama. He drew on the pipe with no result. He laid it aside and again looked me over. At last he spoke. “We could hire an experienced planner to fill in,” said, “but that would cost more money than we can afford.”

I nodded as if the two of us had just settled upon a jointly-developed cure for cancer.

“Vines pissed off the new city manager in Malvern, and he prefers that we start sending someone else to work with their planning commission.” He stared into me, into someplace I had never known existed. I stared back. “I can’t go,” he said.

I must have looked surprised.

“It wasn’t Jim’s fault. He just told them the truth a little too plainly. He does that sometimes. Doesn't always work in our profession. Anyway, it’s opening up a spot.”

I nodded again, filling the nod, I hoped, with an air of wisdom long held from mortal view and reserved for only the highest of the gods. He picked up his pipe, tapped residue into an ash tray, and reached for his tobacco pouch, a nice leather one, very expensive I imagined. He held the pipe in one hand, the pouch in the other, and looked at me as if offering me the choice between two of life’s most important treasures.

“Want it?”

I considered standing and shouting “Sir, yes sir!” I had learned to do that someplace or other. Instead, I chose understatement. “I do,” I said.

It’s funny how those two words, strung together at the right time, can produce such a cosmic change in one’s life.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve (Cont._2)

Goodness gracious but 1971 was an exciting year. I had survived the challenges of entering a profession totally unprepared. I learned many of the basics that year and filed away some lessons not taught as formal curriculum in any university. To say that I had learned much that year was like saying a bear cub learns a lot his first year on earth.

And I hadn’t had to carry a weapon, other than a devious and calculating mind, one always “locked and loaded” on full-automatic. Even so, I had learned that, just as in my former line of work, it always proved advantageous to keep your head below the sandbags. I had sharpened the useful skill of not telling someone everything I knew on first meeting them. I retained a lesson learned in Boot Camp that, as someone said, “All thoughts do not need to be spoken.”

I had learned that a little paranoia can be a good friend if one listens and that, as the Apostle said, “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Conversely, one should always pay attention to the person with “scrambled-eggs” on the hat. I was beginning to be less certain each day that my four years in the military had been a total waste. Learning to live by one’s wits is a marvelous skill, no matter what profession one follows. Nothing teaches that better than the military and nothing rewards it more than life among the sharks and shoals of business.

I hadn’t found love in 1971, but I had found comfort on more than one occasion. I hadn’t found success, but I had avoided failure. I had found that age and an acquired sense of treachery were the allies of the ambitious. In short, I was no longer afraid.

As the holiday system settled in on our collective consciousness, I looked forward to being able to participate. In downtown Little Rock, there were still enough shops and mainline stores existing to create a pleasant and comforting atmosphere. Stores began staying open later and as I left work in the dark each day, the sharp and happy staccato greetings of shoppers filled the air beneath the bright holiday lights. Everyone seemed so pleasant to one another. Were such times here to stay? Time would tell.

Christmas Day came on a Saturday that year. I had a major deadline due for some project or other, so I put in half-a-day Friday morning. Then I left, walked into the MM Cohn store at Fifth and Main to buy a last-minute present, and drove to the old hometown for the weekend. It was the second straight Christmas I had spent with my family after missing four in a row. It was the first ever, at nearly 30 years of age, that I had money to buy presents for each of my family.

Life was good. That first year had gone well and 1972 was going to be even better. Wasn’t it?

Oh, hell yes.

The end of "Ripple Days?"

My Redacted Life: Chapter Five (Cont._2)

Payday came again and I had a little extra money with which to live. I wasn’t in tall cotton, but I wasn’t depleting savings anymore. My brother had decided to play the unemployment insurance game, so he came up on occasion and we drank beer and swapped stories about military life, although his had lasted a mere six months or so.

As it had turned out, he learned, after completing Marine Corps boot camp, that something in the leather of combat boots caused in him a rather severe skin reaction. He had finished radioman school and, I found out later, learned that his next orders would be to “WESTPAC.” That meant Vietnam. After repeated hospital stays for serious skin reactions, the Marine Corps decided that a trooper who couldn’t wear combat boots had little utility as cannon fodder. They gave him an Honorable Discharge and sent him home.

Perhaps there’s a name missing on “The Wall.” Who knows?

At work, we were completing the projects in somewhat orderly fashion now, and so far without a major mistake. Tensions eased, and the atmosphere became quite pleasant. We would work until five o’clock, whereupon everyone would go home for supper. Around 7:00 p.m. we would reassemble at the office and put in a couple of more hours.

It was about that time that I discovered “happy hour.”

No, it didn’t involve libations. But, it did involve popcorn. Back then, there were three “first-run” theaters in downtown Little Rock. The Arkansas was directly behind and to the south of our office building. The Center sat a ways up on Main Street. The Capitol was near the corner of Capitol and Broadway, on my way home. All showed newly released movies.

At a little after five o’clock, the theaters all presented “happy hour” shows for a dollar. When new films arrived, I would often take “supper” at one and enjoy a box of popcorn, a coke, and a movie before going back to work. Since the others didn’t see me leave, nor did they see me return, what business of mine was it if they may have assumed that I had worked through the “supper break?”

Very often, as I was beginning to find out about the world of business, it is useful to dole out information as an investment rather than as idle chatter provided with no intention of return. Thus, the massive redaction due this humble narrative of one young man’s battle with the vicissitudes of life.

My legend grew, and for the next two years, and for the only time in my life, I had seen every American film considered for Oscar nominations.

I still had no social acquaintances in Little Rock, only work and a little cheap entertainment. We generally worked half a day on Saturday and I would drive home to see the family. It was beginning to seem to me that success was an easy thing if you had nothing else to do.

As I say, I had no contacts in the city. That was about to change.

Is there a  hint of
the devious lurking
behind that smile?