How Precious Was That While, page 34
The girls at Goddard could have a mischievous humor about songs; I remember my first semester, when at an open house they were singing with gusto a song with at least ten verses, each suggestive: “Oh this is number one, it’s going to be fun, roll me over, lay me down, and do it again; roll me over, in the clover, roll me over, lay me down, and do it again.” It finished, I think, “Oh this is number ten, HE’S DOING IT AGAIN!” But the Motherless Child song was straight from the heart, in this case.
Sometimes my associations don’t work out. Back in the 1970s Edmund Scientific Company, whose catalog of minor scientific marvels was always intriguing, had a contest to name their new telescope. It looked like a basketball with a projecting tube. I wrote to suggest “Macroscope,” which was by no coincidence the name of the truly powerful orbiting telescope I had invented for my novel of that name. They ignored me and named it Astroscan. Okay, it was their choice. I conjecture that when they realized that toilets would be needed in space, they named their potty-shaped device Astro’s-can.
Any life is filled mostly with incidentals, far too numerous to describe. When I read Isaac Asimov’s massive two-volume autobiography I found it interesting, but concluded that the minutia of daily existence are seldom worth recording for posterity. So I tried to be more selective in Bio of an Ogre, and though I am going into things here that I did not there, so as to make a complementary rather than a duplicative volume, there are still many more notes than I can accommodate without becoming tedious. So I’ll will give samples, selected as much for general interest as for biographical validity.
My experience in the U.S. Army was not fun. It paid my way for two years and enabled my wife and me to survive until we could get to Florida. I went into detail on the problems in Bio of an Ogre, so won’t repeat them here. But there were some lighter episodes.
There was a joke I learned, using a quarter. In the old days quarters were silver, and had a flying eagle on one side. The joke was to hold the eagle upside down and cover its small head with the thumb, so that only the downward pointing wings showed. In that position they resembled the chaps of a cowboy’s legs. “What direction is the cowboy walking?” The other person would say “that way,” pointing the obvious direction. Then you pulled your thumb off, showing the upside-down eagle head, which resembled a penis. “Damn right!” When I was a survey instructor in the U.S. Army, and the material wasn’t urgent, I would bring out my quarter and show the joke to the first student in the class, who would in turn show it to the next, and so on as the class progressed, until I got my quarter back from the last student. There would be chuckles as the coin slowly made its way. That joke is no longer current because with the erosion of the value of the dollar the government issued nonsilver coins, and speculators collected all the real silver coins. For years I saved my “Pecker Quarter,” but lost it somewhere along the way. Too bad.
When I worked on the staff of The Observer, the battalion newspaper, I noticed a heading the chief editor, Bob Ransom, had written. I did a double take, then realized that it was relevant, so didn’t challenge it. It was about the mail clerk for the battalion, who had been highly successful in sports. The editor was not aware that there was anything odd about it. Later the post newspaper, The Cannoneer, picked up on it, remarking on the humor. Thus came post notoriety for that headline: BATTALION MAIL CLERK HOLDS SIX LETTERS.
I identify with most living things, and try to avoid hurting them if I can. There are obvious limits, such as the impossibility of surviving without eating, and though I don’t eat animals, I do eat plants. So constant compromise is the price of life. But I also identify with many inanimate things. When a good machine has served me well, I don’t like to junk it. We have had a number of bicycles, including two tandems, which we used to take our daughters to school when they were small, and I was really sorry when one got trodden on by a horse and couldn’t be repaired. The other we finally gave to Penny when she was on her own, because we no longer had a use for it and I preferred that it be used. Something that isn’t used is dead. But there’s one special guilt I have about another type of thing: curtains. In the 1960s when I was writing, I sat by the window and worked, but then I got the allergic sneezes. Cam thought it was the curtains, so she took them out and bought new ones. It turned out to be the northeast wind; from that direction it set me off, and that was the window on that side. So the curtains were innocent, and it still bothers me that they were falsely blamed. I wish we could recover them and put them up again, but of course three decades have passed and they are long since gone.
That allergy started bothering me after we moved to Florida. My nose got chronically stuffed, inhibiting my breathing, and sometimes I would have daylong sieges of runny nose, so that I had to wad tissue into it to stop it from dripping onto my keyboard as I typed. I asked a doctor about it, but he said that I must be allergic to some common substance, and it would take two years of testing to run it down, and then they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway. So I suffered through it, though at times I couldn’t eat well, because I could not both chew and breathe, and my mouth would get completely dry at night, so that I couldn’t get my tongue unstuck from the floor of my mouth. Until finally it was diagnosed as a deviated septum in the nose. I had surgery for that, and it improved my nose breathing somewhat—and, incidentally, abolished most of my allergy to the northeast wind. I was always more allergic to weather than my wife was, but now the situation has reversed.
When I went to Goddard College in 1952 I was still growing. In two years I outgrew my collection of plaid shirts, and girls asked me for them. No, I had no relationship with any of them; apparently they simply liked the shirts. It would be tempting to imply that these were payments for favors rendered, but it wasn’t so. So for a time a number of girls were wearing my old plaid shirts. I think those shirts looked better on them than they had on me.
When credit cards became popular, we avoided them for some time. We always managed our money well, back when we didn’t have much, and also later when we had plenty. One of the gratifications of my marriage is that my wife is even less likely to waste money than I am. I tease her about her spending money, but teasing is all it is. Once I was shopping for Christmas gifts with my daughters, and I kept seeing nice things to buy; Cheryl kept demurring along cost/value lines, while Penny said “that’s why I like to shop with Daddy.” But eventually we concluded that a credit card could be useful, because though I don’t much like to travel, on occasion family or business concerns require it, and a credit card can be invaluable then. So we applied for what we deemed to be the best one: the Sears Discover card. And they turned me down, because I hadn’t been in debt enough. I was a millionaire with no bad debts, ever, and they didn’t like that? Later that card ran into financial problems of its own. No wonder! When you turn down the best credit risks, you are left with the other kind. Maybe a publishing executive got in their works, counting his beans in the usual fashion. Meanwhile we applied next to MasterCard, whose solicitations we had been throwing away for years. They carried no grudge, and accepted me without any fuss at all. Later yet we diversified, deliberately, so that if a card was lost or stolen we would not be caught short in Timbuktu or wherever, so now in addition to our joint MasterCard Cam has an AT&T card and I have a Wilderness Society VISA card. My main disappointment there was that the ad for it showed a lovely wilderness scene on the card, while the one they actually issued me is dull brown. I was tempted to protest the false representation, but it hardly seemed worth my energy.
At one point one of my readers came to visit me. I generally discourage this, so as not to have all my time taken up, but we had corresponded for a number of years and he had offered to do some professional work for me on a project that never quite jelled. His second visit occurred when my father-in-law was extremely ill, with a fifty percent chance of death, and my mother-in-law needed support, so Cam was away with her mother. Penny, Cheryl, and I were running the household. The visitor brought his girlfriend, and we talked about this and that. He thought I was great, but his friend thought I was terrible. Why? Because, she said, I did not meet her gaze. Now this intrigued me. When I pondered the matter, I concluded that she was right: I had hardly made eye contact with her. But why not? I have met thousands of people, and never had trouble with eye contact; I relate closely with my readers, and can handle other relationships well enough. So what was the matter here? And I realized that it hadn’t been me, it had been her. When the man and I talked, I had more than once looked over to the woman and invited her to participate, but she had demurred, saying that she was good at listening. So I hadn’t met her gaze because I hadn’t been talking to her—by her preference. And I learned why: he had come this time to ask my advice on whether they should marry and keep the baby that the woman was carrying. This was not something I felt it was my province to decide on for anyone else, but I did give my opinion: yes, I don’t like abortion, because it destroys a life that deserves its fair chance. So he decided to do that. But the woman had assumed that I would argue the opposite case, and she resented my seeming power over her reproduction, understandably. So she had viewed me with hostility from the outset. And herein were several lessons for me. One, of course, was not to prejudge; the woman had done that to me, and then blamed me for her own cutoff of communication. Another was not to be too ready to assume I was at fault when I didn’t get along with someone; sometimes the other person comes with a preformed grudge and a determination not to get along. I have seen that notably in fanzines; one fan editor followed me for twenty years from one fanzine to another, having no seeming purpose other than to cut me down. I wasn’t even aware of him until near the end of that time, and don’t know what bothered him about me, other than my success as a writer. Another lesson was that I may have no notion what is going on in a dialogue; sometimes I come up against a hostile agenda that bears no relation to reason. So I remember that reader visit for reasons other than the usual. So what happened between that reader and his girlfriend? Later they had an argument, and she went next day and got an abortion, and they broke up. So my advice counted for just about nothing.
Abortion is one of those difficult issues that keeps me firmly on the fence. I don’t like it—but then, I don’t think anyone does like it. I am a vegetarian because I don’t like the unnecessary taking of life, and a baby is a life. But some others who oppose abortion seem to stand for nothing much else I approve. They don’t really support life, because they tend to approve the death penalty, they bomb clinics, and they murder doctors and others associated with abortion clinics. I also have a problem, because I believe that the overpopulation of the world with people is perhaps the major threat to the continuation of civilization as we know it, and if every baby is saved, that will only get worse. I would much prefer to see effective contraception, so that an unwanted baby would never be conceived. There seems little point in requiring an unwanted baby to be brought into a hostile situation. So I hesitate to second-guess the women who seek abortions. But I hate the thought of the most truly innocent of creatures, unborn babies, suffering the death penalty.
The death penalty is another difficult issue for me. I don’t like it in general, and I see its racist application, but there are specific cases where it does seem justified. Some people seem to exist only to harm others, and I just don’t see why they should be allowed either to be free to rob, rape, abuse, or kill others, or to be supported at society’s expense in prison. So this is another case where I figuratively hold my nose and let it be.
At Goddard, in one of the classes we tried growing plants, to see how they were affected by different conditions. But at the end of the semester I had my trays of seedlings left. I couldn’t take them with me, and I couldn’t do anything with them; it was winter and they would have died outside. I didn’t want to simply kill them. So I put them in the attic. At the next term, after the two-month winter hiatus that Goddard had to save heating costs, I returned to college and checked on the plants. They were dead, of course, but what got me was that they had stretched way out and to the side, seeking the dim light of a distant window. They had tried so hard to survive, but had no chance. I had in effect murdered them. I don’t know what else I could have done, but still I feel the guilt. I don’t like to see plants suffer either.
But there was a more pleasant sequel. One of the things I learned from that plant project was that soil made a difference. I stayed with my mother that work term, and she had an African violet that was languishing, with only a few leaves. So I applied my new knowledge: I bought good potting soil and transplanted the poor rootbound thing into better conditions. Many months later when I returned to visit my mother, there was the plant, with about five centers and flowers all over, absolutely thriving. All because of what I had done for it. Now I try never to plant seeds that I am not prepared to care for. Plants are living things too, and deserve fair treatment.
Some stray items relate to names. I was never good at names, and still am not; they slip through my consciousness like slippery fish. One name I do remember nevertheless balks me. When we came to America, I remember how my grandfather liked to listen to the news in the early evening. He had a favorite commentator whose name, as I remember it, was Bawkage—I don’t know the spelling. He had a very authoritative tone. Ever since I have tried to verify that, and have not been able to. Who cast the news in Pennsylvania in 1940? No one seems to know.
In high school I was at a party of some sort where placards bearing the names of celebrities were attached to our backs, where we wouldn’t see them. Then we had to talk with others, asking questions, trying to guess whose name we carried. I knew I wouldn’t be able to guess mine, and I was right. It turned out to be Fred Astaire. I had never heard of him. But thereafter I remembered the name, and learned that he was a dancer in the movies, quite well-known.
When Cam and I got married in Florida, we had very little money. Our honeymoon was the drive back north, with our best man Charles Gasset traveling with us. We stopped at the Luray Caverns in Virginia—I always liked caves—and they were impressive. But the thing I remember most was the way the guide informed us at one point that we were standing at the lowest point in the explored caverns. But not far from there was a fenced-off section, with stairs going down.
The last conventional employment I had, before retiring permanently to writing, was as a teacher. Two linked aspects stand out in my memory. I discussed my limited teaching career in Chapter 3, but one aspect didn’t properly fit there. Part of the preparation for teaching was practice teaching, supervised by a regular teacher. Mine was with John Humphreys, who taught twelfth grade English at Northeast High School in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was a good teacher and I liked him, but he had in my estimation an Achilles’ heel. He was a tough grader, sometimes brutally tough, but that wasn’t it. It was that he stood up for his rights. I respect that, but it carries a price, and he ran afoul of that price, in what I saw as painful pseudo-justice.
My first day in his classroom, I saw a girl in the front row, crying. John asked her contemptuously if she had some complaint, but she didn’t answer. Later he told me that she was one of the brightest students, but she had made one mistake: when working out test answers on scratch paper, she had gotten her lines crossed, and copied the answer for B to the line for A, and C to B, D to C and so on down. Humphreys had seen that, and saw that all her answers were correct, just misplaced. In such a case, I would have given her one error, and given credit for the rest, as the test was supposed to be of her knowledge of the subject. But Humphreys had given her no credit on that section, so she had an indifferent or even failing exam instead of a top score. All her work studying and preparing had gone for nothing; one misalignment had done her in, and she was crying at the loss. High school grades are important for admission to college; I have no way of knowing how much damage this did to her. I have suffered similar penalties myself, so have sympathy. I felt that Humphreys had been needlessly cruel, and that the grade he gave her did not reflect her competence as a student. But I was only an observer. Perhaps he was teaching a hard lesson that would profit the girl later in life.
Later came what was called the Florida teachers’ strike for better conditions. Legally they couldn’t strike, so they resigned instead. Humphreys supported it, and resigned with the others. The conclusion was mixed; I don’t think the teachers got much of what they wanted, and Florida education continued its decline. I was not part of the scene, having been unable to get a job in the public school system; I taught at a private school. But I would have had to join the strike, had I not been on the sidelines. So the strike ended, but with a difference: the state school boards were vengeance-minded, and they accepted back only those teachers they wanted. They excluded the troublemakers, who were as a general class the most caring and effective teachers, in favor of the duller ones, who would make no peep of protest about bad school conditions. So they excluded John Humphreys, and he lost his livelihood. He was, as far as I know, never to teach in the public school system in Florida again; he was blacklisted. Later, when my little girl and his little girl were friends, and I went to his house to pick mine up from a visit, his wife told me how hard it had been financially. He had paid a terrible price. Why? Because he had given the authorities the chance to get him, and they had struck ruthlessly the moment they could. They didn’t care that he was an effective teacher; they didn’t really care about education. Only about who went along with a stupid system and who made trouble. They had taught him a harsh lesson. The same one he had taught that girl.
